The Face-to-Face Encounter by Chelsea Dingman

Twenty minutes away from this house is a house without rooms
	and cabinets and foal-dark carpeting and a woman
who wears my mother’s face to clean the dishes and the linoleum
		floors and the delicate white lace underclothes
that she wears on special occasions and the problem of loneliness
        in the form of a crawlspace. In some ways, I lost my mother 
when my father died. Before the house was gutted. Before someone changed
        the locks. Before she began disappearing in front of me, like her 
mother, as I told her about my day from the kitchen
		doorway. Sometimes, I think writers are just 
people who weren’t listened to as children, and so remain strange 
        everywhere but in language. Sometimes, when I say mother
I’m speaking about my father. I’m trying to figure out what I owe 
        a future where I am not, and that is different. My grandmother, 
in the years before she died, endured the slow siphoning of her 
        mind. How sad but maybe kind, I’d thought, not to remember 
being cruel or rash, nor the cratered body in the bathroom mirror, Christmas 
		baking and days out by the lake, playing gin
rummy or solitaire, knowing that she was dying, that she would die
	in a strange room in her mind. In a care facility, how fast she forgot 
to feed herself, the names for her children. Their faces. Is one life 
		exchanged for another when one retires, or might retiring be
how one turns away from a life, from aging, from aphasia, 
	from winter’s slag? My mother picks my daughter up from school 
every Thursday. Early retirement she took after her mother died 
	and her partner retired. I wish we were closer, but I don’t 
say that. I wish I’d let her know me instead of what she imagines 
		of me. My young sons left home this year to imagine a life 
apart from mine, which is all I’ve wanted for them amid the waiting 
	mothering amounts to. The indignity of days where they are not
not breathing or eating or fighting now I face. The presence of their absences, 
		deathless as a dream I have that I will dream of them
even when I am dead. Freud put too much on mothers. I find myself 
	getting loud lately, as I get older, yet I am too much 
my single mother’s eldest daughter to be heard speaking from within
	my own name. It is perhaps living that one never gets over. 
To live alone after living inside someone is to live within the ellipsis—
		the constancy of it, the chaos. I don’t know 
	how to function without belonging to its care
scarcities, its precarities. Today, in Windermere, I wake to someone
		sleeping in every room. Whirring car engines
drift up through the windows with the sound of sprinklers and ticking
                           insects. It’s May. My mother texts to say
she’s having a good day. Books crawl off my nightstand, demanding
	to be read. The wind, threaded with rain. Someone touches my shoulder
		midday, and I know without looking it is my middle child
making sure I’m here, I’ll be here. Without him yet knowing quite how
	each of us are responsible for miles of voices and burned down words
		            inside which were once our houses and rooms
        and unmade beds, all the people we’ve looked in the face 
who died anyway. I think it is my mother’s face he sees 
        when I turn to face him. I think it is my father’s face.

Chelsea Dingman is the author of Thaw and through a small ghost (UGA Press), and I, Divided (LSUP). A PhD Candidate and soon-to-be Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Alberta, her current work draws on research supported by funding from the Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada.

29 June 2026