Motherlines: A Memoir on Lineage, Loss and Secrets
By: Melissa Coffey
Tags: Nonfiction, Memoir, Family, Self, Mothers

Motherlines: A Memoir on Lineage, Loss and Secrets

Photo by Ilona Panych on Unsplash

I have my mother’s hands.

My memory of the day this was discovered is vivid; drenched in sunlight, in the midst of eternal-seeming summer holidays. I was fourteen.

My mother and I had weathered the long drive down the Queensland coast with nothing but the glare and the radio for company. As with every visit, we just managed not to miss the sign and the gravel-spattered road that limped off the highway. Lumbering like a wombat for hours over ditches and uneven rises, through clouds of cloying dust, the road finally gave way to a wild and mostly undiscovered coastal landscape.

My aunt and uncle had built a house here over the course of several years, determinedly self-sufficient, with a huge rain-water tank and a power generator. Perched on a peninsula, the view from three balconies was of topaz-blue ocean.

Our secret summer place. Where slowly we adapted, becoming less like city-dwellers and more like the unruly, resilient pandanus palms, sprawling everywhere amongst the scrub; we grew wild, with salt-tinged hair and sun-singed skin.

On this day, my mother and I had followed the kangaroo-trails through spiky spinifex grass to our favourite sunbaking beach. Laid out on our towels, we stretched up our arms and placed our hands palm to palm, middle finger to middle finger, to shield our eyes from the sun. They were a perfect match. Slender, fragile fingers. Nails that were long, strong and oval-shaped. Tanned, fine skin, gleaming tightly over knuckles, and, on the inside of the palms, myriad of deep lines, veined like sycamore leaves.

People had often been startled by the insides of my hands, at the depth and profusion of lines, etched tracings of a life I could not have possibly lived yet. Old-soul hands.

”There are many stories here”, a palm-reader had once said to me, “Many stories”.

If my hands held the imprints of many stories, then so also did my mother’s. I had always been proud of the fact that I was my mother’s confidante. Ever since I was five, it had felt like she shared everything with me; that between my mother and myself, there was no such thing as a story untold.

“You’ll get all of my rings when I die,” she’d said that day on the beach as she turned her face towards mine. As if the similarity of our hands had decided it for her, rather than the fact that I was her first-born, and only, daughter. Reflected in her sunglasses, I could see two tiny replicas of me.

“Don’t say that, Mum.” Secretly, I felt guilty because a greedy part of me wanted those rings.

And I remembered sneaking into her bedroom, an inquisitive five year-old, to open her jewelry box and marvel at the sparkling stones and shiny beaded necklaces coiled inside. There sat my favourite ring, a piece of blue topaz, cut from a clear summer sky and set on a band of gold. Far too large for my tiny finger, the band slid off if I didn’t hold it carefully. When I placed the ring on my middle finger, it felt heavy. Heavy as an untold secret.

Recalling this memory, I dug my toes into the sand as if my feet were shovels, and lifted my legs into the air, letting the cool chunks of sand fall over both of us. Why was she talking about death? The idea seemed ridiculous on such a perfect day.

She must have sensed my mood darken.

“We all have to die sometime”, she said, as she smiled at me.

Although I already knew the details, I asked her to tell me the story of the blue topaz ring, of how my father had given it to her when they were still courting. Our joined hands plaited the sky and my mother’s story into a ribbon of blue above us. A ribbon of story, suspended in the haze of that summer day.