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Bravey(7)
Author: Alexi Pappas

       Recently, I discovered that the photo album and the coat and the shoes aren’t the only things I inherited from my mother. I learned on an episode of the podcast Radiolab that all humans carry around a unique set of microbes that live on our skin, which “colonize” us as we pass through the birth canal. The microbes literally jump from our mother’s uterus and vagina and set up shop on our newborn skin. Regardless of where we move around the world or the countless interactions we have throughout our life, our skin microbes will always be descendants from the original microbes we inherited from our mothers at birth.

   I was devastated when I first learned this fact. Knowing that I literally carry my mother with me made me feel like I was infected with some dark thing. But then I came to feel comforted by this inheritance. What about those times in summer camp when everyone got sick but me? Or the intimate moments when boys tell me I smell nice even when I’m sweaty? It must have been her microbes. I look at how far I’ve come and I see that my mother’s microbes have been my invisible teammates. I understand that even if her illness prevented her from raising me, part of her has been with me all along.

       All dead people should know this: They’re going to matter, even if they think they won’t and even if they don’t want to. I understand now that toward the end, my mother was so sick that she didn’t want to be part of this world any longer. She thought she could fade away. But her absence meant as much to me as her presence would have.

   Maybe my mom thought that she was being kind to me by leaving—that because she was gone I wouldn’t have to deal with having a crazy mother. But by leaving the way she did, my mother actually burdened me with the task that would come to define my young adult life: to grow up without her.

 

 

if an oyster can turn sand into pearls

    i can turn myself into anything

 

 

GIRL SCOUTS


   My brother taught me to pee standing up. That’s how people pee, duh. He’d also dress me up in my dad’s work suits and make me sit on the toilet with a newspaper in my hands and wait for my dad to come home. He would tell me, “See, this is how he does it.” One time my dad was late coming home and I waited for an hour on the toilet reading an article I couldn’t understand. My dad came home and found me, and that was when he decided I needed to be around more women.

   My dad has always liked to live within what might be considered traditional parameters. He orders classic breakfasts like waffles, western omelets, and eggs Benedict. He introduced me to classic sports like baseball, soccer, basketball, and track. He still signs my presents “From Santa.” So naturally, when he sought out female mentorship for me, he turned to the most classically female environment available: the Girl Scouts.

   I was six years old when he first signed me up, and being at Girl Scout meetings felt like stepping through a kaleidoscope peephole into a glittery female world that both intimidated and fascinated me. Up until that point, I had only really been surrounded by men and animals: my dad, my brother, our pugs, and our cats. But my weekly Girl Scout meetings were the domain of the mom. The troop leaders were all moms and they’d lead us scouts in weekly meetings where we’d learn how to sew, do crafts, and cook pancakes on upside-down Folgers coffee tins with tea candles underneath. I felt more comfortable being the only girl at Boy Scouts than being surrounded by girls at Girl Scouts. (I know this because I went to multiple Boy Scout meetings and trips when it was my dad’s turn to chaperone my brother’s troop and he could not leave me home alone.) At Girl Scout meetings I felt the constant presence of a mom hovering over me in a way that was deeply unfamiliar. I had never felt a woman’s chest accidentally brush against me before. Charm necklaces dangled onto my shoulder like fairies and perfume cascaded over me as the mom-leaders helped stitch the crotch together on my pair of homemade pajamas. Other girls weren’t distracted by the approach of a mom-leader and could keep working on their crafts despite being watched by mom-eyes, but not me. I was always taken aback when one of them turned her attention to me, and I couldn’t focus on anything else.

       I was confronted by new female things, like cheeks dusted with noticeable veils of face powder, eyes outlined in eyeliner, exposed bra lines, soft skin, manicured toes, dyed hair. I also absorbed the way they talked, the way they disciplined, the way they loved. It was intellectually instructional but emotionally painful. It felt like touching hot candle wax, where you want to do it and still keep doing it even though it hurts. These moms were not like my mom at all. My mom, when she was home, was liable to explode into a fit of rage at any moment. She was not to be approached. I knew she would never harm me physically, but when she’d yell at the toaster in the kitchen because she thought it was talking to her, my instincts told me to keep my guard up.

       At first I was wary and even afraid of these Girl Scout mom-leaders. It was overwhelming and strange to be around them, and I didn’t like when they paid too much attention to me, as if to overcompensate for the things they knew I was missing at home. They projected a lack onto me that I still cannot fully understand. It’s a lack that other people feel on my behalf. When I was a kid these looks felt like a challenge or a puzzle; I didn’t know exactly what I was missing, but they did.

   When the mom-leaders spoke to me, I fumbled in my interactions with them. I didn’t know how to handle being around mothers like this. I didn’t know the right way to handle being touched—I have no memories of my mom ever touching me, and my dad only touched me when he was showing me how to play sports or giving me an occasional hug. I didn’t know how to be disciplined by or properly receive a talking-to from a woman; I didn’t know how to take a compliment or otherwise respond to being mothered. But I didn’t want them to think I didn’t know how. I tried to respond the way I felt you were supposed to because I wanted them to think I understood my role in this equation. I wanted to pass whatever aptitude test they were giving me, not be the poor little girl with the dead mom.

   Within the incubator of my own home, I never felt watched like I did at Girl Scouts. In my recollection, nobody in my house watched me. My dad or an au pair was always around in case I got hurt, but I was never watched in the literal sense of the word. Girl Scout moms were constantly in a state of anticipation of one of us needing help—the kind of help their mom-intuition told them we needed without us asking for it. Before I even had the chance to accidentally overfill my Folgers tin with pancake batter, an eager mom would swoop in and save the day: “This is how much pancake batter to use, dear.” This was the land of dears, honeys, sweeties, and pumpkins. I will never forget the time I was voraciously sucking on a lemon wedge and one of the moms reached over from behind my back and snatched it away, telling me my teeth would rot if I ate raw lemons. I was hurt and insulted: I had packed those lemon wedges myself and even sprinkled them with sugar—how many of the other scouts had prepared their own snacks? None, that’s how many. I felt suffocated by the unsolicited commentary.

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