Everything Changes, Even Our Moms
By: Sarah Boorboor
As we sat in the car, on my second to last time home, I studied my mom’s profile from the passenger seat. Every thirty seconds or so, she peered forward to see if my sister would be back soon with the Moo Shu Pork. When she did this her face was illuminated by fluorescent Chinatown lights. We hadn’t been alone in a while and the center console sat between us like a pile of unsaid things. Seeing no sign of incoming supplies, she stiffened back into the driver’s seat, her frame swallowed back up by shadow.
For years the pillar of my mom’s identity was her occupation: Nurse Manager of the Burn Unit at St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children. She woke at 5:30am, drove to North Philadelphia, and returned to our house on Downing Lane after dark for a cat nap. Despite exhaustion, she never failed to serve a respectable dinner. A rotation of fish, steak, and pork chops in measured portions (fist sized) served atop rice dyed yellow at its fringes with saffron. As my dad tuned into the evening news, which blared a few feet from the table, she might remain silent or she might recall her day at St. Christopher’s in a flat tone. Flashes of shift drama, third-degree burns, and at worst infant mortality.
If I was lucky, the weekend might bring a trip to Marshalls. A master of efficiency, my mom seemed most at peace while pairing simple pleasures with practicality—sipping a Diet Coke while grocery shopping, observing her koi fish while skimming the pond clean of algae, and (my favorite small indulgence) singing while driving. On our way to the discounts that awaited us at Marshalls, my mom would press play on Jagged Little Pill, the prize of her limited CD collection. I can still see her profile framed by a cracked window, nodding along to Alanis’ profanities, her lips turned upward in a faint smile.
My mom almost never wore lipstick, but on the rare occasion she did, she would lean into her bathroom mirror to paint on a light shade of pink. I would perch atop the rim of her creme bathtub, eyeing her from multiple angles the way a caterpillar might expectantly watch a butterfly. But from her pale green eyes to her rose-colored cheeks, we would never look like mother and daughter.
A curious shopper once approached us in the shoe aisle of Marshalls to ask if I was adopted. To my knowledge, I was not. My dad’s dark complexion and hot temper had simply overpowered my mom’s fairness and practicality. The only thing I seemed to inherit were her curls, which I stubbornly straightened with a flat iron for years to come. Hunched over shoe boxes, we might as well have been friends with an uncanny age gap. “No, not adopted. She’s mine.”
When I was five, I wandered away from her at the grocery store off Evesham Road. In one of my first moments of freedom, I pulled a jar of pickles from the shelf only for it to smash to pieces around me. A young woman in an apron discovered me first and mistook me for a boy due to navy overalls paired with a bowl cut. I wailed until my mom found me and scooped me up in her arms. “She’s mine.”
I’d be lost a dozen times after that. But even as I tripped over the obstacles of girlhood (unrequited crushes, expensive jeans, body dysmorphia, etc.), my mom was a net. I would always find myself reclaimed, the broken things fixed or at least paid for.
When I left home for the first time, bound for college, I chose a school that was a six hour drive away. On breaks, I’d return home to sit with my dad and smoke shisha under New Jersey stars. I’d fill my lungs with rose flavored smoke as he filled my head with dreams. As he put it, I’d be a great writer because I was Persian and poetry was in my blood. I didn’t think then about how my blood was only half Persian, or worry that this might somehow make poetic lines more elusive. I just believed him.
My mom was never around for these conversations, instead our time together ticked boxes. She always made sure I was armed with the things I needed, like a down jacket that could stand up to a Pittsburgh winter. When the break was over, she said goodbye by reminding me to pick up extra shifts at the Chem Library.
In 2014, I graduated and returned home for a summer with my thesis in hand. Fifty neat pages of reporting that had been drafted and redrafted over the year. I bound a copy for my dad and watched anxiously as his eyes scanned beneath wire frame glasses. Across the table (without a copy of her own), my mom told me I could be whatever I wanted. Though not the intent, it had sounded crushing. “Anything, even if it’s just a mom,” she had said.
A few months later, I moved to a city even further away with my own car and Spotify account, so I could play Jagged Little Pill whenever I wanted with the windows rolled down. I put days of driving between myself and our house on Downing Lane, between suburbia and its quiet dissatisfaction. Around this time, my mom and I did not speak regularly, but she did call me one February afternoon to inform me that my dad had gone missing.
Her voice was annoyed, almost like she was telling me the refrigerator had stopped working. But that’s only because it was a bit like the refrigerator had stopped working, or like the vacation you’d been planning was abruptly canceled. When you love an alcoholic these inconveniences become routine. And my dad had always been an alcoholic, through every long work day, big dream, and well portioned dinner. Our family secret was that we had just gotten used to it. We learned to let sacrifice spread like vines. Slow and steady, until only the smallest of indulgences seemed possible, for my mom most of all.
My dad had been on a trip to Florida but missed his flight home. Accustomed to damage control, my mom phoned hospitals until she found him at a place called Mount Sinai. He had been admitted due to overconsumption, but by the time my sister and I found parking in the hospital’s eight floor garage, he had slipped into a coma. In the ice-cold ICU, a nurse handed me the items that had come with him in a pink plastic bag: a pair of boat shoes, a suede jacket, and his wire frame reading glasses. He died five days later.
I kept my dad’s things in the trunk of my car until I moved back in with my mom the following year. Sandpapered down by grief, it had seemed like the only place to go. My mom had sold the house, so there was no pond to skim, but there was a new condo with a small deck to furnish. It was just a few blocks from Downing Lane, but the only things she had taken were her clothes. She had either sold or donated every shared possession, like a snake might shed a layer of skin.
In those first years, she only spoke about my dad in the context of a nightmare she kept having. She would hear the bell and descend the stairs only to find him waiting behind the door. What made my mom wake in a cold sweat, was the exact thing I silently prayed for each night. And so, we didn’t talk about it.
At first my mom was slow to embrace her newfound freedom. She carried the torch of routine and things settled back into something that resembled normal. There were still nurse’s shifts to arrange, groceries to buy, and pork chops to be breaded. Then one day she decided she should try dating.
My mom had met Eric before. He was a nice guy, who by suburban standards seemed to know how to live, barbequing in the yard to Bob Marley and riding his Harley to work on sunny days. I had known him since 2002 simply as: my friend’s dad. It had been on that friend’s suggestion that they met up, but we were all surprised when they soon announced they were engaged.
Love washed over our lives like a tsunami and swept everything away. My mom became occupied with experience, joy rides, and vacations. She and Eric moved in together, in a small house that had a whole room for records and a backyard for barbeques. Earlier that year, I moved out of the condo and left my car behind for my brother. I bought a one way ticket and found my first full time writing job and a bleak shared apartment in Shanghai. With 12 hours between us, we again talked less and less.
The following fall, I returned from China for their wedding. They had a small reception in the yard of an Old Victorian rental in Cape May. My mom wore lipstick and her curls were pulled back in an updo, only to creep back in by the end of the evening. I recognized it as soon as I saw her: she was happy.
Chinese was suggested for dinner later that week, an ironic choice that might have made Alanis smile, since I’d be flying back to China soon. My sister and her fiance got out of the car to pick up our order, leaving my mom and I alone under fluorescent lights, no longer separated by an ocean but instead by man-made things.
From the passenger’s seat, I recalled one of our last moments alone the previous year. My mom had suggested that we return to our house on Downing Lane to bury some of my dad’s ashes by the koi pond. Throughout I was aware this small ceremony was for my benefit, but it wasn’t appreciated any less.
Now, I couldn’t help but wonder if we had left a part of us behind as we patted down that soft earth. Was there still room for me? Was I one of the things jettisoned like my dad’s tennis shoes or chess board? I was in my mid-twenties, but I still felt like a lost girl, desperate to be claimed. My mom looked at me with worried eyes and all of my concerns poured out like an aftershock. I wanted her to know I was happy for her, I just wondered if…
She wrapped me in her arms only the way a mom can and before my sister and her fiance returned, she spoke the words I needed to hear: “You’re mine and you always will be.”
Sarah Boorboor is a Narrative Designer by day and a proud member of Team Unravel by night. She’s been in Shanghai since 2017 and has been writing in one form or another ever since.
Cover Illustration by Bernard Wun @enjoymydrawings
Story Edited by Clara Elizabeth Davis