“Tell me about your mother,” he asked.

It had been a week since Ferdinand brought the girls over. A week of consistent, happy David. I was putting away laundry, small neat piles into drawers. I’d denied his request to meet his mother twice. I wasn’t ready for that yet, and now he was asking about mine. I’d rather meet his than talk about mine, but I didn’t tell him that. My back was to him so he didn’t see the look that crossed my face at the mention of my mother.

David always wanted to know things. Who was your first kiss? Who was the first guy who gave you butterflies? Where were you when you found out Heath Ledger was dead? I answered his questions with a mixture of caution and thrill. No one had ever asked me these things before, but there was the lingering feeling that his questions were a trap, that he was trying to find something not to like about me.

“Your mother,” he said again. “You have one, don’t you?”

It was meant as a joke, his voice light, but it stung. Yes, I had one, but barely.

I felt creaky and old when I thought about my mother, phantom hurts like an old chain from the past was tugging on my ankle. But David was asking and I’d found myself more and more unable to say no to David.

“She had another baby,” I said. “When I was seven or eight. I can’t remember.” These details—the ones I thought he’d want to know. I was his muse after all; my brokenness could feed him. I wiped my hands on my jeans, they were sweating. I moved toward him, wanting reassurance. I didn’t come from what he came from. I had nothing to offer.

He looked steadily on like this didn’t faze him at all, rubbing little circles on the skin of my arm with his thumb when I went to stand near him. I relaxed. Anything that had to do with my mother made me feel shame.

“I remember her belly growing. At first, I thought she was getting fat, but I hardly saw her eat. Then one day she was in the kitchen and she grabbed her stomach with a yell and said it was kicking. I asked her what was kicking and she grabbed my hand and held it to her belly. She hardly ever let me touch her, she said my hands were always sticky.” I paused to watch his face, his eyes slightly narrowed now like he couldn’t imagine the world where a mother would think her child’s hands were too sticky.

“Her stomach was so hard, that’s what I remember thinking, how fat people had such hard bellies.”

He smiled, sort of, and nodded for me to keep going.

“She didn’t come home one day, and the neighbor came to bring me food and check on me. I wasn’t even scared to be alone in the flat at night, I was so used to it. And then she came home and her belly was gone, her stomach was flat, flat, flat—like it used to be. When I asked her where the baby was she wouldn’t tell me.”

“Do you think she gave it up for adoption?” he asked.

I shrugged. “For all I know it could have been stillborn, or maybe the father took it, or maybe yeah—adoption.”

“She could have been a surrogate,” he said.

“Yeah, that’s not really my mum,” I said. “She’s never been into the selfless, giving lifestyle. But, your guess is as good as mine.”

He rubbed my shoulders, kissed me behind the ear.

“Are you asking about my mother so you can find out why I’m detached and avoidant of commitment?” I laughed.

“Yes,” David said.

My mum. She had almost no neck. That’s what I didn’t tell David. Those details felt like they were only mine. It perplexed me how her head was attached to the rest of her. I spent a lot of time trying to figure it out. Just a lobbing ball of blonde hair on a torso. Her hair was like mine, people stopped to admire it. But there was too much of it, thick and heavy. It diminished her necklessness further. She wasn’t abusive, though from a young age I knew she was disinterested. She liked men; they kept her interest. Her life was a quest to find the perfect mate—the one who wouldn’t leave her. And yet she left me. A cycle.

I was a project gone wrong and now she had better things to do. I preferred it that way. My friend, Moira, had a mother who criticized everything she did: you should wear lipstick; you’re pale. You wear too much lipstick; you look like a whore. If you exercised more, you could have a lovely figure. Why do you spend so much time drawing? You should exercise or you won’t find a man. Moira was a lesbian, so lucky for her finding a man wasn’t a priority. She complained about her mother in great detail, which I found fascinating. A mother who cared too much about every little detail…tell me more.

Mothers—bad mothers especially—made their children feel guilty for existing when they were under stress. “I gave you life” was a popular one, as well as, “I work hard to put food in your stomach!”

You wanted to have a baby, or maybe you didn’t and just chose to keep your baby, it still wasn’t our choice to be here, so stop throwing it in our faces that you have to maintain us.

My mother was shouting at me one day. It was after the man she’d been seeing suddenly broke up with her, and her mascara was streaked down her swollen face. I’d answered a question she’d asked me with a grunt and she lost her shit, lobbing a loaf of bread at my head.

“Don’t you talk to me like that!” she screamed. “I gave you life. I put food in your belly!”

I’d had enough. I’d been feeding myself for years, working the till at the local grocery mart. Half the time I was feeding her.

“You brought me here,” I said to my mother. “You wanted a buddy, something to love you, right? Should have got a dog, Mum. Lot easier than a fucking human. Now feed your mistake without feeling like a savior.” I’d marched off to my room and left her standing in the kitchen, arms slumped at her sides, defeated.

She’d not apologized and neither had I—neither of us was sorry. And that’s how we parted ways eventually, both a little relieved to be done with each other. Carrying on with our merry lives.