I Was a Peach Blossom Baby

I was a peach blossom baby.

My mother had a sunny demeanor accompanied by soft sobs, she was scared to let go of me. I was cared for meticulously and tenderly. She made me cups of tea with honey and cakes marooned in spring flowers and beeswax birthday candles.

I was born in power and fear.  I grew up swaddled with vibrant love and shaky guilt. My mother read me historical fiction and her own poetry. I would wake up to loud instrumentals, to which I would dance while bagels burned in the broken old English toaster. It was a wedding gift, she would tell me. 

She told me about her childhood, her young adulthood, the pain and power she gifted me. I was a peach blossom baby with angel kisses, covered in freckles and goosebumps from my mother. 

I was loved often and too much, in lieu of love for herself.

She gave me everything, even her pain. 

I don’t always feel lucky. I throw myself lavish pity parties in my bedroom. I cry and watch my face imitate my insides in the mirror. I hold unwavering, melancholy eye contact with the fish in the mason jar. Regularly crumpling at the roots of my gifted pain. 

I don’t always recognize my features in my mother’s face, her nose and cheekbones are foreign objects in a puddle of similarities. 

We have a complicated relationship, falling somewhere between the honey tea of my childhood and the typical bloody combat that survives in the aging of both mother and daughter. 

We have that mother- daughter smile, the one that looks like a perfect frown when held captive in photographs. I’m a peach blossom girl, regularly forgetting my purpose and roots, regularly running at full speed towards my own brand of power and shaky guilt. 

It’s overwhelming to be the living embodiment of pride and joy but it’s a sweet sort of burden, the kind that hurts with kisses on the backhand.

There are undercurrents of resentment, there are big waves of forgiveness and weepy goodbyes and my mother has held me close despite my spastic arms. 

When her gifted pain hits hard and the weight of familial expectations hit harder my mom swaddles me with the same love she held for her peach blossom baby. 

I haven’t been easy to raise.

I imagine my mother feeling helpless looking at her peach blossom girl crying over the same heartbreak she felt at my age. 

I imagine my mother feeling frustrated watching her nineteen-year-old baby destroy her lungs and liver the same way she did at my age, watching me struggle to find my footing with the sweet kissy burden on my back, as she did at my age. 

She keeps a lot in, for my benefit, to her detriment. 

We both struggle with emotional boundaries, she has heaps and loads of them and I don’t have any. 

We talk over each other, around each other, behind each other’s backs. 

It must be difficult to have a daughter who looks like you, who lives like you, laughs like you, 

a daughter who stole your pain and told everyone you gave it to her for free, told everyone it broke her at first but gave her roots and purpose. 

Her peach blossom baby, one that was cut out of her skin like construction paper.