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My Mother's Stories
Mom told her first story when she unpacked the barbells she’d asked Grandma to send. My sister, Renee,
wanted to play an instrument in the school band and Mom had no money to rent one. Mom sat at the kitchen
table in her old house robe, smoked a cigarette and drank a last cup of coffee. She drew in a drag of
the cigarette, and her eyes looked wet, but she held the rest of her face, her chin and her mouth,
rigid.
"I wanted to play the clarinet," Mom said. "My parents went out and bought me those barbells."
She tapped her cigarette on the side of the ashtray to flick off the ashes. The sleeve of her
robe slid down on her arm. "For the same money they could have bought me the clarinet I wanted."
Mom finished her cigarette and drank the rest of her coffee without saying anything more.
####
Her second story came at Christmas, right after I unwrapped my basketball. I wasn't expecting
it. Whenever Mom asked me what I wanted for Christmas, and I said a basketball - I always said
a basketball - she’d say, "Don't you think you're getting too old to be out there with the boys
playing basketball," or "Wouldn't you rather have a hair dryer?"
Besides we were so poor, even with Ed around now, I only expected one real present. Already I’d gotten a skirt,
a sweater and a hair dryer. Still Ed reached behind the tree for one more box, and held it out. "The last one's
for you, Annie."
It wasn't likely anything else was that size and shape, but I couldn’t be sure even when I
saw the Voit box underneath the wrapping paper. Mom was always reusing old boxes. So I opened
the box and pulled out the basketball, feeling around it with both my hands. It wasn't one of
those cheap rubbery ones that bounced wildly off the rim when it should have sunk inside, or one
of the heavy ones you could barely dribble. The weight felt just right.
Mom watched me with the ball. She turned to Ed sitting on the arm of her chair. She said,
"One Christmas I saw this pair of gloves in a store window. I wanted them so much I told
my parents the gloves were all I wanted for Christmas. I thought I'd be sure to get them."
She pulled out a cigarette from the pack on the coffee table. Ed picked up his lighter and lit
it for her. "I opened all my presents on Christmas morning, and they didn't get me the gloves."
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I figure, everyone has their one story they keep telling themselves over and over again,
about who they are and what their life is. My mother has two stories, but they are really
just one. Her story is: "I never got what I really wanted."
And my story, maybe it's the one about having a mother whose story is, "I never got
what I really wanted," and how she took out all her hurt and pain on me. But I wonder
what could happen if I told myself a different story, or even more than one. Sometimes
I even think my story could be the one about Christmas and a basketball that I didn't
expect but got anyway, and how that basketball felt so right in my hands.
Solla Carrock has had poetry published in the Portland Bridge newspaper,
the Portland Review and To Topos literary magazines and in the anthology Naming:Poems by Eight Women.
She edited and contributed to Mothers and Fathers: Being Parents, Remembering Parents.
Email: Solla Carrock
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