Hey, hey, hey! You’ve reached the phenomenally favored and fantastic ______!
It is her mantra every month.
A cadence like daytime television,
like weather that’s going to be sunny on the West Coast,
with perfect skies and the perfect amount of wind to keep things pleasant.
She steps into this role because she must. Because as mother, she believes that doing so will make her…
My mother and I are headed to the magical pink Candyland of Dallas, Texas, where Mary Kay consultants, directors and internationally renowned bedazzled, Pepto-pink juggernauts known as Nationals converge to turn the thrumming metropolis into a playground of sticker pitches and cold-calling entrepreneurs and ingenues. It’s alarmingly fascinating to me, how so much of this excess and consumption was funded, earned some might say, by the insecurities of men and women who just want to feel beautiful for a season.
Until the new book comes out
and it’s time to peddle more wares
break more hearts.
My mother has been peddling her Mary Kay merch since before I learned the horrors of school-sanctioned Witnessing.
Hi there. I’m from Marsh Elementary School,
and I’m trying to win a trip to Disneyland.
Could I interest you in some wrapping paper
for another lonely Christmas?
Maybe some chocolate
for the women you’ll never date?
for the men who’ll never want to date you?
Will… will you willingly separate your claws
from about $60? your prize:
cheap sweets and
immediately disposed of recycled letdowns
We’ve both done this, but she’s done it for all my life and, at this point, most of hers. Her rewards are meager, nothing like my trip to Disneyland.
(Which I never got.)
Paid for only by my willingness to embarrass myself. Oh, she’s had moments where humility did everything in its power to subdue her, oftentimes winning the war with her self-confidence. But ultimately, she’s stayed in the game because she’s played it for so long with the same rules that she’s no longer become a viable contestant. Just a person who plays the outer tables with the hopes of observing those who go all-in and win the pot on the river. She’s folded before the dealer even has a chance to lay down the flop.
And she works. My Lord, does this woman work herself sick.
Thinning hair and regular chemo treatments.
(Not anymore,
not since she left the doctor
who was scamming her
for her money,
time)
Health insurance is an MLM we were forced to buy into.
If only she could stay close to the top long enough to live paycheck to paycheck.
That’s where Daddy comes in. Heroic in his patience and loving.
Always, always love.
Like oxygen.
(산소 같은 너 / 난 너만 들이쉬면 / 다시 내뱉을 수 없어
You’re like oxygen / When I drink you in / I can’t breathe you out
이 잔인한 고통 속에 / 내가 죽어가고 있잖아
Inside this intense agony / Can’t you see I’m dying away like this?)
Picking up where she left off when she only managed to pay a fraction of the bills she swore she’d take care of.
Because this is her job.
It has been her only steady commitment besides
her marriage
her duty as a mother,
daughter,
sister.
She excels at all three, making me wonder why she didn’t just pursue that avenue. Fear kept her from her passions. Stubbornness and a heavy dosage of self-doubt forced her to stay in one that has drained so much passion from her.
But that’s not Mary Kay Ash’s fault. Not really. The old girl was dead before my mother actually leapt her first major hurdle on her way to the life she dreams of
(And so we converge on her last resting place
The epicenter of everything bigger and more made up.)
I wonder if this is it sometimes. If when my mother reaches that goal, she’ll find her happiness. Because all I want for her is happiness.
She deserves happiness after living a life feeling like she owed the world everything while the world owed her but was too big, had too many henchmen to actually reciprocate.
We venture off to Dallas on Friday to participate in the pony, toy dog, and debutante parade.
This is the problem:
Much like my father—as the baby in his family
—as the head of my family, I’m the breadwinner.
My brother, he does his part and then some.
Giving when he can and spoiling me with treats that he knows make me happy, even if we both know that they’re bad for my blood sugar.
You can have just one box of Junior Mints.
He slides the small box next to my desk where I work.
(Always and forever.)
He smirks and I giggle. We’re both in on the joke.
Yes, he does his best.
He’s too much like our mother to realize he’s so much like our mother.
She, too, does her best, often feeling like it’s not enough.
(Old insecurities, like habits, die hard and kick, bite, and scratch on their way out.)
She always has a sob in her smile. There are always tear tracks left by the last phantom breakdown she had in the privacy of her own head.
A room guarded by stone statues in the forms of her mother
her anchor in the tempest.
and her father
the shame and abandonment wrapped like a stone around her neck
threatening to drown her at any moment.
She keeps the door locked in case the monster wants out, wants to hurt her children.
She’s done that in the past.
Hurt her children.
The scars are still there.
Locked behind our own steel doors.
But we don’t tell her.
We don’t want to hurt her.
She’s seen too much hurt and deserves more happy.
A lot more happy.
Before we head to Dallas, we have to buy plane tickets, reserve hotel rooms, rendezvous with fake associates who fake their loyalty because they only know what it means to perform.
(Take a bow the night is over. This masquerade is getting older.)
I, like all first sons who are daughters
(I’m not trans and wouldn’t disrespect my trans brothers and sisters.
I just so happen to be the first. the inheritor. the heir.)
, am the breadwinner. I plan. I buy tickets on credit and reserve hotel rooms with the same.
I tell my mother,
We can afford two Lyft rides. Don’t worry.
I tell my mother,
Listen, I’ll pay for our food. You just worry about having a good time.
I tell my mother,
How about I come down from Austin, and we’ll hang out during Seminar.
She smiles into her next words
because she’s going to see me again.
She sighs and dismisses my words
because worry walks beside her.
She speaks with a teardrop in her voice
because she wants so desperately to take care of me,
her daughter,
her firstborn,
her rock
when she feels like she should be mine.
To be fair, I do put up a damn good fight
against that hard place
that lump in her throat,
that stone in her heart.
The day before she’s to travel to her first stop on this mother-daughter week, she is in pain. Her doctor doesn’t know why she can’t keep food in her system. She doesn’t have a fever; she isn’t vomiting or going to the bathroom three or four times in a row. My mother has to give a sample to figure things out, she’s been given a diet that means the foods she wants to try might be off-limits, and her mani-pedi was a carnival of disrespect.
Racism is a pattern.
My mother doesn’t know she deserves better.
She goes back because she doesn’t believe she can find anything less
horrible.
She is downtrodden. Her voice droops. We speak for less than twenty minutes when we usually push two hours.
Bye, honey. Tell ____ I said hi. Love you.
It’s her mantra every day.
The way she lets me know that she hears me and loves me and is my mother.
Today there’s so much heartache in her tone.
Don’t be sad or discouraged, Mom. We’re going to have a great time in Dallas! <3
She sends me back three different emojis to let me know:
She has absorbed my love.
She wants me to absorb hers.
(I do. Every time.)
A couple hours pass and she lets me know she’s made some money.
A constant thistle in her stocking, money. Something she never learned how to handle properly
(odd for a former bank teller)
and something that manages to wrap its scaly claws around her soul and squeeze until she’s a rind of her former self. When she gets it, she spends it, because she wants to help her family, and because the illusion of middle-class chic she harbored for so long—
a dream she deserves
if only for the comfort it would bring
her uneasy mind
her always thirsty soul
—has told her:
You deserve that trip to the hairstylist.
You deserve to buy your favorite snacks.
You deserve to get your nails done.
When it’s gone, she doesn’t know how to fill the emptiness,
and it lingers when she speaks to me on the phone.
I sent up a prayer tonight. Asked Mother Earth and The Universe to give my mother peace. She wants so desperately to provide for me, but I am her daughter, her firstborn. It is my duty and my labor of love to ensure her labors are eased. She might even harbor a distant rumbling resentment for it.
That doesn’t matter.
All I hear and feel is sadness.
But I don’t want her to be sad.
She’s earned $450 from giving customers the lipstick-sweet and taffy of her practiced corporate voice, selling the fantasy of glamour that a Southern white woman built an empire upon. She has a Zoom party tomorrow, where she’ll do the same. Give in to humility because it’s what she knows to do when the taxes are due. She’ll bring at least $600 with her
because she said she would
because she’s the mother
it’s her job to provide and protect.
And she’ll feel proud of herself. She’ll breathe easily at least for five days.
Sleep in a king-size bed in a 3.75-star hotel.
Laugh at her daughter’s bad jokes.
Bemoan and bitch with her firstborn about the false niceties of her job.
(As she continues to peddle her perfection and her intelligence for hers.)
Order room service—
or from the restaurant right off the lobby
or from the snacks we brought for our in-room refrigerator
(At no extra cost, thank you very much.
We will gossip and giggle and be the schoolgirl friends we never could be before I moved out of the house for good.
She misses me.
I miss her happiness.
That’s why I’m here, sitting in this conference room that smells like corporate boredom and heavily made-up lies and insecurities. My first time at a Mary Kay Seminar.
(Where I am, incidentally, because I helped my mother.
Placed an order for myself as one of her team members.)
All I want is to see her happy.
************
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