little woman.

5:00 a.m. during a summer morning burns too bright for eyes, too sore for either light or darkness, and the head buzzes as it tries to understand that a whole new day has come to surface. The little woman arises after her early 2000s tone blares on her old flip phone at exactly 5:10, and I feel my heartbeat count each minute in drumming. I listen to her cough, brittle and violent, and the acoustic of every clump of mucus is accounted for in the air. And this time I listen to how long she waits for the water of her shower to get hot, as the house goes frigid past midnight for reasons unbeknownst to me and our seventy-degree thermostat. It’s warm outside but my room, despite the seasons, drives everyone away. She denies it, but she won’t come in even after she knocks on the door. I’m cold in here always, but I don’t whine. ​ The entrance to my room is cracked just a peek beyond my comfort level, and two jagged lines of shadow fight above my piano against the wall, cast in a white block of light visible through the hallway. The light streams in from the bathroom because my mother, the little woman, evaluates her dentures with an open door, and then her eyes trail down to her mismatched sleepwear. It’s a little loose on her body from years of wear when I was ten, as they were my clothes when I was young, and they carry years of neglect and like her are gently refolding. Slowly she hobbles into the kitchen, with her shuffling slippers helping me pinpoint her location, to check how much rice is left over from the previous day less devoured because we had banh mi. A Vietnamese sub, with bread so crisp golden brown, it blocked out the news with each of our bites. ​

She smacks and eats with blatant disregard; wide open, her tongue playing tag with the roof of her mouth. She talks to me about my body and my loves with blatant disregard. She sizes herself up in front of me with blatant disregard; a little woman feeling big, saying big things in the midst of being looked down upon by everyone else. Despite it having snowed in the middle of April, this little woman is deathly afraid of a spring breeze but not the permafrost sudden and prevalent in my room every time she comes in wordlessly to critique me. Her hands are thrown up and she knows what’s best for her daughter. She doesn’t have a favorite daughter. And acerbic as her voice is, loud and inappropriate for the indoors, she is my mother. ​ She's warm from the heat of the gas burner and anger swallows her without chewing enough times, but it chokes. She lurches inside the esophagus of wrath and her hand is always outstretched to meet my face, but not always violently. Her skin is wrinkled and callused from decades of working, under the myth that economic mobility was attainable. The heat of her hand follows me throughout college knowing that it burns itself on machinery, so I have a bed, and burns itself on cast iron, so I leave the house bloated in contentment.

These mornings where she doesn’t know I’m awake, but I’m extremely aware of her, are the ones I feel the most remorse about. Hopefully she, just as well as I do, understands how easy dying could be for us. And we wouldn’t do it together, or exit harmoniously without bitterness and adversity, but we could weaponize it and continue using it as a threat. ​ “You’ll understand when I’m dead,” she says. Her favorite line over dinner. “I wish I was never born, then,” I say. My favorite line over fifth grade. “It would have been better if you were never born,” she retaliates. With a smile, I point at her. “You’ll be overjoyed when I die.” ​ Anger is my least favorite family member; I never see them when the clock chimes at 5:30 a.m. I’m always so sad hearing how frail her footsteps are soft despite the weight of constant loss and frustration. Even with her ball and chain, she’s a little woman, and sometimes I wonder if she takes them off when she sleeps. ​ We get along better in sleep, or at least when everyone else is. She says she doesn’t dream; now that I’ve moved away and seldom see her, I doubt it. While her dreams are noiseless, monochrome vignettes of war times when everyone was still alive, and she could play big sister better than mine ever did, and she was thin and beautiful with a perm and a loyal, charming romantic prospect on bikes with sandals on. They’re still dreams. And she has them. ​ Like getting rich and moving into a huge ranch style home without stairs. The weights are too much and groceries, a bad day at work, and the expectation of meeting eyes with me all prove too much. With a scowl, she asks how I’m home so early. I rectify it by uprooting a corner of the library and flipping it into my refuge until closing time. With a scowl, she asks why I wasn’t more like my sister. I rectify it by uprooting myself, getting sick, and losing weight without notice, and I consider revisiting my childhood days of doing nothing but tracing her handwriting, her artwork, and the shape of her face to fit mine. With a scowl, she asks why I love our father more. In the coming years, I know I can’t help it. Both have equal offenses, but I’m his kid, and I’m his youngest, and I’m his. What am I to my mother? ​ A slightly bigger woman. It’s always important that—despite going to university, introducing my now ex-boyfriend, and achieving much in academia—I am small, or get smaller. Regardless of my broad shoulders and set gaze to ward off strange catcallers, I am small, and I feel it overtake me at 5:45 a.m. I am a little woman, and when I look in the mirror sometimes, I am little enough to be her. ​ She doesn’t call me, and I don’t call her. But this weekend, as I stay up past dawn once more and listen to how dejected every motion of hers is from the kitchen, I sigh in defeat and guilt. The most I can do is hope that her shower gave her enough warmth for the day. Little women, as we know, get cold so very easily and always are, but we don’t whine.