her in an ‘adult way.’ Isabel is “deflowered” both physically and emotionally and, therefore, is forced into a sort of maturity and womanhood at an age when she is yet to walk or articulate. In return, Isabel is finally able to touch her mother, but not until she is, also, vulnerable. Ironically, Isabel is able to violate her mother’s creed against female, maternal intimacy in the latter stages of her cancer. Drugged with morphine, incapable of protesting, defending or protecting herself, her mother was physically accessible. Isabel remembers their closest encounter, “I would stare at my mother’s right breast, the one which remained intact, finding it beautiful…weeping selfishly for never having shared it with her…I was aware of…some comfort that I never found there. Such a crazy process of reverse nursing” (25). Reminded of what she did not receive, Isabel finds solace in her role as guardian. Again, now in her late teens, Isabel is forced into a mature role. This time, it is as the caretaker, the mother, another emblem of womanhood. Unknowingly to Isabel, she will not be able to birth or care for her own children due to her mother’s manipulations. And while it seems unfair that Isabel is now giving life to her mother, it is part of her revenge. As Isabel is forced to become strangely mature by the suppression of maternal love, she must graduate from this infant-hood into finding chosen love from adult partners. She attempts to progress into this forced form of womanhood with physical transformations. She and her best friend, Corrine, would dress up as their older alter egos, adult props of identification in hand, and go to bars. Or, they would sneak off late at night at the beach to meet men or smoke. Or, at sixteen, she would begin to have sex with other boys her age. But the ultimate transformation came when she was forced into a sexual affair w...
