She stopped waiting for it a long time ago.
Not with bitterness. I want to be clear about that because the bitterness is the version people expect from this story and the story she actually lived is more complex and more dignified than bitterness, which would have required a continuing orientation toward the person who should have apologized, a keeping-open of the wound in order to feel the wound, and she is not a woman who has ever been interested in tending wounds that the tending itself is keeping open.
She did the work without the apology.
She raised the children and worked the jobs and managed the household and loved the people who needed loving and made the soup and held her mother at the end and drove to the appointments and packed the bag and stood in the waiting rooms of her own life with the book she was not reading, and she did all of it without ever receiving the acknowledgement that the weight was real, that the carrying was extraordinary, that the person who had contributed most to the making of a life had contributed most and this should have been seen and named and honoured before it was too late to honour it.
The apology did not come. It is not going to come.
I have had to make my own peace with that on her behalf, which is not the same as making her peace, which is not mine to make. I have had to understand that the absence of the apology does not mean the wrong did not happen, does not diminish the size of what she did, does not change what is true about her, which is that she was more than what anyone recognized her as, that her life was larger than the room it was given, that the recognition she deserved and did not receive was the world’s failure and not hers.
I am writing this so it is somewhere.
The record that the world did not make. The acknowledgement that came late and from a sideways direction, from a daughter who is old enough now to see the whole shape of what her mother did and is putting it in the only record she has access to, which is this page, which is imperfect and partial and the best she can offer.
You did more than you were given credit for. The credit was owed. I am paying what I can of it here, in this poem, with this inadequate and real and wholly meant thank you.
