Model Home

by Rivers Solomon

Maybe my mother is God, and that’s why nothing I do pleases her. Maybe my mother is God, and that’s why even though she’s never once saved me, I keep praying that this time she will.

One day soon, I’ll be a failed deity, too. My daughter is learning not to believe in me.

Despite all the coddling denied me as a child, I never became the independent island of my mother’s dreams. I’m a baby bird, chirping for anyone at all to spit food into my mouth. If I make Elijah too many snacks, it’s because food-making is effortless compared to the real task of child-rearing: emotional presence. I don’t give my daughter too much because I have nothing to give.

Mother is God, I’m her whim made from clay. Mother is God, I’m Earth’s broken rib. Over and over again, she says: Child, this is paradise. I say, Mother, I’ve never heard of a paradise with a talking serpent, nor one where I must daily encounter food I’m forbidden to eat. I may be newly made, but even I know apples are to be consumed. They’re on the list of WeightWatchers foods worth one point.

Every day, everyone is a hundred different people: who they are when they are alone and feeling fuckable, who they are when they are alone and feeling unfuckable, who they are when they are grief wrecked, when they are joy smacked.

How was it that none of them were considered cruel for making these ridiculous, arbitrary rules in the first place, but she was cruel for taking said rules to their conclusion to point out the hypocrisy of it all?

How cruel that our parents, unexorcisable, go on inside of us. How cruel that we cannot disimbricate their ghosts from our being.

Can the cellar that a kidnapper throws a child into be guilty or innocent? The lake that a killer drowns his women in? I’m not a person but a place where bad things happen.

Children, girls. Daughters, says Mama. Don’t you know that we have survived everything? Did you know that you have been alive for millions of years? That the whole history of the earth is inside of you? We are ocean people. We are field people. We fought and we are here. We are here at the top of this building. On the top of the world.

God, is that all life is, checking the facts, finding yourself wrong, then doing the opposite of what it’s your nature to do?

Wanted God to be a mystery you studied like the cosmos, like a worm you decapitate whose head grows back.

I could never know how Mama was going to react to anything, though. I hated tossing the coin. I preferred to keep secrets. If I didn’t show her who I was, she couldn’t disapprove.

History repeats and repeats because history is people, and we can reproduce only what we know, and we get what we know from our elders. The same mechanisms that facilitate language facilitate the passing on of pain.

I can’t tell the difference between grief and ghosts. Both seize the body and take what they will.

I hate speaking of her in this way, in the way that I hate speaking of anyone, because whatever I might say will draw a picture, and the picture is wrong. There is no way to describe a person that is not a reduction. I would’ve forgiven Mama everything had she said it, the only thing I ever longed to hear from her: I am sorry for the abundance of pain.

Mother is God, and we are here. Mother is God, and who am I? I lie on a beach towel and turn to my side, my knees curled to my chest. My lips on the ground, I taste sand and salt, crunch it between my teeth, and swallow it. Mother is God, and I am as good as this earth in my mouth, this earth I came from. Mother is God, and I am the Garden of Eden, a paradise inhabited by lost creatures. Mother is God, and I am an animal, made of blood and longing, and what was it Mama said, all those years ago? How powerful it would be for us to be called animals and say, Yes, yes, of course. And what does that make you? Not animal? Not flesh? Not alive? Dead. Oh, Mama, yes. How sweet it is to be alive.