Now My Heart Is Full by Laura June

Author:Laura June
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2018-07-23T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 8

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My mother was raised by a very opinionated woman of the Great Depression. Raised by an alcoholic herself, my grandma Peg was in some ways an amazing woman. She was a working mother in the 1950s, an interior decorator and then, with my grandfather, the bookkeeper at their framing business. But as a mother and then as a grandmother, she was exacting, especially in matters of dress. For her, appearances mattered almost to the exclusion of everything else. Though my mother knew a lot of this was bullshit, she spent most of her life, as far as I can tell, trying to please her own mother and inevitably failing. I remember hearing my grandmother tell her she should lose a “few pounds” or that her hair color needed to be touched up at the roots. I’d hear her quiet, tsk-tsk voice: “Kathy, is that what you’re wearing?”

I know what it’s like to live with your mother’s baggage. I don’t know where my grandmother’s baggage came from, and I do not blame her for my mother’s alcoholism, but I do think that my mother tried to course correct her relationship with me based on what she probably saw as the shortcomings of her own mom. Don’t we all? That manifested itself as an open and pretty honest relationship with me. We talked freely about sex and drugs, and she told me wonderful stories about her teenage years. One of her favorite things to talk about was how when she went to see the Doors and Jim Morrison touched her face. She was seventeen years old, and it was her first concert. I wasn’t afraid of my mother the way that I think she was afraid of her own. My mother made me strong enough and smart enough to tell her when I found out that I was pregnant, and she was open enough to be able to listen to it. If that situation was difficult for her, as I’ve come to realize as a mother myself that it must have been, she herself never complained to me. And I think she certainly wanted to be better than her mother in this way. I never really felt that my mother had expectations of me that I would never be able to meet. Except for one thing.

With a baby and a little kid, it’s easy to dress them. They wear what you put on them or, later, what you buy. I never thought about what was in my closet and my drawers very much, not for the first ten or twelve years of my life. So the fact that my three-and-a-half-year-old already has decidedly strong opinions about what she wants to wear shocked me, and it exposes her genetic predisposition to care.

I didn’t care what I looked like, never felt put together right. I felt uncomfortable in my body and so, to counteract that, I eventually stopped caring completely. This irritated my mother, who had spent my childhood braiding my hair carefully and planning outfits for me.

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