Your mother
breezes down the stairs
quips that she cannot join us for pot pies
because she would have to put on underwear
a thing my mother would never say.
At sixteen
after a sensible family dinner,
I drove to my friend's townhouse
where she and her mother would be found
folded up on a patio chairs
dining on chocolate and cigarettes
the wild instability of which
I would breathe in with hungry drags
Lizzy’s mom kept cereal in the oven
had a untamed kitchen drawer
that would flop off its tracks
clumsily revealing its contents,
the most interesting to our eleven-year-old
criminal minds
were the loose Benson & Hedges strewn among the
rubber bands and packs of playing cards.
My mother’s drawers would not flop
had tidy compartments
a spot for the Chapstick
scissors labeled MOM’S
My boyfriend’s mother,
only fifteen years older than her son,
asked us how our sex was going
one day over brunch
said the words blow
job
as I attempted to steadily chew my eggs
She was fantastic
I never got to wear that child’s flush of mortification
the discomfited rolling of eyes
never dug up the nude photos and loose joints
we found in the nightstand at Heather’s house.
Never argued over politics or religion or my
declarations at the table that meat, suddenly, was murder.
Never heard the confusing muffled moans
in the middle of the night
or had anything to add when morose friends showed cut
marks
and called their moms bitches.
My mother is not a character
she is cool hands on a fevered forehead
fresh, ironed sheets
reading in the shade instead of rolling in the waves
dinner at six o’clock
hand sewn costumes on Halloween
merengue cakes ringed with exotic fruit
In the parking lot of a Grateful Dead show
I watched naked blonde children
spill out of an old van
and envied their little, unkempt lives
a puppy on a rope chewing at the fleas in its toes
they have no bedtimes, I considered.
A fact their therapists must now find intensely
interesting.
