Happy Mother's Day beautiful mommies!!
Mother’s Day
Tomorrow is Mother’s Day
I have asked my children for a work party,
for Decisiveness, Art Direction.
The back deck to be readied for summer,
pots planted with flowers.
And
I have a stack of enlarged photographs
I have a stack of empty frames,
I have waited too long to fill and hang them.
My subjects are teenagers
and now prefer not to see themselves
with daisy chains in their hair,
posturing young bucks don’t want
to be reminded when they straddled
bikes with training wheels,
no matter how proud their expressions.
Because no 8 by 10 glossy could do justice,
I curated nothing.
I have compassion for their diffidence,
hated a family portrait taken when I was a teenager,
showing me chubby and in an awkward style phase,
some punk rock get up I couldn’t pull off.
But it was the only picture with all of us,
a complex step and combined second family,
even a horse, two dogs and a cat were captured and posed.
I still turn the fading photograph over
if a suitor and I visit my mother’s house.
Someone once told me she could never remember
her children’s childhoods once they were grown,
but they visited her in dreams.
This is the most terrifying truth I have realized.
The other night though,
my son was a baby again,
I was holding his small hands
as he learned to walk.
My mom can’t tell me stories of my early life,
she is apologetic when I ask for details.
I thought it was because she didn’t really love me,
but I know now those precious moments were springs,
you can’t exactly locate their origins,
but the soil was nourished nonetheless.
Despite offering my very cells, my youth,
decades of attention and attendance,
when my own children ask for the hour they are born,
I must peek at birth certificates,
yet the wanting I have for their happiness
is deeper than lineage,
it is the making of all myth and meaning.
I have a call out to my mother.
I love her voicemail message.
There is something sweet and settled in her voice
that wasn’t always there when I was young.
I have dialed her,
knowing she is out of town,
just to hear it.