Greta R. Cunningham

  1. My mom would like us to be more similar. She grasps my hands, lining up our fingers like a palimpsest, tracing what she claims to be the twin arcs of our nail beds. 
  2. My mom would like us to be more similar, but her genes didn’t really stand a chance. Blue eyes. Red hair. Mine only started curling like hers in high school, so until then, all she had was our hands. My dad got everything else. He can’t deny those kids, her mom would tell her. I don’t think he’s planning to, my mom laughed. He can’t. It’s the eyes, the shape of the lips. All so “Cunningham.” 
  3.  Nine months, my mom carried me. Longer than that, really. Women are born with all the eggs they’ll ever have: one to two million. By puberty, it’s down to somewhere between 300,000 and 500,000. It keeps dropping from there. As eggs decrease in quantity, they also decrease in quality. Eggs divide every month before ovulation, and, as women age, the chance of errors in the division– meiosis– increases, which can reduce fertility. My mom didn’t think 34 years old seemed too old to have a kid. Well, my mom had me at 42! she says airly. 
  4. Thirty-five years and those nine months, my mom carried some part of me, and all she had to show for it was hands. Look! she says when her family or my dad’s family or friends remark on the poorly distributed resemblance. Yes, but look at our hands! She takes my wrist and splays our fingers next to each other. Don’t you see? It’s the same nailbeds! 
  5. My mom would like us to be more similar. I wonder when she finally found relief in our hands. It must have taken some time for soft little ones to slender into something recognizable as hers. When did she notice? Maybe it was as she sat across from me on the cold bathroom floor, my hands pressed flat on the toilet paper she’d laid out over the even pattern of white hexagon tile, finally finished fishing through the duplicative shades of pink and red crammed her bag of nail polish. The precision she’d earned as a dentist handling whichever I’d finally selected after squinting at ballet slipper and bubblegum, their glass bodies clinking as I held them close to try and tell the difference. Maybe it was as she started the second coat that she found the cuticle curves she was following the same as those pinched around the brush. Maybe it was when she let the plastic-bound double pack of Pentel color pens join the mismatched sets of Crayolas in the craft cabinet. Watching my hands contort themselves around the unfamiliarly narrow barrel. Ensuring I wasn’t pressing the felt tips too hard into the paper. In middle school, she pointed out that we got the same blister on our ringer finger from how we held a pencil.
  6. My mom would like us to be more similar, which is funny because everyone says we are. The first time a friend from college met my mom, she told me we dressed the same. We do. It’s just her shoes I’ve outgrown. Not that I didn’t turn my feet crimson stuffing them into her blue wedges for a high school formal. You can even tell in the photos if you know to look. Bright red up to the ankles.
  7. When my mom came to move me out of my dorm last year, my boyfriend said it was bizarre to listen to us talk. He couldn’t say if it was the phrases, the cadence, the voice– just that it was the same. He eagerly instructed my friend to Just listen! when she met my mom. Walking back from dinner, she told me he was right. I try to hear what they did when I talk to her on the phone. 
  8. My mom would like us to be more similar, which is funny because I’ve always been told we are. I can’t remember how old I was the first time I made the correction. You’re so your mom said a friend I’ve had since I was five. She’s a worrier. No I told her. She just always hovers at 25% stress. It’s my dad who can go all the way to 100%. It’s the difference between my mom asking guests if they’re sure the soup doesn’t need more salt three times after serving it and my dad deciding we probably need to rearrange the furniture and commit to hardcore minimalism while cleaning the house before they arrive. It’s the difference between my mom double-checking all the vacation logistics and my dad staying up until 3:00 a.m. in a packing whirlwind, deciding he probably should have bought a new wardrobe for this trip, the night before we leave.
  9. My mom would like us to be more similar. My father wishes I was less like him. She grasps my hands, lining up our fingers like a palimpsest, tracing what she claims to be the twin arcs of our nail beds. My dad meets my woes with the bearing of responsibility. The essence of understanding. A sorry that asks for pardon instead of asking for sympathy. 
  10. I think I was in second grade when I begged my mom to explain how I was actually related to my father. Maybe I couldn’t see the proof then, the goatee, bald head, and glasses obscuring the resemblance everyone older than seven could see. I just couldn’t understand what he’d had to do with it– those nine months, the 35 years before that she’d carried me. She tried to explain as best as you can explain sex to a seven-year-old. 
  11. Growing up, I didn’t like being told I looked like my dad. What seven-year-old girl wants to be told she looks like a man with a goatee, bald head, and glasses? 
  12. I’ve said the difference between my dad and I is in the handwriting. He writes like he’s drawing the letters, makes his Ms with strokes the same way he creates silhouettes when he’s painting on canvas. Like letters are figures whose stories make sentences. I write words like I’m laying brick. Small. Rounded. Like I’m building. 
  13. At some point, my mom stopped trying to evenly divide pre-guest cleaning tasks between my brother and me, favoring efficiency over equality. It’s okay- it just makes you anxious. Same as your Dad.
  14. When I was in elementary school, I scooted the floppy beach hats off their top shelf in the closet. I must have dragged a stool clumsily across the slate floors to the entryway to reach them. I hid my younger brother’s face under the big blue brim of his bucket hat. With a yellow one secured over mine, I marched us outside and positioned us before our front door. I told my brother he would have to pretend to be deaf– I didn’t trust his acting. I tried to knock on the warm oak with a dignified air, even if my knuckles only reached a few feet up. When my dad answered, I announced we were cleaners who had come to help with the house. He laughed at our antics, my constant playing pretend, and asked what had been the inspiration. His softness churned my tense anticipation into guilt. I didn’t tell him what I’d told my brother. He can’t yell at us if we’re professionals. I didn’t yet know the many shapes anxiety could take. I only saw anger. 
  15. My dad is one of those people who sees meaning in things. Like the doe he saw through the screen door of the cabin. He was at a retreat trying to pick a career, trying to figure out what he wanted to do with his life. That cliche of indecision. That cliche of running away to the woods to think. It must have been still– the scene outside the window– before she arrived. Just a morning fog settling into dew. My dad can stare, watch in a different way, the way artists can even if they’ve run away to the woods, unsure if they should become one. I used to feel guilty going to museums as a kid, unable to look at the same painting as long as he was content to. I wonder how long he was watching before she stepped into view. He would have been content just watching that condensation of the dawn, the day materializing as mist does on blades of grass. He said she had answers in her big brown eyes, or really in the fawns that he saw trailing behind her, proof he should be a parent. 
  16. My dad is one of those people who sees meaning in things. Like random screw bolts. It’s a reminder to loosen up he says. My dad is one of those people who sees meaning in things. like me and hands. 
  17. His hands are not like his father’s were. His fingers are not as thick, as wrought. Every muscle between the knuckles was not required the same way. My dad paints trees, landscapes, instead of cutting them down, panels and canvases stacked in our back room instead of the logs his father piled outside the farmhouse. They have their own ways of running off to the woods to think 
  18. I have the Cunningham face and the Cunningham dreams. My dad says I describe being able to fly the same way his father did. 
  19. There is a charcoal drawing in the back of my dad’s studio. The recreation of a piece of Greek plaster. It’s one of his stories, one of the ones he deploys for the moral, some salve for my lack of confidence, my perfectionism. He tells me how long it took it him. How unsure he was. How he cried when he finished. How he just stared at his hands. Shocked by what they could do. 
  20. When I was little, my dad tried to demystify the parental overreaction. You know he said I heard another dad say it’s like you’re picturing whatever your kid did as if they’re a freshmen in college, even if they’re only eight. What does that kind of behavior look like when the stakes are higher? How it would affect them as an adult. You picture the worst and that’s what you react to. You forget. It can be hard to remember kids have time to learn. 
  21. The summer before my freshman year of college, my dad arrived home to find me having a panic attack in the kitchen over my pre-college to-do list. I had made a mistake ordering something for my dorm and wasn’t sure there would be time to fix it before needing to pack. As I tried to explain what was wrong, he got increasingly upset, finally yelling about the unreasonableness of my response. Later, when I confronted him about what I considered to be the unreasonableness of his response, he wearily said ’m worried about you falling to pieces when things go wrong. I bit my tongue through the well-meaning worry but wanted to say Of course I will. That’s what I do, with fractures and folds running down me like veins. I’m good at breaking, so I have practice putting myself back together. 
  22. My lack of confidence, my perfectionism. My dad’s lack of confidence, his perfectionism. I thought the familiarity would coax sympathy. But sometimes, it just coaxes fear. 
  23. I was already 16 the first time I finally got behind the wheel to practice driving. My mom didn’t think she should be the one to teach me, joking about how annoyed my dad would get at her urgent requests to please break now during roadtrips, so it was my dad who ended up sitting shotgun with me. I’d move the driver’s seat as close to the wheel as possible. Your knees are going to break if you crash my dad said, but I didn’t feel in control unless my arms were pulled that taut. My hesitation to accelerate, my jerky turns as I refused to trust the car’s momentum to carry it around the corner, my flighty merges, never sure that I hadn’t missed a car in my blindspot, were not only frightening but unfathomable to my father. You are careful, you pay attention, you studied all the rules! There is no reason to be this nervous! I was reminded of him telling me I’d earned the right to be confident when I was anxious before exams. You have your mom’s work ethic. I never could study like that. A perversion of the comforting words. When he’d finally let me out of the car, my abs would be sore from the ridge tension I’d held my body in for the last hour. Unbelievable he’d say. 
  24. My dad has come home from art talks telling me his back seized up for an hour before he had to get up to the podium. 
  25. Research shows anxiety is about 30% hereditary. Neither my dad nor I have ever been tested. The only diagnosis he’s received was depression after his brother died in a car crash when he was 22. 
  26. If a child shows signs of anxiety before they turn 20, it’s more likely hereditary. 
  27. My first memory of feeling anxious is taking a math test in first grade. My mom says I wasn’t a nervous kid until I was seven. My dad remembers me struggling to count, freaking out before I could get to 20, when I was five. 
  28. I don’t remember how old I was, young enough to be in the back of the car instead of in the passenger seat. I was crying. One of my dad’s favorite solutions is to go for a drive. You’re just going to feel everything a bit more. There’s nothing wrong with that. It can be good too. It helps me paint he said. 
  29. You know your dad my mom says he’ll get goosebumps from good music. I listen to my mom’s favorite songs for nostalgia. I listen to my dad’s for the puckering of skin.
  30. My dad has his phone settings adjusted, so it rings when I call him, even if it’s on silent. One night last spring, I called him at two in the morning. It was the point in the year when new college friends don’t feel that new anymore. It was the point in the year when you’ve had them long enough to trust them with new stories, the kind it takes some time to earn. And so a couple of my friends were seated on ends of beds or desk chairs in my dorm room sharing them. I almost couldn’t get words out on the phone. Dad, my friends have been telling me these stories, these things that have happened to them, and it’s just, it’s just so sad. Feeble words from my feeble feeling body. I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t bring myself to repeat the bullying, the assault, the shitty family dynamics I’d been told. Getting to know people means getting to know their grief. I was shaking. I stumbled outside of my dorm and dry-heaved into a patch of grass. I know, I know he said. 
  31.  I’ve said I’m a 50/50 split between my mother and my father. I have her hands. They shake like my dad’s do.

Greta R. Cunningham is a sophomore in Medill.