The Things We Share

I never thought I looked much like my mother. She was naturally a very light blonde with stick straight, fine hair and blue eyes. While my hair wasn’t as dark and coarse as my then bald father, it was brown and wavy with a mind of its own when I’d bother to brush it. No one ever thought we were related. I had a few blonde friends and if we were out anywhere together, strangers would assume that one of them was her daughter. Our body types were pretty different. I was taller, awkwardly lanky, flat chested. She was more of what I thought of as ‘normal’ proportionally, never worrying about sleeves being too short,bangles sliding off her wrists or strapless dresses having nothing to hold them up. Her rings and bracelets would never fit if I’d wanted to borrow them. But she was more into gold and I preferred silver back then. We wore the same size shoe but her feet were wider so we rarely could share those either.

Of course it wasn’t until I was fully grown that I would have cared about any of that, and even then, our styles were so different that it rarely would have mattered. She had sort of a bohemian flair to her aesthetic and I was more of a tomboy grunge ball until college when I started going towards more vintage and eclectic feminine looks.

I still have a lot of her clothes. I wear some of the really unique vintage pieces and have immortalized them in photo and video shoots over the years. I have her jewelry, mostly in an old travel bag mixed in with an assortment of heirlooms whose origins she undoubtedly told me about once. Some of the pieces were gifts I gave her over the years. A lot of amethyst which was her birthstone. I wear one of her rings sometimes which is adjustable. I have one of her hair brushes that still smells vaguely of the products she’d always use. I have an old bathrobe that I remember her wearing often when we were kids. I even have a few pairs of her socks but I never ended up with any of her shoes.

So I guess it took me by surprise when I saw it. I was laying on the couch , half watching a silly show and had put my foot up on a pillow to try and stretch a tight hamstring. I caught sight of my foot in the corner of my eye and somehow at this strange angle, in the dim lighting of my living room, it looked like hers. The lines of the bones sloping from toe to heel creating the illusion of a broader figure, the slant of my line of sight painting the image of squatter, straighter toes. In that moment I could almost imagine her sitting there with me, in the home that she’d never gotten a chance to see. I could reach out and grab those toes that I’d painted for her a million times and hear her yelp and say “Ash!”, annoyed that I was distracting her from the show.

A few years before she passed I started bleaching my hair blonde. I could tell that she got a kick out of it and I did feel like it made us look more alike. I’ve kept it that way, finding that I booked more work with the color when I was modeling and now with acting as well, but I think there’s more to it than that. It’s something small that allows me to still feel connected to her. Now, people that I meet who have only known me as a blonde, will see pictures of my mother and say “you look just like her” and I smile politely, not bothering to disagree anymore.

She always told me that she named me after a little girl she’d seen in a public bathroom who she’d thought looked like her as a child. They say that when you are a baby you tend to look more like your father and as you get older, your mother. I’m sure that’s been debunked but I always thought I looked more like my father and still do. I wonder if that will change as I get older. Maybe if I decide to have children, my breasts will get bigger, maybe my feet and fingers will swell. And if I had her shoes, maybe they one day would fit.

As time goes on, these moments become more and more infrequent. As the memories we have fade, it sometimes takes something new or external to refresh those we’ve lost in our mind. A story we never heard from an old relation or a photo we’d somehow never seen that shows us another side of them. So I see this as a gift. A little connection that had always been there that I’d never noticed. Reminding me that she was here and we are connected.