You’re being held up by rough hands. A woman’s hands, larger than your whole life. They grip you around your ribcage and hurt pressing in on soft skin, soft bones, but they’re warm, and you’re safe. They hold you parallel to the ground, the floor. The floor under her head is green carpet covered in a sheet of off-white and autumn orange, little flowers that you sometimes trace with your fingers. A sheet that you still own, given to you in a box of things after she dies. You like knowing it’s there. Right over there in its little cardboard box.

The owner of these rough hands is not your mother, but something like her. She smells like her, powdery, but that might be you. Maybe they both smell like you. You don’t know when you learned that mothers have mothers, but it’s not yet. She has doughy skin almost as soft as your own and laughs loud and creaking, a sound thrown into the world. You try to match her laugh, but it comes out wrong.

She lowers you toward her face until all you can see is her face. Her smiling mouth with all its crooked teeth, white except for one that hides behind the others, gray and soft looking. One day, a few years from now, that tooth will come out, and in pictures, for pictures, she’ll replace it with a chewed piece of Wrigley’s Doublemint Gum, teeth making a tooth to fill the hole. Later, when she pins notes to your shirt before sending you off to school because you’re too scared to speak, you’ll think of that little tooth and how it used to hide. Later still, you’ll go with her to the dentist where they’ll pull out all the rest, and she’ll smack her gums at you, and you’ll laugh because you’re supposed to, but you’ll be sad because it’s something lost. You’ll think of that little tooth, gone before the others, but with nowhere left to come back to, nowhere left to hide.

She lowers you toward her face until all you can see is her face, and she says, “I love you.” You try to say it back, but it comes out wrong. You strain and grunt and you want to give her this thing. You want to give her words, but you don’t yet have them to give. For this woman with the doughy skin almost as soft as your own and a laugh thrown to the world, these attempts are enough. She will tell everyone that these rough facsimiles were your first words. That the first words you gave to her, to the world, were those three. You will suspect that this is untrue, that they didn’t count, but you’ll hope that maybe they did, that maybe they were enough.

This is your first memory. The sheet of off-white and autumn orange spread over green carpet near the table with six legs, the crooked teeth smile of the woman who is not your mother but almost, and she’s hugging you to her, cooing about how smart and good you are. Her words make you better than you are, than you will be.

This is your first memory, but it’s not the one you tell people about when they ask. You know they won’t believe you can remember something from that early in life. So, you tell them about the bee sting, barefoot in the grass when you were two and a half. You make your first memory about pain, because it’s more believable than the one about being smart and good and loved and loving.

It’s more believable than the one about how, with words, she made you better than you are.

It’s more believable, even to you, you who were once held up by the woman who wasn’t your mother but almost, that life is painful.

Then she’s gone, and, in secret, you chew a piece of Wrigley’s Doublemint Gum and try to find the right hole to plug, but there aren’t enough sticks in the pack. When the gum loses its flavor, and you don’t have the heart to spit it out, you swallow it. You hope that whatever magic turned that gum into a tooth, a little gray tooth hiding, will work on you.

It helps, but it’s not enough.

There are never enough.

It is never enough.