Some of my favorite moments

Are watching my mother deal with her mother

Because the matriarch does not give a damn anymore

She announces her presence with

Loud boisterous tones and bright red lipstick

Her face glowing with the security and strength of her position

My mother stands behind her

Hissing like a snake about to strike,

The venomous word

Implying the priority of the position

“mother.”

I giggle in the corner because

I love watching my mother play daughter

Seeing her feel the gut wrenching embarrassment

The flexing feeling of uncomfortable organs

Swimming in absurdity

The feeling that,

“Ugh my mother is so embarrassing”

“because she…”

Because she

What?

I don’t know

I can’t remember anymore what my mother says that is uncomfortable

But I remember the emotion

The disdain at her lack of refinement

Or the hatred of the way she said that

Word

My God my mother

I tell friends

And it’s only when they repeat back to me

My own criticism for a woman they do not know

Or understand do I remember to say

My mother lost her best friend and sister

To cancer

At the age of thirty-five

And she had to pull herself out of bed everyday

To take her seven year old daughter to school

My mother was twenty-seven

Alone with a six-week-old baby

Because her husband left her

My mother took karate classes for ten years

And can kick your ass

My mother reads romance novels

My mother is in her element as a teacher

My mother makes up show tunes

When she makes peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in the morning

What have we done to our mothers?

It’s only when a male friend

Calls me “Mom”

For trying to plan

For trying to make sure everyone is having a “good time”

That I think of the question again

What have we done to our mothers?

Our mothers who are women

beautiful, kind,

Intelligent, mean, pedantic,

Frustrating, complex, insecure, lonely

Happy, amused, angry, funny

We, daughters are sometimes so cruel to our mothers

The body and soul that brought us into the world

We deny them their humanity

Wrenching it from their hands

This is ours now

Go be something else

Why this frustration?

Perhaps it is because everything in society screams at us

The eventual turning of time will deny you

Everything

You will loose the four inches of height

You have on her mother

Suddenly inherit her nose, her eyes, her mannerisms

And be thrown onto the generic pile of “woman”

In the corner

What a patriarchal way to perceive women!

Put into categories

Tiny boxes piled on shelves

Forgotten

As if everything I, she, we are

Can fit in a box

I will never be mother

She will never be hers

As we are all unique individuals

Let us celebrate our mothers

As we would any woman we know who

Brings us food when we are sick

Who is learning to play the cello

Who went to Spain last week all by herself

Who lives without a man

A woman who is feeling beautiful, sensual, intense, lonely and strong

All at the same time

Motherhood does not deny you your womanhood

Motherhood is everything on top of it