MOTHERSELF
Before my birth, I existed in some infinitesimal form in my mother, and before her birth, still, I was there. Tucked away in some impossibly small corner of her body before it knew how to raise a hand to strike or how to form words sharp enough to slice, I was there. Nameless and faceless and soulless in the womb of my mother in the womb of her mother before her, I was brewed into the same sort of woman that they had been or would be, the sort of woman who marred the pages of recorded history, the sort of woman who fled burning countries and married men sick with rage and baked beating hearts into sugared cakes. I had no choice but to become my mother, just as my mother became her mother, and over again until Eden, until the lamblike Eve was choicelessly cursed to the inferior fate of the human mother. The same scenes play themselves over again, casting new faces onto stories that have been told before, and my mother tells me that once, she let a man hurt her, too. I had no choice.
In the kitchen, I watch my grandmother slice an apple, and when she rests the knife I realize that it seemed like an extension of her own body. I am stained by worldly ugliness and wonder when the women before me became weapons, what customary moment I would have to undergo to become more knife than girl. I throw myself at the impenetrable wall of time, desperate to ask my grandmother at seventeen what anger she stored away inside her. Is it the same as mine? Was she still my grandmother then, tight-skinned and golden-haired and unsure? Am I only an incubator for this bleeding heart, mine only as long as my motherself still plays the child? I see glimpses into my future through her, all arthritic fingers and stinging silences and leers towards someone younger than me, more easily loved than me. She feeds me half of the apple she sliced for herself and I mull over how much I have been given besides blood and food, over how much more there is left to take.
Tell me that I am just like my mother and let me thank you, let me cry into the bathroom mirror, pawing at the skin of this doppelgänger I have blindly become, impossible to rid myself of. The fate is not unlike some lurking illness, an affliction of the heart and lungs and bones. She formed me of herself, tore away lesser pieces to form her personal version of the monster. I will follow in the errors of her ways and she will smooth my hair, tell me that there are things the women in our family have an affinity for, tell me a story of a woman cursed. We will make sense of ourselves through the versions in other bodies and leave waxy flowers at their graves, flip uninterested through their photographs and pretend to know better. A younger version of me pitied her for the simple pursuit of motherly perfection. I call her now from states away to ask her how to pick myself up from the floor of this icy shower. She tells me of having her skin scrubbed until it was a glowing, doughy pink by her mother in childhood baths. Some things are sacred between mother and daughter, she whispers, and the fleshy part of brain tissue she plucked to form mine hums in agreement.
Inside of me, there exists an infinitesimally small, nameless, faceless, soulless, version of this woman who bears this curse. She wears a face that is a watery reflection of mine, shares my burning temper that my mother’s before it was mine, and before her belonged to long-lost Eve. She pulses with blood that belongs to time, a testament scrawled in the footnotes of lives she will never know. She comes screaming into the world covered by me and made of me and will spend the rest of her time on Earth running from the consequences of that first baptism. She will look into mirrors and see fragments of my face when I was young and she will have questions for me. She will pretend to know better. She will follow in the errors of my ways. She will have no choice.
Celeste Tyrrell, 23, Pittsburgh - USA ✯ IG: @letterlovings ✯ BACK TO FICTION: OUROBOROS
“My name is Celeste Tyrrell, and I am a 23 year old author and poet from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. This piece, titled MOTHERSELF, is a fictional vignette reflecting on the cyclical nature of motherhood and generational female trauma that often feels inescapable and inevitable. As was wisely said in Phoebe Waller-Bridge's Fleabag, "Women are born with pain built in."