A Mother Like You

Category C: Second Place (2025) Monash Short Story Writing Competition
Author: Grace Nebesky

I have no memory of him.  He packed up and left like a circus leaving town when I was no more than knee-high.  

“Your father’s never coming back, Charlie,” you said, sharp as a slap one day.  “And I am done discussing it!”  You said I was like a dog with a bone, but that longing I had, I couldn’t shake off. 

Every kid I knew had a mum and dad I wished I had.  Their hugs came big and plum-soft.  Your rigid frame was like a thread pulled tight.  When I was the first to hug you, without a mote of tenderness, you were the first to let go.  Your smile was like costing something you couldn’t afford. 

Cricket bats and bikes littered neighbour’s backyards.  They had treats and television time.  Their lives looked impossibly perfect; their futures laid out like an all-you-can-eat buffet.  It got harder to hide my fatherless family.  To hide a mother like you.

Dressed in my Sunday best every day of the week, I was the kid with home cut hair, a camel-brown sweater, and shiny shoes you polished until you could see your face in them.  You insisted when I said goodnight that I keep my door open.  You said you needed to hear me breathe.

You vacuumed and polished other people’s houses when money was tight, and yet when you came home, you’d go searching for dust that never had time to settle.  My presents were practical like a book, a scratchy button-up shirt, or a cheap pair of sneakers from Fossey’s.

I longed for a brother.  I imagined a perfect life if I had one.  I pictured everything I wished him to be.  We’d share a room instead of Aun’y Rube.  Some nights my brother visited me in dreams.  We’d play cowboys and Indians and tickle each other ‘til our sides hurt.  Exchanges would be wordless knowing what the other was thinking.  Perhaps this was because I never had a special friend; never had a party and only heard about parties I wasn’t invited to.  There was no money for the pictures or a swim at the local pool.  Sometimes after school there was drink in your eyes.  First it was a few drops in coffee, then it was straight from the bottle.

But there was a time before Jack Daniels when you looked like a movie star.  I wish I could say you stayed pretty, but drinking and smoking and picking at food hardened you with age.  You still set your hair with a liberal dose of hairspray but you rarely went out.  Apart from Aun’y Rube, the phone stayed silent.  When Aun’y Rube came over, your sister was all the company you needed. 

Your familiar Tweed perfume was overcome by the smell of death in the hospice.  Whittled down to bone wrapped in flesh, it was hard to look at you. Your cancer had clawed its way into your brain, but you never complained your cancer was unfair. 

I felt no pull towards you.  I placed my hand against your cheek, pale as winter white, hoping for a stirring inside me; something that told me you loved me.  Your time on this earth was almost done, yet that unbridgeable gap still existing between us didn’t close.  The story of my childhood because of that remains a complicated chapter unfinished. 

Death was the blessing you embraced in the end, but you died dragging your secrets like a stone to your grave.

*

I cross the lawn to the house I grew up in.  It’s still a boxy beige with a chain-link fence, but it’s on a busy road now.  Protruding like trumpets, your daffodils are nature’s only survivors of neglect.  Slotting the key, the door opens when I shove it.  Years of smoking Rathmines, a habit you tried but never kicked, have soaked into walls.  It catches like chalk in my throat.  I leave my shoes on in an act of childish rebellion. 

There are no soft carpets or overstuffed armchairs.  The walls are entirely bare.  Sparsely furnished, there is nothing that doesn’t have a purpose.

My eyes scan its contents of such little worth.  There is nothing to keep for keepsake.  Your economical belongings I am happy to let go.  Save for the house bills I need to sort through; the removalists can do the rest with a minimum of fuss.

In my room empty hangers dangle like skeletons but it’s largely untouched. Still papered with rock stars, it reminds me how as a petulant teenager we passed in the hall like a synchronised dance.  I was changing, but you stayed the same.

Finger-dipping the peanut butter or not washing dishes to your impossible standard of clean would set you off.  I punched a hole in the wall one day when teenage emotions grew taut.  Unphased by my outburst, Aun’y Rube plonked herself on my bed, listening with patience to my woes.

“Why is she like this, Aun’y Rube,” I snivelled.  “Why can’t she be just a normal mother?”

“Honey,” Aun’y Rube said, blowing a smoke line to the side, “there are some rocks you don’t wanna look under.”   

We stayed quiet for a moment, my temple sticking to her foundation thick as wall paint.  “Look at me, sweet boy,” Aun’y Rube said, squeezing my chin between fingers, “in her heart is an ache your mother never gets used to, but I want you to know that love comes in many different flavours.  Your mother does love you, but it’s not always in ways that are obvious.”

Aun’y Rube was my salve.  I wanted to be like her when I grew up.  I was lost when she died.  A failure of the heart, they said. 

I dreamed of a better world.  I knew it was big from the books I read and I wanted to see it, so when barely old enough to shave, I joined the army on my seventeenth birthday.  First, I was a private, then a corporal, and by twenty-five I became a sergeant, distancing me further from my solitary childhood.

I pull the loungeroom curtains to the side and open the mahogany dresser where my eyes rest upon an old GPO envelope, oddly thick from under your unread bible.  My heart does a little dance hoping for some evidence of my father.  Smelling of aged paper, I slip a finger into the seal and empty its contents.

            There is something about them that makes me hold breath.  I flick through the photos like a deck of cards, my eyes darting rapidly with no pause in between.

All motion stops in this moment.  My eyes scan a face as recognisable as my own, but it’s not mine.  My ears fill with noise.  Coming into focus are two bald, chubby-faced babies; their eyes open wide to the world around them.  The very guts of me knows before my brain catches up seeing a tiny starfish hand placed on the other one’s cheek.  There is a picture of our christening I’ve never seen before.  On the reverse side in your perfect penmanship is Charlie (left) and Ben (right).  April 1962. 

A pit opens in my stomach.  Ben is the brother who visited me in dreams.  I am - we are - 20 months old.  I unfold each clipping, my mind racing ahead of the words I am reading:

September 24, 1962

Twin boys left in bathtub

One found unresponsive

Everything crashes into place.  My identity was formed before I was born.  We are one blood.  We shared a pulse before we took breath.  Ben is the reason I felt something missing; something I couldn’t quite define.

I ached to understand you; why the act of a smile was beyond you.  All the while your guilt set like rot, the dull peal of failure circling between my ears I thought was my fault. You never said you were glad to have me, or grateful you pulled me out of the bath with a pulse.  I felt like an unwanted puppy.

There was never a time when you saw only me.  When you gave yourself permission to feel joy, and know it was safe to be joyful.  I was the mirror you didn’t want to look at; the guilt you bore until your very last breath.

In a world harsh and unforgiving, I understand perfectly how three unplanned minutes was all it took to hurry your son into his grave.  I realise grief was the love you wanted to give, but couldn’t, but you had your Jack Daniels to forget Ben was the source of your pain.  You never considered what was taken from me.  Ben was my phantom pain, but that doesn’t make it any less real. 

I dig in my pocket for a handkerchief you drummed into me to carry; my sobs threatening to overwhelm me like they did as a boy. 

To a stranger I am a man on the cusp of middle age.  Inside, I am still a little boy yearning for someone to love him. 

I am angry at you.  And sorry for you. 

Perhaps I shouldn’t blame you.

But I do.

word count: 1,527