baked into a pie

there is a large black and white photograph of my mother and I. I am somewhere around two years old. she is making bread, cradling the telephone on one shoulder, and carrying my soon-to-be first brother. I am eying the camera and wearing a shirt with the word hawaii on it. my hair is short and I look, like I usually look in pictures of me under the age of six, like a boy. the curls of the phone cord are stretched out between us. the bowl she is using is the same yellow plastic bowl that has always existed in our kitchen.

this photograph was taken by my uncle. I don't know why I like it so much, but in my mind it is an iconic thing. my mother on the phone, mixing bread dough. and me standing there, our eyes and faces so similar. really her eyes are brown and mine are blue, but you can't tell in this photograph.

I haven't always been close to my mother. it is my father that seems to match my temperament more exactly. it is my father I've always wanted to be more like. my mother has just been there, mixing bread dough, talking on the phone. I've taken almost everything about her for granted because she has, like that yellow plastic mixing bowl, always been there. and so much about her is ingrained in me. the thick brown of her hair is the same as mine, though she keeps hers short. the shape of her chin is my chin, though she smiles more readily than I do. her voracious reading habits are my voracious reading habits, though she prefers nonfiction.

or maybe I don't know my mother that well. I love to look at pictures of her from before she was married. her hair was long then. she wore lovely dresses. she looked thoughtful.

I don't know if I'll ever be making bread and talking on the phone at the same time with a two-year-old at my side. the world I am in is not the world my mother lives in. but somehow I feel like everything I am is contained within her, just as the earth is contained by the galaxy. whatever I am it is just a little speck of what she is.