my mother raised
three children
to be served
paranoid that any of us should
feel overburdened or have
anything done unwell �
which is to say, imperfectly � she did
it all herself: dishes, laundry;
and spent the sunny hours baking
in bad lighting, where petty
office battles and flourescence�s
endless quarrel with aluminum
raged. she wrote briefs
that wouldn�t let her rest, like
her mother-in-law whose mind
had phased back, over her eighty-six years of
midnites, to the lopsided, clumsily-
formed moon of childhood
Why not American rice? she�d
say petulantly evening after
evening when confronted noxiously
with cous cous. My mother strove
not to let impatience show while we children
snickered.
my grandmother called me “pepi,”
the second name of an unknown aunt
who died young from, my normally unromantic
father tells me, a broken heart:
her husband made her choose between
her ailing, fragile mother,
and him: cruel man: whose heart
wouldn�t give way like a crab under
such a mallet? The subtle lesson
of this was, Don�t intermarry.
I got her name and my mother got
her burden: a mother-in-law
whose damp sighs clouded
the inside of the windows as she and her
dangling armflesh lumbered up and down
the stairs at night, calling “Marge?” Once in my bathroom
on the top floor, she collapsed
and lay like a de-shelled mollusk
on the white tile til the white ambulance came
and white men lifted her onto a white stretcher
and took her away
After that, the waning of her mind accelerated
like a wind-up toy my little brother propelled
toward a wall. She died in a hospital.
My mother never said a word
throughout and if my father grew impatient with
her later, I never doubted he loved her
for that. My mother who lay the
job she wanted, the helping-people job,
on the altar to help us instead
three pampered children who sighed
and bitched and poemed our way
through 13 years of expensive Jewish school
returning home to ask Dad questions
when we had them and inform soapy-
handed Mom what different rabbis
ruled was the proper way to clean.
She invariably listened and she still
feeds the dog first because in sixth grade,
I told her to. Taking advantage of her compulsion
for order, we carelessly left smears and piles
for her to rearrange: in explosions,
sometimes, she reminded us that this
was selfish, and we were contritely diligent
for a while.
she wanted us to be mannered, sociable,
attractive, and polite, but while I hid
from puberty�s invasion in tee-shirt tents,
she allowed me � even as I did
so (reading instead of running, remaining
stubbornly content in my circle
of familiar friends) she called me pretty;
wisely, she kept
her frustrations sheathed.
essentially, she gave me freedom
not leashing me with even modest obligations
to the house
where she whiled away nearly all
of her out-of-office time.
and when I got into my first choice
college, twenty-pounds lighter
between the shedding of weight and angst;
contact-ed, gelled, expressive, Express-ed;
she built a Mayan temple from
the surplus bumper-stickers she ordered
from the school store
but never once said “I told you
so.” I�ll be a mother someday � it�s possible,
even likely, but my generation wasn�t raised
to sacrifice like that; to bite our lips
and bide our time — I don�t know how I�ll handle
motherhood. hopefully better than daughterhood.
and hopefully my mother, a perfectionist
to the end, will instruct me: what rice to cook,
and for how long, and when.