The Argonauts, by Maggie Nelson, is available now. I pecked out a text from California: I’ve made my own family and don’t need to feel attacked or like I owe you information. In Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Jeannette Winterson writes that “no emotion is the final one.” Even remembering that line, telling my mom to stop talking to me felt final. I sound hurt, which is her cue: I’m just kidding, don’t take it to heart, you have no sense of humor. I try to explain that nothing, especially identity, is ever clear. Is this just something you are doing or are you gay? This needs to be made clear. Now when my mom and I talk, our voices pulsing through a cable under so many fields between LA and Baltimore, she says I’ve hurt her by withholding words.Īs for the part of you that makes us uncomfortable, well, you need to come clean.
A declaration I would later carry out, leaving New York for Los Angeles, for mileage, for daylight. There’s a video of me, age three, telling the camera what I intend to be: A bird, so I can fly to California. I picture her holding baby me, saying, “Those are your pants! Those are your eyes!” and talking into my fuzzy head like a mic, my brain recording her voice, the soundtrack to a field of long grass: Shhhhhh, shhhhh, shhhh. And then, mothering: my mom, the caretaker. From the beginning, I knew a mother: the body in which I was grown.
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