Mommie Dearest

I try to understand my mother, really I do. After all, when I look in the mirror, I'm looking at her even more than I'm looking at my dad. I inherited her build, her nose, her eye shape, and her lip shape.

We 'met' over breakfast, and as usual, she spent about ten minutes carping over my clothes. But I would divert her -- temporarily.


"How's your latest painting going, mom?"
"Pretty good, actually," she said. "My latest went for five grand at auction."
"That's impressive, mom."
But mom would have none of it. "Savannah, why did you go to Egypt?"
"I wanted to," I told her, "I've always been curious about it, if the stories were all true."
"What was it you were doing there?"
"I'm an archeologist," I explained, "I study ancient civilizations." Of course, I only told her half the story. If I'd have told her the other half, that I comb ancient tombs for treasure, that I dodge mummies and fire traps, that I chop through piles of rubble and dive head-first into wells, she would have a coronary right then and there.
"An archeologist? Really?" she said. "I'm a little surprised, Savannah. It's not an occupation I expected a daughter of mine to go into. But then again, nothing about you was ever typical."


"As a little girl, Savannah, you hated dolls and dresses. I used to dress you up in these cute little clothes and you'd come back dirty with your jeans ripped. I used to get so upset." She also said when I was little I loved reading, playing chess, playing catch outside with dad, and collecting bugs in and around the house. "I knew you were different the moment you came out of me. I even named you 'Savannah' in hopes that my hunch about you wasn't true -- and it was."
Mom did something I didn't expect her to do. She talked about her childhood. It was something I'd never heard from her.
"Before the disaster (the one that claimed her parents' lives and those of most of the residents of the town where she lived), I lived a pretty decent life. I had a mother, and a father, and a happy home. The names of my parents have been lost to time, but I still have fairly vivid memories of it."



She pulled out this one photograph, in which she's sitting alone -- in a cemetery -- reading.
It explained nothing, and it explained everything.
It explained my mother.