Wound

Mothers are tricksy things. I suppose daughters are, too, in our own way. Many of us become mothers in turn, don't we?

I don't hate my mother. I don't even dislike her. I love her, in exactly the way she deserves. The same, vague and detached way she loved me. Dutiful. That, I lay at her door. After all, she was the one who taught me how to love her, so if I'm doing it wrong, she only has herself to blame. We reap what we sow.

My childhood wasn't bad, as such. From the outside, lots of people would think it was a good one. I wanted for very little. Nothing at all, in a material sense. I wasn't unhappy, exactly.

I suppose the best way to describe it would to say it was like the houses I grew up in. Too wide and thin, with echoing polished floors and tiresome minimalism. It looked the part, but there was... something lacking.

My mother was beautiful once, and after that she carried on being beautiful, in a hard and determined way. She aged like a raisin: dried out in the sun, or an approximation of it. Replacing the fat that should have been in her diet with Botox injections right into her skin to smooth out near-permanent frown lines.

I say this without ego or self-pity: I am not sure why she had me. For most people, they know. Their parents made love, or something like it. They had a fling, or one submitted to the other, or one claimed the other... and it could look like love if you didn't look too close.

My mother practically chose me from a catalogue. Perhaps she had me to complete a set, or tick a box. Because it's what you do. She was very particular about the father (a man whose name I'm not furnished with). She wanted good genes, but she also wanted a man who looked like her. She'd read that first babies look like their fathers, and she wanted a child who looked like herself.

Dragonlike in the way she guarded her own youth and taut midriff, she outsourced the task of actually growing and birthing me. I was fortunate, really, to at least gestate inside a human being. That's becoming rarer and rarer these days.

I think I was grown inside a Polish woman, or maybe Spanish. I don't know. I was never told her name. It's recorded on my birth certificate, which I've never seen. One of our cleaning women was Polish. This mystery woman might be a bit like her. Polite, decent, hard working. But mostly, raw. The way she looks is the way she really looks, not a curated shell modelled on what she looked like twenty years ago.

My real mother, not the one who birthed me, but the one who tolerated me, who cussed under her breath at me and bit her lip afterwards, who created a schedule for me and very carefully ensured some of it overlapped with her own... That mother didn't love men. I wondered, for a while, if she was a lesbian, but I don't think so. I don't think she loved anyone. I don't think she was cut out for it, and she used the same cookie cutter on me.

To be clear, I wouldn't have minded if she was a lesbian. I'd have quite liked it, actually. I'd have had another mother, for a start. If I was lucky, the other one might have been one that smiled properly. I'd have fitted in with some of the kids at school. The ones who made a show of rejecting their privilege. Not in any real sense, but they sure talked about resenting it a lot. They wore rainbow everything and sneered at cishets. Especially the white ones. It was a little bit exhausting, to tell you the truth, but you can't possibly say that. Even if they do, actually, belong to the group they claim to despise, and if it all looks a bit performative and silly.

I sometimes wished I'd gone to a regular school, instead of the one my mother shopped so carefully for. That's how most people do it; their kid just goes to whichever school is local, and they hope for the best. It might have been horrendous. The food could have been awful, and maybe first-years really did get their heads flushed down the lavatory on the first day.

But (and don't hate me for this) my privilege really would have been a privilege, in a place like that. Other kids would have been envious of my home, instead of judgemental of it. Kids would have wanted to be my friend so they could be at parties at whichever big, rattly, house I was living in at the time. I could have been a bully, drunk on ill-earned popularity.

I'm not saying I wanted to a bully, or I should have been. I'm just saying, the chance would have been a fine thing.

These days, I flit from one project to another, and in the little corners of my days, I recognise the shadows of her. I catch myself stretching in the mornings, or tilting my head just like that. Or making a bowl of fresh fruit and yoghurt the way she did, drizzled with expensive honey. Wanting a daughter, daydreaming about it. I squash the want, unwilling to come full circle. Scolding myself for even thinking about inflicting the spiral on someone else.

It is tempting though. Maybe that is it. The place I'd find the answer to the puzzle-box of her. Perhaps that's why she had me.

I look down at her, in the bed she will never leave, eyes closed in that desiccated face... and I imagine that belly huge and taut with my baby, against the backdrop of her gaunt frame.

I'm almost giddy with the thought. I stifle a chuckle.

Her nightstand is depressingly neat. I slide open the drawer and rummage around. One of the nurses paints Mother's lipstick on for her every morning. Isn't that nice? They're so good here. I picked this place out as carefully as she picked out a school for me. Of the two of us, I think she got the better end of the deal.

I apply the colour to my own mouth in a couple of generous swipes, and, smiling, put it in my pocket.

I leave, humming, and I tell cheerful lies to the staff like, see you tomorrow! I think, at this point, I've already made up my mind what I'm going to do. Without even being properly aware of it.

There's a specialist centre where they grow the babies. They pay well for incubators, and there's nothing wrong with her womb. I won't perpetuate the cycle on another generation, but I can stitch this circle closed. Neat as her bedside cabinet.

I smile with lips the same colour as hers used to be. They're pale now, giving her a washed out look. When the arrangements are made and it's time for her to be moved, I kiss her on the forehead.

"Bye, Mum."

I stand back and bow my head, as if I'm at a funeral, and I try not to smile.

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