This is exactly our relationship.
“You never hugged me, Mom.”
“You’re a liar, Monica. I always hugged you and I wiped your butt too,” she defended herself. “How could you say I never hugged you?”
That’s not how I mean it.
But the truth is I have no recollection of a single maternal hug. This was not by her design or neglect. Her hugs were and still are available in plenty at the ready. She was and still is generous with her affection, giving of her own well-being. But I am a selfish heiress reckless with her fortune. I never earned what I have squandered.
I have the self-awareness to know that I was not an easy child. Because some things never change, I was then as I am now easily entranced, fixated on accomplishing whatever is preoccupying my mind. I lash out when someone threatens my focus, or worse, tries to stop me. I do not like to feel held down or stifled. It could not have been easy to mother me, and it was flatly impossible to hug me.
At a very young age, I announced that I would be walking alone to school going forward. “You are too small, Monica,” she resisted. I told her very honestly that, if she wouldn’t allow it, I would just wake up very early and walk to school before anyone else woke up. Knowing that I would make good on my plan and that she would have to account to the police as to why they found me sitting on the steps of my school in the middle of the night, my mother gave in. She didn’t hug me, but at the appropriate time of morning, she watched me walk out the door, reach up towards the doorknob, and close it behind me for the first time. I didn’t get very far before I realized my mother was walking behind me, keeping about a block and half’s distance. This was unacceptable.
Eventually, she promised she would not walk behind me any more. Instead, for weeks, she drove slowly around each block I walked, a satellite of concern. When I noticed her, this too was unacceptable. We re-negotiated and settled on finding me a walking mate. This system worked for years.
When I was a bit older, I insisted on wearing two sets of leggings under any shorts, skirts, or dresses to hide my hairy legs. I had neither the complexion nor the smoothness of all the other girls in the fifth grade and it tormented me. My mother refused my demands for a shaving tutorial. She didn’t hug me, but she told me I was beautiful the way I was. I persisted. She relented. She wouldn’t allow me to shave, but she offered to teach me how to use an epilator. She warned me that the machine would hurt and I said I didn’t care. She said the process took hours and I told her I would cut school on her next day off and we’d spend as long as we needed. She said the epilator didn’t have its batteries and she would get them for me soon and I waited. A week rolled by, then two, then a few more. I got hotter and more heated in my layered nylons but I wouldn’t give up.
I began to suspect she was stringing me along. So, I found a fresh razor and locked the bathroom door. I sat in the middle of the bathtub fully clothed and shaved a patch of hair just above my right knee. My fresh skin was smooth and soft. It had an unobstructed light to it.
By my third stroke, the razor was full of hair. I sliced my thumb open cleaning it. I held back a scream and cried silently.
My mother didn’t hug me, but she didn’t yell at me, she didn’t punish me. I will never forget how kindly she apologized for not taking me seriously enough when I told her that the hair on my legs really, really bothered me. After she was satisfied my thumb didn’t need stitches, it turned out the epilator was electric.
A few years after that, I bleached my own eyebrows and bangs bright orange, necessitating the professional color intervention I had been after. I also nearly made it out of the house in a skirt I stitched one seam short of being a proper pillowcase before it fell apart entirely. She didn’t hug me when I hid myself in panic and shame and embarrassment, and she didn’t berate me for declining to use common sense or the sewing patterns she’d bought me. Once she grew aware of the latest crisis, mistake, mishap, or disappointment, my relief was not far behind.
The stakes got higher with time. Hugs couldn’t have been less important to me when I moved into my first dorm room, when I needed help feeding and caring for myself after a nearly fatal car accident, when I jetted around Europe for 6 months alone, when I was a teenager who accepted a ring from a boy she barely knew. So she didn’t hug me then.
I don’t believe she hugged me when she was too weak with sadness to come downstairs to see me off on my move to Atlanta for law school. She helped me pack up the room she’d made me, the dresses she’d approved in fitting rooms. I left behind the books she’d read to me, the stuffed animals she moved away from my sleeping head. She asked if I needed anything, directed me to call her if I was scared or tired or just wanted to come home. I waved to her from the car as she stood in her window and watched me go, go, go away from her and towards my future.
If it were up to her, she would have hugged me in each of those moments. She might have tried to hug me. But no hug can communicate both space and support precisely the way I need, and in this language she is fluent.
Even now, this is all true. Last month, I underwent a minor medical procedure and settled in with my husband for evening’s worth of recovery time. I was still a bit loopy from the propofol, when the doorbell buzzed. “It’s just a food delivery for another apartment,” my husband said. Then it buzzed again, but no one answered the other side of the intercom. About an hour later, I saw several text messages and missed calls from my mother. “I’m here to see you, Monica.” She wanted to comfort me and had driven over with some soup (and no doubt hugs on offer), but we hadn’t let her in. She carried a box up to the door of our fifth floor walk-up, knocked on our apartment door, but we didn’t hear her. I didn’t hear her knocking. She left, she left. How long have I gone without hearing her knocking.
There is no unshaded spot on any beach, no amount of soft alpaca wool that is as warm to my senses as my mother. The circumference of her affection is far greater than the wrap of her arms. It’s the circumference of my whole world, all I’ve done, all I’ve seen, all the places I’ve been. “You never hugged me, Mom.” That’s how I mean it.
No hugs please.