Stars in Her Eyes

The place is nestled between Marshfield and Fairgrove, a prize for skywatchers tucked at the end of the maze of gravel roads.  It’s a sort of haphazard collection of buildings and structures.  There’s the grassy wannabe parking lot, separated from the telescopes by a short barbed wire fence and tiny box hedges that will never fill out.  An unmarked white dome hides half the main building from view, the home of the still-unfinished robotic telescope.  Behind it, a concrete pad is permanently dotted at regular intervals with skeletal bases for absent eight-inch scopes.  Perched on the far edge of the pad, just before the thick trees begin again, is the heart of the Observatory—an asymmetrical, twin-domed white shack.  There’s barely room inside for the two monster computers (straight out of the nineties) and the cabinets that house the eight-inch telescopes.  On either side, the mismatched domes hold the bigger fourteen- and sixteen-inch scopes. There’s a bathroom somewhere, but I admit I’ve been too wary of Slenderman to hunt for it in the trees.  It’s not nearly so glamorous as you might think when someone says “observatory.”

Twice a year, we open Baker Observatory to the public.  I spend the final half-hour before sunset erecting a randomly selected eight-inch out on the pad.  I mount it backwards at first; it’s been a full six months since I last visited.  I laugh and remind myself that in order to keep up with the Earth’s rotation, I’ve got to position the scope with the miniature finder-scope perched on top, so the whole mess can pivot on its stand.  I correct my mistake, drag one of the sparing plastic chairs next to my post, and flop into it to listen to the clock drive’s innocuous hum.  I intend to sit while the visitors fumble to find the eyepiece, but I know full well I’ll spend the majority of the night on my feet, surrendering the use of my chair to the kids too small to reach.  Choosing a target while the sky is still light is folly, so I settle into the chair with a Clif bar and a bottle of Gatorade.

The parents with the smallest children are somehow always first to arrive, as if they expect the sky to darken more quickly to suit the kids’ bedtimes.  They never listen to the parking attendant and they never point their headlights away from the Observatory.  They’re lucky there’s anything to see this early, but we catch a glimpse of Saturn as it sets, just distinguishable against the denim blue sky.

They always expect color, but they won’t find it through our low-power scopes.  I try to explain to them that the human eye just doesn’t have that kind of light-gathering power, that the pictures they see in the books are created with sensitive cameras, incredibly long exposures, and colored filters, but some grumble all the same.  Honestly, you can’t expect your eight-millimeter pupil to gather all the photons an eight-inch lens does, hold on to them like the hundreds of microscopic wells in a CCD camera will, and process them like a nice, modern computer can. 

But barely anyone listens to the whole answer, let alone accepts it.  Last year at this function, I had a delightful gentleman exit the sixteen-inch’s dome and make a beeline toward me.

“You!  You know somethin’ about planets and such?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What was that nonsense in there?”

“Last I knew, they were looking at the Ring Nebula.”

“It’s just a smoke ring!  I couldn’t see a damn thing.”

“I’m sorry, sir, it’s just that the human eye—“

“Bah!  What’s the use in driving out here for a lousy smoke ring?  What a waste.  I didn’t see anything.”

Sometimes it’s less about ignorance and more about straight-up stupidity, like the drunken redneck that came later.  He wobbled up to my eight-inch, clearly unsteady on his feet, and slurred, “Where’s Vulcan?”

“You mean the constellation Vulpecula?  It’s just above the—“

“NO!” he roared.  “The planet!”

“Planet, sir?”

“The one Spock’s from!”

“Erm.  It’s, ah…not visible this time of year, sir.”

I sincerely hope he hadn’t driven himself.

It frustrates me that I can’t always make our visitors understand the magnitude of what they’re seeing.  I am armed with a wealth of knowledge about star formation, about the potential of protoplanetary discs, about the mythology surrounding our ancient celestial neighbors—but no one ever asks.  The millions of light-years of distance go over their heads.  They don’t seem to grasp it when I tell them they’re seeing Andromeda as it was two million years ago.  They gape and crane their necks and pout about the length of the line to peer through the sixteen-inch.  They blind each other with the flash on their iPhones and allow their children to play tag on the grassy knoll beside the pad and when it’s over, they pile back into their cars and wash the observatory with the light of their headlights and trundle down the gravel road noisily, taking nothing with them but the dirt on their shoes.

If convincing people to take my word for astronomy is difficult on home turf, imagine the difficulty of being summoned to do it in a classroom setting.  As part of an internship, I accompanied my advisor to a meeting with an art teacher at an elementary school.  She had grand plans for having her students create a to-scale replica of the solar system and was heartbroken when we told her she’d need two projects to scale size and distance separately.  What resulted was paper “plaques” taped down a hallway at calculated intervals, inaccurately colored foam balls hanging from the library ceiling, and a disgruntled old lady.

“Well, could you at least come to our open house?  We’re having an assembly that day, could you speak at that?”

I cobbled together everything I knew about the planets and made a movie, complete with photos and my own voice narrating.  The video played to a packed gymnasium, but the tiny voices never stopped.  Too excited about having time out of class?  Maybe.  I got a pat on the back for my movie from my advisor, but it was clear I had missed the mark.  I spent the remainder of the evening supervising children in the creation of graham cracker replicas of the Mars Rover.  I bit my tongue, held back the waiting flow of information about the recent discover of water beneath Mars’ surface, and mopped up the icing with Clorox wipes when it was all over.

I can’t imagine I was much different at that age.  No “astronaut” ever came to my school assemblies, but the most I ever learned about above the atmosphere was the phases of the moon.  I like to think I would have known better than to ask a visiting NASA employee how many planets she’d been to or whether I could stand on Jupiter, but then again, would anyone have told me before that day that humans are (for the next few decades) bound solely to Earth?  That not all planets are rocky and solid?  Surely, I thought as I wilted in light of their perfectly innocent ignorance, surely these are not the future grumpy old men and drunken Vulcan hunters.

 My hope was renewed after being requested to make a presentation for a homeschool group.  I was thrilled and honored to be asked to come.  These were not public school children we’d be presenting too; if their parents cared enough about astronomy to seek out university students well-versed on the subject, then surely they already knew a thing or two.   In my excitement packed up a school-owned eight-inch and a sun filter, to give the kids a chance at some safe solar viewing. That year was the peak of the sun’s eleven-year solar cycle, and I was eager to share the abundant sunspots with anyone who cared to look.

I perched on one of the church’s basement library tables while my partner lectured and showed pictures out of the many books she’d brought.  The crowd was more diverse than I would have liked; a crew of kids ranging from three to fifteen makes it tough to alight on a definition for “age-appropriate.”  We did the best we could, but the littlest ones fidgeted after ten minutes and even the older ones seemed positively nonplussed by the idea of black holes.  She gave up after an hour or so, and the kids happily trouped outside where the eight-inch was waiting.  I took one look at the now clouded-over sky and called it a bust.  Oblivious, the two dozen tykes took full advantage of the church playground.

I hope they get to see sunspots one day without going blind.  I hope someone will tell them that different parts of the molten sun spin at different rates, and that they take their magnetic field lines with them.  I hope whoever explains all this compares the field lines to rubbing a fine chain in between your palms, letting the links become hopelessly tangled.  The tangled chain of field lines rise up out of the surface and sink back down into the plasma.  Where the fields penetrate the surface, the fusion slows down; the particles are held hostage in a magnetic prison and cannot interact properly.  The surface cools and grows dark in the places where the line rises and falls.  I hope they personify the sun like I would have, and tell them that after eleven years of this snarled mess, the sunspots growing worse and worse, the sun gives up, throws all its magnetic field lines away, and starts fresh.

I never could have explained that before my first astronomy course.  I myself was barely interested beyond the fact that it would satisfy the university’s need for me to take a natural sciences course.  I opted for the section without a lab, mostly because I was lazy.  The generic lecture hall in the library housed up to a hundred students, but only sixty or so attended class on any given day.  The pictures in the textbook admittedly intrigued me.  I actually read the first reading assignment.  And the next.  And every one after.  Our professor, a gruff but soft-spoken man, presented the strange physics of space like it was no big deal, except that it was.  I sat in the front row.  It wasn’t enough to know that quasars were a thing.  I had to know why.

I didn’t trust myself to major in physics, but I changed my minor to astronomy.  I had to know more, and the online articles and off-brand two-inch telescopes weren’t enough.  A flyer went up in the physics building, advertising open positions as astronomy research aids.  On the day applications were due, almost on a whim, I slipped my resume and cover letter under the head honcho’s door, certain that other, more qualified applicants had already been selected.  The joke was on me; there were almost no other applicants.  So I snuck onto Kemper’s staff and added NASA to my resume.

So, admittedly, my romance with science didn’t properly begin until university.  So I can’t be too angry--they’re only children, after all.  It’s the parents’ prerogative to prioritize what they will in raising their little ones.  How can I blame them for the fact that my own parents planted a seed when they woke me in the middle of the night to see a lunar eclipse?  How can I fault them for wanting to be anything other than an astronaut when they grow up?  After all, NASA has slashed their space exploration initiatives.  The US curriculum for math and science is skimpy at best.  No, it’s not little ones I blame, though I mourn for the relationship with astronomy they’ll likely never have.

Thing is, I’m not sure if the adults are really at fault either.  There are so few men and women of science to look up to here and now—so few models to demonstrate a proper appreciation of astronomy.  I’ve been with the “professionals” too, and they hide their nastiness and elitism behind the mask of their nationalities.  Sometimes they let politics dictate who gets published and who doesn’t.  They abandon their science at conferences, when an American finishes speaking and the French attendees stand up and shout their dissenting opinions.  Thank God I never witnessed that, but at the conference I attended in Tucson, it was difficult to remember that I was at a professional meeting and not just another gen-ed college lecture, so great was the number of faces hidden behind laptop screens showing no reaction to the words being spoken at the front of the room.  Even the emails they write to their colleagues are peppered with snark and sarcasm—not the business-letter formality I expected.  I’m not entirely convinced that they consistently care more about astronomy than the average Springfieldian.

What, then, can be done?  Surely no one individual can be responsible for the resurrection of interest in astronomy.

Sometimes there’s a glimmer of hope.  Sometimes I tell Callisto’s story at Open House night to an avidly interested guest, and smile as I spin the epic tale, the constellations as my characters.  Other times I’ll ask a child how many dots they see in this cluster, and point to Pleiades with my green laser.  If they answer “seven,” I tell them they’d make a fine Roman archer.  For the briefest instant, I make contact.  I break whatever boundary it is that makes people so unwilling to learn from a stranger and for the split second of the breach, I deposit some small nugget, a factoid, a new knowledge.

When I point my eight-inch at the twin stars in the middle of the Big Bear’s tail, a boy of no more than ten removes his glasses and mounts my chair to get to the eye piece.  I don’t see his mouth open, but I hear the tiny exhalation of wonder.

“Do you see them both?”

“Yeah.  Do they go around each other?”

“You mean like binaries?”

“Uh huh.”

            “Not these.  They look close, but they’re a good ten lightyears away from each other.”

            He removes his eye from the eyepiece and looks up to focus on the constellation again without the scope’s aid.  “Ya know, I think I see them both, now I know they’re there.”

            “Definitely possible.  The second one’s just on the edge of visible magnitude.”

            He hops down from the chair and I spot his wide grin even in the faint red glow that leaks from the Observatory.  “Thanks, miss.  I think that’s the coolest one so far.”

* * *

On our most recent visit to our hometown, my husband and I informed my mother-in-law that we’re expecting.  After the initial squealing and hand flapping, the questions came thick and fast.

            “Do you know the gender?”

            “It’s only week 14, Mom.”

            “Have you thought of names?”

            “Not really.”

            “What theme will the nursery be?”

            My husband looked to me, deferring to my judgment.

            “Uh… Space.  Yeah.  Outer space.”

And that was that.  It took exactly one day for my Pinterest feed to overflow with pins to the “space” board my mother-in-law has dedicated to the baby.  I guess I made a choice, without realizing then that I had decided.  I have seen the grumpy men and the drunkards, the children who know no better and the adults who will not teach them, even the scientists that cannot be bothered to be their field’s own advocates.  Maybe no one person can bring astronomy back to the kind of popularity it enjoyed in the 1960’s.  I cannot change school curriculum, nor can I round up the funds to bring NASA back from the brink.  But I can do this one thing.  One day, when he’s older, of course, I can wake this little one and bring him to the backyard to gaze up at the blood-red moon.  Maybe he’ll ask what makes it red, and I can get excited and make huge gestures and explain it’s all to do with the Earth’s shadow.  I don’t care what his major or minor wind up being, or if he goes to college at all—I just really hope he thinks lunar eclipses are cool.  And maybe that will be enough.

House of a Million Lights

I can tell you that it’s on the way to the dentist’s office across town, but I don’t think I could ever name for you the street or the house number.  It was a pretty dilapidated old thing—much like the tenants, I imagine—perched on a generous lot that took up most of a city block.  On a good day, it was an eyesore.  The squat off-white shack managed to stand out, even amidst the used-up cans of rust that were once cars and the rickety swing set.  It came right after a particularly hilly patch in the road on the ride to the dentist, so I was usually too busy keeping my head between my knees to bother looking at it.  Unless it was December, of course.

It was a whole other world around Christmas time.  Some faceless man, perhaps one of Santa’s own elves, came and gave the entire lot a healthy coating of incandescence.  Our family made a tradition of driving around town sometime in the weeks leading up to Christmas to survey the handiwork of our town’s residents.  Since we could not be reasonably expected at that age to know right from left, our parents directed our gazes by calling out the side of the vehicle the next lit-up house would be appearing on—Mommy’s (the driver’s side) or Daddy’s.  Some houses were admittedly boring with little but icicle or string lights, and the ones with flamboyant collections of inflatables were always fun.  But it was the House of Million Lights we waited for.  Neither my sisters nor I cared that it was a full 20 minutes out of the way of our usual light-viewing tour; we begged for it, and our parents always wound up folding.  The car would creep to an almost-standstill to allow us time to press our noses to the Daddy’s-side windows and ogle the dazzling display.  It was all there—the nativity diorama lit with floodlights, Santa’s sleigh recreated in LEDs, all manner of blinking, flashing, strobing icons of the Yuletide season.  The house was decked out, too.  The peeling paint and filthy gutters vanished under rainbow string lights.

In December, the inhabitants were not the “trailer trash” my mother made them out to be.  They were royalty.  It was tradition, and no one dared defy it.  Every year, like clockwork, you could expect the wise men to appear over the hill in such a timely manner you could set your watch by it.  The lights were no different.  They appeared just after Thanksgiving, without fail, every single year.  And nothing was exempt from the Christmas charm.  What once was lead became gold; the grubby shepherds were upgraded to bearers of the Word.  No one mocked their plain clothes or unkempt hair when they came dashing down from the fields with such wondrous good news on their tongues.  Just the same, my mother bit her tongue when we inched past the House of a Million Lights and let the shepherds have their moment.
         Beyond the house-hopping drive, we also made a pilgrimage to Carthage to drive through the “Way of Salvation” light display.  It was the one time of year my parents didn’t bother making us buckle our seatbelts or stay in our seats, since the max speed through the guided labyrinth was a whopping five miles an hour.  It began with nonsense fixtures—animated ducks fishing in frozen-over ponds and grinning dinosaurs munching neon-green leaves from rope-light trees.  It gave us time to tune our radio to the channel they hosted, the one that tells the lit-up bible stories in the right order, but never in sync with our position in the unending line of cars.  We usually lost interest by the time we got to Elijah and the chariot of fire.  We’d stop keeling this way and that, craning to see the next display, and instead relish the novel feeling of lounging in the car in pajamas, no shoes, no seatbelts.  When we arrived at Jesus’ birth, we’d wait and watch the plastic barn animals’ noses and squeal when the cow or sheep released an automated puff of steam.  On the way out, we’d mock the host church’s Vietnamese name and, if we hadn’t pissed off Mom and Dad too badly, proceed to Braum’s to stuff ourselves with Black Forest Sundaes, too proud to admit we’d started feeling sick three bites ago.

I can’t remember how many years it’s been since I’ve been to Way of Salvation, but I imagine I’d probably need both hands to count.  It might have been one of the first Christmas traditions to vanish, but it won’t be the last.  Somehow I’ve still managed to maintain my streak for waking up Christmas morning in my father’s house through college and the first two years of marriage, but I don’t think I’ll manage it this year.  A number of factors point to not only a different Christmas experience, but a different way of visiting in general: the lack of a bed in my former room, the divorce paperwork that has finally been filed, the impending sale of my childhood home of nearly fifteen years.  This year, there will be no joint effort by my parents to hide our candy-laden stockings before we wake (which might be a good thing—the hiding spots got harder every year, and last year it took a full ten minutes to find mine).  I doubt my father will even take the time to decorate the yard of the house he already feels like he’s on the way out of.  Frosty, Mary, Joseph, and all the rest will stay in their boxes this year.  This time next year, they might just find themselves on the shelf at Goodwill.

Things look different when you’re not little anymore.  Lately I find myself homesick, in a way more temporal than spatial.  It’s like visiting your elementary school years later, breathing in the nostalgia, then going immediately from fondly content to pissed when your ass gets stuck in one of those tiny chairs.  But you can’t be mad at that chair, it’s a part of your childhood!  So who are you mad at?  Not yourself, either.  Things aren’t worse, just different.

Two years ago was my first Christmas as a married woman.  We lived in a studio apartment, and the extent of our Christmas decorating was a one-foot white tree on our kitchen table.  Afterwards, we scoured the clearance section and found a proper tree for a steal.  When I took it out of the box for the first time, nearly a year after its purchase, I was underwhelmed, to say the least.  The measly thing stood a scant five feet tall, was thin as a rail, and got swallowed by the discount tree skirt.  I spent a solid hour carefully balancing the larger ornaments, which attempted to pull over the wussy tree more than once, then stepped back and wallowed in the dissatisfaction of the Charlie Brown-esque twig in the corner.  Then I did something out of character for me—I went out and purchased a new tree.  At full price.  Before the post-holiday clearance.

I couldn’t bring myself to downgrade from the seven-foot, burgundy-and-gold monster of a tree I’d known all my life.  My father wasn’t especially proud of my deviance from my usual frugality, but I wasn’t pleased with any tree shorter than me.  It was a kind of juxtaposition of traditions.  I had been raised to scrimp and save, to donate what I didn’t need or use, to never keep what I wouldn’t miss.  But I was also raised to anticipate the yearly shuffle of furniture in the living room to make space for my mother’s towering display of peacock-like Christmas vanity.  In the end, that vanity won—but what I have is not a carefully coordinated, professional-grade tree.  The seven-and-a-half foot, pre-lit tree I settled on (actually a small step up) bears instead a motley hodge-podge of ornaments documenting my husband’s childhood.

His traditions were much different than mine.  His mother’s tree had no theme, unless you consider it a once-a-year scrapbook of her sons’ school Christmas parties.  The ornaments I crafted in elementary school were always the last onto my mother’s tree, and they always got tucked away in the branches that faced the wall.  Our tree now is the height and thickness of the tree I had growing up, but lovingly and clashingly decorated like his.

I have things now that I never had before, and those things don’t bother me.  I have a cat that curls up on the tree skirt and swats at the lowest-hanging ornaments.  I have a husband who takes the time to make things from scratch every now and again, who frowns on holiday staples that come straight out of a box or can (God, don’t get him started on my love for boxed stuffing).  Introducing these new elements to my holiday season does not bother me, but the removal of the old sometimes does.  I understand that some things naturally fade, but there are just a few things that have proved difficult to let go of.

Maybe four years ago now, at about sixteen or seventeen, I mentioned the House of a Million Lights to my mother—some passing suggestion that we hadn’t seen it in a while, and maybe we should go have a look that year.  I got an eyebrow raised at me.

“You mean the house on Maiden, just off Murphy?”

“Uh, sure.  You know, on the way to the dentist.”

The eyebrow creeped higher.  “You don’t remember the sign?”

“No…?”

“The guy had cancer, Heather.  The one that put up all the lights.  There was a sign last year—the family did it one more year in his memory, but it’s too much work without him.”

I found it on Google Maps.  No one remembered the address, so I plunked myself down in Street View halfway to the dentist’s office and moseyed toward it, one agonizing click of the “forward” arrow at a time.  669 North Maiden Lane.  It’s uglier than I remember, especially in daylight.  I guess the yard’s not littered with as much junk as I thought, and the tree looks lovely, at least on whatever day the street car went by.  The chipped paint is worse than ever, and it looks like they’ve surrendered some of the lot for some newer little bungalows.  Maybe the family, minus their Christmas-loving patriarch, couldn’t bear to stay, I wouldn’t know.  Maybe they, like me and my husband, have shirked tradition and started afresh elsewhere.

I’m coming to terms with the death of a man I never once met, a man without a name or a face—one of Santa’s own elves, I think.  I don’t think there’s a house in all of Springfield like it was.  Maybe not even in the whole world.

A Personal Essay

          My mother used to weigh what I’m sure was well over 200 pounds. Every childhood memory contains, somewhere, the image of her round and freckled face.  Her hair in those years was forever in a ponytail—even on the days she’d washed it, because whatever room she was in was always sweltering.  When we joined family members on their annual excursion to Stockton Lake, my mother spent the weekend in her hunter green folding chair or the temporary hammock, her face as pink as though she’d rubbed it raw.  There were passive-aggressive comments galore about who the hell decided camping the last week of August was a good idea.

            I don’t blame her for thinking of herself.  From what I’ve gleaned, her childhood was rough.  She speaks about it in disjointed, dreamlike anecdotes.  In bursts, she would tell us about the nightly meal of nothing but beans and “shit on a shingle,” about moving at an hour’s notice, about working in her father’s illegally-owned burger stand and how he blew the entirety of their savings on a tractor.  They didn’t even live on a farm.  By no means did she continue the cycle of abuse with me, though.  I was certainly provided everything CPS would look for.  My childhood—especially by comparison—was downright uneventful. I squirmed in my seat when these details fell out and did exactly as I was trained to do—thanked her for sparing us from such a rotten upbringing.

            I remember when the weight started coming off.  She was sitting on the living room floor, not quite cross-legged, having just fiddled with the old-school stereo’s buttons.  The tape sounds just like a televangelist, though the speaker’s message is not about loving God, but about how losing weight is a spiritual journey.  She didn’t bother to get up and resituate on the couch, which was still fully within hearing distance of the speakers, but elected instead to remain on the floor, eyes blankly unfocused.  When she noticed me lingering in the hallway, she shooed me away.

            The softer, squishier woman I knew in my youth began melting.  She tried just about everything in short bursts.  She began at home, shy, the bedroom door shut as she clumsily imitated Jillian Michaels.   She purchased a Zumba starter kit, complete with maraca weights that I don’t think even made it out of the box.  Slowly, with an air of “once bitten, twice shy” that I could never find the origin of, she ventured out, purchasing a membership to the Curves fitness club nearby.  She timed her workouts to coincide with a nearly-empty building.  In between, she flirted with every fitness method available: Pilates, yoga, jogging.  Curves was the only thing that stuck for long.  She became a religious portion controller.  She consumed dinner off of a tea saucer.  She didn’t really eat better, just less.  Sometimes she skipped entire meals; she sat at the table with us, but touched nothing and snapped when spoken to.

I wish I could say that the arrival at fitness meant more time spent playing together.  I wish I could assume that my mother’s motivation for the loss was the desire to be healthier for her family, to live a longer life with her three daughters.   But if I assumed these things, I would be wrong.  I understand that being selfish can be a virtue, and I do not blame her for wanting something of her own in the midst of a life centered on the needs of her husband and children.  To an extent, though, I do blame her for the petty means of marking her progress.  From what I’ve come to understand of weight loss, some of the best, most satisfying indicators of fitness are no longer getting winded going up stairs, lifting every-day objects with ease, and the general dissipation of that sluggish, lumpy feeling.  But fitness was not what my mother wanted.  It was the loss of inches, the narrowing of her face that my mother craved.  Two things motivated my mother, and they both resided in the bathroom—the silvered glass on the wall and the judgmental glass scale on the floor.

            I myself can never decide how I feel about mirrors.  For the longest time, I was all too happy to have earned being called a “stick.”   Though facially, I look like a carbon copy of my mother, my teenage body was just the opposite of hers.  The jury’s still out on how I managed it, though I will say that everything I ate was closely monitored for the first seventeen years of my life.  I never felt entitled to a single thing in the cabinets, and snacking was a foreign concept.  I ate what was given to me, and it wasn’t all that much.    My plates were made for me until around sixteen years old.  My friends wondered at my “fast metabolism,” and I accepted their diagnosis at face value. I emerged from high school carrying 120 pounds on my five-foot-seven frame, scraping just above “underweight” on the BMI charts.

            College and getting married changed that.  My metabolism slowed down significantly—or so I thought.  Without any knowledge of matching my calorie intake to my activity level, I ballooned quickly.  I think my mother was secretly pleased when I came home for a visit some number of weeks before my May wedding and found that my size 4 wedding dress was fitting a little more snugly than when I had purchased it.  She had offered to have her beaded halter-top gown adjusted for me, but at a size 18, I didn’t imagine any seamstress was talented enough to make it fit me.  I stuck with my ruched sweetheart-neckline gown.

            It’s been a good long while since it’s been necessary for her to shop in the plus-sizes.  These days, she hovers between a 10 and 12.  For a brief while, she slimmed all the way down to a six—small enough for her and my sixteen-year-old self to swap clothes.  Those skinny jeans and pencil skirts still lurk in her closet, reminders of what she is capable of and might one day reach again.  The “fat pants” remain in that closet, too.  She laments every now and again that she’s on the path to pulling them back out to cover her unsightly ass until she can get signed up at the 24-hour gym like she’s been meaning to.

            My closet is devoid of such dramatically oversized “fat pants.” Unlike my mother’s closet, where the trophy clothes with the smallest numbers on the tag sit in plain view, I’ve tucked away the clothes I no longer feel flatter my “curvier” shape in a black garbage bag.  I’ve marked the bag with a silver Sharpie: three blocky numbers that warn me not to open it until I’ve returned to my target weight.  I’ve ignored the warning more than once.  On days I look in the mirror and feel like some noticeable progress had been made, I’ll bring the bag down, disregard the shiny “135,” and try on an old sweater or two.  Every time I shake my head, fold the sweaters again, and return the bag to the Shelf of Shame.

            My mother used to tell me (more often than I would have liked) that I was beautiful.  It’s paradoxical to me that I could look so much like her and still be, to her, the unquestionably more attractive one.  Perhaps, in her own strange way, she was trying to prevent me from inheriting her self-image issues.  But pointing out my physical aspects has done nothing for my confidence.  If anything, it has driven me to stand naked in my mirror for hours on end, wondering if this or that feature is as lovely as it once was, if she would still approve of it now.  In those moments, I am worth nothing more or less than the sum of my (body) parts.  She does not congratulate me on my jobs or internships or grades, or if she does, the words are lost amongst the shower of unwanted commentary on my appearance.  Even her “happy birthday” to me this year was marred.

            “Happy birthday to the most beautiful woman I know!”

Not “the most clever” or “the kindest,” not “Happy birthday to the daughter I’m proud of.”  If I am not beautiful, then the message is not for me.  I suppose I should be glad that my mother has something kind to say to me, but I find myself wishing that she valued the same things I value in myself—namely my intelligence and wit.

            My mother lacks neither of these things.  She was, in her academic days, a talented writer, and she kicks ass on her Words with Friends knock-off app.  I gave up playing against her long ago.  It seems that, in the absence of opponents she knows in real life, Word Feud has morphed into a pseudo-Omegle for her, pairing her with strangers and giving her more fodder for discussion the next time I come home to visit.  Her avatar is never an image of herself, but some stock representation of an interest—the Superman logo or a Boston Terrier.  It resembles a social experiment: how much attention can she garner from strangers while maintaining her anonymity?

            Snapchat is another favorite, and though I’m close to abandoning that one as well, I receive snaps from her about every other day.  Many of them include the same compliments I get via text message.  She also chronicles her ongoing weight loss journey for me, relating pound after grueling pound lost.  For the most part, I try to congratulate her, but as I’ve been bitterly embroiled in my own fight with the Freshman Fifteen that became more like forty, my enthusiasm is spread a bit thin.

            It was during a visit in June (an “up” in my mother’s yo-yoing weight) that I related I’d been tracking my calorie intake and had purchased a cheap elliptical.  My efforts had yielded a loss of about five pounds—a mere dent in my goal, but I was proud.  My mother was, in a word, unimpressed.

            “Oh, so now I’m going to be the only fat one in the family, huh?”

            My mind initially rejected the multiple facets of that comment.  I waved a hand to indicate that I had nothing more to say on the matter, though I did briefly berate myself for bringing up the topic of weight at all. 

My husband fumed in the car on the way home.

            “Something bothering you?”

            He sighed.  “It’s hard sometimes to listen to your mom when she’s so full of herself.”

            I cocked my head, indicating he should go on.

            “Why can’t she be proud of what you’ve accomplished?  Why does it have to be about her and her weight?  Did she never learn to just smile and nod when someone shares a little victory?”

            I almost laughed, but my chest hurt.  “That’s just how she is.  I shouldn’t have bothered tell her.”

            “It just isn’t fair, that’s all…to have to censor what you say to her…” He trailed off, eyes steadily fixed on the darkened highway.

Even with all my mirror-gazing, I had, until recently, failed to recognize the imprint of my mother on my being.  Steadily, quietly, my mother’s hands shaped my personality, my perception of myself, until, with a bang, I was entirely my own.  I do not like the finished product.  I find myself rewetting the clay of my being, struggling to tweak my mother’s design and failing; her fingerprints run so deep.  When I emerge from bathroom stalls with mirrors on the adjacent wall, for a split second, it is not my reflection, but my mother looking at me.  I cannot meet her eyes.