Mirror Portal - Friday Flash

A long involved telephone call. I’m seated on the bottom stair, handset cradled under my chin, giving Amy a draught of flesh top. Suzanne is plucking my arm, but soon takes cognizance of her place in the orchestration. I watch her storm off. Momentarily I hold the phone away from my ear, and pitch for the timpani of small armed percussive reparation. But none is forthcoming. Amy falls asleep and takes my pinioned arm with her. My distressed cabled confessant is chewing my ear off. Yet what rips out and bears aloft my heart, is the petrified image of my eldest daughter’s receding elfin form. Seeing as only empty space now resides in front of me, it’s as if she'd disappeared in a puff of disenchantment.

I wasn’t tracking her down, more trying to clear my head of phone tinnitus. Having decanted Amy from my arm into her cot, I wandered towards my bedroom. I must have glimpsed a dash of colour through the door crack, since I snapped myself back before the threshold. The hue displaced itself once again and unblocked the sliver of light that affords me witness. There she was, sat at my dressing table. In front of my hinged mirror triptych, that gateway to the source of identity. The family omphalos. For I too had sat in front of just such a mirror, a child seeking reassurance of my Mother’s continued existence, when confronting her temporary absence from the house. Jesus wept, suddenly even my pang had a pang of its own now!

My mother’s orderly bedroom with nothing out of place. Everything personal and messy having been buried behind sober, white wardrobe doors. Over the marital bed, fundament of my genesis, a neutral, passionless landscape with a tiny cottage at its heart. ‘I shouldn’t be in here, I shouldn’t be in here’ I inhaled pantingly. ‘I’ll get caught’ I exhaled.

But then my eyes alit on the dresser, with all those personal allures of womanhood. Whisked away by the faint scents and oily emulsions lingering in the air, held in the glass at the forge. The foundry. For all that was feminine. A place of creation, beauty and adornment. I knew I must not approach, to seat myself, to touch. For this was the portal to the forbidden world of boys and sex and once seduced, my soul might be whipped away from me. I would be discovered still sat in this grotto, dusted head to foot in incriminating powders. Guilt and shame battling it out with non-hormonal rouge for incontrovertible confession written upon my cheeks. But I felt the warmth surging through me anyway. Imagining for my mother, a divine trinity illuminated in those three mirrors. Ambrosias and honeys in hand, as she peers in towards the core of her central glass, fluently kindling the two vitreous handmaidens either side with her radiance. Thrice-enhanced, I felt myself equally ordained to enter the world inhabited by my mother and her mother before her. The nine of us stretching back towards infinity.

And now, admittedly at somewhat more of a precocious age, here was my daughter undergoing the very same private initiation. I did what any proud mother would do, I checked that the decor was fitting. I didn’t have such a big heavy dresser as my mother possessed, nor could not even recollect whence I had come by the picture above the bed. The unguents were not as dense as in my mother’s day, but for all their brittleness, I felt still presented a palpable patina with which you could almost gild the walls of the room.

What was she doing exactly? She was bobbing in front of the mirror. Instinctively I pressed my torso back from the door, as she herself cringed back from the purview of the lens. At present I couldn’t get her in focus. Since I’d sat there, both as mother and tremulous daughter, I knew I couldn’t reveal myself and expose her. Yet I had to know precisely what was happening. Fortunately she dipped forward into the dimension of the mirrors again and tugged my frame back to the buffer of the door. Several times we repeated this process as if we were attached by an elasticated umbilical. That we'd never shed the toddler reins.

I gleaned she was ducking in and out of the glass’s survey, as if it was a searchlight. Trawling for a breakout. For escapees and absconders. Fugitives from familiarity. If the beam didn’t sweep you up, it meant that you’d slipped away. If it conjured you in its field, you were held fast and atomised. My daughter was too discerning to want to convene the snarled trinity of me and my mother before me. For here she was, treating the triplicated lenses as if they were sited in a House of Fun. Distorting and reassembling. Distorting and reassembling. Whose genes does she see eyeballing her from within the scope of the looking glass? I just pray that it was only the sloughing of me and my mother that she craves after and not that of her own self. For mirror narcissism is bipolar and self-antipathy gilds one of those foci.

I took my leave. I went into Amy’s room, as if to confer with her that I wasn’t going to fail her as demonstrably I had with Suzanne. She was still in the land of nod. I stood there forlornly, trying to red eye my doting behind her shielded lids. I held there staring, just waiting to harvest the emanations of attachment, but my well seemed either dammed or dried up. Now I really was marooned. Already exiled from my own bedroom, I didn’t want to creep out of here, lest Suzanne hear me and then denounce me for being close enough for spying and yet too distant to be present with her. Something was ricocheting around between me and my daughters, but sure as hell it wasn’t love.

Pelvic Floored - FridayFlash

I cuddled up in the marital bed with a ciggy and my new book for some warmth and understanding. Just trying to reclaim some time for myself. To stretch out a little piece of night and smooth out the wrinkles of day. But my corporeal gristle has long since lost its elasticity ...

I was awakened by the familiar aubade from the room next door. But a yet more pressing stimulation, was the driving ache just beneath my shoulder blade. “I’ll be in in a minute Amy”. Valueless to a pre-lingual. “Mummy’s coming” Just perverse.

I groped for the novel that had become furled in the bedsheets. I bent an arm beneath my spine arched for access. Pain spasm. The throb of my shoulder now swamped by the mushrooming cloud of electro-chemical payload, radiating from the ground zero of my canted back. Click-click went the pain geiger counter in my head. Ack-ack came the less than transcendent neuronal response. And all the while, I seemed insensate to the stream of refugee signals emanating from that numbed tributary of the pinned arm, propping up my entire lumpy weight into the contortion. I don’t seem very connected up this morning. Except through a network of pain knitting me together. Oh, and my alarm-clock only reads five-seventeen am. Morning has broken me ...

Sure enough, there it was, my late-night abscondee. With several pages fed back at the edge into an earlier part of the story, shredding narrative flow. The contents less imprinted on my mind, rather now informing the sinew of my back. A feedback loop. Book-suffering-book-pain-book. Silently screaming, ‘Leave this nightmarish scenario! Get yourself out!’ “Coming Darling. Mummy’s coming in right now”. There’s your loop for you. A perfectly enclosed system. A vicious/virtuous circle. With the creased pages, the book no longer sat flush when closed. Feedback becomes distortion, when you’re plugged into someone else’s amplified instincts.

Feedback as the principle of engagement. Each child’s cry, a blip on the radarscope of parenting. The calculus of neglect. How many blips before targeting your response exactly right? Too few or too many, either proffers a lifetime of depth charged unforgiveness. But first, there is a mewling infant to attend to.

*

Thus does literature go the same way as needlepoint, am-dram and cycling. Replaced in my hormonal biochemistry by caffeine, nicotine and TV daydream.

My body shape has altered too. The mesomorphic legs of that cyclist peddling for all she’s worth, now distended to those of an endomorph.

On the plus side, having either to hoick about an exponentially growing child (or her exponentially regressing sister) in both arms; or performing a balancing act, bracing baby in one, while conducting some suddenly minutely calibrated task with the other, has toned my upper body.

However, my overall post-labour, stretched flesh-rather-than-muscle disposition, delineates a phenotype for me which could only be described as that of a fat blob. Regaled at the convenience store with “When’s it due?”, “Boy or girl?", until my blazing red eyes laser-guides their gaze down through the glass counter at Amy in the buggy.

I’m paunching above my weight.

Playground Pecking Order (for parents)

With friends like his, who needs extra-terrestrials ? As for me, my surrogate friends are determined by the exigencies of my newly adopted life. NCT and pregnant yoga communards. Playgroup, nursery and now school parents. While the former drift away into their own private but supple hells, the latter I spend my time politicking and diplomacying among, in order to get them to like my children. Monitoring whispers of swapped telephone numbers. Watching for furtive exchanges of party invites. The stakes are very high. The defence of the realm of my daughter’s development no less. She may be responsible for electing who her playmates are inside the classroom. But here, out in the carpark, favoured grace determines whom are players and whom are not.

The little faces register nothing of the subterfuge occurring above their heads. But they cotton on. They are innately programmed to pick up and respond. For how could they fail not to ? Their mothers with expressions like defeated Oscar nominees at awards time. To discover we, that is both Suzanne and I, didn’t merit an accolade. Of course, it’s who you know darling. That bitch ! I don’t care that it was the first week of term and her little spawn of Beelzebub didn’t know any of the new kids. It should have been the whole class invited round to fingerpaint on her wallpaper, with chocolate birthday cake melted by hot little hands.

Yeah ? Well you should have had the school calendar in mind when you were procreating missus ! You and your asinine black-hand gang ! With your prissy manicures concealed inside leather gloves against the autumn chill. And the rayburns, hardly harbouring milky eyes from the rheumy sun ? More likely to filter out the wavelength of us wheyfaced women, even as you to cast disdainful darts from behind their embrasure. Walkman earphones for women who never go anywhere on foot, (save the gym treadmill), in order to blot out our background chatter. Since you can’t bear to fall in behind our bromidic hum.

Who do you take your direction from I wonder ? I half-expect you to whisper down the cuff of your blouse, to receive the holy orders of your mothers superior clique. The updated aloof gesture from your moisturised handlers. The latest affectation mandate from your Fashionista wranglers. But then I realise how ridiculous you are in your black clad sensory deprivation. Don’t you realise the stark gloved contrast, lights up the white envelopes like a searchlight beam ? There are people who do real secret agent stuff in this land and they’re dying for it. If I was petty enough, I’d utilise black envelopes. Blend in unseen against the coven’s uniform. You wouldn’t have a clue it was even taking place, if I chose not to invite you and your brat. Or maybe I’d flaunt it. Rub it in your face. Wear white gloves like some photographic inversion of everything you are. Embossed black invites for a kids’ party, how apposite !

So, I’m thrust back into the happenstance of alliances with the parents of other kids outside the blocs and cliques of the autumn party possees. After an intial screening out of the pyschopathic ones from my new square circle, (a habit I wish both my husband and daughter would practice), I have of course spent the ensuing time trying to rid myself of their cordiality. Just as Caroline foretold from her ivory tower. Smart-arsed cow !

*


Caught myself at it again today. Been trailing here long enough now, to put the names to the faces, the faces to the aspects of the mothers. Traced the parabolas of shed scales, as children cast themselves from the line snaked behind the teacher, and puff and distend themselves into a paroxysm of burst relief. I follow the fall-out, track the trajectories of unleashed ground-to-air arms flung out for a hug. I plot the tear-streaked cheeks, to the eczematous worry-beads of maternal fingers.

Now I match a fresh-faced, ruddy-cheeked visage, to the cracked-veined, bucolic alcoholic. Rather than the emulsified rouge-prominence and beacon-red lipstick, of the mother flushed with Church-mongering sociability. Hers’ is the pigtailed, pierced-eared princess, hewn from head-girl material. Hard on the heels of the girl with tight braids and minature briefcase. Demurely marching up towards her own spruced mother, to receive another dose of middle-management incentives and exhortations. I almost overlook the bland formlessless of a mother and daughter who describe one another fully, in their inimitable non-descriptiveness. The pair who seemingly didn’t feel it necessary to comment on school, one another, or even life itself as they trudge mutely off. Their plastic soles kiss-sucking the playground tarmac as redundant punctuation. And so it goes on. Won’t prejudge my daughters, but sure as hell will anybody else’s. It’s not big or clever, but it does answer a few queries. Without me having to undergo the unpleasantries of actually talking to any of these women.