Belly Up

A daughter works to understand the ways her mother sees herself

The air in Milwaukee was buzzing with heat. What I love most about summer in the humid Midwest is how full the air is, and how I feel like I can’t get enough, can’t get a full breath, can’t reach every alveoli with wet air. Mamma had an agenda, like she always does, but she was resting. So I woke up early while she lay in bed, not bothering to change out of my shorts and tank, with sleep still in my yawn and in my muscles. The day before, Mamma had transferred the koi and the aerator from the pond to two large plastic storage containers, pumped out the water, and was now in the process of scooping years of built up bio matter from the pit. But there was still a lot left. 

I slipped my feet into some too-big rain boots and started scooping shit with an inadequate shovel. I’d get in, fill a tall yellow bucket with slop, get out, heave the bucket out of the pond, and slowly and clumsily carry it to a remote part of the yard to dump it like she’d inexplicably asked, shit splashing on me all the way. Tired, but focused on getting this done for her, I ignored the smears on my thighs and the way the smell of fish mixed with the smell of my sweat. The heat made it all the more nauseating. At the end of it all, there were baked teardrop shaped piles of shit scattered across the grass.

And so it went as the day got hotter and hotter and the cicadas got louder and louder. It felt like pressure in the air was building. When the shovel was insufficient for the small puddles at the back recesses of the pit, I used a metal mixing bowl.

Mamma frets about time. There’s never enough of it in a day to do all the things she needs and wants to get done. She resents the days she can’t get out of bed until late because of her pain. 

“Can you make me some coffee?” she’ll ask me some mornings. “I have cement hands.” 

Her mind is organized, and she gets frustrated by the chaos imposed by the outside world. Every day is a day of catch-up. Cursing when she gets interrupted by the phone calls, unannounced visits, and requests of others, she just as quickly sighs, straightens herself, and says, “That’s okay. People are more important than stuff.” She gives her time to others with abandon despite the fact that she knows it’s borrowed. Which is why, if you’re around, you might as well make yourself useful. She’ll use all the extra hands she can get. 

Mamma bought the house with the koi pond in the backyard because she imagined it would be peaceful, a return to something she had lost. She loves talking to trees and she loves those fish. When it’s warm she’ll go out, light herself a cigarette, and watch them from a nearby bench or from her squatted perch right next to the pond. I watch her take a break from her life to feed the fish, providing her a small measure of control and calm in the day. Perceptive, she’s spent enough time by that small pond to recognize the two toads that live there and name them; she’ll yell at the dogs if they bother them.

Mamma is pressed to get her affairs in order. Not just legally—she needs to straighten the house, she needs to clean the koi pond, she needs to teach us accounting, she needs to go through her storage locker, she needs to plan the vegetable garden and stock up on tampons and paper towels so that there’s food to eat and supplies in the basement when the world goes to shit like the news makes her feel it will; she needs to arrange it all, to make it easy for us when she dies. She’s scared and selfless and fierce and stubborn.

“I hope you get to feel this someday,” she says, unprovoked.

“What?”

“What it’s like to have kids and want to give them the whole world. It makes you crazy. I can’t explain it, really—but I would do anything. I would do absolutely anything for you and I don’t even feel like I can help it. I want it more than life itself.”

Watching her zoom through life, one might think she’s just energetic. But in many ways, she’s spending her life preparing for her death. She can’t sit still. For a while she would say that she wanted me to sit down in front of her with a video camera and record her instructions for us (“so that you know what to do with all this shit!”) and a video to be played at her funeral. The video wouldn’t just be a goodbye to whoever attended, but also a confession, loaded with individualized praise or admonition. Whether from her grave or ashes, she wouldn’t hesitate to deliver a few “fuck-you’s” to the people who didn’t show up for her until she was gone.

I was always surprised by this request because she doesn’t like being in front of the camera. She would pose for pictures if I asked, but she would make it clear that she was doing it for me, not because she actually wanted to. “Whatever you need, honey,” she would say. But then, like the ballet dancer she once was, like the performer she still is, she would strike a pose and indulge in her image.

Earlier in the summer, I asked her if we could create a project in tandem. I had begun to delve deeper into my obsession with photography and documentation—an attempt to mitigate impermanence. Now I was starting to record interviews and tidbits of sound, like birds singing in the morning, and conversations, as a form of oral history. It wasn’t that I had never asked her about her life before. I did all the time, and some stories I knew by heart. But this time I wanted to record her voice cracks and hesitations, to be able to later hear the exact way she used words. 

Mamma has a running list of books she’s writing in her head, and sometimes it’s too painful for her to write by hand or computer. Recording her musings and stories, I thought, could be helpful for her too. Legacy is important to her. So many of her belongings are things she kept of her parents or grandparents, “because those things matter, that’s someone’s life.” Most of her things aren’t even hers, she’ll say. She holds on so tightly to them. She thinks minimalism is stupid. But as much as other people’s legacies mattered, she was convinced no one, not even us, cared about hers. I wanted to show her that I did, that her story mattered to me, that I’d hang on to every word if I could, even if no one else did. 

One morning I was lying with her in bed. She always has the TV on in her room, often the news, because it calms her to have consistent background noise. Sometimes when we’re talking she looks at the TV, though I know she is really paying attention to me. When she tells stories, they interweave and overlap and run off each other, to the point that an hour can go by and you don’t remember how you got so far away from the original question or if she’ll ever answer it. I was listening for what felt like hours when she suddenly got really quiet for the first time, for a long time, lost in thought looking at the TV. 

Still not looking at me, she said, “I don’t want to do this anymore. Let’s stop these interviews,” her face very serious, her eyes far away.

“Why?”

“Because it doesn’t matter.” 

She recounted a time when she was younger, after trying to integrate herself back into her family, when her sister told her: “What you don’t understand is that people don’t care and it doesn’t matter.” 

Mamma looked at me and said, “I had spent the rest of my life, up until recently, trying to prove that wrong. And what I have realized is that she’s right. If what I did mattered, if it actually had an impact, I wouldn’t be where I’m at now.” 

She went on to tell me, so matter-of-factly, that she was disappointed. That all the trauma she’d undergone, and all the effort she’d made to seize her life was for nothing. That the lives of those around her would’ve been better if she hadn’t been born. She didn’t want to die, she clarified. Rather, she felt that all her efforts, her whole life, and even now, as she prayed not to die before she got everything in order, were pointless.

“I keep trying. Don’t get me wrong. I will try every day. But I know that I’m so insignificant that I’m replaceable. That if it wasn’t me, it would’ve been someone else.” She didn’t even look sad. Instead, she seemed almost bored. She was stating what, to her, was obvious. 

“What about me? If I hadn’t moved in with you, I have no idea where I’d be,” I said, unable to appropriately summarize the complete turn my life took when she became my guardian, after I moved out of my biological mother’s life. I felt stupid, as if I was saying all she had done for me was provide me a roof, when she’d really given me a new life and another mother.

“You would’ve figured it out. It was your destiny. It would’ve been someone else.”

“I don’t think that’s true,” I fought, stubborn and slightly insulted. But mostly I couldn’t understand because the divide between how I see her and how she sees herself is a heartbreaking, irrevocable chasm. Standing on the edge of it, I said, “I don’t think you’re replaceable. You can’t imagine an alternate life and be certain it would’ve happened. You don’t know that.”

“I do.”

Here’s the thing about the eventuality of her death: it wasn’t like a truth revealed, something that sent you reeling and struggling to find balance in the aftermath. It had always been there and always would be, like a thick fog lacing the air with premonition and hysteria. You live with it, and, in some ways, become less sensitive to it. Of all of us, she sometimes seems the most calm. She’s composed and rational, often either incredibly vague about what’s going on with her health or talking about it like she’s delivering a joke. 

“Now that I know it’s not gonna kill me,” she once said about the latest curiosity in the string of half concerning and half benign developments of her body, “it’s super cool. This machine that we walk around in does some nifty fuckin’ things.” 

But if you’re paying attention, you’ll notice that she’s scared. And then you get scared too.

By midday the heat was almost suffocating. In the morning, the fish were calm in their tiny world—they’d been in those big blue containers for a few days. By afternoon, when I went to check on them, most of them were belly up. 

“Fuck! MOM!”

The water had gotten too hot. Warm water causes fish to become more active and require more oxygen, and unfortunately, warm water holds less oxygen than cold water. As the increasingly hot day penetrated the depths of the containers, the fish were competing for less and less oxygen, their nervous systems becoming more and more stressed, and they started to suffocate. It was slow, barely noticeable, and then it happened all at once. I reacted quickly, running to fill another bucket with cold water. 

I moved my hand through the bloated and slimy fish, trying not wretch, trying to find the ones that were still alive. I looked for any sign of life—some would swim against my fingers, others would just twitch. 

“Just leave them,” Mamma snapped, trying to get my help for another problem from another part of the yard, resignation in her voice. Why she wasn’t concerned about this, about her fish, her peace, I couldn’t understand.

“Hold on,” I insisted, the heat rising to my head, still weaving my hand through the water, bringing the aerator closer to the mouths of the fish, seeing if I could revive any more of them. The pressure of the day was rising in my chest and in my focused movement.

She was growing impatient with me and my insistence. 

“Most of them are going to be dead, okay? Just let it go.”

Her apparent annoyance and indifference infuriated and distracted me.

“Just hold ON! Give me a fucking second,” I snapped back, motivated by the smaller ones I kept finding with some lingering life in them, electrified by my touch. She and I never argue. When I was sure there were no more live ones in the big bucket, I stopped and took a breath.

All the beautiful, big, old ones were dead. 

It got quiet. I transferred the lifeline of the aerator to the smaller bucket with colder water, giving up on the chance of any of the others jolting awake. The six or seven fish left alive were starting to move more and more, slowly at first, grace and swiftness eventually returning to their bodies. I stared at the fish. I sat there for a while, alone, crying, in reverence of these few remaining creatures. 

The sun was setting, the hues around us now bluer and cooler. Flies began to gather on the dead fish in the blue containers. We both rejoiced at the thought of showering for the first time in a couple days. Before she got in, she came out in her towel, looking like a robed princess. I asked if I could take some photos and this time she obliged with more enthusiasm, laughing with ease. She has the youngest smile and laugh. These images will always make me think of the sweat and pain and fish scales of this day, but also how shaken it left me, what it foreshadowed. It’s a form of archive to me. When I later showed them to her, the chasm of representation became even more evident. I see her and I see my beautiful mother, her eyes, and all the unimaginable. She sees her pain and her abuse and her exhaustion.

"Well, of course you think I look beautiful. You're my kid."

Excessive Issue | January 2020