by ML Gordon
“It’s just a picture.” My three-year-old daughter is unimpressed and begins to fidget. We stand in an antique store bent over an old photograph of a woman, expressionless and fixed, with an equally expressionless infant frozen in the circle of her arms: madonna and child, matted, framed and cased. Two pairs of eyes regard us warily from beneath the glass. "It's an ambrotype," the merchant corrects her as I turn it in my hand. "Pre-Civil War. Lace and crinoline,” he says, waving his hand absently. “You know.” I don't. But I murmur something polite back, and then, without really knowing why: "I'll take it.” He removes the tag. 1850's ambro, $22.95. Mother and child. As is. The crash of the old register sings a sale and he hands the picture back to me. Mother and child. The girl is all lambent innocence—a little out of focus, a suggestion of animation still clinging to the cherub curves of her face. Her mother is a proper Victorian matron, shoulders squared in stoic immobility, eyes cut with the hard-edged weariness common to so many pictures of the era. The camera has caught her mouth tightened against things unspoken, little disappointments like the disarray of her collar and the slight asymmetry of her hair, and finally I understand why I am buying the picture. I know that mouth. Centuries unwrap like so much tissue and a shopkeeper tucks them around the photograph of a woman I never knew—but whose mouth I know as well as my own. Because just barely visible beneath the fogged glass is a certain line, a wrinkle, a taut parenthesis which punctuates her lips on one side and betrays the indifference of her pose. It is the first furrow of motherhood and it unlocks her to me—a thousand little tragedies and joys are written into that line. In that one wrinkle I know her as my sister as I recognize all of my kindred; we are mothers, and the moment we take upon us that mantle the geography of our mouths is never the same. I have similar portraits of my daughters and me at home. In the glass mats I see my own tired reflection superimposed on theirs and mine is the disenchantment of the vain old queen in the fairy tale: "Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of us all?" My youngest daughter, still in the luster of babyhood, laughs. I squint, pulling my skin against my cheekbones to reveal a face she never knew; now it is a game. She peels back my lips and cackles delightedly into the hollow of my mouth, drags thick little fingers across the landscape of my face. But that one wrinkle, the mother line, defies us yet. It will not be stretched into submission. "Botox," my sister always jokes. I consider. I consider what that would remove. A wrinkle, yes—but also a visible remnant of things that had been. I look at the woman in the photograph. Hers is a mouth that has twisted in frustration and curled around the soft shape of lullabies. Her lips have beaded with the damp warmth of a sick child's head, parted in prayer and profanity alike. They have smirked and scolded and soothed and sighed and smothered themselves in the perfect milkweed silk hair of a baby. I see in her mouth the tight wreath of my own lips as I brought my daughters, naked and squalling like storms, into the world. Wry smiles at their small, unfocused faces in the half light of three A.M. feedings. Terrible white-lipped nights listening to the ache of their sobs. These things and more have carved themselves into that one crease, left a mark more emblematic than slack belly or haggard eyes. I am a mother; I have won and worn this as it has worn me. I carefully unwrap the ambrotype at home. "Is that your picture?" my three-year-old asks. I nod, busy struggling with her sister on my shoulder as she lunges gummy and open-mouthed at the photograph in its Oreo brown case. "Who is it?" "A mommy." “How?” I do not understand her question, but I am used to answering questions I do not understand. I feel the corner of my lip crook in puzzlement and deepen the crease there. “How? How is she a mommy?” I opt today for the simple answer. “Because she has a baby.” But I have forgotten that she is almost four, and easy answers don't satisfy her like they used to. She pulls my hand back down before I can protest and regards the pair in the picture. Frowns. Nods. She seems to be looking for something, some proof beyond the restless little imp in the woman’s arms. And then: "Yes." She understands. "Do you know her, Mommy?" As we peer into the glass I can see our faces mirrored in theirs. For one perfect moment, our children—the one in my arms, the one at my side and the one in the photograph—are utterly still. With my eyes I trace the bend around the young mother’s lips and wonder how many impossible questions that mouth answered long ago.
"Yes, sweetheart. I think I do." I place the photograph on the shelf as my daughter scampers off. The sunbright baby in my arms smiles, tugs again at the wrinkle near my lips as she will someday pull at the million tiny lines that intersect and converge in all of our faces—our histories, mothers and daughters, written in the sands of our skin. But this time I gently brush her hand away and smile back. Mother and child. As is. A native of Cleveland, Ohio, ML Gordon now makes her home in Peoria, Arizona, where she teaches English at the high school and college level. She is the mother of two gorgeous little girls who (despite taking up much of her precious writing time) inspire her beyond words. HOME |