When I was 12, my mother cornered me in the bathroom of our suburban Vancouver home. “Your teeth are too yellow,” she said, handing me a can of Comet.
Though disappointed that little about me ever pleased my parent, I understood from past experience how to get through the current predicament. I sprinkled green powder on my toothbrush and did my best to not let any of it go down my throat while I scrubbed.
The things I didn’t do: report her to the authorities; confide in a reliable adult; tell my school friends; cry. Perhaps my mother was right and my teeth were ugly. Or perhaps the shame I felt overshadowed the grievous nature of her request.
As my sole guardian, my mother was the most important person in my life. And under her roof, I played by her rules, no matter how bizarre, because losing her was unthinkable. I didn’t know she suffered from psychosis. I only knew that when she stared at me, her brown eyes near black and glittering with relentless intensity, what she saw didn’t meet her approval.
In addition to my imperfect teeth, she obsessed about the hair on my arms, the bend in my nose, and the bow in my legs. She hated my dark eyebrows. I let her dye them. They turned orange, and I laughed it off. But while the brows grew out, an invasive apprehension moved into my nervous system. Just the tap of her heels on the kitchen linoleum sent my heart rate into rapid ascent.
Through the seventh-grade underground book railroad, I’d already read Linda Lovelace’s biography and constructed a clear landscape of the porn industry in my head. But material on my mother’s paranoia and delusions was not as readily available, and absent from my school health classes in the ’70s and ’80s.
[To read the rest of this article by Laura Zera, click here.]
Image: Giselle Potter
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