Mirrors of My Mother (3)

One day I finally gathered the courage to confront my origins. I climbed the stairs to the eggshell blue room wherein laid the shadowy ghost of my mother's childhood. Plastic perfect dolls that once smiled too serenely and blushed a perfect pink were meticulously resting in a row on the bed. Their once perfect updo's were now matted together, tangled, and some were shorn in pageboy cuts. A few were missing arms and legs. A once fluffy teddy bear, missing an eye and both his buttons of his overalls, laid kingly in the middle of the ambiguous looking ladies. I sat down on the bed. The springs moaned their years and the entire bed felt the weight of my curiosity. I scanned this haven where my mother held her dreams, hopes, fears. I imagined her as a child sitting on her bed and staring out of her second floor window. The endless ocean of oaks and pines unfurling in front of her. I wondered how many times she thought of this place, this room that held the past that made her. I stood next to her height that was hastily measured against the back of the door. I'm almost a foot taller than the last marking which was taken when she was thirteen. The peeling wall held a few pictures of her slowly aging. She didn't ever change much though. Her pigtails were swapped out for a long thick mane that I would one day pull on as a three year old. On the mirror, stuck in between the frame was a picture of her and another surly girl. I plucked it from the side. Both girls are dressed in jeans and t shirts. Hair long, lips too red, and eyeliner reminiscent of Cleopatra. Yet I could still tell how everyone thought that my mother and I looked exactly the same. Our face structure was the same squarish shape and our black almond eyes always had people guessing what nationality we were and what thoughts we were thinking. We even held the same endless expression of indifference. I quickly turned the picture over. Me with Evie. Senior year. I needed to know this woman who had given me life and then proceeded to shatter it. How had she become who she was? Was I to repeat her perilous past? Could I escape it?