Mother, May I? (Part 1 of 3)

Somebody's Mother

Somebody's mother today

Will linger by her phone

Hoping one child will call

Before the day has flown.

Somebody's mother will weep,

Heartbroken and stunned tonight,

Because her children gone

Forgot to call or write.

Somebody's mother somewhere

Will kiss with lips of grief,

Portraits of children grown

And cry herself to sleep.

Often in my life, I tend to dwell on the hurts. I like to tell myself that it’s the intellectual thing to do: engage those mental and emotional wounds to better understand the pains they cause. But lately, I’m not sure that one is meant to understand pain. The body evidently doesn’t think so; it feels it and reacts to heal it as quickly as possible. And that works, as long as the splinter is in our flesh. 

But the splinters in our mind are a different matter, entirely. For some reason we feel that we can only get these “out” by contemplating them, ruminating over them and analyzing them. Many of us will find a way to blame ourselves for some of the splinters, and then begin a series of construction projects in and around each of them, inevitably making more out of them than they originally were.

The thing is…splinters are only meant to be removed. 

My mother and I separated when I was five. She left. My father and I. And just like those two, very short and no doubt grammatically incorrect sentences, that was life for a long time: my father and I, against the world, and my mother leaving, only the one time in reality, but in my heart? It felt like she left over and over. It was a sharp splinter and in my youth I only pushed it down, further and further. Until I couldn’t see it.

Forty years later the man my mother left us for died. I was as indifferent to his death as I was to her grief. My dad once told me that my mom had a saying she’d use with us kids (me and my half brother and sister) that used to drive him crazy. It was “You made your bed, now go lie in it.” Well. As my mother mourned and found herself suddenly all alone in world, I didn’t say that to her, but God help me, I thought it. Yeah, I know. Harsh. And we're just getting started.
TO BE CONTINUED NEXT WEEK…