Summer makes me look more like my mother.
The sun brings out little spots on my skin, somehow in the exact same pattern that she has: an arc beneath my eyes, spread out on my cheeks like someone stamped right onto me a replica of the way she’s been burned, wanted me to look in the mirror and see her.
Summer, like all seasons, makes me miss my mother, and realize why I won’t go anywhere without Google maps navigation: I refuse to admit I know my way around. Refuse to trust myself. To know well enough, another place where she isn’t. Refuse to be here.
Sometimes, when I feel this way, like my youngest self trapped in my own growing body, I place my hand in the middle of my chest and push down with the part of my palm that meets my left pointer finger’s knuckle. Not on my heart, but right in the center where the bone feels most flat, where it feels like everything could separate in half, if I were to break in two like she did.
At some point in my childhood, a teacher read me a book called The Kissing Hand.
It was a short, fictional story I was likely not meant to have taken so literally — like I do everything — to have spent evenings before bed for years after presenting my left palm to my mother, so that she could kiss it gently and I could hold that lightning bug of love in my closed fist long enough after she tucked me in that I was certain it would stay there, that I had collected her in a way that was measurable and with no expiration date. I had to be weaned off this practice like a pacifier, like with each kiss I was sucking something out of my mother: making her affection currency for myself, assigning value to the hum I would feel in my center when I sensed this bank of hand kisses filling me, aging with me.
The Kissing Hand is by Audrey Penn, and it tells the story of a young raccoon who is afraid to leave his mother.
Sometimes on summer nights when I wonder the same things we all do about how we got so old so quickly, how we ended up so far from home, how we know it will never be like that again, we will only keep growing, I start the familiar trip I know, ask the bank teller to make a withdrawal, and fill myself with the amber of one imaginary kiss.
Question to ask your mom:
Are there any books that stick with you from your childhood or mine? If you could write a children’s book, what would it be about?