Samantha Bell

Identifying [with] Identities: A Dilemma

Identity, n.: Sameness of essential or generic character in different instances; sameness in all that constitutes the objective reality of a thing; oneness.

Identify, v.: To cause to become identical; to conceive as united (as in spirit, outlook, or principle); to be or to become the same.

In the mirror: me, someone apart from my crazed father, my lonely mother. On a day when I feel disjointed, displaced, the mirror-image says to me that I am my parents’ only child.

My mother visits me in Lawrence, Kansas for the second time in three years. She flies in from New Hampshire; she has been living there ever since she left my father. My father lives in Minnesota, a state I could get to by car.

Today, when my mother gets off the plane, she looks older. When we come together to hug, it is like hugging a limp fish out of water. We are trained for connection solely based on this: the sport my mother and I most often trained for was my father, which we both failed at ruinously. Our approaches were admirable.

In my apartment, my mother steps out from her reflection in the bathroom mirror and into my small hallway and says, rubbing her cheeks, “You know, we should pick up some more of this lotion – I love it. And, I want to get you some new clothes. Not much, but some, okay?” I attempt a protest but she’s already back in the mirror.

My father and I look alike: skinny, jutting cheekbones, long noses. When I dance, I see him in the studio mirror at practice, prodding me along, our long arms working together. I work as hard at erasing him from my face.

A place can govern an identity. My family is a disconnected triangle: my father’s homelessness, my Kansas apartment, my mother’s house in New Hampshire. To cope with instability and rage, I have put distance between us.

My father began a new life in a halfway house. He mails me postcards from the local art museum of work that he likes, especially Picasso. I see myself in each tipsy drawing.  

I picture my mother alone in her small wooden house. I picture my father on a solitary marble bench, in an art museum, lost in Picasso’s shallow room. I can see the ghosts of my old selves wandering.

We hold a hidden map. The one we have now has us moving on one small road in only one direction, to only one home. The map we need is multifarious and un-grooved. Its paths greet us, my mother in the chill of a summer night, me in the humid storm of thunder, my father thrush in the lasting glimpse of that torrid rain.           

The paths of my old selves don’t merge. I stand in a cool, humid morning light, tears down my cheeks, confused. My mother is leaving. I am on the concrete sidewalk, waving goodbye, as she wipes her smooth cheeks. I watch the cab move up the hill until it is a black dot at the end of the road. I go inside, to my own home, my own day, mapping the ends of the lines between all of us, loosely untying the fray.

Samantha Bell: Before becoming a writer, I practiced ballet in upstate New York. I have a kitten with two broken toes and I live in Lawrence, Kansas with my husband Dan. I am an assistant professor of English at Johnson County Community College. I study memoir and recommend Terri Jentz’s new book, Strange Piece of Paradise – it changed my life.

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