She gave birth to a child and now I am another
My mother still calls me by my dead name. Though I have changed it several years ago, she still calls me P. I’ve stopped correcting her (did I ever?) but it still affects me somehow. But it no longer makes me angry. It still touches something inside —a tender ache I no longer try to address - except here; my mother can’t say my name.
Frankly, I don’t even think she knows it, if you ask her. Before, when I was still in the frail moments of the transition—when the graft of my new self felt delicate, like a transplant that might not hold—I found this infuriating. The name Sage felt new, fragile. Even if I was certain, I still felt raw. Hearing my old name was like being misnamed by history itself. She doesn’t do it to harm and it is not indifference, either. It’s probably that for her a daughter belongs to her mother—by blood, by naming, by memory. Whatever I do, whatever I say, whatever I become… in her world, she is the holder of it all : I am hers. A daughter owes to her mother. A mother owns her daughter. And even if I change names, identity, country, personality all this becomes a little more complicated but it does not change much.
When people call me by my real name—Sage—it makes me feel seen: Real. Important. More than that: it makes me feel like Me. Language holds identity. In my family, identity was always an unstable currency. A mirror held by others. A stage you couldn’t leave. A sage you could not be.
Kafka's Metamorphosis still haunts me years after I studied it when I was barely 13 in college. It was not the transformation into an insect that stayed with me: it was to suffer such a metamorphosis and have your mother ask if you're being lazy.
My mother is delightful; a real diva. A vibrant artist. A woman who expresses herself through art, beauty, glamour, and “allure”. Even now, at 80, she wears pride like defiance and still forces admiration. I still carry conflicting emotions about her—respect, admiration, unease, horror and disgust and tenderness and a lot of other things I can´t really share with words. Sometimes, I am baffled by our similarities. I often recognize myself in her and it is deeply unsettling. I am constantly navigating destabilizing waters with her. You see, I have not been mothered well and this is maybe what blurs my judgement about her. Because she was never mothered either.
As a child abandoned by her own mother, she grew up without affection. She grew up convinced that her beauty was her only armour and to be pleasing was to be safe. She passed that myth to me—not as a lesson, but as the air she was breathing. Unconscious. “To be seen, you must be beautiful. To be loved, you must never disturb.”

My mother has always been such a beauty! I wonder if she was convinced that her beauty was her only reason for her existence and being. She sought attention through manipulation; things were simpler if you were sick or obedient.
I often read back my words and they reveal a chain of sorrow passed down not through malice, but through wounding. A mother unloved, left hungry for affection, builds her identity not on being, but on appearance—and then transfers this further, without words. This, too, is a myth—but a dangerous one, for it replaces the soul with the mirror, and the self with the mask.
Even now, I’m unlearning that. Her flair for melodrama was a shield—a performance stitched in place of mourning. In my family, melodrama was a defence against unbearable grief. My mother never truly mourned her own abandonment. How could she? Instead, she performed it—again and again—trying to reclaim the gaze of the mother who never looked at her. And now, her gaze is not upon me, it is not quite mine, but shaped by a phantom of what she herself could not see.
She calls me by the name she knows—not to hurt, but because she cannot see the one who changed, the one who chose to become another. To see me would be to face the truth: that identity is not inherited, that the mask is not enough, that her child has become more than she dared to be. I have accepted this, anger has turned into something more enduring: compassion without illusion.
And yet… it still affects me.
And every time we talk on the phone, after enduring her usual litany of grievances, bitterness, loneliness, her subtle but harsh judgements about my daughter and how we have raised her, her pains and all the rest, I suddenly find myself a little more affectionate. And tender. And I am telling myself how extraordinary it would be if I would be able one day to dedicate a book to her. But immediately, I regret myself and the thought of it. For her to receive the book—to read it, to feel seen by it, to take advantage of my dedication without offence or rupture—I would have to write a book in which the following words do not appear: no incest, no rape, no violence, no brutality, no forced violent sex, no prostitution, no abortion, no abuse, no incest, no perversion, no whore, no disabled body, no mental illness, no psychosis, no schizophrenia, no depression, no shit, no blood, no milk, no hunger, no addiction, no drugs, no alcoholism, no pills, no anorexia, no self-harm, no suicide, no grief, no rage. No disobedience. No mother wound. No daughter revolt. No secrets. No memory of the orphanage. No tears in the red-light district. No silence too thick to breathe. No love that tastes like debt. No shame worn like perfume.
And so, the book I would have to write would be a long, dramatic periphrasis. A shadow ballet around nothing. I know how to do that. I can call it «A beautiful lie». A good distraction for moments of boredom, or long afternoons by the window.
But no. Not this book.
Not this story.
Not this daughter.