“That moment. The moment that my mother and I lost everything we once had.” When a revelatory conversation between a mother and daughter changes everything…
by: Taylor Kelley
Trigger Warning: This story contains discussion about sexual abuse and rape.
My mother’s fingers run through my hair, pulling the strands from my face and lifting them off my neck. Soft, orange light fills my bedroom, illuminating the purple walls and making them appear to be golden. My mother’s leg is brushed up against mine, and her skin is so soft, everything about her velvety. The breeze from the open windows invokes goosebumps on my legs while she twists my hair, the cicadas screaming.
“I’m going to do a fishtail braid today,” she says, but I don’t care what she does to my hair, only that she pulls it away from my face and finger-brushes through the strands. My eyes close.
I hear my sister’s voice in her bedroom. She is playing with her dolls. I imagine her brushing their hair back, cradling them in her hands. Gentle and careful, even though she never really has been. The baby in her arms changes everything.
When I open my eyes, I am no longer eight years old, but twenty. My mother no longer braids my hair; I have learned how to do it myself, although it never feels the same as when she would do it. It never looks the same, either, always a little too loose, a little too messy. When I find myself looking back at my life, I think I long for those moments in my bedroom with my mother the most.
My mother and I no longer have the relationship we once had. Somewhere along the way, that relationship was irrevocably changed and we can’t seem to get back to how it once was. I think maybe that is the nature of mother/daughter relationships. What was once so divine can never be recreated once lost. And it is inevitable that it will be lost.
I keep having this recurring dream. In the dream I have a baby. She is six months old and she is screaming at me. She is screaming at me to understand her. And in the dream I can’t seem to find out what she wants me to understand. I try to feed her and change her and put her to sleep but no matter what I do she screams and screams and screams.
Sometimes she gets older in my dream.
She continues begging me to understand her at the age of sixteen and even though we speak the same language now, I still can’t grasp it. I once held her soft body against my own but now there is all this space and it is so full and we cannot walk through it. All my friends in my dream tell me that this is normal, that this is just what having a teenage daughter is like, but I don’t want it to be normal. I do not want to be like my mother.
In my dreams, I am my mother and my daughter is me, and we can’t reach each other. We are reaching and reaching but we can’t get back.
When I was 16 my mother came into my bedroom and sat on my bed, the wood creaking beneath her. The sun was setting, and for a brief moment, I felt as though it was eight years earlier, and that she was about to braid my hair. I closed my eyes. I held onto the moment for as long as I could before it had to end.
Those moments always have to end.
“I was raped,” I told her, and I felt the room shift when the words left my mouth, watched the walls darken as they hung in the room. I couldn’t look at her face after I said it so I stared down at the floor, waiting. “A year and a half ago. By my first boyfriend. The one you loved so much.” I stopped. Tried to start again. “He told me not to tell anyone.”
I looked up, saw the impact of the words hit her, the blame casting shadows over her thin face. She stood, moved towards me and stopped, seeming unable to control her response, her body, in the wake of this news.
“Did…did you know you could’ve said no? Did you try to say no?” she asked me. “I just don’t believe he would do that, not without knowing you weren’t okay with it.”
That moment. The moment that my mother and I lost everything we once had.
My gauzy curtains shifted in the breeze from my open windows, my mother’s hair slightly lifting from her neck. I watched her hands move up to stop the shaking, tucking pieces of her hair behind her ears, the dark black of the strands contrasting with her pale skin. When she looked at me again, her eyes were far off, distant. She no longer looked at me the same.
My mother loved my first boyfriend. I knew it from the moment she met him, the moment she said it would be okay if I dated him even though I was only fifteen and he was eighteen. I knew it when she told me that he would be my husband, that he would lead me in a “Godly” life. I knew it when she ignored the bruises on my wrists and the silence that consumed me. I knew it when I finally broke up with him and she cried, not for me, but for him. For the end of our relationship. The one she truly knew so little about. The one she never wanted to know the truth about.
I looked around my bedroom, looked down at the flowery bed sheets and the stuffed teddy bear tucked against my mother’s arm. The one she had given me for my first birthday, my tiny hands clasping its brown fur and glass eyes. The one I had named Coco when I was three, because he was brown and reminded me of chocolate. The one my mother stitched back together when I was nine, because I had caught it on a tree branch, her mouth kissing my tears away when she handed the bear back to me. The one that watched me get raped when I was fifteen. Those glass eyes. Those same glass eyes, looking at us then, watching silently as my mother and I retreated from each other.
Sometimes, I felt as though my mother loved my first boyfriend more than she loved me. I wondered if maybe she felt that he was the son she never had.
My mother had a miscarriage before she had me. I sometimes regret having been born a girl. I think what my mother truly wanted was a son. And so when she asked me if I had said no, if I had tried to stop him, I knew she didn’t mean to hurt me. I knew she was only defending the boy she considered to be her son, the son she never had, the son she had hoped I would marry so she could have him in her family.
Sometimes, when I look in the mirror for a little too long, I pull my hair up and imagine what I would have looked like if I had been a boy. I think I would have been ugly. And yet, there is still a bitter regret in my throat, lingering where an Adam’s apple should be.
It took me a long time to forgive my mother for the blame, for the disbelief. She was only the second person I told about my rape, and after her reaction, it took me years to learn to say the words again without fear of being denied my truth. And even after I forgave her, our relationship was still strained, the simplicity of our love gone. We had to relearn how to talk to one another, how to move, how to embrace.
I think it took my mother a long time to see me, her daughter, and not a mistake she made, trusting the wrong man, ignoring the signs. It took her a long time to look at my body without flinching. To instead see the little girl whose hair she once braided. The little girl who trusted her mother to always protect her. The little girl who would sing with her, softly, “You are my sunshine, my only sunshine,” while the sun set in the backyard, painting her bedroom golden.
My mother and I were once each other’s sunshine. As we’ve grown older, we’ve had to learn to adjust to the lack of light in our lives.
My mother and I no longer talk about the hard topics. Now, we pull our lips into tight smiles when we sit across from each other, a kitchen table in between us, asking about our days. We talk about her job, my classes, and the dogs. We do not talk about how long it has been since we last embraced. We do not talk about the space that now exists between us that was never there before.
My mother no longer braids my hair. Her arms have not wrapped around my body in over a year. But there is a hope that exists between us, in the softness of our voices, in the longing in our eyes, that one day, we will get back to that day in my bedroom, soft light and cicadas, soft skin against soft skin, with nothing hard between us.
Taylor Kelley is a writer from McAlester, Oklahoma. She is currently pursuing an English degree at the University of Missouri. She loves to read and write creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry in her free time. This is her first published work.
Header art by Hannah Elizabeth Caney.
