Photo by Breno Machado on Unsplash
I don’t really know how to tell you this, but I’m a good man in a storm so a good man I’ll be: My mother taught me how to be a woman. She taught me that being a woman is shaking shame’s hand and biting your tongue until it bleeds. My mother knew shame better than she knew Love. She also taught me how to read at the young age of four. By age eight she had me reading and reciting Emily Dickenson, a practice that took place usually after meals. Once, right after I had finished reading aloud to my mother ‘Hope is the thing with feathers’, she took the book of poems from me and fiddled with her wedding ring before finally taking it off. She then stared at me with her young oak eyes, juxtaposed by her crows feet, and said, “Emily dickenson said that white, not red, was the color of passion, I don’t know anything about Passion, but I do know that red, red is the color of women. The color of women and shame.” She got up from the table, and began to walk away, leaving her ring behind. Before she could leave me alone at the table she turned back and told me, “Don’t let it stain you.” The way she pronounced the words was the way one would hold an expensive and precious gift, and I knew then she was giving me a ghost, words that would haunt me for years to come.
That little piece of advice rang louder every time I looked at my mother. She was covered in red, practically drowning in it. Red lipstick, red shoes, red wine. She was stained all over. I spent years observing the way red had bleed into her bones. I remember her sitting on the kitchen floor late at night, she probably thought that she was alone, that she had finally stolen a moment to herself, for herself. But I had snuck out of bed and watched as she picked up a bottle of wine that had been next to her, with her teeth she pulled out the corked, and without a second thought she tipped her head back and began to chug from the bottle. Never stopping for a breath, she finished in 30 seconds. I watched as some dripped down her chin, slithering down her neck, before the red wine caught and pooled in the deep crevice of her collarbones. At that moment I did not see my mother, instead a storm of a woman had taken her place.
I don’t really know how to tell you this, but I’ll give it the good old college try. I used to know a girl who could describe the color red without ever using the word red. I could describe shame without ever using the word shame. I could describe shame without using the words Shame, or humiliation, or guilt or any of those synonyms. I know the feeling in and out. It has sunk so heavy into my bones, I’m sure it would be impossible to try and carve all the shame of me. But maybe you don’t believe me. Suppose you think I am being dramatic, overexaggerating my long-acquainted friendship with shame. So I will do what I claim to be able to do, I will describe shame without using the word shame.
The comfort of sleep is often thought to be a universal gift; every person, no matter race, money, or gender, is privy to the benefits of sleep. This is not true. As anyone with chronic pain that keeps them up: terrible insomnia, a person who works a day and night job to make ends meet, or simply a student who must spend their late hours studying to pass their next exam, will tell you: sleep is not a necessity that everyone is entitled to, sleep is a luxury that the lucky are allowed and that the unlucky must learn to live without.
I was one of the unlucky as a child. Some nights I simply couldn’t fall asleep, even when I would just lay in bed for hours and hours. Some nights I would avoid sleep like it might kill me, partly because I was a bit afraid it would. I was haunted by terrible nightmares and some nights the prospect of spending a day exhausted seemed better than having to deal with facing my worst fears in dreamland. But, most nights I was able to fall asleep, the real problem though was staying asleep.
I would fall asleep, my body cold to the touch so piles of blankets layered on top of me, perhaps even a sweater dug out of my mothers closet could be seen draped over my small body. Yet, I would wake, I would wake in a puddle of warmness. Like a not yet trained puppy I would wake up and see the degrading act I had committed.
Once I woke I first would always walk over to my parents room. I would gently knock, usually too gently at first, and then I’d knock again, harder this time. My mother would grudgingly pull herself out of bed. I would stand in front of her door, squirming; my legs in my wet pants, and hold my breath with every footstep I heard her take. She would finally pull the door open. There she would stand with her motherly eyes still half shut with sleep showed some concern and caring love, but below them was a mouth pressed thin with the remarks of a young girl ready to come out.
Looking back it is amazing how my mother always managed to be a mother before being a young girl. She had only been 26, when I was seven. She had been so young and spry and I doubt she had wanted to take care of her child who had wet the bed when she could have been doing about anything else but she did anyway. Most of the time she managed to do it with kindness, she would bite her tongue and keep herself from giving out punishments or cruel words, and that is a kindness.
She would, however, tell me to go shower, while she replaced my bedsheets and blankets with towels and whatever knitted blankets she could find stuff at the top of my closet. When I would shower the water was always cold. Showers are always miserable at Three A.M.. Every late night shower I took as a child was always deceptively cold. Even when the steam would fog up the glass door, I still felt as if the water was burning me with its chill. There was the silence too. The dead silence of the house, my mother made quiet work of my bed and my father never stirred. There was just silence, only broken by the slap of the water against the shower floor, and any small noises I happened to make. After my terrible shower, I would change into a new pair of clothes. I would climb back into my newly done room and watch my mother walk out of the room, with each step my mother seemed to get a little bit older.
I couldn’t break the “habit”. Not with encouragement, not with doctors appointments, not with discouragement and not with punishments. Every night I would fall asleep, my cold hands wrapped around my bitter ribs. Every night I would wake up, the darkness of my backyard spilling into my room, laying in a warm pool of my own making. Every night spoiled pajamas were changed for new clean ones. Every night my mother cleaned my mattress and laid down towels while I took the coldest shower of my life. Every night I went to bed knowing how I would wake up.
My mother stopped giving me water with dinner. In fact I wasn’t allowed at all to drink any liquids after six pm. They were exhausted, tired of washing the sheets so many times, tired of hearing the shower water at three A.M., tired of looking at my desperate face while I held up a pair of soiled pants. And with the drought, came some sleep, some relief for my mother. She was no longer awoken by the tap-tap-tap of small knuckles rapping against her wooden door, and she no longer had to stare at the new yellow spot on my mattress.
While my mother slept I would still wake up at three am. Wake up on dry sheets, but still wake up. Every night, I would fall asleep with winter bleeding into my bones. Every night I would fall asleep with three blankets to try and stay warm. And some nights, some nights I would wake up at three am. But there was no heat with waking anymore. I would wake up, my skin, the blankets, the mattress, the room, my pants, all still lingering with the kiss of cold.
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe you read that and “shame” wasn’t the first word to come to your head. Maybe when you picture shame, it looks nothing like my messy words. But for me, shame is painted with the colors of my childhood memories. I don’t really know how to tell you this, but I've already started, so it can’t be too hard to finish the job.
I used to have this reoccurring nightmare when I was in middle school. In the nightmare, I would just be lying in my bed alone, in my room alone. It would always be dark and usually night, and despite being exhausted in the dream I would just lie there in my bed. In the dream, my father would creep into my room. I would smell the cheap vodka on him the minute his hand touched the door handle. My father would silently creep into my room, drunk and bastardly, and call me by my mothers name.
When the nightmares felt too heavy to carry, I would just try my best to outrun sleep.
“An object at rest stays at rest and an object in motion stays in motion,” my own voice sounded foreign when I spoke, I could hear myself trying to drown out the sound of sleep. A word corresponding with each step I took around my room.
“An object at rest stays at rest and an object in motion stays in motion,” I would say this to myself. Anything to distract myself from the word “tired.” The word itself was temptation. For me it was a dirty soiled word, an act and pleasure I was not permitted to languish in without guilt. I didn’t allow myself to think the word, let alone ever utter it aloud. I knew how the word “tired” felt on a stubborn man's tongue and I couldn’t afford the bitter taste. Instead I would repeat my prayer: “An object at rest stays at rest and an object in motion stays in motion”.
I don’t really know how to tell you this, and I wonder how my mother would tell the story. There is not much I know about my mother, outside of her being my mother. I know a bit about how she is as a boss from the afternoons, after school, spent doing homework, in her offices, but even still I wouldn’t have much to say on the subject. My mother and I don’t ask each other questions. When I was a child my mother would say, “There is such a thing as stupid questions, and don’t ask them.” And I eventually learned that my mother considered most questions to be stupid questions, so I just avoided asking.
My little sister would often say to our mother, “I have a question!” And then proceed to say something that was not a question, which would always prompt our mother to respond with, “That was a statement, not a question.”
So my sister never really asked my mother questions either. It just wasn’t how we were. We didn’t have that sort of relationship. She would instead drop little bits of information as she felt like it. Sometimes while chopping onions she would bring up her grandfather, or while driving, might tell me of a memory from her favorite childhood summer. When she shared words about her life it was always unprompted and always just a small bite of information. When she wanted me to tell her something she would just come sit on my bed until I began to talk. Or, occasionally she would just give me a look during dinner, a look that let me know I needed to say something, anything. We managed to communicate well this way. It never bothered me and I never felt a deep desire to ask her questions.
Curiosity kills the cat, and maybe satisfaction brings it back, but then regret just kills it again. It was always odd when someone asked me something I didn’t know about my mother, when I had to tell them I didn’t know, and I couldn’t ask. I would have to say, in that foreign voice of mine, “I don’t have the sort of relationship with my mother where I ask her questions.” And the other person always would look at me quizzically, wondering what kind of relationship I did have if it wasn’t one that permitted asking personal questions.
I myself never liked being asked personal questions. I didn’t want to lie when asked but I had no impulse to give honesty to a person I felt I owed none too. This predicament made me wish to avoid questions. I adopted a similar strategy to my mother’s when it came to being private, I would drop small tidbits of information I was comfortable with sharing. Just enough to satisfy the curious hunger of my friends.
Sometimes I wouldn’t be able to fall asleep, I’d be so anxious about my morning alarm going off at six am, that I’d stay up half the night worrying about hearing that dread beeping at a much too early hour. When I had nights like that I would go to my mother’s room. I would rap on her door, once again shrunken down to the same size I had been when I was seven. When she answered, when she came to the door she looked just as young as she was when I actually was seven. On those nights I would ask her, not a question, but for a favor.
“Please tell me I’m going to be okay. Tell me that when I go to bed I’ll wake up and I’ll be okay, please?”
I don’t really know how to tell you this, but I’m a good man in a storm and the storm’s coming soon. My mother taught me how to be a woman. She taught me that being a woman, being a woman is shaking shame’s hand and biting your tongue until it bleeds. My mother knew shame better than she knew Love. She also taught me how to read at the young age of four. By age eight she had me reading and reciting Dickenson, usually after meals. Once, right after I had finished ‘Hope is the thing with feathers’, my mother fiddled with her wedding ring before finally taking it off. She then stared at me with her young oak eyes, juxtaposed by her crows feet, and said, “Emily dickenson said that white, not red, was the color of passion, I don’t know anything about Passion, but I do know that red, red is the color of women. The color of women and shame.” She got up from the table, and began to walk away, leaving her ring behind. Before she could leave me alone at the table she turned back and told me, “Don’t let it stain you.” The way she pronounced the words was the way one would hold an expensive and precious gift, and I knew then she was saying something I wouldn't want to forget.
That little piece of advice rang louder every time I looked at my mother. She was covered in red, practically drowning in it. Red lipstick, red shoes, red wine. She was stained all over. I spent years observing the way red had bleed into her bones. I remember her sitting on the kitchen floor late at night, she probably thought that she was alone, that she had finally stolen a moment to herself, for herself. But I had snuck out of bed and watched as she picked up a bottle of wine that had been next to her, with her teeth she pulled out the cork, and without a second thought she tipped her head back and began to chug from the bottle. Never stopping for a breath, she finished in 30 seconds. I watched as some dripped down her chin, slithering down her neck, before the red wine caught and pooled in the deep crevice of her collarbones. At that moment I did not see my mother, instead a storm of a woman had taken her place.
I don’t know how to tell you this, because I know it will hurt you and I don’t want to hurt you. Yet, I don’t have the privilege to live a life led by wants, I live one led by needs. I want you but I don’t need you. Because I know everything about shame and nothing about love. Because I’m a good man in a storm, and you're the goddamn storm. Cheers and goodbye old friend.
Lilo Hayes is a student writer who finds comfort in drinking coffee in the shower. Most of her time writing is during late nights when she has finally run out of reading material. Hayes was taught to read by her mother at the age four and has been an aspiring writer ever since.