Relentless chatter

All day long, the girl heard the chatter of her mother’s triage. Everything was either good or bad. Everything earned either admiration or contempt. Maria has not a single memory of her mother noticing something and taking it in, without judgment.

As she grew up, she internalised her mother’s triage guidelines. At first, she just knew, viscerally, whether a person would be deemed “nice,” or even “accomplished” or whether that person would be relegated to the scrapheap, next to “He’s a nice young man; not very smart. But then, he’s only a mechanic.” Or: “That woman, look at her clothes. Can’t she get anything better?”

Maria also recognised the pre­requisites of high praise. “He’s and amazing pianist, he can play a piece from memory without a single mistake.” Or “What a great man; he has tenure at such-and-such university, you know.”

As a teenager, the girl bristled at her mother’s all-too-predictable judgments; she could see them coming, and she tensed up ahead of time. She was friends with a group of artists. Knowing they would be categorised by the prizes they won, she stopped mentioning any of them. In a restaurant one day, a young man with dreadlocks walked in with his family. Maria’s mother gasped. “Well would you look at that!” she exclaimed.

And so, the child grew into a rebel, a young adult who sought out positions that were opposite to her mother’s, and she enjoyed seeing her purse her lips. Maria wore clothes that would never qualify as respectable. She became a righteous activist of worthy causes.

Many, many years later, after her mother’s death, Maria paused and took a look inside her own mind. She realized it was structured exactly like her mother’s; that her categories of good and bad were often only the mirror image of her mother’s. She took notice of the chatter in her mind and found it exhausting.

She caught herself racing from one thing to the next; she forced herself to stop and take a look at the world around her; to admire a clump of mushrooms growing on a fallen tree trunk. She noticed the shades of grey in the cloud cover, and that little fringe of sunshine.

And then she examined her instinct to judge people; to dismiss out of hand what some folks brought to the table. She felt the burden of judgment on her shoulders, a heavy backpack, crossing the mountains. Her knees hurt from the effort of carrying so many opinions, predictable and tedious. The heavy residue of her upbringing.

When she was done judging herself for this legacy of bias, she smiled. She let it be. She felt freer every day, taking in the beauty everywhere around her. She loved this complex world, every corner of it. Even the parts that desperately need mending.

She felt alive.

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