Lily: beauty
I like flowers in theory. In reality, I’m not very partial to dirt, and I don’t like having things knowing that they will die. I’ve never kept a plant alive, and knowing a fresh bouquet will soon rot just reminds me of the ever-looming mortality that lingers over me and everyone I love.
I’ve always kept some sort of fake flowers in my living space; they fulfill the aesthetic purpose of having a dainty and beautiful object, without all of the hassle of being an actual living, breathing thing.
I like being a woman in theory. I enjoy the act of extreme femininity, performing gender roles in my day-to-day life brings me joy. I identify with girlhood and the accompanying joys and pains of being assigned a pink box at birth. Despite my love for being a girl, I don’t think I’d be a very good woman.
Womanhood is messy, womanhood is visceral, womanhood is accepting the inevitable: that I feel an overwhelming need to accept my biological purpose and have children. I think about removing my uterus a lot. I hate the pain and mess I deal with on a monthly basis, and I loathe the idea of giving my body even more hormones just to put a stop to the pain even more.
I want the wretched organ out of me; the idea of my body changing in all the ways typical to pregnancy makes me nauseous to think of, without even considering all the ways a pregnancy can go wrong. I don’t want my body to grow ugly with life, I want to remain beautiful forever, even if it means I can only give the appearance of a woman, something entirely different and entirely fake on my insides.
I think I’d like to have a daughter of my own one day, a day so far in the future that I can’t imagine what that day might actually look like. I want to give my mother a chance to be the doting grandmother she wishes her mother had been. I want to present a child to the world and let everyone see what a good woman I am. The reality is that my child would not be perfect, and no matter how hard I tried to raise her in the best way possible, I am not perfect, and would therefore traumatize her in some awful way in my attempt to circumvent the trauma my maternal figures gave me.
I’ve never felt a lack of maternal influence. I had a mother, a consistent babysitter, and three grandmothers. They all tried their hardest to raise me right, not to inflict the traumas their mothers had inflicted on them; yet I am still traumatized. No matter how hard you try, there is no right way to raise a child; you can follow all the necessary steps and still hurt them. Like a flower, you can do everything right and still have to watch it wilt.
To accept my womanhood would be to realize myself as an ugly thing, to nurture what is inside of me and create life, only to fall into the same cycle of all women before me. I stand at the precipice of this decision, delaying the label as far as I possibly can, even as I reach the age where girl is no longer an accurate label. I hold two bouquets in my hand. One bouquet is perfect, the flowers all the right colors and beaming with the notion that they will stay beautiful forever, but it isn’t real. The other is as real as can be, imperfect petals as far as the eye can see, a tantalizing floral scent wafts from the stems, only something temporary can smell so sweet.
Apple Blossom: preference
No one likes to admit this, but I think most people have at least some kind of preference between their family members. I most certainly do, no matter how hard that is for me to confess. Babushka was never my favorite as a child. Her accent was often too thick for me to understand what she was saying; she was much stricter than my American grandmothers, and she would get angry and offended if I didn’t finish the food she had cooked. Worst of all, staying with her most often meant being separated from my parents. Her New Jersey home was synonymous with some of my least favorite things: long, boring days on the shore, my sister and me tracking sand all over the apartment and consequently into our beds, having to use sour cream as a sunburn treatment, and my parents staying at a hotel somewhere, away from me.
Reflecting on those summers, I am aware of how much of a disrespectful child I was, and probably still am. Babushka and Dedushka tried their best to accommodate me, even going so far as to convert one of the rooms in their apartments into a dedicated bedroom for me and my sister, covered in the Disney princess iconography I had loved so much. I’ve always been a creature of comfort, preferring to stay home in a familiar environment with the people most familiar to me. I resented having to stay in any place that wasn’t my own home. I resented that my parents dared to want a few days of vacation for themselves instead of constantly being with me, and I took out all that resentment on my grandparents.
Despite my being the world’s most spoiled brat, Babushka and Dedushka were always there, and even moved to Houston when I was in the fourth grade. They would continue to split their time between Houston and New Jersey until about two years ago, when Babushka became too sick to make the constant travel, and they are now in Houston full-time. If I had any sort of time machine, I would tell the ungrateful young girl I was to enjoy the moments she had with Babushka, but I know I wouldn’t have listened. I didn’t realize the importance of connecting with my grandparents until it was too late.
Foxglove: secrets
My first language was Russian; my mother and her family arrived in the US on a refugee visa when she was fifteen. Although they were Lithuanian Jews, the Soviet Union’s reign had only just ended when they arrived, so the primary language any of them spoke was Russian. When we moved away from my grandparents when I was three, all efforts to maintain my Russian were thrown out the window. Throughout my childhood, I occasionally mourned the loss, but everyone around me mainly spoke English, so I never pushed myself to relearn the language. The only times I felt the missingness were when my mom got on the phone with my grandparents. Babushka and Dedushka both spoke English, albeit with heavy accents. Still, my mom found it easier to communicate with them in Russian over the phone, thereby obscuring whatever they spoke of from any surrounding people, including me. I learned pretty quickly to pick up on the emotional tone of the conversation, and I was able to recognize a few words here and there, but the majority of what was said between them was lost to me. I still don’t know what most of those conversations entailed, and most of them were probably mundane enough that it doesn’t really matter.
However, as I grew older, my mom started to reveal more about her relationship with her parents, and I realized that the choice in language was absolutely intentional; there was so much she had been hiding from my childhood self, so much malice in my Babushka’s words about my sister and me. Despite the insults being directed at my sister and me, the intention behind her words was never to hurt us; instead, it was to express her disappointment with my mother’s parenting style. She wanted her to know that she worked too much, saw us too little, that our babysitter was more of a mother to us than she ever would be, and that we’d grow up into horrible people if we weren’t whipped into shape.
My mom knows that I don’t agree with those statements at all; she and I have thoroughly examined the rights and wrongs of how I was raised, and I affirmed that I never felt neglected in any substantial way. I tell her I can imagine how much Babushka’s words hurt, and she swears that they don’t, that the insults slide off her like water off a duck’s back.
I’m not sure she’s telling the truth.
Orchid: elegance, beauty
I hope that every little girl thinks her mother is the most beautiful woman she has ever laid eyes upon. My mom is not only the most beautiful, but she is also the most resilient, generous, intelligent, and caring person I have ever known. I grew up thinking her favorite flower was orchids. Every Mother’s Day, there would be a fresh bouquet of white and purple orchids in our house, and whenever she needed to get a last-minute present for someone, an orchid was her go-to choice. I learned recently that my mom doesn’t have a favorite flower, just as she doesn’t have a favorite color, favorite food, or favorite song; I don’t even dare ask if Mary Poppins is actually her favorite movie or if that too was just a favorite I had assumed for her at some point throughout my childhood.
I’m not sure that my mom has ever devoted time to picking a favorite anything; she is always just so busy that she never has time to think of such trivial decisions. My mom works insanely long shifts, oftentimes on weekends too, but she says she loves her job and that they need her there. When she does get home, she does all the cooking and cleaning in our house, and
spends her free time catching up on work and getting three or so hours of sleep. My dad says that my mom is just built for that sort of life; she doesn’t need to rest or spend time daydreaming. She is perfectly happy sustaining a life entirely based on work and childcare. I used to believe that was true, but as I’ve grown up, I’ve seen the bags under her eyes and the way she holds her emotions, which she has no time to process until they physically snap out of her. My mom is the epitome of grace, beauty, and class, an extremely talented nephrologist and businesswoman, and she is also a great and dutiful mother. But at her core, she is a real person —a person who could desperately use a break.
I try my best to give her those breaks when I can. I feel guilty for attending college so far away, as I’m not home very frequently to take over some of her many duties. When I express that guilt, she tells me it’s fine, that it’s not my responsibility to do those things for her, and that the best thing I can do is be exactly where I am, following my academic passions.
She’s probably right, and I certainly inherited my father’s executive dysfunction, so it’s often a real struggle for me to get things done around the house when I am there. Still, I regret not trying harder when I was younger. If only I had noticed her exhaustion at an earlier age, if only I’d developed a stamina for housekeeping before I left for school, then maybe things would be just a little bit easier on her now.
Belladonna: silence
Babushka called me today, twice, each ring lasting shorter than the one before. I didn’t get a chance to pick up, but I’m not sure I would have if given the opportunity. She had been sick for a very long time, my parents’ connections within the medical center allowing her multiple experimental treatments that delayed her Parkinson’s from progressing for as long as it possibly could. It was a slow sickness, a creeping that made it harder and harder for her to move around, but her mind stayed sharp as ever.
That changed recently, first she began to fall a lot more often than usual, her cane was traded for a wheelchair, and her angry fits became much nastier. Then she began to lose her English, and one night she told my Dedushka that she believed she would see her own mother very soon.
I visited her in the hospital over Spring Break, but I couldn’t stay there for more than an hour. My mom warned me that it would be difficult, and I swore that I could handle it. Nothing could prepare me for what I saw. I expected her to be mean; stories of her screaming at my mother and threatening to shoot her with a gun she had never owned were commonplace in my household at this point. I was ready to bear the brunt of her confused anger.
What I wasn’t prepared for was her silence. The slow, labored breathing and the ambient nature noises the hospital had queued up for her. Babushka had always been a force to be reckoned with; she might have been strict and occasionally flat-out mean, but she was never silent. She always had something to say, a complaint to voice, or at the very least a tune to hum. Yet here she was, rambling quietly in Russian, unable to get a coherent message across to me, if she was even truly able to tell I was there. I stayed with her as long as I could, which didn’t turn out to be very long at all, as I silently begged my mom to find a reason for me to be there no longer. My mom visits her multiple times a day since she’s located in the hospital where she works, spends so much time in that space playing the caring daughter to a woman who had been cruel to her her entire life. I told her I could take on some of that burden, to sit and watch over Babushka for a few hours so she could have a moment of respite, and yet I barely lasted forty-five minutes.
I didn’t want to pick up the phone today, it was undoubtedly a butt dial, but I’m sure I would’ve seen something if I picked up. I couldn’t bear to see her again, I couldn’t bear to see her try to speak to me in a language I understood and fail, not now, not when I am so far away. I didn’t need another reminder that we all eventually rot.
Carnation: maternal love
Love cannot save you. If there is anything I have a surplus of it is love from motherly figures. There is enough love in my mother’s heart to fill the ocean a million times over. Even for all her disdain at the person I’ve become, Babushka loves me too. If I were to have a child, there would be no limit to the maternal love that I could give her.
Love didn’t prevent me from becoming traumatized; how then could I expect it to protect my future child? Perhaps it would be best to not even try, to let the passing of anguish from mother to daughter end with me.
I don’t know which bouquet I am to choose.
