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The words were harsh, but true. And having the truth sitting between them, out in the open rather than coiling around them like a snake strangling their air, already felt like a step toward healing.
“I—” Tears shone in her mother’s eyes. When she cut herself off, a few slipped down her cheeks.
Becca rose. “I’m going to go walk Bagel.”
Everly placed a hand on her friend’s arm, giving it a squeeze as she passed. Though she’d love for Becca to stay, Everly had to open this box on her own. Just her and her mom, without Ellis or Becca or Grandma Helen to intervene.
Thesnickof the door closing echoed in the quiet room. The glow of the TV painted Everly’s mother’s face a ghoulish shade of white. On the end table beside her, her food sat untouched, the fork and knife abandoned in the middle of her egg roll like an unfinished archaeological dig.
Then, with a small cough, she straightened her shoulders and lifted her chin, finally meeting her daughter’s gaze.
“I was chubby as a teenager.” She tucked a strand of her blond hair behind her ear. “When I told Stanton people could be cruel, I was speaking from experience.” Lifting the paper towel from her lap, she dabbed her face dry. “The fashion back then was short skirts and sheer cropped tops, and like most girls, I wanted to look cool, but when I wore those things, other kids laughed at me. One day in gym, some of the more popular girls stole my clothes from my locker, and I had to walk the halls in spandex shorts and a sweatshirt because they were all that fit me from lost and found. After that, the boys nicknamed me ‘dump truck’ for the rest of the year because I carried my weight in my back end, and it was on display in those shorts. It was a small school. There was nowhere to hide. I cried every day.”
“Did you tell Grandma Helen?” Everly couldn’t imagine her grandmother letting her mom hurt that way if she’d known what was going on.
Her mother’s posture stiffened. “Your grandmother told me to ignore it. That those awful kids didn’t deserve my tears or my energy.” She shook her head. “Maybe she was right, but not all of us are built that way. I wanted to have friends. To fit in. To be liked and accepted.” She frowned, her knuckles white from how tightly her hands were fisted against her thighs. “There’s nothing wrong with that, you know.”
“Of course there isn’t, Mom.” Everly set her plate on the coffee table and shifted to face her mother fully. She rested a hand on her arm. “You never told me any of this.”
Her mother fussed again with the ends of her hair. Talking about this seemed to physically pain her. “My senior year I started helping your grandparents out on the farm and dropped a lot of weight. It changed things for me, and I just wanted to put those terrible years behind me.”
This explained why there were so few pictures of her mother from before college in their family home. Her mom had always insisted theygot lost in one of their moves, but Everly wondered if maybe she’d destroyed them. Or had avoided cameras to begin with.
“I’m so sorry. No one should have to go through that.”
“I know you think I don’t love you—”
“Mom, that’s not—”
“But it’s because I love you that I never wanted you to suffer like I did.” She patted the top of Everly’s hand, then folded her fingers in her lap. “I still don’t.”
Everly hated that her mother knew intimately what it was like to be fat-shamed. And she hated even more that those feelings had turned her fear into a wedge between them. Because no matter how much she loved her, Everly’s mother had never been able to see past Everly’s body. And because of that, she’d never truly known her daughter.
Everly sighed. “I never cared what other people thought of me. I knew the kinds of things they said, but who gives a shit? They were strangers who disappeared from my life the minute I left high school. I loved myself. That was all that mattered.”
Everly would never forget what Grandma Helen had said to her in seventh grade, when she’d found an amazing sequined shirt at a thrift store but was worried about wearing it to school. She’d been afraid kids would call her a disco ball, and her grandmother had sized her up and said, “If you love it, that’s what matters. You don’t need anyone’s permission to be yourself.” Everly had worn that shirt with pride. Every day afterward, until she got to college, she’d repeated those words in her head when she woke up in the morning:I don’t need anyone’s permission to be myself.If only she’d never stopped.
She and her mother had been taught the same lessons by Grandma Helen, and yet they’d internalized them in opposite ways. Everly had learned to accept herself; her mom had learned that accepting herselfmight mean others didn’t. It had caused them to turn into two entirely different people.
She fought the urge to reach out and hug her mom. She wanted to bury her head in her neck the way she used to when she was small, and whisper everything that scared her into her mother’s vanilla-scented skin. But she wasn’t that little girl anymore, and her mother wasn’t a sanctuary, and if Everly hugged her right now, she’d never get the rest of what she needed to say out of her mouth. “Butyouropinion mattered to me. You’re mymom.And the way you talked about my body, the way you looked at me, tried to hide me, tried to teach me to hide myself, that hurt.Thatdamaged me.”
Fresh tears leaked down her mom’s face. Everly could feel some of her own sketching warm paths down her cheeks. But she felt lighter now. As if she’d set every word she’d spoken free from her chest like the birds in her tattoo.
“Was that why you stopped…” Her mother hesitated, clearing her throat. “… being yourself?”
Everly blew out a breath. “It was part of it. And losing Grandma was part of it. And I was, too.” She had to take some responsibility for letting her mother’s voice drown out her own.
Her mom pressed her fingers to her temples. She was fully crying now, her chest heaving with emotion. “I thought I was doing the right thing. I thought I was protecting you. I wanted your life to be easy. Everything with your father leaving was hard enough. I didn’t want you to have to deal with this, too.”
“I know.” Everly wanted to say she forgave her; she wanted to be able to move on. But loving someone who didn’t show you love the way you needed was complicated and messy, and their issues weren’t going to magically vanish because of one open conversation. Not after twenty-four years of ignoring what hurt.
Her mother reached out and squeezed her elbow. “I’ll try to do better.”
It wasn’t an apology. But it felt like a start. People couldn’t change overnight. That didn’t mean her mother wasn’t willing to try.
Everly pulled her into a hug. They still had a lot of work to do, but tonight felt like progress.
A beginning.
