loss and permission

Monday morning over coffee, gearing up for my day devoted to writing, I read a line in a blog by Lesley Wheeler that had me nodding slowly  How the death of one's mother, while usually pretty devastating, also entails this weird freedom.  My mom & her best friend used to joke, both having lost their mothers, one early, one later, that whatever mean thing they gossiped or said about someone else, that karma could not possibly do anything worse to them since their mothers were dead. This, I also feel sometimes. But the freedom in writing most of all, esp. since I am quite certain, even without the narrative of the last year of her life being a central part of FEED, there were poems in other parts of the book I would not have been comfortable with her seeing.  Or maybe "comfort" is not the correct concept.  I would not want to be hurtful, since that is not how intended it at all. The discussion of dieting and body image that involve her and my young self, are of course, the reality, but also I don't think they are things that would have done any good to my relationship with her. Which was actually a good relationship over all, though complicated by some things--her anxieties about me and my sister, my reluctance to share almost everything, but very much not some things (relationships, health & money issues b/c of those anxieties and her tendency to gossip.) There was much my mother did not know entirely.  But most of it was to keep her from worrying---which is also why I wouldn't have wanted her to see many of the poems that I would include in feed. 

I have no doubt that she did her best, as best as she could having had so much leveled at her and her body over her lifetime. In addition to the time she said, gazing into a hotel mirror, that she'd hated her body her entire life, she also once said something I did not include in the book, not because I was afraid of her reading it, but because it still makes me insanely angry at her in many ways.  I was probably in my early 20's, and we were probably talking about diets. About being fat, and she said very sadly "I would have wanted anything for you the two of you (me and my sister) except being fat."   It enraged me, and I fired back something nasty, I'm sure.  Because, in reality, there were so many things we could have been.  Stupid, or mean, or racist. Terminally ill or raging alcoholics, . By that time, I was already done with diet culture, so it was especially infuriating.  That of all the things she's have wished for us--happiness, money, intelligence, she was stuck on that. . And we turned out pretty well--both smart, well adjusted,  and talented (and my sister is far more gracious and saintly than I am.)  If fat was the worst thing we were, we were doing pretty good. 

But I probably never would have addressed this with her when she was alive.  Even if she still were.  And so much of the feed, had she realized what I was saying--that decade s of having body image and disordered eating issues was coming from her as much as it was coming from the culture at large. And really, it's all under the bridge, but becuase I am a writer, it never really is. When I invited her to a reading, the first she'd ever attended to hear me read my work, it was pretty early and poems from my first book.  I told her beforehand that the "mother" in those was not always her--in fact, virtually ever. . That I tell stories about other people in my poems, so to never assume they were autobiographical. This changed of course through the years, as I mined my own experience more directly. As I just had more experience to mine from and the lens of the artist.. I was always pretty safe though, because outside of readings, she rarely read my work outside of poems here and there in e-journals.  My books, though I dutifully gave her a copy she proudly showed everyone, she later admitted she usually only skimmed, since she didn't "get" them.  My sister once told me she had been mining her for info on my romantic life, and I laughed, since  all she really had to do was read the books. She didn't live long enough to see the book that gave that particular info she sought from that conversation (sex & violence), but so much was embedded in the other books if she'd only known how to read them.