“Vessel” from Worldly Girls Tamara Jong
EXCERPT
“Vessel” from Worldly Girls Tamara Jong
Much like my delayed shoe tying, I couldn’t tell the time for the first five years I was in school. I struggled with math, and the numbers on the clock only confused me. I had this Snoopy watch I loved, mainly because the minute hand was a tennis ball. I got by okay by bluffing my way through with my Consumers Distributing digital watch. I even fooled my parents somehow, but maybe because of their own drama, they didn’t notice I couldn’t tell time.
When I was twenty, I got the watch Ma had on her before she died. I studied it for a long time before I stuffed it in my drawer. It’s a gold-coloured Timex, the lustre faded, adding to its charm. It has a small oval face, stick bar markers instead of numbers, and a stretch band that used to catch the little blond hairs on her wrist.
Some parts of me act as a reminder of Ma. My voice, my laugh, my expressions. My sister, Angie, and my father tell me this. When I look in the mirror, I struggle to see what they see.
Ma’s boyfriend, Owen, paid for their trip to Cancun, taking my little brother, Tommy, along. Ma was going to pay him back.
On the plane, Ma told Tommy that she had insurance in case anything happened to her. It was a sunny, hot day when Ma gave Owen her watch and keys to take care of while she and my brother went for a swim. I wish Owen had gone instead.
When I get the watch, it is given to me in a plastic sandwich bag.
· · ·
I’ve only kept a few of Ma’s belongings since she died. I have handfuls of her old family photos, the ones that Auntie Marg and Diane claim she took from them. I feel guilty about wanting to keep them but not guilty enough to return them. It’s easy to keep what belongs to another when you have shouldered mountains of regret.
Ma was a poet, and Auntie Marg said one of Ma’s poems was about drowning. My brother told me he found another one of Ma’s poems that only had four lines. I’m not a poet, so I don’t know if it was any good. I once contacted Concordia to see if there were records of Ma’s poetry back when she was a student, but since she was no Mordecai Richler, no one replied.
· · ·
My sister and I didn’t have much of a relationship with Ma later in her life. We let God’s laws separate us.
My sister said maybe Ma’s watch came back with her luggage from Cancun, which ended up in her Saint-Laurent apartment.
Ma had asked me to clean her place while she was on vacation. I said no, but planned to anyway because she was my mother.
That doesn’t matter now.
· · ·
When it was time to clear out Ma’s apartment after she died, my father came along. Dad was quiet a lot of the time we were there with him. He ended up keeping one of her favourite John Abbot College sweatshirts. He started crying at her kitchen table and said that she was the only woman for him. I had never seen him this way, and it shook me. Ma divorced my father when I was fifteen and effectively divorced us kids too. In many ways, God had replaced my father, standing in for him when it felt like he had abandoned us. My love for God would alter and betray me, but at twenty, I knew everything and, of course, nothing.
—from Worldly Girls by Tamara Jong, published by Book*hug Press, 2025. Reprinted with permission. Copyright Tamara Jong.
Tamara Jong’s powerful memoir documents the slow unravelling of her connection to her faith and the tragic history of her fractured family, shining a light into the dark corners of memory that have haunted her well into adulthood.
With clear-eyed honesty and written in sparse yet searing prose, Jong collects the fragments of her unconventional childhood, with her busy schedule of Jehovah’s Witness meetings, Bible study, and door-to-door ministering. She also details her emotionally distant father and alcoholic mother’s tumultuous marriage, her deep yearnings to become a mother after the loss of her own, and her struggles with mental health.
After corporate and spiritual burnout, and a suicide attempt at the age of thirty-two, Jong comes to understand that the strict religion she had long believed would protect her prevented her from pursuing her true sense of self. In a story that traverses a wide range of potent themes—including addiction, estrangement, grief, infertility, and forgiveness—the ultimate message of Worldly Girls is one of hope as Jong finds her own path to healing and belonging.
Tamara Jong. Photo credit: Deepa Rajagopalan
TAMARA JONG is a Tiohtià:ke (Montréal) born writer of Chinese and European ancestry. Her work has been published in the Humber Literary Review, Room Magazine, and The Fiddlehead, and has been both long and shortlisted for various creative non-fiction prizes. She is a graduate of The Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University, and a former member of Room Magazine’s collective. She currently lives and works on Treaty 3 territory, the occupied and ancestral lands of the Haudenosaunee, Anishinabewaki, Attiwonderonk, and Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation (Guelph, ON). Worldly Girls is her first book.