My mother’s body is a medium for love. It transmits her affection to me more than words can. When I was young, she would feed a bossa nova CD into our kitchen radio, balance my feet on the tops of hers, and waltz me over the hardwood. I can still feel the weightlessness of the dance, of having her steps become my own. We’d laugh and spin and then she’d release me to finish cooking dinner.
When I tantrumed, she would shut herself with me inside my room. I remember her back against my door, with her legs straight and hamstrings taut. I would writhe on the carpet, igniting my hair with static electricity, and cry about whatever she had done to upset me. I would hate her body for being strong and immovable. I would think about the meanest thing I could say—which was to call out what separated us, to sever her body from mine. I would say that she wasn’t really my mother because she didn’t give birth to me. She was a pretender, and I did not belong to her. What I did not say was that I wanted to belong to her, to share in her loveliness.
My mother’s body is a beautiful thing. She is tall, like me, with black hair, a pair of dimples, long arms, long feet, and pointed elbows. She is thin-boned, her shins and wrists bird-like in their delicacy. Her fingers twitch when she is thinking—she was forced to play the piano as a child—and her toes rest on top of each other instead of lying flat. She has one tattoo on her hip and biceps from her days of Division I college basketball. The lines of which, both ink and muscle, have softened with age. There are scars on her neck, on her knee, and on her stomach. She has small lips and a strong jaw. She clothes herself in shades of blue and purple, and she changes her glasses depending on how sunny it is outside.
The thing is, I have two moms. Having two moms means that it is impossible to be genetically related to both of them. I am a sperm donor baby, so half my DNA is a mystery. I don’t know how my biological father walks, or how he sounds, or how he smells. And I don’t want to know, because it doesn’t matter to me. He isn’t my father. He is a body, a string of DNA, that has had no part in raising me. My mom’s body might not share a genetic identity with mine, and yet she is my parent. She loves me. She withstood me when I was horrible, insecure, and selfish. She danced me on top of her feet. What I cannot admit to her is that I feel that there is something missing inside my body, a longing for hers, that this love cannot fill.
I want to be related to her so bad it hurts. I crave her genetic code. It is a carnal thing, this wish to have her DNA inside of me instead of this mystery man’s. I want to pass her on to my children. I want their eyes to be hers, for the arcs of their necks or the angle of their elbows to bear a resemblance. I want to preserve her in my biological line—her body, her shape. But I can’t. I am a bit jealous of her body, that it belongs to her alone, and that no part of it resides in me. I want to see myself in her, to know that I have the ability to pass her on, maybe because I want some undeniable proof that she is my parent. Tracking relationships through biology is so arbitrary, yet so ingrained in our idea of parenthood. Without this tangible connection, I wonder, what makes her my parent?
To me, the answer is both simple and obvious. Love. Embedded between us is the love between a daughter and mother. I can’t touch it or track it or measure it, but it’s there. As steady as my own heartbeat. A constant current, like blood through veins.
It is this invisible, unquantifiable thread that connects us in a way that supersedes DNA. Nothing about my mother’s biology obligates her to be my parent. What comforts me, without being biologically related to her, is that I am so wanted as a child. My conception was planned, prayed for, and paid for. She sought me out for years, even though she did not carry me, or give birth to me. Being a mother, for her, is an act of agency. When I am home, I’ll be downstairs and she’ll be on the second floor. I’ll shout to her, my voice will travel through the walls: do we have any more eggs? What’s the HBO password? Where’s the cat? Rather than shout back, she will always, without fail, come down the stairs to answer me. She will stand in front of me and, whatever it is, whatever I need, she’ll help. Regardless of biology, she has wanted to be my parent since before I was born.
Instead of becoming my mom by default, she became my mom by choice.
Now, her body is a beautiful thing, but also a betraying one. Sickness has brought us closer together. On a warm fall day, with sunlight puddling on the linoleum, I held my mom’s hand and watched her body wither. The nurse flicked on the machine, and it began to hum. The cold cap clung to Mom’s forehead, dragging the temperature of her scalp down to a freezing point in an effort to preserve the hair follicles. To slow down their division. To hide them from the jaws of the chemo. I watched it drip through a thin plastic tube, and into her bloodstream through the IV. It seemed so innocent, this clear, water-like bag of chemicals. But her cells, both healthy and cancerous, were shriveling. As I sat there, drawing circles with my thumb on the back of my mom’s bird-like wrist, I felt it. The thread between us snared my heart. It is a string of coiled wire, pricking its barbs deep into the muscle, turning my chest to pulp.
I love her so much it hurts, like my age-old longing for her DNA. It is a fresh kind of hurt, a new kind of love that feels the same as pain, as fear. Donna Tartt wrote that “Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.” I used to be jealous of my mom’s body, its beauty, spiteful that I did not share her biology. Now I quiver. I am afraid. I love her and I am afraid.
