My Mother and I

When I was a young child,  everyone said I looked like my maternal aunt.

I adored this relative, who always had time to play with me and help me with schoolwork.

Her name was “Bernice” but I always called her “Aunt Bunny.”

We were more like friends than aunt and niece.

When we were learning to tell time in school—in the days before digital clocks—I was totally lost. 

 

There was a class game in which someone  took the moveable hands of a cardboard clock and set a time. 

The first student  to tell the time correctly was then entrusted with resetting  it.

If, by any miracle, I guessed the correct time another student had set, I  always reset the clock to the hour or half-hour since they were the only positions I knew.

And my teacher would say, “Well, Carole has made this very easy for someone in the class,” not knowing how bewildered I was.

I remember my aunt sitting down with me at my grandparents’ kitchen table and working with me until I understood how to read a clock.

I also recall a rather bizarre experience in which my mother first explained menstruation to me as we were on the D train heading uptown to the theater.

This sounds as if it has to be a false memory, but I know that it really happened. 

She was so reluctant to broach sexual matters with me that she chose the most public venue she could think of so that I would not raise embarrassing questions.

When I was younger, I had asked her where babies came from and she responded that I was too young to even be thinking such thoughts.

I felt tainted and dirtied by my own curiosity, as if I had committed a great sin in broaching this taboo subject.

My aunt, on the other hand, sent away for a short book from a woman’s hygiene company for young girls explaining what was happening to pre-pubescent bodies.

But the “resemblance”  between my aunt and me was based only on height, my aunt and I being very tall and my mother being very short.

In fact, I take after my father, who was tall, but died when I was only a year old.

I told my aunt when I was an adult that I used to have childish fantasies

that she had “gotten in trouble” and my mother had offered to raise her daughter (me) since she was married and my aunt was not.

She said that she would have been so proud of being my mother that she would  never have given  me to anyone else to raise.

I had the same concerns about my appearance that all teen-age girls do: my hair, my weight, my underdeveloped breasts, my lack of popularity.

But I never disliked my face.

And then I began to realize I was turning into my mother.

When I would catch an unexpected glimpse of myself in a mirror, I would neglect to put up the psychological defenses that I had carried with me for years.

And I actually saw that I have the identical bone structure  as my mother, and certain facial expressions of my mother that I remember from my childhood flash at me from the mirror.

It was very much like my pregnancy with my twins.

I was enormous---a Volkswagen with legs and arms—but I never saw myself that way.

I lived in pleasant ignorance until I would catch an unexpected glimpse of myself in a store window when my defenses were down.

Now I am learning to live with the resemblance to my mother, but it still is not easy.