mothers and other losses
One of my mother's most often and memorable quotes during my rather difficult teen years was "You will miss me when I'm gone." Usually flung about in the midst of a fight, or sometimes, just jokingly. I was not a particularly rebellious teen in the way of boys and bad grades, but more in that I had a particularly stubborn streak I swear I inherited from both parents and a very smart mouth. This led to squabbles over cleaning and laundry and dishes that lasted through most of my teens, waning as I entered the latter half and went off to college for a semester states away. This was almost a release valve, and when I returned my second semester and remained for four more years as I finished my degree, things occasionally bubbled, but were mostly calm.
In 2018, I wrote a whole book about mothers and daughters and the havoc they can wreak on each other. I worried I was being too harsh sometimes, my childhood overall having been very good, even with those turbulent teen years. But there were patterns of behavior and attitudes toward bodies and food and diet culture that had been laid in the groundwork on childhood and festered through my teen years and early adult life before I even realized they were there. I don't blame her, anymore than you can blame weather. Her own struggles persistent through her entire life. In the last weeks of her life, she often criticized the body that was failing her, even as she ate less and less and dwindled.
It was definitely probably a book I would not have showed her were she still alive, and in many ways I was processing my own grief through that book. (there is a little of this in the RUINPORN manuscript as relates to my father and the more recent loss of a second parent. Though my relationship with him was not even remotely as wrought or complicated.) I think in the wake of my mother's death, we were actually able to grow closer. And even perhaps being there at his death was a better circumstance, horrible as it was. I did not dream, unlike her, that he was alive night after night and I had to break the news to him of his demise over and over again. Each time, in that moment, remembering it again myself as if I had forgotten.
Every year since 2018, I have skirted Mothers Day like its a pool of quicksand, mostly trying to avoid it entirely. (This year, we have some plans to get takeout and watch a movie with J's mom, who lives just a few blocks away, so I'm not sure how open those wounds will be.) last night, I was recording some more poems from my very first book and wound up selecting "Nebraska"--a poem of which there are probably around half a dozen versions floating around in journals, diaries, and chapbooks before it was included in THE FEVER ALMANAC. Before my mother first came to any of my readings in the early aughts, I was careful to tell her beforehand that the mothers in my poems were not her. That they were slippery and sometimes fictional. That they were sometimes dead or missing or even just ghosts of mothers.
"Nebraska" was a little closer to home...a speculation of sorts on the very real details of my grandmother, her mother, who had died when I was 8 of a blood clot following a freak accident. This poem, however, finds her much earlier, as a teenager in Blair, NE, where she met my grandfather at 14, 5 years older than her, and married him. How different the world was and her life than even my mother's, who had met and married my dad in her late twenties. Or me, who planned at the time to never marry. The sort of limitations that starting down that path so unbelievably early Of birthing three children over the next few years when you were still one yourself.
Anyway, it seemed a perfect poem to post on Mother's Day somehow, even though I have an entire book of poems, FEED, that sorts things out with my mother and me. That book still feels raw, even three years after publication.
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