The Bird on My Head

For most of my life, I had trouble describing the signature look my mother gave me. Which was strange, given that my unofficial hobbies were recreational psychoanalyzing, conspiracy theorizing, and watching serial killer documentaries. In short: human behavior. Every child’s first science project is mapping and analyzing their parents’ emotional DNA, and while the official Human Genome Project took thirteen years to complete, figuring out your mother—or trying to—is a never-ending farce. It requires decades of data collection, the patience of Margaret Mead, and the skills of an FBI profiler. All I did was whine and complain and make mental notes. No wonder I failed to crack her code.

Proof of my efforts exist, though: there’s an anthropological field guide the size of the old New York City phone book inside my head, filled with all the “faces” and “looks” she made over the course of my lifetime, and hers: dog-eared, with Talmudic-length interpretations and annotations scrawled in the margins, it’s the homemade version of Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Like the real one, my collection of deconstructed facial-muscle contractions and gestures had expressions universal enough to make labeling easy—especially the negative ones: the “majoring-in-art-history-won’t-get-you-a-job-with-benefits-but-a-teaching-certificate-will” face; the “what-will-become-of-you?” face; the “I-don’t-understand-why-you’re-still-not-married” face; and the “I-don’t-like-your-husband” face, to name only a few. But while monkeys and humans use the same muscles to laugh and show rage, I’d bet my door-stopper-size tome that monkey-mothers are physically incapable of the faces human mothers make when their daughters’ lives don’t go according to plan. Expressions of maternal disappointment are luxuries of domestication, not the wild, and their variations are infinite. There isn’t a book—real or fake—big enough to contain them all.

For years, I opened mine to the same page and pointed to the one unidentified, uncaptioned look I could never get past: my mother, head tilted, brow furrowed, facial muscles a patchwork of bemusement, confusion, and disapproval. Sometimes she just gave me the look; other times she added a verbal component: “You’re so weird!” But whatever the delivery, I always got the message: no matter what I said, no matter what I did, my mother didn’t “get” me. Anyone who reads or watches the news these days knows that there are far worse things to overcome than not being completely adored by your mother, but being told you’re weird at a young age almost certainly guarantees you’ll feel weird as an adult. Some children grow stronger in the broken places, like bones; others grow sadder. I did both.

One day, when I still lived in New York and worked for Black Bear, after a meeting with a boss who didn’t get me and couldn’t stand me, Glenn followed me back to my office and poked me.

“Did you see that?”

“See what?”

“The way she looked at you!”

I shrugged. The boss had looked at me like I was incredibly weird. So what else was new?

“She looked at you like you had a bird on your head!”