Note from Maggie: Hello, Estranged subscribers. In honor of Mother’s Day (happening in the U.S. this Sunday), I’m publishing this guest essay from Yvonne Conza. Yvonne is a writer in Miami. She has work in The Believer, INTERVIEW Magazine, Lit Hub, and many other outlets. She is the assistant nonfiction editor for Pithead. Find her on Instagram @yvonneconza and Bluesky @yvonnec.bsky.social .
Bingo calls stampede from a memory of my girl-body snaking through a tangle of people to get to the church gymnasium bathroom. B-15—G-57—I-21, and then, a hand swinging a lit cigar that singes a spot alarmingly close to my right eye. Quashing tears and a scream, I freeze.
Five decades later, I can still see the white-hot end of the cigar.
A woman from a nearby table grabbed my hand, pulled me from the stream of traffic, examined the circular burn on my face and asked if I was OK. When I didn’t answer, she slid over a scorecard.
“If you win, the money is all yours.”
Returning her attention to the Bingo game and her numerous cards, she used a dabber to cover the numbers instead of the penny-sized red tokens available. I was slow to cover my squares so she got on me. “O-75—right there.”
During a break she bought me a 7UP, then took me to the bathroom before walking me to my mother. After Mom put out her cigarette and inspected the crimson cigar burn, she seemed to appreciate a line offered up by the woman.
“She’s a strong one.”
“That she is. Four going on forty.” The woman laughed at Mom’s pivot.
“Didn’t say a word. I doubt it’ll scar, but you never know.” She departed adding: “Cocoa butter — prevents scarring.”
Mom nodded a sharp gesture of “enough” and “mind your own business.” I knew that steel smile of dismissal, but the interplay was fast, making it difficult for a stranger to interpret. The woman’s goodbye wink at me amplified my mother’s annoyance. She could have taken me by the hand and walked me to the bathroom, however that would have required stubbing out her newly lit cigarette and, well, a face should only be used once as an ashtray.
In our household, lip-sealed toughness was prized. Mom’s chief way of mothering was a steadfast, wordless you’ll survive. My numbing the heat of that lit cigar without crying out in pain earned her pride. Exhibited boldness. Demonstrated deadening. Once again, proof I could keep my mouth shut. Silence kept our family together. The unspoken-ness—numb meaning strong—was everything. Mom gave me cocoa butter that I applied to the brown circular scab that had formed near my right eye. It prevented the scar from being visible.
When I was four—the same year of the cigar burn—my seven-year-old sister said something during a squabble that I suspected was a lie.
“If you don’t believe me, ask Mom,” she said. Then she strutted away, the older sister schooling the youngest sibling about our skimpy family history.
I raced to Mom.
“Did I have a brother named Johnny?”
Mom’s eyes focused elsewhere. Then she turned and looked at me. In that moment, her limp expression answered my question. Words trickled out slowly in what shaped the only real mother-daughter conversation we ever had. Her soft tone made me think she was floating away from me.
“Your brother Johnny was born unassisted, three weeks early. In our trailer. We didn’t have a house back then.”
With my undivided attention, she told me that Dad’s hands pulled their son into the world and placed him in a dresser drawer.
“Blue. He came out blue. Blue skin.” Then she went still, unable to speak another sentence or light another cigarette.
Blue? As in the color of the sky? A blueberry? The ocean? Even a child knows not to ask questions about unbearable blue. For a long time, we sat suspended in silence, adrift in a wild rotation of baby blue. Then she gathered her composure and snapped. “You never lived in the trailer. You have no idea about the meaning of poverty.”
Her first conversation about Johnny was unrehearsed. Heartfelt. Subsequently, whenever she wanted me to sit and listen to repeated “your father” tirades, she’d breadcrumb out the “blue baby” story first to get my attention. To lure me to the table, she’d surrender feral blue fragments about my dead brother.
I understood her need to use me as an outlet regarding my father. But as I grew older my attention came with the cost of wanting to know more. But Mom was clever. She’d wait for me to open the fridge for a glass of milk, then bait me with “second born.” And after taking a seat, recount the time Dad punched his fist through a plywood closet door, ignoring that I already knew this story because I had been there, too.
In the midst of us fighting, Mom would say “Johnny was the first-born redhead of the family.” I did not know how to process that, but quieted down as she retold of the time police officers knocked on our front door and asked, “Everything OK?” Had she forgotten that I had stood tight-lipped behind her in fear? Johnny’s death was the crack in my parent’s foundation. From then on, nothing in our family was normal.
“No headstone, just a metal marker with a number on it.” Sometimes she said Johnny lived for fifty-four days, other times fifty-five. “Congenital heart defect.”
More recently, I learned that, in some cases, blue babies appear bluer when they cry out. She never mentioned if Johnny ever came home. Or what he felt like in her arms.
“Hearse.” At the time of Johnny’s death, the town where I was raised did not have an ambulance, a detail I learned when I was an adult. After my mother and I had long been estranged, she continued to send me letters. “A hearse pulled into the gravel driveway.”
For years, the only image I had of Johnny was being swaddled in a pinewood dresser drawer. There was never a mention of him hooked up to machinery or coffined inside a glass incubator. Perhaps that was her way of protecting both of us. But I don’t know for certain. Mom’s actions were her own ways of numbing and soldiering on, ways that stopped her from howling and turning wild blue.
When I was 16, during a routine medical exam, my doctor heard a heart murmur. Panicked, Mom took me straightaway to a cardiologist and told him that my lips would turn blue whenever I got cold.
Her concern shocked me. With the cigar burn, she never even got out of her wooden chair. This was a sharp contrast. Alarm. This mothering made me feel very conflicted. I was torn between being receptive and not knowing if I could trust it. The physician put his stethoscope to my chest to search for the lub-dub percussion. Pulling out his earpieces, he smiled.
“Innocent murmur. Wanna listen?”
What followed was a rush of amazement at a sound—soft and swishing. Your heart valves flowing. Blueness marked me as her child.
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