I keep a catalogue, a mental inventory. There are mothers who paint portraits of cats dressed as Napoleon Bonaparte and mothers who fall asleep drunk on patterns for XXXL pajama pants, and mothers who mouth “fuck you” to their daughter in the backseat when they get lost in the family car and the daughter is trying her best to calm everyone down. Mothers, man. Every time I meet someone’s mother, I think: Fuck. I’m glad my own mother’s dead and that I never knew my mother after I was 12, and that the only memories I have of her are hazy and half-formed and cruel, sure, but in a distant, faraway way and not there, in the front seat of the car, mouthing fuck-you while the GPS is insisting over and over the need for a U-turn. One time, someone’s daughter told me: Just because your mother didn’t love you doesn’t mean mine doesn’t love me. And hoo boy, that’s the kind of thing that sticks with you. Someone else’s daughter told me to stop trying to make her mother into a villain. She said her mother wasn’t a bad person, she just had a hard life, a hard marriage, and that she used to play tennis—She was a tennis star, and her husband was in the military and she lost herself in being a wife and also being a mother, and so it makes sense really, the way she turned to her daughter in the backseat, her lips shaping themselves around F and Y. Some people’s mothers are dead and some mothers are tennis stars or criers or guilters or painters specializing in depicting cats as 18th century French generals, and there’s always a little part of me that’s waiting for other people’s mothers to die. Long after the daughters vanish from my life, I still think of their mothers—The way their breath smells like Southern Comfort when they braid your hair, or how shy they seem as they give you their faded yellow wedding dress to try on, or those who see your ankle tattoo for the first time and start bawling, or who tell you, offhandedly, that they met Cher once, and she wasn’t that great, not really, it’s all just the wigs. It’s CoryMaryMelissaKarenBeckyLinda—Mothers who watch their kids stir cloudy plastic jugs of Tang with their arms, who curl their hair out at the cheeks like Farrah Fawcett and who, on special occasions, use the same cracked blue eyeshadow they’ve had for twenty years, who get their belly buttons pierced when they turn 50 and show me—just lift up their shirt right there in the street and show me the little dangling jewel, even though I’m not their daughter, and seeing that great white expanse of belly is terrifying, more terrifying than the piercing and the little pink rhinestone winking up at me, and I swear, the only comfort of mothers is that someday those mothers will die, and all the pieces of them will get ground down into dust, and the crushed-up bits of bone and teeth will go home in a little plastic box, and then their daughters become something else—just another motherless girl watching and thinking: Fuck. And isn’t it easier? Isn’t it easier for a mother to be dead and tucked away in a little plastic tub of Tupperware than what it could be—Like my own mother, crying into the hospital phone as she says she could’ve been someone, would’ve done everything differently, if not for you, if not for your eyes always looking, watching, expecting, waiting for her to die. She would’ve done everything differently, she cries, but she made a sacrifice, is sacrificing, will continue to sacrifice again and again and again until all that’s left of her is crushed-up bits sealed only semi-airtight on a dark shelf, waiting, watching as I catalogue other people’s still-living mothers, weighing them and sorting by size and character and story to fill the space that’s gaping open in me, hungry, starving, sharp.

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Toni Judnitch’s nonfiction and fiction has appeared in AGNI, Sycamore Review, Nashville Review, Ninth Letter, Yemassee, and Third Coast. She has received New South’s Prose Prize, Bellingham Review’s Annie Dillard Creative Nonfiction Award, and a story of hers was selected for reprinting in New Stories from the Midwest. She received her PhD in fiction from the University of Cincinnati.

Artwork by Shelley Lennox Whitehead