![]() ![]() ![]() |
|||
Reed Magazine table of contents | Reed Home
essays home | doff | fenollosa | henner | la luz | mayer | o'hara what to say in a college admission essay
Morgan O’Hara We keep my mother’s life in the basement. She never throws anything away, so her life just
gathers and collects in piles. There must be more than ten racks of clothing down there. Costumes,
hats, dresses, gloves, pantsuits, masks, shoes, forgotten stained glass projects, paintings, paperwork,
art books and art supplies all share the same space in the large unfinished room underneath my house.
There are even several plaster sculptures of my mother’s face and figure, which my father cast
during their art student days. Yet while I remain entranced by exploration of my mother through her belongings, I too experience the matrophobia that so many other daughters do. For it must be known my mother and I are not the same person. Ironically, it is our differences that allow me to comfortably walk in her shoes. I think like my father, which unfortunately, especially since their separation, has quite too often led to heavy argument with the woman whose clothes I adore. We fight, and I wonder if she is the same person whom I study in the basement. I look through the old photo albums, which lie across from the family tree information and behind the clothing racks, and I see a funky, attractive girl who is too smart for her own good. She is my ideal. Instead, the lady who wakes me up for school every day in a fluster and a nightgown seems to be in a state of perpetual lateness; not for any present time appointment, because she arrives everywhere hours in advance, but as though she overslept for some crucial appointment in life and is now trapped in that hurried state. Nevertheless, every time I unearth a remnant of that life in the basement, I get to see a glimpse of the woman I seek. She sees me in her dresses and I see her. The remembrance of the past has in this moment brought her respite, if only for a few seconds. For this reason, I continue to navigate the disorder in my basement. Where my mother has preserved her previous selves in fragments on shelves and racks, the true thrill of the basement experience is in witnessing her rediscovery so that I may preserve my creator and in turn, myself. |