I am the idiom for admonish. I am put in my place.

Before the meeting was casually called to order, I chatted with a City Planner who knew my Mom years ago when she chaired the county’s Planning Commission. He told a tale, true to fact and true to form, of my Mom’s rebuke and reprimand of him at a public meeting.

“My Mom and I have similar energies, except she leans towards provocation. She can be tough.” My reply to his story was a boundary drawn between who was “Me” and who was “She.”

Is every Daughter in a perpetual motion machine of see-saw slicing the umbilicus, or is it just me?

Tough like meat, that no one wants to eat. 

Not sweet like me, who will rot your teeth.

He looked Brooks Brothers but had the alluring scent of rebel, both rare traits among city employees. As he leaned back in a chair designed for an Executive Board Room but banished to the aging restraint of City Hall, he said to me, “She had to be.”

Me: “She could be tough.”

He: “She had to be.”

How was something so lost on me so clear to someone who hadn’t seen her in decades? As if her whole life was summed up in those four words:

She. Had. To. Be.

Because she’d been. . .

Abandoned.

Abused.

Assaulted.

Yet the Planner knew none of this. He only knew she existed as a strong Woman in a World of Men.

Tough as nails that hold a home together. Not weak like me, who will yield under heat.

After the meeting, I ran into an old colleague whose appearance was unchanged: a jolly waterfall of flesh on a sturdy frame and a mess of grey curls and beard on a patient face. We embraced, and he called me “kiddo.” After talking too loudly in the hallway, we went into the key-card-only labyrinth of cubicles to catch up. He told me of His Wife and their recreational pastime of feeding Raccoons who lumber onto the deck to feast on a dog food buffet.

“No shit,” I said, “Mom does the same thing, and I tease her relentlessly about it!”

He’s known her longer than he’s known me, and his casual reply was to ask what brand of dog food she preferred. I shook my head, more amused now than critical, and explained, “She feeds them angel food cakes, pans of turkey tetrazzini, and fried rice.”

“Yeah, they’ll eat anything.” He was unfazed by the apparent-only-to-me chasm between dog food and angel food cake. An uncrossable canyon between what is accepted and what is ridiculed. I realized at that moment how little grace I give my Mother. A grace so effortlessly given by others.

We hugged goodbye, and I commented on how glad I was that he recognized me.

“I didn’t at first. You’re grey now.” The soft smirk of his words caressed the edges of a statement that may make another woman go mad. But it was fact, and that’s how it was intended. He was an engineer through and through.

My hollow follicles give my age away, but my age has yet to give me the insight to see my Mother through the faceted eyes of a Dragonfly.