Holding My Mother On The Kitchen Floor

Rushed and running late through the Lower East Side, I was startled by the sight of a familiar face. Turning to look, I realized it wasn't my mother, who was back home in France, likely asleep in front of the TV as she had a bad habit of doing. It was my own agitated reflection in the window of a parked Honda Civic.

I have been told I am the spitting image of my mother for my whole life, but this was the first time our resemblance had become acutely noticeable to me. I’ve always cherished the comparison because, as all mothers are, she was the most beautiful woman in the world.

Although there is an ease in defaulting to trendy pessimism on the topic of parental relationships, I am one of the insufferables who describes my mother as a friend.

A long legged, mini skirt flaunting, vision in pale white, my mom's beauty was only rivaled by her own unshakeable confidence and wit. My mother, the only woman on her trading desk in the 90s. My mother, who offered her assistance in laminating my homemade fake ID. She not only understood but also supported my unwillingness to forfeit my right to a glass of wine when I moved to the U.S. for college. My mother, who strutted into her Advanced Applied Mathematics class in high heels, called out by the professor for being in the wrong auditorium. She became the first student to ever earn an A+.

I revered my mother as a defier of expectations. My rural city in France had never before come up against a force like hers, and she was judged for it. From the sidelines of my native language, I witnessed my mother overlook the side eyes and offhand comments of cashiers, waiters, and my father’s high school friends, or at least feign to. People were bothered by the accent, short skirts, rapturous laugh, ripped jeans, but mostly, the irreconcilable dichotomy between her striking beauty and relentless intelligence. They had never met a woman this free of the expectations of others.

Because of her, I knew beauty and power to be inextricably linked. If beauty and power are tied, does the gradual change of the former affect the latter? In the Honda’s passenger window, I found myself scrutinizing my reflection, frowning at the same features she’s always lamented: the early signs of crow’s feet, my slim, tight lips, my intense bone structure, my pale complexion. Features I revered on her until I understood what they foretold of my own fate. Looking deeper, I now also recognize her stubbornness, defensiveness and self-reliance in the avoidable fights I wage. When I speak too convolutedly, move too stubbornly, laugh too loudly and cry too readily I will catch myself thinking: ‘I look like my mother.’

All matriarchal relationships are inextricably intertwined, but there is something unique to the vitriol from disagreeing with someone who shares your face, and resultantly, your life. Self-reproach is easily mirrored by the physical features mothers and daughters share. You judge more distinctly when the objects of your frustrations are known from experience. Our patience and understanding wane when the words come out of a mirror of your own, pursed lips. As Charli XCX confides in 'Apple', “I guess the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, ‘cause I’ve been looking at you so long I only see me.”

Existing in the world can sometimes feel like filling in the outline of her choices. A result of the most consequent gift she gave me, the power of belonging in any room by sheer determination and stubbornness, is questioning the same room that shaped you. Scrutinization is the shared context of both veneration and vitriol. With both the wisdom of adulthood and the ignorance of delayed rebellion, I no longer look up to an unattainable idoI. I now call her down and push and shove, and guiltily pick up the pieces of our fight on the kitchen floor. I am now the age she once was, when I first called her mine.

‘Never meet your idols' cannot apply when you were raised by yours. Perhaps inevitably, mothers assume the role of antagonist necessary in the trial and error of defining who you are. Who better than the person who knows you, loves you, and judges you best? While mothers expect more for their daughters than for themselves, daughters hold our mother’s accountable for foreshadowing our future. There is no greater kiss of death for the stubborn than ‘I told you so.’

For my twenty-seventh birthday, my mother gifted me the same motorcycle boots my father had bought her on their first trip to France in the early 90s. This trip was the precursor to her move away from her parents, her city and her career a few years later. She took the boots to a cobbler who explained that fixing them up would cost more than the boot itself. She didn’t care. Once, she had been the exact same age I am now.

I am now walking across New York City, in her boots, in a life that was once hers. Remembering my beauty, freedom and stubbornness are simply borrowed until I lend them to my daughter in return. She and I always forgive our shared ignorance of the other’s context despite our shared face. Holding my mother on the kitchen floor, I am gradually learning that what may sometimes seem like an idol’s fall from grace may in reality be the closing of a gap. A gap shrinking not from a mother’s fall but rather from a daughter’s rise to her pedestal, now understanding that it was climbed not given, and what had to be left behind to get there.