The lies that Mama told me
Photo by Phil Hearing on Unsplash
Even though I don’t believe them any more, the lies that Mama told haunt me still.
Lie no 1: “You will never be like her”
I must have been around ten, the age when little girls first notice hairstyles. I had just discovered a small print of my grandma and grandad’s black and white engagement photo dated 1931. Yaya is twenty years old, Papou is thirty-eight. Papou is mature and stocky, has a dark, bushy moustache and his hair is slicked back. Yaya wears a dress with a bow-tie collar and a light-coloured thin cardigan. Her dark hair forms a wavy line across her forehead. Her green eyes (I remember they were green, not that I can see then in the photograph) look severe, and her thin lips are slightly pursed – was this the starting point of a life-long resentment? At least, that’s how her expression seems to me, but then I often spin stories out of nowhere. Her joined hands rest on Papou’s right shoulder as if to say I lean on you as they both stare solemnly to an undefined point to their left.
After discovering the photo, the first thing I did was to wet my fringe in the washbasin, wrung it and ran quickly to my room for fear it would drip on the mosaic floor, and then I would get told off. I stood in front of the mirror that was mounted on the inside of the fitted wardrobe door and began trying to form my bangs in a wave across my forehead. My hair was too thin, too heavy, too straight, too heavy to achieve the 30s look. A clip pulled it too far back, no clip meant the whole fringe fell down my forehead, more like a 70s Teddy Boy. I pushed, pulled, prodded, re-arranged, but no, my fringe had a mind of its own. I just had to accept it.
Mama came out of her bedroom into the hall, saw the photo on my bed and glanced at me in disdain.
“No matter how much you try, you will never match even her little finger!”
And she walked off to start another no doubt important conversation with her non-pareil mother, leaving me to wonder what exactly she might mean.
Lie no 2: “You are too fat”
I was a chubby baby, and grew into a chubby child. I was intelligent, healthy and energetic, but Mama only saw the chubby part and was determined to set it right. This was in Greece in the 60s, the beginning of the fixation with weight and diet fads. Mama was on the heavy side too, so she saw it as her mission not to let me grow into a plump woman.
“Don’t you want to lose weight? Look at your cousin: she lost twenty kilos in six months – she looks like a model now! Unless you lose weight, nobody will like you, let alone love you enough to marry you!”
My cousin had a boyish body, the hips only slightly wider than the waist. And I was not too fat: I was curvy, with an hourglass figure and shapely hips. Choice of words matters, and it mattered then too. But at a time when Twiggy was held up as the ideal of female beauty, my full figure was measured (by Mama) and found surplus to requirements.
Lie no 3: “You are too fat to be lovable” – see above
Facts proved Mama wrong on that score too.
To begin with, Cypress was a penfriend from Iran, and our channel was old-fashioned letters in German. Very soon after we met in Athens our lives converged and they are still together across countries and continents, thirty-three years later.
Lie no 4: “You will never be able to do a PhD with a baby”
Mama visited us London to help with new baby Olive in August 1993. I had asked her to bring the original of my degree from the University of Athens, needed for matriculation at Cardiff. She brought it of course, but did not miss the opportunity of a warning: “If you think you will be able to do a doctorate with a baby, you are much mistaken! From now on, your life is just your family and your baby.”
That’s not what I needed to hear post-partum. But I went on, had a second baby, Oak, twenty months later, and was awarded the doctorate one month before Olive’s fourth birthday. Mama never mentioned this lie again.
Lie no 5: “You left Greece because of me”
Technically this is a lie that Mama was telling herself about me. When I flew from Tehran to Athens the day after she died, our neighbor Popi, her daily coffee morning companion, told me that Mama often cried about me because she felt guilty for making me leave Greece for good. For me this is only partly true, but nuance had never been her forte. If she’d spoken up, I would have tried to put her mind at rest, but most likely without success as always.
Because these lies were told early enough and often enough, they became baked into my very being.
Nos 1 and 3 continue to haunt me.
My academic work broke new ground in the analysis of Persian communication. I examined the theses of doctorate candidates that went on to academic careers. Still, a little voice chimes “You’ll never be good enough; who do you think you are?” I don’t know if the voice is Mama’s or mine.
I continue to test the permanence of love by holding on to weight as if it were a lifebuoy. Whenever I am told that I need to lose weight (now a health necessity), or, God forbid, I lost weight without trying, as for example during arthritic flare-ups, panic sets in and I set off to set my world to rights armed with bread and butter, and occasionally Nutella.
(inspired by Miranda Doyle’s A Book of Untruths)
