We grew up in the suburbs where eating disorders were normal, where we were taught to fear our fathers but never really did. Mostly because they weren’t around all that much and our mothers were much scarier. They were to be listened to, they ran things, they garnered our respect immediately and all at once and we feared them and looked at them in awe.Â
Evenings out smelled like Estée Lauder’s Youth Dew. I can still smell that musky scent in my nostrils, the bottle shaped like a torso or an interpretation of a torso with a gold bow wrapped around its tiny waist. This smell meant mom had a date, this smell meant my older brother was stuck at home to babysit me. I didn’t sense his resentment then but his wife tells me now how much he hated that he had to be the father that wasn’t around. I was blissfully ignorant. Happy to have big brother pack my lunches, blow dry my hair, tuck me in, wrap me like a burrito in the blankets, and tell me I had nothing to be afraid of. Of course, he hated it —a young teen not being able to hang out with his friends on a Friday night. I wonder if he remembers Youth Dew, I wonder if that smell means something entirely different to him.Â
Mom was beautiful with her dark black hair before she started dyeing it red, she’s still beautiful but back then she was the thing I thought all women should be. I wanted her to have a good life, I knew if she was happy we would probably end up happy too. And I knew that not everyone has the same luck. Especially in the suburbs where some houses are right next to the highway and some are at the end of the cul-de-sac secluded from noise and nosey neighbors.Â
Mom did get happy and we moved into a new place, into a house that never stopped being built. We lived in a construction site for a lot of our years there in that big white rambling house that felt too big and too small and was always somehow expanding. I learned there that drugs were bad just like Nancy Regan said they were but they were also something you should try for yourself and so I did but had learned enough from my older siblings to be smart about it, to not do the hard stuff, to lie to mom when you came home about what you were doing and not run right to your room which would always give you away.Â
Too many siblings can be a good thing but it can also be a bad thing. It’s easy to get lost when there are a lot of you, it’s easy to recede into the background and hide there. I learned that skinny was pretty and even as an adult the same holds true. You learn a million tiny things as you get older that break your heart. The adults never really knew what they were doing although I think I knew that even when I was younger. That things change, that not everyone has the same luck or the same stuff and sometimes you have to give up your favorite dog for a different life with a pool and more siblings and pigeons and a kind stepfather and sometimes that will make up for all of it but sometimes it won’t.Â
When you get older there isn’t a map you’re given that says this way to adulthood and even when you're 45 you will feel like you are 22 some days. And you will always feel bad about not calling your mom enough. And your dad will try to make you feel guilty but you will not feel guilty because you remember he was not there. You have a loyalty to your mother you never felt towards him. And she is older now but just as beautiful and you have looked past your differences and connected on the things you both have, the similarities you can not deny. We are witches she often says, every time you guess a thing before it happens, we dream dreams that come true, we can talk to the dead. And you believe her because she got you here even while she was batting away all the bad things, she got you here in one piece, for the most part.
You remind her of Youth Dew as you buy her that new perfume she wants for Christmas— this one is called Alien and it’s not a scent you would pick out for yourself or even her but it immediately smells like her, like this all-knowing adult that’s lived a thousand lives and has a million secrets and somehow always manages to keep you all fed and full.
lovely
So evocative, Christina. Love how you imagine what the smell of it might be for your byother. The way smell is linked to memory. I wrote about Youth Dew in my memoir, specifically my grandmother's bottle which – after she died and I inherited her bedroom for a time – had developed the 'off' smell of perfume left in direct sunlight. It was kind of metallic, I remember. And sticky. The lid somehow claggy with a gunk that I couldn't understand.