My Mother is Not a Character

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.