Chapter One: Holy Mother

The beginning of my memoir...let me know in the Comments if you'd be game to read this in serial installations.

I slip into this world a day after my brother’s second birthday, my waters splashing forth as my mom finishes throwing away the paper plates smeared with white frosting and uneaten cake from his party. They say I didn’t cry when I was born, just lay there quietly, stunned by this new, arid world. And very soon I’m in awe of my mother.

I’m doomed to love her. Flung into the universe as a small, helpless planet, I have no defenses against her heavy gravity. She blazes before my black-and-white newborn eyes in technicolor radiance.  She hushes my primal cries with her breasts, my sole harvest. She speaks and the thrum of her voice is my very first sound. 

With no option but to worship her, I set to it, first through wailing for her milk in the dark watches of the night. Then by blowing raspberries when she coos at me. On into the toddling years when a stranger’s hello sends me climbing up her body like a sanctuary. 

I have no memories of making these devotional acts; I was much too young.  But my own daughters have worshiped at my feet and in my own hands, so I know what Heidi’s warm omnipotence required of littlest me.

When she sits at the piano, my devotion is stirred.

It’s the way her body composes itself. Her back arches over the claviature. She presses her eyelids shut. Her forehead is creased in concentration, her jaw tightly clenched. Up and down and up and down the keys she trills and bangs chords, her wrists lovely and swift. They crane over the shiny surface like the Lord God himself hovering over the deep. Veins in her hands rope across white tendon and bone, returning the oxygen-starved blood that feeds crescendo and pregnant pause alike. She never looks at me or at anything in the room–her eyes are always set inward to a place between her ribs where I imagine a white-hot coal glows. Fire feathers off from its brilliant form and her fingers translate it into each note she plays.

As I watch her, I know deep in my own bones that I should never interrupt her in the middle of a song. It isn’t a rule she once announced, or the memory of being reprimanded for doing it in the past that keeps me silent. I’m afraid of angering her, but that isn’t why I stay quiet. I’m quiet because cutting in on the music would desecrate her holiness, and nothing I want to say or feel or do is worth that. 

So I listen, closing my pale eyelids, leaning my small frame into the linen paneling of our sofa until finally her light foot lets off the damper pedal. When her hands return to her lap and her eyes open, I slip in between her chest and the keys to occupy the space where she builds empires of feeling, spins galaxies of sound. Leaning above me her golden hair canopies us as we bend over our altar. 

Put your fingers here and here, she says, her arms wrapping around me, her breath warm on my ears, and I obey.

Later, much later, when I realized her artistry was laced with narcissism, I swore off creativity as the vocation of fools. But not now. Not yet. Right now she’s the Holy Mother and there’s nothing more sublime than watching her at the piano colluding with eternity while I wait for my chance to once again be near her.