The Plate My Mother Denied Me

I was nine. I did not have a job. Nobody at that table had paid for that cake except my parents, and it was my birthday. But I put my hand back in my lap and I waited until every other child had a slice, and by the time the plate came around to me the good corner pieces with the frosting flowers were gone, and I ate a middle piece and said thank you, and I did not cry until I was in the bathroom with the fan on.

I have carried that sentence for thirty-two years. You didn’t pay for that. It became the rule of the house without anyone ever saying it out loud again. There were things I was allowed to want and things I was not, and the line between them was never about money, because we were not poor and I was not asking for much. The line was about whether I had earned the right to take up space, and the answer, somehow, was always no.

Kevin never had that problem. Kevin is three years older than me, and Kevin came out of the womb certain that every room he entered was glad to have him. Our mother adored him with a completeness that never left room for a second favorite. He was the one who got the drumstick, the front seat, the last word, the benefit of every doubt. When he broke something it was an accident and when I broke something it was carelessness. When he skipped a chore he was busy and when I skipped one I was lazy. I am not telling you this to sound bitter. I am telling you because you have to understand the water I grew up swimming in to understand why I did what I did at Halvorsen’s, and why it took me forty-one years to do it.

I became the useful one. That was my role and I was good at it. Somewhere along the way I figured out that if I could not be adored, I could at least be needed, and I built a whole self around being needed. I was the one who remembered the dentist appointments and the anniversaries. I was the one who drove Mom to her cataract surgery and sat in the waiting room with a book I never opened. I was the one who set up the church rummage sale spreadsheet and did the taxes for the family and figured out the confusing part of Dad’s estate paperwork after he passed, the winter I was thirty-six, while Kevin flew in for the funeral and flew out two days later saying he could not miss a work thing.