dreaming of amy

on my mother's & my generational desires (tradwife wet dreams vs. sex n the city, basically)

amy, holding my brother and & i

i remember being young enough that all my mother’s dreams were also mine. i wanted to go on the horseback trip through the sierra nevadas she planned as a girl but never completed. i wanted to read all of her favorite novels, wanted them to be my favorites too, so that she knew i appreciated and understood them and in doing so, understood her. when i stumbled across her sketchbooks filled with old movie stars i’d never heard of, i realized i could work at something until the dreams were tangible in my hands.

we’re not very similar anymore. i think i have her compassion and longing for adventure, but i sometimes struggle to see the pattern continue beyond that. i’m brash where she’s hesitant, impatient with my longings and her anxieties. we don’t argue, make friends, or express ourselves in the same way. we live a few thousand miles apart. on the phone i ask, can we go skinny dipping on vacation? and she laughs hesitantly and answers, i had a feeling you were going to suggest that. i’m surprised to feel so known, then disappointed when she says it’s not her cup of tea. (it’s probably weird to go skinny dipping with your mother and sister anyways. i’m just saying, we could have had a whole connecting-with-the-moon wild woman experience. you never know.)

like this matisse i saw last year at the moma. you get it

we don’t look much alike, either. this shouldn’t matter, but there were painful twists to growing up with a beautiful white mother as a lightskinned black girl. in every she’s so beautiful i heard a quieter implication—oh, you don’t look like that. my sister and i, lovely in our own ways but never white-passing, frowned and accepted the compliments on her behalf. the invented comparison faded and healed as i grew older, but it’s been angrily raw in my mind for a couple months now since someone jostled up against the wound with a casual joke while i was tipsy and feeling vulnerable. i try to let the resulting resentment drain away from my heart like sand through an hourglass, but sometimes i’m a petty bitch. she’s so beautiful to me—always has been. her face is so familiar i would know it blind. she’s just my mother. the thought is petulant, which isn’t fair.

it would hurt her if she knew, but i don’t want a life like hers. she saved up to buy copies of her favorite books for her future children when she was 13. by my age she’d already been married for six or seven years, while i research IUDs and delete hinge (again. for now) once i realize it’s no place for a certified triple-platinum yearner like me. she lives hundreds of miles from the airport and an hour from the nearest movie theater, while i survive off public transit and walking to art classes after work. it was her dreams that took us to the boonies to grow up barefoot in a farmhouse with one bathroom that sort of worked, and i learned to resent it a little—the isolation i felt there, the smallness and repetition of everything. eventually i left, and felt guilty for leaving her behind.

lately, i’ve been catching myself longing for her life in disguise. the last time i rewatched minari, i spent a few months in a half-embodied haze, wishing myself away to a green plot of land so removed from the world that all i’d have to focus on would be washing my husband’s hair in the bath after we fought and praying for water to help the crops grow. (this is stupid because i spent several childhood summers hauling irrigation pipe to water the fields when prayers didn’t suffice, and they were such atrocious times that i have effectively blanked them from my mind altogether.)

..and yet….

my friends and i joke about “easily impregnatable spring,” that dangerous window of time from late march to june where the dizzying hope of life becomes so infatuating that if you were in love with a man who cherished you and if you got pregnant on accident, you’d consider giving up your cautious position against parenthood and have a baby brown-skinned and full of laughter, like him. like you were at that age. we warn each other against the danger—don’t even think about it. in this economy? hell, in this country? nobody’s trying be pregnant during hot girl summer. nobody’s trying be a parent unless you’re sure you can do it right. and even then, you may not want to. don’t eeeeven think about it. but i look over the photos of my mother holding us in her arms and understand a little better than i did before.

i’ve been playing the last of us, and there’s a scene in the second game where you carry your child through a farmhouse at sunset. you put on a record for your partner while she’s washing dishes and press kisses to her neck. there’s a studio full of your unfinished paintings. out on the porch, you watch as the sunset swathes the foothills and the rocky faces of the mountain range. it looks eerily like the farm my mother chose to raise me in, the landscape so familiar it could have been pulled from my dreams or blurry childhood photographs. even the birdsongs are the same. almost in tears, i viscerally understand all at once how she could have left the jammed freeways of california behind for a place so quiet. of course she did.

dad occasionally reminds us that he’s going to decide what happens to our childhood home when he dies, to make sure we all get our money’s worth without squabbling over the will. this brings a clutching sense of panic that i struggle to fight off every time, which doesn’t make sense because i don’t even think i can live there anymore—i don’t really feel safe in my hometown now, plastered with presidential flags and empty of my few childhood friends. besides, i’ve grown so accustomed to the luxury of trains, and sketching in big museums, and walking to get iced coffee in the morning. but i miss the smell of the wind pushing down the canyon on summer evenings, and light scattering over the water running past my house. the idea of eventually surrendering these particular joys for good scatters the vision of my mother’s self-ordained eden, which in my mind should exist forever, just like the red cherries and robins on her pajama pants in 2006.

i’m sure there’s a way to balance all these desires, a magical country or town that has them all, and new lovers and friends who will look for them with me. if i can’t find any of it, perhaps i’ll move back there as an old woman and live out my days quietly in the valley. maybe i’ll set up sprinklers for the garden, get up early to pick the strawberries, and feed the dog, the way my mother does. that would be very narratively satisfying, at least—a bit of life tied into a bow, which the fantasizer in me appreciates.