Sun-begotten
If there’s something wrong, it must be her. A memoir by Avery Irene Stewart
Just like my mother, just like my mother, just like my mother. My brown skin, and hers fair and freckly, my brown hair, and her hair like grain and buttercup. Just like my mother. My brown eyes and hers green. I always marvelled at them. As a child, I would repeat descriptions from books and mid-day soap operas. “Your eyes are like sapphire,” she would correct me, “Sapphire is blue, my eyes are green,” but it didn’t matter; sapphire was green, sapphire was bright and sparkling and diamond.
Dad was at work dad, dad, dad, dad. He was just like me. He had black hair and dark eyes. It made more sense. Just like me. Just like me.
“Why are you brown and your parents are white?”
Just like my mother, just like my mother, just like my mother.
I am an only child. I was just me.
“You have my smile.”
“You have your mother’s smile.”
“You and your mother have the same smile.”
Smile. Just like my mother.
“What do I have of Daddy’s?” “Nothing.”
It made more sense. He’s just like me.
Nothing.
If there’s something wrong, it must be her. Sapphire. How unlike me. “She’s not my real mom.”
We lived on a farm in Cape Breton, and my third-grade class had pen pals from Indonesia. I was sent a photo of my pen pal and her family, and they were all brown-skinned and had dark hair. I thought they were just like me.
The farm was a different world. The old lady who used to live there would wander up the long driveway and make her way into the house, our house, her house. She would stand in the kitchen. Her son would drive to pick her up. “I’m so sorry about that — her mind — she still thinks she lives here.”
Sometimes I wish she would stay.
My dad built a chicken coop. He mowed the acres we had with a push mower, and it would take an entire day. He made nice lines in the grass. It would be sunny. I would bring him a lemonade.
Some days, we would go to Chips. Chips was the name of our fort, our magic assembly of trees in the middle of the wheat fields. Brown against grain and buttercups. Hemlocks and spruce
trees, tall as the sky. A portal. My dad and I would march through the fields until we got to the trees. We couldn’t get into the fort unless we said the password “chips,” then we would be granted access. Tree branches would bend and sway, and we could enter the labyrinth. There were fairies in there. My dad was always talking about all the stories the trees have to tell. One night, going back to the house, we stumbled upon a ground-nesting wasp nest. My dad told me to run! The sky was so red, and I was running as fast as I could, and I had no socks or shoes, and the house was in the distance, and my mother was somewhere inside, and I was running and running and laughing, and it was one of the only times that I have ever felt real.
Ten years later, I would be sitting across from a human-sized notepad perched on a spinny chair, and the notepad would ask me to recall a place where I felt most peaceful. It would take me some time to think of it, and much of the time I was supposed to be remembering that place, I spent searching for it. Finally, I found it, and it would be there—those fields, the sky, and my dad.
I was eleven when I was told he wasn’t my biological father. We were in the spare room of the old house we rented right off of the Bedford Highway. My cousin and aunt lived in the basement, and we had a German fire ant infestation in our yard.
The spare room, the queen-sized bed with white sheets and white pillows up against the window opposite the door. Sometimes, I would bring my pink guitar in here and play with it, but I didn’t really know how. A tall lamp to one side, a generic painting on the wall. A closet full of miscellaneous boxes and construction paper, old jackets nobody wore. The lamp was on, and the room was yellow. It was a rainy and steel grey day—those only experienced as a child, those days which don’t come the same way when you’re an adult.
“I don’t want this to change the way you feel about Daddy.”
I knew, and I understood, and I was eleven, and I burst into tears but not because he wasn’t my biological father or because we didn’t know who that was but because I didn’t want my dad (he’s just like me) to ever think I would feel any differently about him (he’s just like me).
I still smile when people say we look alike (we don’t; we just are alike), when I hear him boast about nurture versus nature, or when my friends praise him for raising me.
Just like my mother.
“You’re the most selfish person I have ever met.”
I remember hearing my parents argue in that old farmhouse. It was a beautiful day and the sun was beaming hot through the kitchen windows that overlooked the barn, painting giant squares of light on linoleum. I was in the playroom, only a couple of footsteps bigger than an average bathroom. I had a book of construction paper, and there was a dusty green couch at my back, and the door was open. I was not looking at my toys or the spiders in the corner but the warmth of the kitchen and the warmth of anger that wasn’t mine.
Avery Irene Stewart is an African-Canadian literary and interdisciplinary scholar, published writer, and visual artist with a heart for Romantic poetry and paranoid fiction. Her works have appeared in various literary magazines and chapbooks. The inspiration for her writing is closely connected to her post-graduate research in 19th-century medicine and contemporary mental health.
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Excellent.
love it...