Category: Poetry

My Mother’s Hands Are My Hands

Reading Time: 2 minutes

I noticed it at the sink.

Not in a mirror, not in a photograph, not in the slow way you might expect to notice it, with time to prepare yourself. At the sink, hands in the water, reaching for the dish cloth, and something in the angle of my wrist, something in the way the water ran off the back of my hand, made me stop. Made me go still with the dish cloth half-extended.

My mother’s hands.

These are my mother’s hands at the sink. The knuckles. The way the tendons rise when I reach. The particular geography of a hand that has done this exact work, this same dish cloth reaching, this same water running, for fifty years.

She is eighty now.

I am watching her become smaller in the way that some people become smaller, not diminished, but concentrated, distilled into the essential, the way a long piece of music resolves in the final movement into something you can hold. She is more herself now than she has ever been. Less patient with things that waste her time, more precise about what she loves, quicker to say so. Eighty years of knowing what matters and she is done performing uncertainty about it.

And I am her hands at the sink.

I used to think becoming my mother was a thing to resist. That was the deal I thought we had made with progress, with feminism, with the particular brand of wanting-more that my generation learned. We would be something other than our mothers. We would not repeat.

But her hands are capable hands. Hands that worked and held and made things. Hands that washed dishes for a family and never stopped working long enough to be acknowledged for the washing. Hands that are mine now, that carry her in them, that are going to carry me forward in someone else’s body someday, and I am standing at the sink and I am not afraid of it.

I am, a little, moved by it.

These are good hands. They come from good hands. That is enough to say.

My Son Calls Every Sunday

Reading Time: 2 minutes

He started it without being asked.

That is the part I did not expect. I had prepared for the adjustment of the empty nest the way I prepare for most things I am anxious about, by reading about it and talking to other mothers and developing a set of realistic expectations that included the understanding that adult children build adult lives and those lives are appropriately centred on themselves and not on the parents they came from, which is correct and healthy and the whole point of everything I tried to give him.

I had not prepared for the Sunday calls that he initiated.

Every Sunday, mid-morning, from wherever he is. The calls are not long. Thirty minutes, sometimes forty, sometimes shorter if he has somewhere to be. We talk about his week and mine and the small navigations of his life in the new city and I ask questions and try not to ask too many questions and he asks me what I am doing and I tell him and somewhere in the telling I understand that he actually wants to know, that the question is not maintenance, that he is genuinely curious about the life I am building in the absence of him, the same way I am curious about his.

We are becoming friends. That is the thing I am slowly understanding.

Not instead of mother and son. In addition to. The relationship is expanding into a new shape, adding a dimension that was not possible when he was a child who needed a mother to be a particular kind of thing, reliable and boundaried and somewhat knowable, not the full complexity of a person but the specific necessary portion of a person that a child can use. Now he can take the fuller version. Now he is interested in the fuller version. And I am learning to offer it, slowly, the way you learn any new mode of being in a relationship that has been one thing for a long time and is becoming something larger.

He called last Sunday and I was at the sea.

I picked up and he said: where are you, I can hear water. And I told him and he said: that sounds amazing. And I said: it is. And there was a small silence that was not an uncomfortable silence but a good one, the kind that happens between people who are comfortable enough to share a moment without filling it.

I am going to hold that silence for a long time.

My Body in the Morning Light

Reading Time: 2 minutes

I have not always been kind to it.

That is the plain truth of the relationship, the accounting of fifty-something years of a woman and her body that is not the accounting she would have chosen to give at thirty but is the one she can give honestly now, from this distance, with the perspective that only comes from having been in the body a long time and having a record of how the being-in-it went. Not always kind. Often demanding. Frequently treating the body’s needs as inconveniences rather than information, its requests as things to be managed around the schedule rather than the schedule as something to be built around the needs.

I stood in front of the mirror last week without flinching.

Not without noticing. I noticed everything. The way the body has redistributed itself over the years, the things that are different from the body at thirty and the things that are surprisingly unchanged, the new landscape of a body that has been somewhere and shows it. I noticed all of it and I did not flinch. I stood in the morning light, which is the light that tells the truth and does not soften anything, and I looked at this body that has carried me through everything, that has held the grief and the exhaustion and the burning and has kept going, that has been braced for years and is slowly learning to unbrace, and I said, not out loud but in the place where the real conversations happen: thank you.

Thank you for continuing when I did not give you adequate reason to.

Thank you for keeping the record when I could not look at it. Thank you for the shoulders that are a little lower now, for the jaw that is looser in the mornings, for the walk that has become a daily conversation rather than a commute. Thank you for knowing what rest was even when I would not give it to you and for still knowing it when I finally did, for being willing to receive it after years of being refused it, for not holding the refusal against me.

We are on better terms now, this body and I.

It still has its opinions about stairs. I am learning to find that funny rather than alarming. We are learning each other again, in this new season, at this slower pace, in this morning light that tells the truth and that I am finally, mostly, ready to hear.

Invisible Labour, Visible Now

Reading Time: 2 minutes

I have been counting it.

Not obsessively, not as score-keeping, but as witness, as the plain accounting of a woman who is finally old enough and rested enough and far enough from the middle of it to look back at the full shape of what she did and call it what it was. Labour. All of it. The visible kind and the invisible kind and the kind that was invisible precisely because it was performed so well that no one knew it was being performed, that it looked like simply the way things were rather than the daily result of someone’s effort and attention and expenditure of herself.

The school lunches for twelve years.

I have done this calculation. Not to present to anyone. Just to know. Twelve years, roughly two hundred and twenty school days a year, two children, not always elaborate, not always what they wanted, but made, thought about, put in the bag, the thinking-about being its own form of labour, the invisible management of preferences and nutrition and what was available and what would actually be eaten rather than traded or left at the bottom of the bag, that specific calibration that no one sees but that requires a running database of two small people’s needs and tastes that is updated daily without ceremony.

The emotional accounting of a family.

The tracking of who is okay and who is not and who needs what kind of attention and who is approaching a threshold and who needs to be left alone to manage and who needs to be gently asked about the thing they have not mentioned but that is in the room, which I could feel because I was always tracking, always with some portion of my attention on the temperature of the people I love, never fully off duty from the work of knowing how everyone was.

I am putting that work down now. Some of it. The portions that were never mine to carry.

I am keeping the love. I am releasing the surveillance. The children are adults and adults get to have their own interior lives without their mother monitoring the temperature. I am learning the difference between paying attention because I love them and paying attention because I am afraid of missing something, and I am trying to do more of the first and let go of the second.

The labour was real. I am naming it. I am not waiting for anyone else to name it. I name it myself and I put it in the record and that is enough. The naming is enough.

Learning to Receive

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Someone brought me flowers and I cried.

Not because of the flowers. Because of the being thought of. Because a person had stood in front of the flowers and thought: she would like these, and had carried that thought all the way to my door, and the distance between the thinking and the arriving is the whole of what undid me, the evidence of having been held in someone’s mind as a person who deserves flowers, which I apparently needed more than I knew.

I have not been good at receiving.

This is the honest accounting of it. I have been very good at giving, at anticipating what is needed and providing it before anyone has to ask, at the particular silent satisfaction of a woman who manages care so thoroughly that the care becomes invisible, which is its own trap, which means the care is never seen and therefore never returned because no one knows it was given. I built a life around giving of a quality and consistency that made it easy for people to take without noticing they were taking, and then I wondered why I was depleted.

The receiving required unlearning.

The specific unlearning of the deflection, the automatic redirection of any care offered my way, the habit of saying: oh no I’m fine, I don’t need anything, let me get that for you, the routing of the attention away from myself and back toward the other person so efficiently that no one ever quite managed to give me anything before I had redirected it. I did this for decades and called it low-maintenance and it was not low-maintenance, it was a refusal, it was a holding-at-arm’s-length of the very thing I most needed and did not know how to take.

I am practising saying thank you and stopping there.

Not thank you but. Not thank you however. Not thank you followed immediately by a gift returned in kind to rebalance the ledger and remove the debt of having been given something. Just thank you. Just the receiving. Just the standing in the fact of being cared for and letting it land, letting it actually touch the place it is aimed at rather than batting it aside before it arrives.

The flowers are on my table. They are yellow.

Every time I look at them I practise saying: I deserved these. Someone thought of me. That is enough. That is the whole of it. I deserved the flowers and I let them come.

I Let the Phone Ring

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Not always. Not as a policy. Just once, on a Wednesday afternoon when I was at the water and the phone rang and I looked at it and knew it was not an emergency, knew the difference between the ring that requires me and the ring that can wait, and I chose the water.

I let it ring.

This sounds like a small thing. For someone else it might be a small thing. For a woman who has been available by phone, by email, by the particular telepathy of a mother and a caregiver who is always slightly listening for the thing that needs her, always with some part of her attention allocated to the incoming, always at some level on call even when officially off, letting the phone ring was not a small thing. It was the size of a decision. It was the conscious choosing of the present over the available, which I have not always been willing to do.

The water was doing its thing.

The particular late-afternoon thing it does in October, the light going bronze and the surface catching it in the way that surfaces catch certain lights, making something beautiful out of the angle and the hour and the temperature of the air. I was standing in it. I was present in it. The phone rang and I looked at it and I put it back in my pocket and I looked at the water and the water did not know I had made a choice but I knew, and the knowing had a quality to it that I am still trying to name, something like reclamation, something like: this hour is mine, this water is mine, this particular bronze October light is mine and I am standing in it, fully, without the phone, without the incoming, without the part of me that is always slightly elsewhere managing the needs of the always-next thing.

I called back from the car.

Everything was fine. It was not an emergency. It was a call that could wait and waited and the world continued while it waited and I had had the water and the bronze light and the choice and none of that was taken from me by the waiting.

I am going to let it ring again.

I am going to let it ring more. I am going to practise the putting-back-in-the-pocket until it becomes a reflex, until the default is presence first and availability second, until the water gets as much of me as the phone has been getting for the last twenty years.

I Kept the Jar of Peanut Butter

Reading Time: 2 minutes

It was his brand. The kind I never bought before him.

The natural kind that separates and has to be stirred and he would stir it every morning, standing at the counter in his socks, not fully awake, methodical about the stirring in the way teenagers are methodical about the rituals that are theirs, that they have decided on without you, that belong to the version of themselves they are building in small domestic choices you are not supposed to notice but you notice everything, you have always noticed everything, that is the price and the privilege of being the mother.

He left in August.

I drove him. We loaded the car and I drove and we talked about practical things, the parking, the orientation schedule, where the laundry room was on his floor, whether he had enough hangers, the ordinary conversation of a practical woman managing her feelings by managing logistics because logistics are manageable and this is not.

I hugged him in the parking lot of his residence. I did not cry until I was back on the highway. I gave myself the highway. I think I earned the highway.

The jar was still in the fridge when I got home.

Almost full. He had not thought to take it. He would buy a new one there, he would have a new brand maybe, he would have a new fridge and new roommates and a new set of small morning rituals that I would not see, that would accumulate without my witnessing them, that would become the ordinary texture of a life I am no longer the primary author of.

I kept the jar.

I did not eat it. I moved it to make room for other things and I put it back. I do not know what I am waiting for. I know what I am waiting for. I am waiting for the part of me that knows he is fine, that he is more than fine, that he is becoming exactly who he was meant to become, to be loud enough to drown out the part of me that is standing in the kitchen holding a jar of peanut butter and missing the sound of his socks on the floor.

Both parts are true. I know both parts are true.

I keep the jar anyway.

I Thought I’d Be Ready

Reading Time: 2 minutes

I had years to prepare.

That is the irony. I had the whole of childhood to watch the leaving approach, to see it coming down the calendar like a weather system you track for years, that you know is coming, that you have made every practical arrangement for, the savings account, the university visits, the conversations about laundry and budgeting and how to talk to a doctor when you are far from home and feeling like you might be sick.

I was prepared for every practical thing.

I was not prepared for the particular quality of the silence.

Not the absence of noise, I knew there would be that. I was prepared for the noise to stop. What I was not prepared for was the texture of the silence, which is different from quiet, which is not peaceful in the way that the books about empty nesting promised me it would be peaceful, which is instead a specific silence shaped exactly like the person who is no longer filling it, a silence with a particular weight and temperature and smell, a silence that knows what it is missing and says so.

I had told myself I would enjoy it.

That is the lie I want to examine. The lie that the freedom would feel like freedom immediately. That I would wake up the first morning to the absence of morning chaos and feel relief rather than this particular hollowness, this sense of a purpose that has been central to everything suddenly asking to be renegotiated, to be replaced with something, only I do not know yet what the something is and that is the actual work, the work no one puts on the preparation list.

The preparation list does not include: figure out who you are when you are not primarily someone’s mother.

It should.

I am working on it. I am being honest that I am working on it, which is more than I could have said in those first weeks when I was telling everyone I was fine and fine was not a lie exactly but it was not the whole truth either and this is the whole truth: I thought I would be ready and I was not ready and that is allowed and I am doing it anyway.

In Praise of the Ordinary Tuesday

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Nothing happened today.

That is the true and complete account of it and I am writing it down because I want it in the record, because I spent too many years treating the nothing-happened days as the days between the real days, as the connective tissue of a life rather than the life itself, as the waiting room for the appointments and the milestones and the things worth telling people about.

The walk happened. The walk always happens now.

The light was doing the late-autumn thing. The neighbour’s dog acknowledged me with the ears, which is one level below the full-body wag but is still acknowledgement and still, I find, pleasing in the way that being recognized by any living thing is pleasing, which is more pleasing than I would have predicted before I started walking every morning and discovering what was out there paying attention to the same route I was paying attention to.

I made soup. The season’s first. The house held the smell of it through the afternoon.

I read for two hours in the chair. Good reading, the kind where you look up and the afternoon has moved in a way you did not track because you were somewhere else, inside the book, inside the particular gravity of a well-made sentence that holds you the way good sentences do, the way they go on working in you after you have moved on to the next one.

He came home and we made dinner together and the making of it was its own conversation, the particular kind of conversation that happens when your hands are occupied and the pressure to be interesting is off and you can just say things, the things that are just things, not important, not worth telling, just the texture of two people’s days making contact in a kitchen over vegetables and the familiar choreography of two people who have been making dinner together for a long time and know where the other person is going to be without having to look.

Nothing happened today.

Everything happened today. It happened in the ordinary register, in the key of Tuesday, in the unremarkable and irreplaceable texture of a life being actually lived rather than performed or managed or endured. I was in it. I was present in it. I want that in the record: today was a Tuesday and I was here for it and it was good and I did not waste it waiting for something else.

I Stopped Explaining Myself

Reading Time: 2 minutes

It happened gradually and I did not plan it.

There was no morning when I decided I was done with the explaining, done with the pre-emptive justification of my choices to rooms that had not asked for it, done with the particular habit of a woman who had learned that her decisions required context in order to be tolerated, that arriving at a conclusion without showing her work first was considered arrogance in a person with her body and her gender and her long history of being assessed before she spoke.

I just stopped.

Someone asked why I had retired when I did, the implication in the question being that it was early, that there was more I could have done, that the departure required an accounting. And I said: it was the right time. And I did not add anything. I let the sentence stand without scaffolding and something in the not-adding felt like a muscle I had not used in years, a muscle I had not known I still had, a small and specific strength in the saying-enough-and-stopping.

I have been explaining myself since I was old enough to know that my explanations were being graded.

In school and in institutions and in meetings and in the rooms where the door opened and you were expected to justify your presence in it, to prove in real time that the letting-in was warranted. I became very good at the justifying. I could anticipate the objection and pre-empt it, could frame my choices in the language that made them legible to the people whose legibility I needed, could manage the impression I was making in the gap between what I thought and what I said.

I am tired of the gap.

At this point in my life I would like my thinking and my saying to be more or less the same country. Not cruelly. Not without consideration for what other people need. But without the layer of translation that was always for someone else’s comfort and not mine. Without the performance of uncertainty when I am not uncertain. Without the hedging that made my knowledge smaller and more palatable for rooms that were made uncomfortable by a woman who simply knew what she knew.

I know what I know.

It was the right time. That is the whole of the answer. I am done explaining why.