Member-only story
Not Another First Time Story
My Broken Mother, My Broken Heart
My first hurt haunts me, even now
When I was small, I would watch my mother lace up a pair of Pumas. She called them her “shitkickers,” and she wore them whenever she was ready to fight. I remember her walk — that fearless strut down Fort Hamilton Parkway in her black leather jacket — and how everyone seemed to yield to her. I think about the way she pinched a Kent 100 cigarette between her fingers, and how she would rope her thick hair into braids. Later, she would pull at the rubber bands and her face, once taut and tight, would soften. My mother was cashmere. At night, I would curl up close and bury my face in the thicket that was her hair. She used to joke and say the Pumas were her fighting shoes, and three decades later that’s how I remember my mother — a woman who wouldn’t go down without a fight.
My mother was also cold and impenetrable, a forest in which I was forever lost. That’s the way I remember her, too.
You’re my mother, not a memento.
I haven’t seen my mother in 22 years, and I’ll never see her again. She died, in 2015, of metastatic cancer. I wrote a book about how my mother was my first and only hurt, and I spent two decades running away from her because being with her was…
