when you look at a body you see a history
to my mother, and all mothers
My mother has a scar right below her collarbone. It’s left from a surgery for her lymphoma treatment a few years before I was born - and really the only evidence of the fact that she ever had cancer.
Growing up, my father would often remind me and my brother that it’s a miracle my mother is alive at all, let alone gave birth to us. I think about that a lot.
Every daughter has a special bond with her mother. For me, I credit my mother - always put together with a whiff of Chanel No. 5 - for instilling in me much of my love for clothes and beautiful things. My earliest notions of clothes were the dresses in my mother’s closet and weekend pilgrimages with my mother to glossy department stores when I was five, the way our eyes both glistened at the sight of luxuriant silks, satins, and chiffons. I didn’t care much for the straight silhouettes and blunt colors of childrenswear but adored the shapely forms of grown-up clothes. My mother graciously let me run through the women’s floors and play dress up on her - I’d pull sparkly gowns for her to try on. She would often say how the collar is cut too low for her, it shows her scar, she can’t wear it.
In my teenage years, I noticed my mother caring less and less about her scar. She accumulated more and more flowy dresses in her closet, many with collars that bore her scar. She wore them with confidence and grace.
These teenage years were the years of me trying on her cheongsam, the promise of femininity, she’d tell me I look so beautiful in anything I try on. These were the same years when I didn’t eat enough because I didn’t feel thin enough or beautiful enough, and she could never understand why - the years when I cried out of desperate helplessness over my gradual self-destruction and she cried out of desperate frustration. I was hurting but I know she was hurting more. But she still held my hand.
We still don’t see eye to eye on many things. She still doesn’t understand why I’m much more reserved than her, much less outgoing than her, and much worse at keeping in touch with people. But every time I visit her now, we would always go to her closet. She would show me a new jacket or let me pick out a favorite sweater to keep and bring back to New York. In the same tender regard and reverence with which our fingertips run across the fabrics, I know that I am - and always will be - my mother’s daughter.
When you look at a body you see a history.
—Louise Glück, Walking at Night
In the winter of my senior year in college, I broke two bones in my right ankle on a weekend trip to New Orleans. It was the first time I ever underwent surgery. I had six screws and two plates placed in my right ankle for stabilization and a long scar to show for it. The first week of post-surgical pain brought long nights of insomnia. Alex became my lifeline for all living needs and my parents called daily as additional emotional support. My mother asked if I’m in pain; I asked her about the scar. She understood. It was a cold winter.
It often happens that we treat pain as if it were the only real thing, or at least the most real thing: when it comes round, everything before it, around it, and, perhaps, in front of it, tends to seem fleeting, delusional.
—Maggie Nelson, Bluets
It took another three months of physical therapy for me to gradually put weight on my right foot and learn to walk again. I can run now.
The plates and screws are still in my right ankle. I don’t ever even have to take them out. It took me a while to comprehend the permanence of it all, and the ableism embedded in the false notion that for those of us fortunately born without defects, our bodies would always be perfect. But no - they accumulate wounds, bandaids, scars, accessories, visible and invisible, telling the whole history of us.
The morning after my college graduation, my mother went through heart surgery at the Stanford Hospital. Her heart valves could no longer stop the back-flow of blood which made her constantly out of breath. I spent the previous months lining up the best surgeon at Stanford for the operation, and it was done quickly. By noon, I got to see my mother in the ICU, still asleep from anesthesia. She was breathing through a tube, her face ashen and swollen. I could barely recognize this as my mother.
My father gestured for me to reach for my mother’s hand. “If you squeeze her hand she’ll squeeze back. She knows you’re here.” I squeezed her hand. It was warm and soft, she firmly squeezed back. “Your mom is a tough lady,” my father said, “she overcame so many hurdles in life, and this is just another one”.
I had to leave with Alex that same evening for our long-planned graduation trip to Italy. It was the worst I’ve ever felt about leaving. My mother told me about her pain over the phone. Months later, I finally saw the long scar the surgery left on her right torso.
Three months ago, I sat on my apartment floor unboxing my new canvases with a knife. I applied too much force - my knife slit through both the cardboard box and the canvas inside. I scrambled to tape up the backside but the front slit still gaped open, like a wound haunting me, chastising me for my clumsiness. I didn’t touch the canvas for weeks. I resisted the urge to throw it away.
When I got the idea to paint what would become Breathe Easy II, the only canvas I had on hand was the wounded one. I reluctantly painted around the slit, then took a deep breath, and slathered on a thick layer of red paint onto it.
The paint dried as a heavy, crimson bulge, mending the gap. It looks so much like a scar, like the one beneath my mother’s collarbone, on her torso, on my ankle. It thrills me in its reminder of strength, of healing, of growth, of grace - and especially on this day, of my mother.
Happy mothers day, to my mother, and all mothers.
