Ancilla L
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The Emerald Pendant.
🕑 Added 2024-12-26 03:50:16 +0000 UTCMy mother gave me a tiny emerald pendant when I was sixteen. It was beautiful, in the box, some things are like that. In the blue velvet-lined box it looked delicate and pretty, laid out in white gold and hanging from a very fine chain. I knew instantly how it would make me feel when I put it on; it would make me feel like a gunny sack tied in a rope made of diamonds. I didn't wear things like that, not when I was sixteen and not now, and my mother knew this as well then, as she does now. I thanked her for it, and I sat looking at the box for a few minutes.
"Why don't you wear it to dinner tonight?" She asked me.
"It's really not my style," I told her, hoping that would be enough information, "I really don't like things like this."
"Don't worry, I was just like you when I was young," she said, "I didn't like these things either when I didn't have them, and you just learn to like them."
At the heart of it there was, as there is today, a deep hope that one day I will become comprehensible to her by doing the things she does, that she used to believe she would never do. That one day I will just wake up and suddenly things like fine china, gold bangles and designer purses will matter to me. I don't mean to disrespect people to whom it does matter, but it's part of a bigger, cultural requirement of womanly conformity to which I am ideologically opposed to a point of fanaticism, and I wonder sometimes whether she would have been happier if she had had that daughter instead. The "womanly" daughter, who is comfortable in the belief that once you get married you dress in accordance with the cultural norms and embrace the patriarchal roles that marriage dictates. The one who cares about how she looks, remembers to shave her legs if she's wearing a dress, pays attention to skincare and always make sure to make 10% less money than her male partner so as not to emasculate him.
That's why she gives me things like emerald pendants, and she does it all the time, but it won't stick, and it's not because of anything I do. I'll go so far as to say I am sentimental about jewellery, perhaps even more sentimental that the women in my life who wear religious symbols of it, because to me, when I put on jewellery there is a certain permanence to it. I put on a bracelet for six years at a time, and until it can no longer be worn or just breaks. I wear a "necklace" (but they're mostly choke-chains with locks) for years at a time. I'll wear a watch for a decade and never take it off expect for medical or airport reasons. When I put on a piece of jewellery, it's usually not meant to be removed, and it's rarely aesthetically pleasing in the regular sense of the term, but it is meaningful to me. It represents who I am. I am the person who would rather wear stainless-steel forever than put on a diamond necklace for a day. It's very important to me, because I value consistency above all else, and my sense of beauty lies in the repurposement of the mundane. The tawdry. The almost useless. I am terrified of being enslaved by possessions.
Which is why, when I lose my jewellery, I accept it as what was meant to be. I can love the things I wear, but they add no value to me, and that's the sentimentality of which I speak. When the time period for what I am wearing elapses, often coinciding with fundamental changes to who I am, the jewellery I wear discards itself. My collars break. My earrings fall into cliffs. My nose rings flow into the ocean. My watches break beyond repair. Sometimes replacements present themselves, and sometimes they don't, but I don't go looking for them. Alternately, when I put things on that weren't meant to be on me, I either lose them almost immediately, or someone in my life likes them enough that I just give them away. That is what happened with the emerald necklace. I lost it even before we were back from dinner.
She told me it looked nice, even though it was clear she didn't think so at all, before we left the house. I believe my mother sees that her idea of aestheticism dims me, but because she is so driven by the idea that if I were "more like her" life would be easier for me, that she forces herself to believe it is working. Even now, when she buys me a dress or shoes that aren't me, she tells me repeatedly that I look great, but she doesn't mean it, and I don't. On the contrary when I dress in the black dresses and mascara of my own making, she wants to tell me she likes it but she refrains, often covering it up with explanations and excuses for why it *appears* to be working. She pretends she doesn't understand me at all, and it doesn't bother her, and at the same time, she ensures that I know that she is the only one who understands me, and that's why she buys me the things she does, because "one day," one magical day in the future, I will become who she is.
What is strange to me is that she misses how similar I am to her in many ways already. I cannot let injustice stand, and she cannot either. I eat every meal with green chillies and smoke cigarettes because of an oral fixation. I value love to the point of insanity, I would never not aid someone in their quest for love, no matter how morally ambiguous, and she she would too. I have a self-deprecating sense of humour, as does she. We feed and take in all strays, but we don't love them, we just believe it is our responsibility to do so. We solve problems, we don't ruminate on solutions endlessly. We theorize our emotions to avoid having them. My mother and I are remarkably similar, but she believes she doesn't understand me. There is a distance, both emotional and physical, between us, and no matter how much she tries, and she has been for a few years, I cannot reciprocate her attempts at physical affection.
Earlier today she was napping on the couch, my youngest sister and I went to wake her. When we lifted the quilt from over her, I spoke but my sister leaned down to kiss her, my mother opened her eyes, beaming, believing I had done that, and I saw her disappointment when she realised it wasn't me. She didn't say anything. She would never, but I know she wants, and so desperately wishes, sometimes, that I would reach out to her with physical affection. I cannot. Too much has happened in the last thirty years for me to suddenly become capable of that, I can do it with my husband, but really I can't even do it with my stepson. That broke long ago, and I am given to understand that not having physical contact with your child as an infant has a bearing on that, and it makes sense, but there's also something else.
To me my mother's touch was never about comfort or affection. Aside from the touch that was just abusive, her touch was always meant to quieten me. She still does that. She nudges my side, or pulls on my shirt, or brushes her knee against mine to tell me to stop talking because she is constantly worried I am being problematic or incomprehensible. She wants to brandish me to her friends and neighbours, but she is constantly afraid that I will say something too liberal, too aggressive, too truthful, too real, too honest, too much. That's all I remember from dinner on the night of the emerald pendant. My mother's nudges of reminder not to correct a man's knowledge of politics or sports. Not to challenge someone's racism, classism or homophobia. Not to make a joke that's too "smart". Not to be too witty or intent on having my voice heard.
It's what I remember from all social situations with my mother, including ones where I'm just with her and the rest of my family. She says over and over that she just doesn't understand anything I say, and insists that neither does anyone else. She's really only interested in whether I am making enough money to buy recreational diamonds or my views on various platters, because she is determined never to validate my intelligence. She tells me regularly, often as a joke, that I am an idiot who knows a lot of big words, which I say about myself too, but I don't think we mean the same thing. She nitpicks the way I phrase things, and immediately brings up sarees of some kind if my father tries to say something positive about a professional accomplishment. Her friends will tell me about nice things she says about me, but she will never day them to my face.
To me she said that I must have thrown the emerald pendant away on purpose. To me she'll question why I am not half an inch smaller from this side or less articulate, and more docile, in my manner of speaking. My lack of grace is of endless concern, so she tries to lend it to me with pendants, and they don't stick. They lie in boxes in her jewellery closet or I lose them.
"How can you lose something so valuable?" She asked me of the pendant.
"I told you it wasn't for me," I said to her.
"You won't become less feminist by wearing a necklace," she said, "All these theories are of no use in reality, you'll see."
But it was never about becoming less feminist, it was about becoming less myself. This morning she bought me earrings, and she didn't give them to me herself, she sent them up to my room with her housekeeper. That's what she does now. I refused to take things years ago so she slips them into my closet or has them sent to me by people I cannot give them back to. I liked the earrings, though, because she has decided to take a different route. She buys me black things now, believing that is what I really want, and her casual extravagant purchasing is not the problem. I wore the earrings to lunch, because I'm still seeking, and maybe hoping, the earrings will make me more real to my mother. I still hoping the jewellery will bridge some gap. At lunch she kept nudging me under the table to stop talking.
And now, I can't find the earrings.
