I’ve been thinking about memory lately, trying to hold onto every shred of baby time with the 3rd and last small human of my creation. Memory is fleeting, fickle, finite. My memories are unique to my perspective, and I filter them through my present lense as much as I shaped them with the filter of my past thoughts and emotions.
I felt a memory here. My mother and my aunt, there may have been other people there too. Lionel was my aunt’s boyfriend and he lived in these apartments. There was a Panago downstairs, but it was probably still called Panagopolous. I think I am 10 years old, maybe 9. We had pizza and the adults were drinking. My aunt was in rare form, a kind and jovial drunk, instead of the sharp and suspicious angry drunk she mostly was.
“Who loves you, Baby?” She said that night, pulling me into a rare embrace. “Who loves you, Baby?”
“Who loves you, Baby?”
“You do, Auntie,” I replied, not sure if it was the correct answer. I remember her face, large pores, the lines around her eyes when she smiled, the feathered bangs parted strictly and framing her forehead. The smell of cigarettes, beer, sweat and men’s deodorant because she refused anything soft and sweet smelling. She was strong and took no shit. She was an unintentional Indigenous feminist.
“Who loves you, Baby?” And I thought it was just a simple, rhetorical question. She said it to me on several other occasions, her affectionate expression. Sifting through these moments of memory inspired by place, I think maybe the question was more. Physical affection for kids in my family was rare. I hugged my mother once a week, before I left to go to my dad’s house. Love was unacknowledged but often conditional.
Probably “Who loves you, Baby?” Was the easiest way for her to say “I love you,” without the absolute commitment. I wonder what terms of affection my IRS survivor grandparents offered their children. I have no one to ask because my mom would never answer.
Thinking through this and realizing that announcing my love to my children has more meaning, is a proclamation, feels very definitive. “I love you.” Me. Mama. I love you. No doubts, no conditions. No alcohol obscuring my intergenerational trauma. I’m here feeling it. Loving all of you.
The Reluctant Anthropologist 