My Mother, the Story-Weaver | Kiana Govoni
My father is a dirty whore. Or so my mother tells me. My father sleeps with invisible women: sleeps with, not fucks.
Every night three to four women sleep in bed with my father, the king of elder kings. And my mother struggles at the abyss of her life, her sanity, and the sagging bed—the invisible women jammed tight between her and her husband of over fifty years.
My mother is not a liar. She tells the truth of her stories in this new life of hers. She is not reincarnated; don’t misunderstand. She is Alzheimer’s latest murder, and she’s got a lot to tell.
Every day my mother weaves me stories. My father has brazen audacity, a traitor body, and ugly greed. I’m enraptured by this new storytelling voice of my mother’s. I want clarification. Like what do these invisible women smell like? Like what does the weight of their weightlessness feel like next to you? And mostly simply: how?
There are rules when caring for loved ones with Alzheimer’s. Most are common sense but still difficult to maintain and remember for always: don’t tell them something they believe is wrong. Don’t argue. Don’t ask if they remember something from the past.
The rules tell me to agree or to change the subject when my mother tells me my father whores around in their bedroom. But a woman’s words and convictions lie in the crevices of her heart. My mother believes what she says and what she sees in the dark. How do I distract from that? How does anyone?
My mother will eventually forgive my father for his transgressions, but he will suffer all the same. And then my mother will forget and grab another line of storytelling thread.
Every day my mother weaves me stories. Our family home of over twenty years is a fake. If she knew the technology, my mother would declare the heart of our home a deepfake. Nothing is right and she needs to leave it immediately.
In another tale a family member is like a bounty hunter, in cahoots with nursing home staff. My mother distrusts them to her death.
Alzheimer’s is a serial killer, a destabilizer. But it can deliver its funnies, like when my mother once tried to walk out of her bedroom unclothed and my father told her, “you’re naked,” and she said, “no I’m not,” and he stressed, “you are naked.”
But she laughed and my father laughed, and my mother’s life was still in there. She was funny. She was her, and I saw her, and then—
My mother wasn’t a storyteller in her past life. She was a yard sale connoisseur, a country decor gal, a lover of TV dramas, and a sneaker of night-time sweets. She liked to watch stories on the screen, not read or tell them. But now she is saturated with a tongue of song—and of story.
Every day my mother weaves me stories, new accusations against other family, more sightings of the impossible, more communications with dead voices. She bores cavities into my eyes with her sincerity, and I breathe in her stories like we are both girls of childhood—like she is my older sister telling me bedtime stories or like I am her mother listening as she tries to grow her world through the body of fiction.
I want to wrap my mother in the cotton of warm blankets and soothe her back into reality under a fort tent. But I am not her mother. I cannot elderspeak or infantilize her like the rules and common sense tell me.
I am human. At times I break the rules on purpose because I want to believe in legends and myths, as they are forever but can be ever changing—their origins and endings not the same in every iteration.
Everyday my mother weaves me stories. And with prickled blood I wait for my turn, for my story, like with my father’s and how she accused him of infidelity to his face and to the world.
To her I must be her nurse or a caretaker—a stranger in the home she cannot always recognize as her own. I wait for my mother to tell me I am not her daughter because our skin doesn’t match.
Don’t be upset if they don’t remember you. There’s a preparation for that in the rules. But what if they don’t just forget you? What if they can’t even believe in the idea of you?
Thankfully my mother never disbelieves me. I am lucky. But until she takes the last of her earthly breaths, I will always wonder if she will question the existence of my black near her white.
My mother is now a story-weaver. I eat every one of her stories like starbursts. I want to ask her if I can be a story-weaver just like her, entwining my stories with hers.
To start my weaving, I’ll tell a story of an old woman with bubble cheeks and a sweet gummy smile who has a home and a family she will never lose. My mother will listen, stitch in her own details, and together we’ll sit on a queen bed if I can assume this new title. My mother will braid my hair and then I’ll rest my head above the beating of her heart, TV singing in our background.
We’ll triumph together on a queen bed, guzzling chocolate, and crafting legends for the eternities. But only those of adventure. Of healthy minds and strength of bones, the defeat of the dark and human disintegration.
We’ll triumph together on a queen bed, and as story-weavers, my mother and I will tell legends of indestructibility and immortal women—of bodies and minds that can never die.
about the author:
Kiana is a black writer who holds an MFA in fiction. She is a two-time Best of the Net nominee, and her work has been featured in Witness, Harpur Palate, The Minnesota Review, JMWW, and elsewhere.