My Mother Was My Critic

I tottered on the top landing, my toes curled on the stairs of my childhood home. A heavy maroon Webster’s Dictionary balanced precariously on my head. My hands were in a prayer position behind my back, pointing skyward. I was ten years old. I walked slowly up and down the hallway. “Prunes, prisms,” I said. My mother nodded. “Say it again,” she said. “Again. Enunciate. Punctuate prunes!” I walked back and forth, back and forth. “This is good for you,” she called out. I continued until my tongue felt twisted and my back ached. Finally, when I couldn’t stand it anymore, I casually shrugged the dictionary off my head. “I’m stopping now, Mom! I’m going to watch TV.” Did I really do that? No. Not unless I wanted a walloping. Back and forth, again and again, praying my mother would finally smile, tell me I was doing it right. Prunes, prisms. That night, I said my prayers dutifully. Dear Allah, please bless Mom, Dad, Ray, the cat, the dog, and the fishes. Please bless everyone and every soul, and please forgive everyone and every soul’s sins. If any soul has cancer, diseases, afflictions, and handicaps, please let them not have cancer, diseases, afflictions, and handicaps from this second on for the rest of eternity. While I prayed, I blinked seven times with one eye, then the other. Always seven. My own private ritual. Then I prayed the most fervent prayer of all: Please God, please make sure I don’t let my mother down. Ameen. Practice makes perfect. By the time I was in grade six, I had no fear in front of large groups and entered a public speaking competition. I stood in black patent leather Mary Janes and a frilly navy polka-dot dress at a podium in front of my entire school. I said my lines. I paused for laughter at the funny bits—I had every beat down. My mother stood at the back of the gymnasium, glowing with pride.

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W hat is something you loved about your mother? Here is something I loved about mine. I was rushing home for lunch, my grade four report card fresh in my hands. My younger brother, Reza, and I usually ate lunch at home; Mom always left a meal for us in the fridge. But today, Ray was eating at school, so I was coming home alone. I planned to leave the report card on the dining table for Mom to see when she came home that night. But when I barged through the door, there she was, taking off her alligator pumps in the vestibule, rubbing her feet. (She was always rubbing her feet. Even when she was at work. And she always wore heels—she had a head-to-toe attention to detail that made everything beautiful.) I was surprised. Typically, she was at her Montessori school at this time. I remember she wore a high-necked silk blouse and an A-line skirt. Her makeup perfectly applied. Coral-pink lipstick. She greeted me lovingly, as she always did—always so happy to see me, as if it were the first time after a long time. I told her I got my report card. Her face was still for a moment. I handed it over with some reluctance. I hadn’t read it yet. She opened the manila envelope with deep seriousness, then her deathly expression turned joyful. “Mashallah, beti—all A’s! I am so proud of you!” She squealed and lifted me up, startling me, swinging me around wildly in our hallway constrained by jackets and hockey sticks and basketballs and umbrellas. She didn’t hear the thwack of my skull against the doorknob, and she didn’t feel what I felt, too caught up in her revelry. She put me down and was busy staring at the report card again, tracing it gently with her fingers and quietly reading the comments, scarcely audible as if they were a prayer she was reciting to herself. I surreptitiously rubbed the bump on my head, hoping she wouldn’t notice. It started to bleed, but only a little. After she died, I found the report card and rubbed the spot on my head again. The bump was long gone, of course, but the body remembers. When I told my cousin Anise this story many years later, he looked at me and said, “That sounds like a reason you hated her, not loved her.” I stopped, startled. I couldn’t see the difference. I still can’t. S omething I hated about her. Before almost every weekend outing to see relatives and friends, she used to chase me around the house with an Avon rouge stick; its shade a sickly orange-red, so wrong for my skin colour but perfect for hers. Up and down our moss-green carpeted stairs we’d go, like we were partners in some comedy routine—a Brown Abbott and Costello. “Muni, please put this on! You look so pale! You need some colour on your cheeks!” Her face was a canvas of perfection, thanks to years of cosmetology school. Didn’t I tell you how beautiful she was? In contrast, my own face was a refusal of that inheritance: blotchy, already showing signs of prepubescent acne, and so much darker. I was furious that it wasn’t good enough for her. Eventually, I always gave in, curled up on the stairwell and allowed her to roughly rub the stick into my pockmarked skin. “There, that’s so much better.” Two red welts, bruising both cheeks. “Now you look beautiful.” A nother question for you. A more cheerful one. What’s your favourite food? My guess is it’s something your mother made for you. Or a close relative. Perhaps it’s something you associate with a cherished relationship. Is this why they call it comfort food? When my mother became ill when I was in my forties, a thought kept gnawing at me. Will she ever cook for me again? Even though she wasn’t gone yet, with a macabre practicality, I wondered if I would be able to find some frozen delicacies she had put aside at her home. I felt guilty thinking this, but I was already in the after in some ways. I scoured my mother’s house for recipes: her delicious shrimp curry, her spicy chicken divan. But there was one particular dish I was looking for, the one that held a place of pride in our family: my mother’s ohn no khao-swe. Egg noodles studded with cubed boneless chicken, dotted with hard-boiled eggs, dhania (cilantro), lemon, chilis, and scallions. Khao-swe originated in Burma, where my mother’s parents had been based for several years. This dish had travelled from Burma to Iran with them, and now with us to North America. Always served at our family holidays and gatherings. Emails from my cousins would read: “I can’t wait for Christmas dinner. . . . Is Ameh making khao-swe?” But I couldn’t find the recipe anywhere. When I studied at Chapel Hill and my mom came to visit, I asked her to write the recipe in my journal. In her beautiful writing and with perfect curlicues and doodles framing the page, she’d captured the recipe, closing it with a stylized “Bon Appétit!!!!!” It was more artwork than a recipe. But where was that journal? I found a recipe for khao-swe on a Burmese website and did my best to recreate it, but it was only mediocre. What is it about the addition of this or that, a pinch of something we have forgotten, that so changes the taste of a food we have deep affection for? Would I ever be able to recreate it? I placed the dish in front of Cole, my three-year-old son, to see what he thought. He devoured it, much to my surprise. I thought about what I’d read in the Guardian earlier that day: a child’s food preferences begin in the womb, and tests have shown that what a person eats during their pregnancy is easily detectable in their amniotic fluid. The fetus develops a taste for familiar flavours. Maybe it was in his DNA to love it as much as I do. D uring the early days of my radio career, I discovered many gadgets unfamiliar to me. One of these things was a sock. My co-worker told me I punctuated my p’s too much—I’m too punchy—and that I needed to soften how I spoke. He told me to put the sock on the mic. This would make my speech more palatable, he said. Soften my speech, make it more palatable: this made me laugh. I was being asked to tone things down. Be less loud. Now, I would have help from this inanimate object, this thing that would muffle my voice. I placed the sock over the mic and tried again. Prunes, prisms, I thought. “Better, better,” he said. I’ve always hated my mouth. By this, I mean I not only hated what I said with my lips, teeth, and tongue, and the macabre dance that entailed, but also what my crooked mouth looked like when I said it. My mouth is marked, you see. When I was three, I fell on a glass coffee table and tore my top lip open, blood spilling on the carpet. Ever since then, I’ve had a tiny crescent moon scar right above my Cupid’s bow. (I love having a reason to write those words, Cupid’s bow, for you.) Years later, a reporter would write an article about mixed-race identity for a magazine and ask me for my official perspective as an expert in the field. When I read the published piece, this is what it said: Mahtani has long, dark hair, a toothy smile, and a collection of features that are impossible to place on a map. When she was growing up in Thornhill, people would guess at her background without ever hitting on the actual mix, Iranian and Indian. “As a kid, I was one of the few minorities in my neighbourhood, and there was pressure to acclimatize to whiteness,” she says. You might be tempted to drill down on what I said there about the pressure to be seen as more white. Maybe that’s interesting to you. Maybe you wish I would tell you that I saw my limp little body as proof of the promise of mending. But for now, I want to ask you to focus on this instead: that bit where he said I had a toothy grin. This wounded me to the point that I called up the reporter and told him that what I looked like wasn’t the story. The story should have been what I’d said. After a day of gruelling interviews in the radio booth that I felt hadn’t gone well, I would go home to cuddle my son, grapple with what to make for dinner, and, later in the evening, grimace at the bags under my eyes, and, most of all, stare at my mouth in the mirror. “That girl has her mother’s mouth,” I remember hearing a relative say once, disparagingly. “It’s a good thing she has her father’s eyes.” Excerpted from May It Have a Happy Ending: A Memoir of Finding My Voice as My Mother Lost Hers by Minelle Mahtani. Copyright © 2024 Minelle Mahtani. Published by Doubleday Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the publisher. All rights reserved.The post My Mother Was My Critic first appeared on The Walrus.