When people ask what my first childhood memory is, I don’t tell them the truth. I tell them my first childhood memory is opening Christmas presents. I talk about the warmth of the fireplace and cascading limbs of a Frasier fir. It is a delightful first memory, but it’s not mine.
My first childhood memory is a spinning box fan and my mother’s smooth breasts. My first childhood memory is just a flash, a short burst of a foggy shower, a mild disturbance to an otherwise seamless day. My mother would argue that she was not a good mother and that most of our days were volatile and intentionally forgotten with overflowing buckets of guilt and shame. To hear my mother tell it, my childhood was a broken heirloom, a fractured branch of an ancestry tree that she worked tirelessly to repair.
There isn’t much left of that day, only a piece of the night, which began with a yellow glow creeping from underneath the bathroom door. The box fan cooled my face; my long hair danced in the stream of cool air. My body was limp and molded by a heap of blankets. Our dog rested against my back; my brother twisted and flopped on the other side of the bed.
The shower began, as it did each night, and draining water paced itself with the hum of the box fan. I waited for the variation of falling water, my mother’s entry to the warm shower, but there was a delay - perhaps a forgotten rag or towel. My mother’s feet eventually sank into the shower and the water ran its course, over her body and down the drain.
The gentle chirp of my mother’s voice disturbed the running water and a clap of a dropped shampoo bottle scared me into easing the bathroom door open with a careful nudge. The light was low, and in my mind, after all of these years, the light is softly falling down on my mother. The rest of the hollow room is dark, and my brother does not exist. I see my mother, her large breasts caressing her chest, her swollen thighs leaning towards the shower wall. I see her hands clenching her face; I see her long brown hair, tacky with moisture, clinging to her back. Her brown nipples are large and caring; her bare arms are tan and shaking.
My first childhood memory is of my mother weeping; it is a memory I have carried with me all over. I have sprinkled it all over my relationships and I have unpacked it each Christmas morning. I hear my mother crying when I look at pictures of my father, a man who never aged. I hear her crying in my mind when I consider falling in love. I hear shower water running when I think about my mother on her knees, begging for peace, for closure, for just a second to see my father standing tall and telling her, “I love you.”
My mother carried her grief with her to her last hour. She struggled to find a light, to see a shimmer of him somewhere along the hospital wallpaper. She reached for my hand before her last few breaths. I knew her fear was that I would only remember her pain, her unfiltered discipline, and her second-hand shirts, so I leaned in as she closed her eyes and whispered, “You are the most beautiful woman I have ever known, and I know Daddy will be so happy to see you.”
This story was written for my daughter; a presumptive telling of her first childhood memory...of me.
C. Cimmone is an author, editor, and comic from Texas. She’s alive and well on Twitter at @diefunnier