I've been thinking about my mother, Josephine, a lot lately. Partly because I have heard news of her, partly because Mother's Day is coming up, partly because it was around this time of the year when I made the decision to have no contact with her until she agreed to talk to me about the past, and partly because Uma Thurman has been really visible lately** and Josie bears more than a passing resemblance to her - especially when she's kicking ass and taking names. I have a photo of her, she's about 30, as tiny as a child, sitting on a pew in my dad's apartment. She is wearing a beautiful sky-blue and white-trimmed v-neck ball jersey that is STILL not as blue as her eyes. Her skin is very tanned, her hair is cut short, and pale blonde, and she is smiling a little. It's my favorite picture of her, and the one I showed to Stewart and Chris to say "See? She looks just like her." They agreed. U.T. has always been my favorite actress, too, and I never considered that this might be one of the reasons...
I think about her a lot, anyway. Probably every day, almost every time I look in the mirror, or every time I do something especially hard without anyone's help. It's hard to separate he good from the bad sometimes, especially lately, since I realize that I have ceased to exist in her mind, but the fact of the matter is that she is stamped on every cell of me. (One of my closest high school friends said that I resembled Uma a little (ha!), and I said "No, I just look a little like my mother, who looks a LOT like her...")
I am proud of who I am, and so many of my best qualities, and definitely most practical, survivor qualities come from her. She is tough and clever, smart and strong, stubborn and likeable, beautiful and powerful - she is an amazing person. In fact, there have only been two things that I have ever seen or known her to be unable to do, and unfortunately they were both very important things. In my opinion, they were the most important things, but the reality of those things disappeared along with the reality of me.
I will never stop hoping that change will come, but the person closest to me in the world assured me that this was a hollow hope, and that maybe I was the wrong kind of optimist. Oh well, I could be - and have been - worse things. And maybe he'll be wrong. Wouldn't that be nice?

Today's poem is about my mother.
I wrote this in 1992.

Diving from the Leaf River train trestle

When mama told the story,
I could feel my toes
hooking around the warm edge
of the outside rail of the trestle.
The breeze from the river
must have curled up against the small of her back
and pushed a little --
I could feel the sway.

I know my spitfire mother
never jumped feet first,
tucking up like a roly-poly,
cannon-balling into the muddy water.
I think she must have spread her arms
and flexed like a baby bird,
filling her bony ribcage
with green summer air.

(Here, I held my breath
and shivered a little,
knowing she wouldn't
change her mind...)

Springing up
on the balls of her feet,
trigger release,
arcing into the open space
like a short, white rainbow -
did she even have time to squint
at the sun on the surface
before her thin body wedged
into the water?

Cold,
then nothing more
than a second
before she curved along
the slick river bottom
and, flexing again,
arced back toward the sky.

***

Happy mother's day to all of you. Hug your mothers if you can, and if you see mine, hug her big, and twice, but don't tell her the second one's from me, her non-existent kid.
-Sam


* when Brian met Autumn (my cousin, Josie's niece), the VERY first thing he asked her about was the story of her pulling the gun on the sheriff when she was only 17 and veryvery pregnant with me...
**MAN, is 'Kill Bill' a good movie, too.