Which of my mothers’ smiles is mine?
Someone sent me a photograph of my birth mother as a young woman clinking her glass with a friend’s. Both their glasses brim with a dark liquid that this sender was careful to mention was ‘not wine but Coca-Cola’. But I wasn’t looking at the glasses, I was transfixed by my mother’s smile. It is my own. Or rather, I now have hers- an eager but closed smile. I have no way of knowing how I picked up this smile for I haven’t known her at all.
By some miracle I also smile like the mother I have always known, the one that raised me. The one who exasperates me but whom I also turn to for comfort and advice. When I smile like her I smile like I am open to the whole world.
I’ve spent so many years trying to figure if I’m like this mother or the other. The birth mother or the one who has raised me since I was four. I’ve looked for clues about my biological mother in old photographs and infrequently dropped anecdotes that I’d listen to with the eagerness and indifference of a spy. But these glib words painted a picture of a paragon of virtues- no one can be like that entirely. Was she? And if yes, how am I like her at all?
When I turned 30 I received a box of my birth mother’s things — saris, gold bangles and a diamond nose pin —I was disappointed. I was hoping to know more but what can these things ever tell you about a person? I’d rather have found an old notebook where she’d scribbled in the margins. Like the time I found a scuffed old cookbook that belongs to my adoptive mother where she’d written in the longing hand of someone who misses home- ‘Gift from Appa.’
I’ve spent years trying to find my mother in me. But what I’ve found instead is that I am a collection — an aunt’s eyes, my own father’s square jaw, my adoptive father’s absent-mindedness (charming on him, perilous in me), one grandmother’s strong hands, another grandmother’s passion for stories, a cousin and our shared lack of Vit B12 — none of this is me. It is everyone.
As I keep searching I discover a few secrets, things that matter or don’t. That on some days I’m the whole of my mother’s shy and eager smile which says, “I’m here in this moment but can I go back home when I’m done?” I’ve also learned that my glass is more likely to have wine in it.
The truth is I’ve found out precious little in all these years. But in looking for my mother in me, I keep finding bits and pieces of my self. And lately I realise that this will have to do. Because all along it’s what I’ve been looking for.
