Who tells a girl that she matters?

A personal narrative about generational worth

I know my mother was once a child because I have photographic evidence.

A black-and-white picture, the only image of her childhood that exists. It’s around 1945, and she is 2 or 3 years old, standing chubby-kneed and belly-forward on steps in front of a modest house with channel siding. A too-small cardigan hugs her arms, and she holds the preposterously high hem of her white babydoll dress. She is the last of five sisters to wear it. On her face is a smile of such pure delight that you want to see what she sees, feel what she feels. She reacts to the world without calculation, with trust, with the promise of a life that could go anywhere.

This little girl is a stranger to me.

The journalist in me longs to understand where my mother’s lightness of being went, to put together a narrative of how and when it disappeared in the years after this photo was taken. But I have only the patchwork of her remembered grievances, only a bit more information than I’ve gathered for the profiles I’ve written of strangers.

What I have incalculably more of is the gristle and grain of being her daughter. I have her eyes, her skin, her hair, her mouth. I have her history, her hurt, her fears, her fury. Perhaps my children do—and will—too.

The journalist, the daughter, the mother in me—we are all in this together. We must begin somewhere.

I start with what I’ve heard, with what I think I know.

♣♣♣

My mother rarely spoke of halcyon days when she reminisced. She spoke of moments that stretched out across the thin skin of her history like a deep purple bruise. She moved between southern West Virginia’s coal company towns growing up, following her father’s work as a mine foreman, scrabbling to find her identity among a new group of coal kids every couple of years.

The only thing that remained the same from season to season was the complicated, lovely, brutal, necessary fact of siblings: Sisters who loved and envied and brothers who could be as cruel as a branding iron, the terrible copper marks they tattooed on her heart too stubborn to ever fade.

You’re too ugly to be loved.

No one will ever marry you.

There was Mercy, the bossy one; Mae, the sweet one; Tom, the handsome one; Lettie, the generous one; Ellen, the fun one; John, the favored one, and Georgia, the—

What title to give my mother?

Though she was the second youngest of seven, she began cooking for the family when she was 11 while her mother helped at the company store. She chopped wood. She made fires. There were years with indoor plumbing and years without. Sometimes, she lived in a house with so many rooms she needed three hands to count them, and sometimes she slept five siblings astride in one bed, and all the time, all the time, she fought to matter. First and always to her parents, then and always to men, and later to a world that refused to grasp the truth that she needed to believe: that she was exceptional — not just one of seven, but one of a kind.

You’re too ugly to be loved.

No one will ever marry you.

The Handsome One said it.

I know her brother’s words the way I know my children’s birthdays, the way I know my own haunted hurts. Again and again, she revisited his insult as though she needed it to lord its power over her, as though the carbon blocks of her being would decompose without it. I can see her tipping her nose upward, setting her jaw, sewing her lips into a thin line. An odd feeling would settle in the pit of my stomach. The feeling had elements of sadness, of shared fury, of sympathy. But it was closer to unease.

“That’s what he told me. You’re just ugly.”

Those stories dripped like vinegar from her tongue: sharp, biting, well preserved. When she told her bitter tales, she seemed to forget she was married and adored by her husband and raising two daughters who did not care about her beauty. She seemed to believe she lived on a going-nowhere dirt road down a holler that no one, not even herself, could rescue her from.

She was born fighting to matter to this world. She wanted us, my older sister and me, to fight, too, for we were born to the same battles as she, born to a state that no one cared about and born to an extended family of souls who were hell-bent on winning the good graces of their elders, my grandparents. There was a shifting hierarchy among my aunts and uncles, each of whom kept a jar of pickled hurts plunked on a shelf.

Mercy, Mae, Tom, Lettie, Ellen, John, and Georgia.

How much did they do for their parents, for each other?

How often did they visit?

How good were their children?

My 89-pound maternal grandmother—heroic, hilarious, formidable, and a known player-of-favorites who possessed the best laugh on the planet—was the kind of woman who placed your teddy bear in a secure spot when you left him behind and then patted his head gently before handing him back to you. She was the kind of woman who made bread each morning at 5:30, kneading it with the help of an arthritic pinkie that turned out 90 degrees at her first knuckle. She was the kind of woman who nursed my grandfather through 14 years of cancer.

She was also a woman who declared The Generous One’s husband unwanted in her home and removed photos of her young grandchildren from her side tables when one of us displeased her.

That boy is just as rotten as can be, my mother would report her saying. Meaner than a snake. He’s terrible to his mother.

She was the woman you become, I suppose, if you are 10 years old when your mother dies, leaving you her washboard and her weariness, leaving you and your nine siblings and a whole hard world behind.

♣♣♣

“I don’t know why she did that,” my mother told me a few years before my disownment, a few years before she told me that I had been “nothing but trouble for this family.” An old hurt pooled like new in her eyes. My grandmother had been gone 19 years. “I don’t know why Mother always helped your Uncle John with whatever he needed when he was an adult, no matter how he screwed up. I don’t know why he always got everything. Why the rest of us could never do enough, could never be enough, to earn her favor.”

“Maybe,” I said, “she did it to keep you close at hand. Maybe she did it so you would keep trying to earn her favor. Maybe she did it so the seven of you would never leave her.”

Georgia looked at me with open-mouthed surprise but did not correct me. She looked at me like she knew it was true. She looked at me like she was trying to hold onto an idol, still trying to hold onto a mother’s love.

Maybe Georgia cooked dinner for her parents and six siblings as a child because she wanted to. But when she spoke of it well into my adulthood, the fight in her jawline and the pride in her brow told me that she cooked because she believed it proved that she was worthy, that she was necessary, that she was not to be overlooked.

When you are my mother, and you grow up visiting the graves of your three stillborn siblings, and you grow up hearing about the lifeless baby girl your great-grandparents surrendered to the foamy seas of the Atlantic before they had even begun their new, hard life in America, maybe the distant echoes of those lost and discarded children thrum through your subconscious.

Maybe they thrum through mine.

If you are my mother, you might worry that you are expendable, that there is no love, only survival; and the way you hold onto that old fear transfers to your children, seeping into their roots and rising through the stalks of their souls. Maybe you, too, could be thrown over in this old, hard life by your parents, your siblings, your lovers. Your children. Maybe they, too, need to know that an uncertain ocean moves beneath them, that it would rampage and take them whole if given the chance.

Maybe that’s why we both, mother and daughter, have sought higher, unimpeachable ground.

Every time I came off my backyard swing and out of my inner world as a child, I left that dreaming, unencumbered, mountain-loving girl behind and became another. An observant one. A watchful one. I stitched a protective suit across my words and actions. Inside that Suit of Goodness, I was the best girl. I was not the unsolvable infant who wailed nonstop for one year, then part of another, whose parents were told that my umbilical cord had damaged my brain, that the tether that tied my life to my mother’s had wrapped around my neck and refused to let me go.

It had refused to let me go.

“Parents like to say, ‘Just wait until you have kids,’” my mother told me early and often. “But I would never, ever hope you have the experience I did with you. I would never wish that on you. It would be cruel.”

I was a bad baby, but a good girl. So quiet, so good.

I was not like my sister, a kid who splashed in filmy creeks and made mud pies and poked her fingers in the tarry, molten, black goo on the seams of our street in August, who made my mother howl about the impropriety of little girls playing in the dirt. I did not like dirt. I was not like my friend Nellie, an irrepressible eight-year-old with a mind of her own who knew the kind of fun we were supposed to have and vied with my mother at a sleepover to make it happen.

Nellie was fun. I was … not.

“Well, we’ll never do that again,” my mother said.

For a long time, I was a girl who was Not. Not loud. Not demanding. Not outgoing. Not opinionated. Not visible. There was so much Not inside me that I still don’t trust the memories others have of me as a child. Sweet. Kind. Shy. Goofy, they would say. How could they know the sum of my negative parts?

Maybe I was mean. Angry. Jealous. Selfish.

Maybe I was wild. Mysterious. Reckless. Fun.

Maybe I was everything.

My sister, five years older, always mistook my solitude for calm. But I was no more calm than she was impulsive. What we were, both of us, was existentially nervous.

“She isn’t brain-damaged,” a pediatrician told my parents when I was 2. “If anything, she’s too smart for her own good.”

A tuck here, a button there. I cinched my Suit of Goodness so tight when I visited my friends’ homes that I sat tentatively and moved about hesitantly, slowly, like a decked-out astronaut stuck on solid earth. I tried not to have needs or wants and certainly never requirements. If I’d had a shellfish allergy and my hosts had served shrimp, I would have eaten a full platter.

I crawled into my sleeping bag in the dark of my best friend Mary’s second-floor bedroom, grateful for the end of the day, relieved that I had managed not to embarrass myself during my visit. I listened to the hush of the central air system as it gently came to life from above, somewhere near the stars that shone through Mary’s surprisingly light veil of a curtain.

The fearless twilight of that room, the warmth of that house and the people inside it, breathing in and breathing out, settled me. Laying there, I was aware in the dimmest of ways how I moved through the waking world catching only half a breath at a time, how tightly I had bound together all but the minimum of me so that there was no excess, no visible overflow. I melted deeply into my borrowed pillow and allowed my muscles to go soft, my whole self untangling and sighing, my Suit of Goodness dissolving into untroubled sleep.

I wanted to be golden, chosen. I believed that suit would help me be loved. With it on, I believed my image would never slip from my grandmother’s photo frame. I wore that suit to contain the hurt my mother carried forward from her past. I wore it to become a daughter, as so many daughters do. But I’ll always wonder who I would have become without it.

In photographs before age 11, I am often wearing the thin-lipped, no-teeth smirk of a dimpled kid hiding all her cards. Behind her Not-Quite smile are galaxies of unexploded stars. I want to know her riot. I want to know who she was. Because she might be able to tell me who I should become now.

You’ve been nothing but trouble for this family.

You’re too ugly to be loved.

There was Mercy, the bossy one; Mae, the sweet one; Tom, the handsome one; Lettie, the generous one; Ellen, the fun one; John, the favored one. And Georgia, the—

The Fighter. Georgia, my mother—she was The Fighter.

Maybe I am, too.

The little girl Georgia was in that black-and-white picture must have disappeared sometime before graduating high school. Standing at the stove stirring brown beans in their gravy or standing before her brother as he stirred up her tears. Standing in the middle of her heartbreak when she was 17 or 18. Standing there, watching her sister, The Fun One, walk into the house wearing the class ring of the boy my mother had been dating, the boy she had been sure would one day soon propose to her, the boy who must have represented the rousing, fairy-tale, middle-finger ending to The Handsome One’s cruel words. I have convinced myself that the little girl with the glinting joy didn’t survive these aches—these wounds that I know about and the ones that I don’t, all the spirit pains that echo across the Atlantic and back through the coal fields of Staffordshire, England.

But I think about her all the time. When I close my eyes, I can feel the nubby yarn of her cardigan on my palms as I bend down and hug her tightly from seven decades into her future. The warmed-cotton and cut-grass scent from her babydoll dress, wind-whipped and sun-dried on my grandmother’s clothesline, pins me to my daydream. As the camera clicks, I whisper in her ear to hold onto whatever she’s thinking about, whatever she’s beaming at. I tell her to carry the memory and use it as a shield through the mystery of what happens next, through all the hurt that is coming for her as a young woman, and across all the anguish that I will one day inflict on her as I try to become her daughter.

If you can do this, I tell her, maybe you can save us.

Maybe I can stay in the ether above the mountains, and she can remain that small figure of laughing sunshine on a riser of wooden stairs. We can both have our higher ground.

Just hold that thought, I tell her.

Just hold that thought, I tell myself. ♣

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