American Mother: A Character Study in 500 Words

During time spent on lock down in the 2020 coronavirus outbreak, I produced a series of character studies, short shorts, poems, and vignettes in 500 or fewer words. Enjoy!

My mother wasn’t an especially good mother. But my head is filled with American nonsense about how mothers are always attentive, always giving, always putting their children before themselves. That wasn’t my mother.

When I remember it’s mostly a scent like rising bread. I only have one visual memory of her: dusty bare feet on the wood floor of our kitchen, tanned calves, an apron smudged with flour, a blond hair caught in another drift of flour coating her freckled nose and cheek. I remember a flake of purple polish on one long toe. I don’t remember polish on her fingers because I can’t see her fingers: they are buried in a fluffy mound of dough.

American mothers are supposed to cook. That part my mother perfected. I have a childhood filled with cream sauces, soufflés, homemade pizza, rosewater cakes, passion fruit yogurt, calzones, and falafel. All made from scratch, my mother’s quest to start with the most basic, the foundational, the most elemental. She packed my lunches full of raw veggies with three dipping sauces, toasted crackers and mozzarella made from whole milk, crème fraise with ripe berries, sushi rolls with cucumber and pickled ginger. Then she turned vegan and I arrived in the cafeteria with vegetable dips made from tofu and hummus, decadent banana muffins sweetened with dates and chocolate chips, rice balls with pickled plum. She forgot to buy me new clothes or school supplies, but my bento box overflowed with five star bounty.

Mothers are supposed to care for their children, help them with homework, draw baths and see them to bed. Mothers are supposed to teach their daughters to keep house, to cook, to clean. My mother shooed me from the kitchen every time I evidenced interest.

“Dirt and food, that’s all women are good for,” my mother said. (I know this because my father told me her words.) By the time I turned five, I learned to do my own laundry, pulling the sheets off my bed, separating whites from colors. Soon, I washed all the sheets in the house. So I suppose my mother did teach me to keep house: my negative role model for what not to do.

I look like her. I see it in photographs. I have her tilted green eyes and dark blonde hair. I have the dimple below the right corner of my mouth. But I have my father, too, his high cheekbones and dusky skin.

I wonder if my mother wanted to be a mother. She and my father had been together fifteen years before I arrived. Had I been an accident? She died before I could ask her. And my father only offers up sparing anecdotes that do not let me know her.

Am I supposed to know how to be a mother? I buy a cookbook but I burn the quinoa and the soufflé falls. My bread burns on the outside and stays goopy on the inside. I will never be an American mother.