How My Mother Saw Me

Going through an old file I stumbled upon my mothers papers, yellow and wrinkled from age. She’s been gone now for over 25 years and I still miss her. The loss of someone you love never goes away, it just becomes apart of you – ghostly memories that resurrect themselves, like now.

Slipping into her pages,  I found this hand written draft she wrote an eon ago about me as a little girl. This is how my mother saw me.

Her words are written below. 

Rene is an eight and one half year old girl of mixed blood – white European heritage – with 1/4 Cherokee, Seminole Indian. She weighs 50lbs, is 3 feet 6 inches tall, she wears a size 1 shoe in girls. She has hazel eyes, chestnut brown hair, a powder of big, brown freckles across her snub nose. Rene’s skin is medium light, tans very quickly and rarely sunburns, it is delicate in texture.

Rene slips from a merry little minx to serious studious Miss in a twinkling and in a minute more shes pouring over a trifle, screaching at her brothers or complaining over some imagined hurt to her vanity. She can sit still for an hour but most often she’s moving restlessly about the small apartment, out in the yard or talking for hours on the telephone.

This morning I asked her how old she was. She replayed eight. A moving insight. Most little girls her age would have said almost nine or eight and one half or eight and a half.

– Crystal Thomas Tuchel

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