The Mother || Augusta Origins # 1
Joanna had always tried to teach her daughter to be fierce, to be stronger than the child was capable. She had told her that they were goddesses among lesser folk. Augusta had seen her mother as the summer breeze, more as an idea than a woman. She watched as she danced across hot sand in soft chemises and bare feet, watched as she swayed longingly with men who certainly weren't her father. As a child, she had found her mother to be everlasting, to be an immortal fixture in the world. A world in which her mother had never existed seemed silly to even imagine. How could the planet breathe without her? How could it dance to it's own rhythm or sway carelessly across it's own breeze? As a child, Augusta had believed her mothers stories of godliness, she had to believe that her mother was more than all other living creatures, because Augusta -- like every little girl before her -- idealised her mother. The leap from man to god was not too far from the child's eyes.
It wasn't until she grew slightly older that she realised the truth about her mother, fickle and fleeting. An ageing beauty afraid of growing old. A woman who had poured so much of herself into creating an image, that she had failed to create a reality. As Augusta grew older, she heard her mother's screams of frustration more and more. Each cry attempting to elicit some greater passion from her father, who for all intent and purpose was a passionless man. As she grew older, she became her mother's pet, her tool, her accessory. She would sit in the corner of readings or art shows or lectures, she would draw pictures on tables and on her hands in pens. She would lose herself to her mother's words, and to her own imagination.
She would imagine herself free and falling. She would imagine herself -- like her mother -- the summer breeze, skating across the sand. Untouchable, unattainable, perfect.  The young Augusta was a romantic girl, wanting to be the one that got away to every young man who's life she touched. She wanted to be loved as she felt her mother was loved, she wanted to be something off the pages of her mother's novels, she wanted to be a warrior. With any luck, Magdalena, her mother would remind her. You will be free and the world will look at you and say, there is Joanna's daughter. There is the warrior princess. In her early adolescence, this idea appealed to her.Â
By the time she was old enough to think for herself, she could see her mother was nothing like the woman she had created in her head. She could see that though her mother loved her, she wanted her to remain forever in her shadow. Another accessory, another accomplishment. But not a child, not really. A testament to her free spirit and her ability to create new life in the universe, but only if that life fit her ideas of what it should look like. Only if it didn't overshadow her own. Be less beautiful, less talented, less able, but do not be a victim. The only home you need is your own heart, other people will only distract you. Embrace temptation, throw caution to the wind. Be as the mother, but never be more.
Augusta had always wondered what would happen if her mother could be inside her head, if only for a moment. Would she shun Augusta for the slivers that reflected her father? The father who had come and gone from her life as her mother floated from place to place, her father the doctor, the logic, the regiment. Or could Joanna see it plainly just by looking at her? By seeing her caramel skin, the darkness of her hair, the way she held her shoulders when she looked up at the pale blue sky and wondered what it was like to see the rest of it all. She shared her father's curiosity, and she had learned her mother's selfishness.
Augusta left before any confrontation could be met between any three members of the family. She left with no goodbye. She left with a photograph on her pillow, one that she had kept close to her heart. The only real picture of her family that she had. The mother at the table with her husband and her daughter. Her husband with his nose in the paper, pretending he doesn't see the young man walking out of the guest house and into a truck. The daughter, too young to have a cigarette between her slender fingers (and yet she does), and she stares forward at the camera, aware of the reality of it all. The mother, in pose. The mother a statue. The mother a vision. Not really a mother at all.Â
It would be two years before she spoke to her mother again, but when they spoke it would be as if no time passed at all.Â
The conversation would centre around the shame of Augusta's wasted potential, about the horrors of war, and about the promise of death that filled the air around her.
She loves her mother anyway.
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