Its strange, seeing your parents for who they are. Maybe it's sad and I'm scared, that's why I feel angry.
My mother and I were the same height briefly when I was twelve. For two months, we were both just under five feet. Now, I think she's shorter. I grew a few more inches but I'm still not tall enough. I compensate with my personality.
My mother has blonde hair, cut like all sensible women, short and permed. It reminds me of those wigs you buy at the dollar store to be a granny at Halloween. She has a child-like face, round and seemingly boneless. Her eyes sit too far apart and radiate a hopefulness. When I was fifteen I saw a picture of her when she was the same age. She had the same hopefulness then. Life had not kicked it out of her.
She wears makeup but is convinced the point is to look like you're wearing none. Just a little lipstick and in the sun, you can see her rogue. She still calls it that. She is not a woman who fusses. She never wears high-heels, because she considers vanity a sin. She is practical, my mother.
I am different. I'm garish. My hair is always a new colour because I get bored easily. I like popular music just because. Right now, I have five tattoos, all of birds, and I'm planning three more.
My mother always worried incessantly, but I only noticed as I got older. We're the same like that, but I only noticed as I got older. Her worrying is effective; she raised children, had a home, married my father, for better and ultimately, for worse.
Mine is not. I understand why my mother worries about me. I married a man when I was twenty-one for no reason other than fun. We separated six months later. Then, I left school to travel cross country with a not-quite divorced man and I haven't returned. He's long gone. I shouldn't drink as much as I do. My weight is always changing. I am now engaged again but I think she senses that I have it in me to break it off any second, with no warning.
"It's so good to see you, darling."
Despite our differences we are supernaturally connected. I can feel my mother's quickened heartbeat like my own.
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