MY MOTHER
She Looks Rich But
Is Really A Domestic
By Tish Cook

“That’s the house I used to go to for work and clean,” my mother said one day as we drove by the old colonial in the neighborhood where we now lived. It was hard to comprehend the reality that she referenced so casually from her past because it stood oddly out of place from both the life and style that I had come to know. I couldn’t visualize this woman who never left the house without make-up, hair coiffed or designer logo, scouring someone else’s toilet bowl. I looked back following her pointed finger with no clearer sense of what my mother meant, than if I’d learned that I was a twin separated at birth and had just passed my sibling on the street. A quizzical soft-spoken “Oh” was all that would surface along with silence.

It was just like my mother to have a soap opera moment - an epiphany where she discloses something dramatic and expresses it as a simple matter-of-fact or one item on a list of things to pick up from the grocery store. Once she told me that she gave birth to a mentally and physically challenged child during her second marriage who subsequently died before his first birthday. That bombshell landed over lunch at an AW Root Beer restaurant at the mall. I nearly choked on my ice-cream float as she moved on to another subject as seamlessly as blinking an eye. She had a way of shedding light on these weighty subjects and shoving them back under the rug never to be spoken about again. The revelation about her former occupation as a maid, although it came as a surprise, only underscored what I knew for certain about my mother: I didn’t really know her at all, nor should I expect to.

My mother’s truth-telling of a domestic past life came at the insecure and impressionable age of fourteen, fresh at the beginning of high school. I was suffering a Sergio Valente jeans obsession and my material needs elevated daily to keep pace with my affluent suburban peers. I became self-conscious of my middle class status and the attention paid to my skin color which contrasted with the vast majority of the town residents creating a dissimilarity that was exacerbated by the fact that I was ‘one’ who lived in the neighborhood and not ‘one’ who was bussed to school as a part of the eighties integration policy. I was always ready to offer a rote response when asked the loaded question of what my parents did for a living. “My mother is a branch manager at the local bank and my father is a public policy maker for the local government,” I would say. Being culturally bilingual I knew the question translated to mean: How did you move to a neighborhood like this?

The combination of social boundaries and inquiries created a pressure to fit in and secure a sense of belonging and with that came an enthusiasm for goods that were not easily within reach. It did not help that my relationship with my mother was shaped by shopping sprees, while my father indulged my intellectual leanings. Neither seemed to mind the role they played as an ever flowing Niagara Falls of funding. However, my mother’s occupational confession became an inner embarrassment to the status and pedigree I strived to maintain. At the opposite end of my emotional spectrum was a guilt that was gaining momentum. I began to flashback to desperate pleas for transient fashions forced upon my parents. What was worse, I compared them to other people’s parents who only showed their children love through things and not by their presence. I acted as if these items I had to have or else I’d die were worth more than our family gatherings at the dinner table.

My mind would begin to race calculating the insults, the stomping off to my room, the begging for Benetton, the tears accompanied by falling upon the ground to get my way and then it rested on that old colonial and eventually the house that had become my home just a few blocks away. In that moment, I understood that my mother wasn’t the only one prone to theatrics and that her masquerade of always having a certain wealth was in part because she too felt societal pressures.  Perhaps, I had helped to create them and, unbeknownst to me, it cost my parents more than I could conceive.