Goddessy-good, full, round, and robust with life. Did your entrails jiggle whilst your tongue clapped within your mouth? Eldest daughter, outside the norm, completely unexpected and unpredictable, was your laugh like mine?
I was a freckle-faced-eight-year-old, laughing in the car, alone with my mom, the first time the likeness was invoked. “I wish you had known your great aunt Polly. She was my favorite aunt,” sighed my mother, “You remind me of her.” Her eyes a hazy gray while lost deep within a memory. Locked and stored inside the emotional baggage packed on to her five-seven frame by years of sweets to soothe the pain of life. A life that had turned out nothing like she had imagined.
Now I see my mother as the eight-year-old, another eldest daughter of a patriarchal Mennonite family, anxiously buzzing about the farm while her mother, my grandmother, tended to the old crones' hair, Polly, and the twins, Eugina and Evalina. My mother, sitting close to Polly in order to breathe in her smell and feel the vibration of her joyful laughter. Listening to hushed, secret women jokes during this time when the men-folk were away. She must have relished in these moments of inclusion, being treated as a young-woman, not just a girl. A girl who could not own land, a home, independence, nor a higher education, for everything was controlled and defined by her father.
I once found the courage to ask my mother if she had thought my aunt Polly to be gay. A stunned, stinging gaze slapped across her face. Quickly collecting her thoughts, by grasping the frayed edge of her memory's tapestry, she proclaimed “No, she was an old maid by choice. She fell in love once, he married another, and then she lived with her twin sisters who married brothers.” I didn't bother to point out that I had been betrothed to a man once, many years ago, before meeting my wife. Nor did I choose to remind her of her first forbidden love affairs. Those memories were tucked too deep, hugging the bone, constricting the heart. Surely words as sharp as these would spur an instant death.
“She was brash and loud and funny,” the hazy look returned to my mother's face, aged by an additional eighteen years this time, “You would have really liked your aunt Polly. You remind me of her.” And that is all there is for her to say about her favorite aunt. Everything else was supposed to be defined by the chores she did, the pies she baked, and the children she cared for. She owned nothing and was completely dependent upon the generosity of her sisters' good-christian-husbands to take her in. I imagine that her failed love affair was used as a warning to all of the little girls: “You don't want to end up like your aunt Polly.” In our family, it is common knowledge that the worst fate for a woman is be husbandless and childless.
But what if Polly's love and vivaciousness were simply bigger than the social constraints of the time? What if my great aunt was the first in my family to whisper the lines of Sappho? Perhaps a lingering embrace among girl friends caused her nipples to press against her shirt, sending an electric jolt between her thighs. Could my aunt have led her own quiet revolution? Seeking a hidden pleasure within her hands, late at night, tucked between cotton sheets, remembering the scent of a woman's skin.
So where does that leave my aunt, my mother's secrets, and me? The matriarchal-black-sheep of the family, the ones who are asked to be something other than they are. “Whatever you do, just don't be you. Can't you just follow our rules? We'd all be so much happier if you could just be who we want you to be.” Instead we create a self defined road ahead for us all. My aunt an old maid by choice, my mother in a traditional marriage her parents did not approve of, and me: considered the ugliest of ducklings. I am fording the tides of exodus by building my own family. Giving voice to the secret passions within our bloodline, this is my swan song.
And as I throw my head back in joyous ruckus, I wonder, was her laugh like mine? Goddessy-good, full, round, and robust with life. Did her entrails jiggle whilst her tongue clapped within her mouth? Eldest daughters, outside the norm, completely unexpected and unpredictable, each generation surpassing the past to continue the climb towards freedom.
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