My mother died the day I was born, and my father hasn't forgiven either one of us. My childhood was shadowed by the ghost of a woman whose body may live on, but whose essence evaporated with the emergence of her firstborn child.

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"It's a daughter," the nurse announced.

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"Take it away," were the first words of my loving mother.

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Or so I'm told through whispers and the modestly bowed heads of those who pretend to decry the telling, but who live for the opportunity.

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So what is a girl to do with no one to braid her pigtails and show her how to apply lipstick?

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"Not so much...That's not your shade...Let me show you how..."

I hope I don't sound bitter. The opposite is true. Bitterness is born from tortured expectations. I never had any to torture.

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It was what it was. My father and I. Alone in every sense of the word.

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Didn't everyone's mother abandon them at birth? Didn't everyone's father mutter to himself in the darkness, drink himself into a stupor, and spend whole evenings painting sordid word pictures of what his daughter must never become?

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When my mother's body healed, she packed her bags and left. No explanation that I ever heard. But in the early morning hours, when I found my father on the porch, gazing beyond the rising sun, I knew, even at the age of seven, that she had left an explanation.

At age eight, I decided I didn't care anymore why she left. She was dead to me and that was easier. I told my playmates fantastic stories of her demise, which grew all the more fanciful the more I told them.

When my father found out, that was the end of the stories. And the playmates.

It was then I decided to stop living under her tombstone.
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