Knowing

When we are young our parents know the size of our clothing, our favorite colours, favorite food. They buy our underpants in bulk packets or in three sets on hangers and they prepare our meals, ensure they are balanced. 

We leave at some point; after that point of half-knowing, where secrets are kept and parental rummaging has begun, where doors have been slammed and meek offerings made, compromises, to calm and to placate the morphed young-but-older things we've become. We leave at that point when knowledge is no longer shared and there seem to be no bridges for the fissures that have formed.

I left home a whole lot of years ago and recall lugging furniture onto a borrowed trailer, my mother screaming at me that I couldn't take the dresser she'd given me as a child. It was hers, she said. Back then I didn't feel her panic. I didn't understand the quiet distress behind her yelling down that driveway.

The shreds of this child she knew being pulled away like gum, my removal of the only tangible bits she understood, made for fear.

I wonder when parents stop knowing. At which point is it that it goes, and if it comes again.

I think sometimes my parents see me as the child, the teenager, who liked bright sheet sets and wore outlandish clothes. The one who would or could eventually be something they were not, but who would still fit the mould they understood to be good and right. Tick the boxes that go with nine to five jobs and nuclear families. I would be the girl who would grow out of phases and meet the 'real world' one day. They knew what I would be. What I should be. They understood that much.

Today, at an age older than my mother's at the time she gave birth to me, I wondered if there are bridges to mend the crevices that form from old fissures. That perhaps a phone call from one-thousand-six-hundred miles away, a crevice in itself, might tack some kind of something into place. I hoped my meek honesty on the other end of the line, a confession that would never fit a mould, might be enough of a silent shout to resonate with the woman who once stood by that trailer thick with fear. It would be an offering to have her understand a morning's worth of thought, the shifts and changes that happen over distance and age. I would hand over words, fill an empty mould with some sort of knowing, not the perfect and good kind, but a kind.

I make a phone call and it's peppered with gaps, quiet, and names of people who I don't know, they are pregnant or recently coupled, there is her ironing, my nephew, the temperature—it's been too much lately, and her friends, concerns and silence between topics. Her stories are told. And I find a silence where I tell my own.

The dresser lays in some share house back there. I sold it before I crossed the boarder some years later. In the room where I now sit there is furniture that she's not seen, people have entered this place who she does not know. A careless confession lays worn and ravaged across phone lines. And I wonder when my mother stopped wanting to know, couldn't fathom more than the child I once was.