Today is the 54th* birthday of the woman who carried me, albeit reluctantly in her tiny body.
Every day I am trying to come to terms with the fact that we will probably never speak or hold each other again. I can give myself the small comfort that she is happy in love, that my brothers and she still have a relationship, that she is young and healthy and beautiful and strong, and that maybe she is comforted by the fact that there is an ache and void in me that will never be filled by anyone else. It's sad to say and to think that someone might be pleased by your pain - especially your mother - but I know this woman fairly well and I can imagine that the thought of that particular pain might bring her pleasure. If there's nothing else that I can give her on her birthday, nothing other than spending the day with my usual constant loss of her magnified to the point of unavoidable sadness, then so be it. It is an honor and a recognition of a sort. She is never forgotten, but especially not on this day.
I have a picture of her, in black and white, she is about 8 maybe, and she is standing on a chair in her mother's dining room. She is wearing an angel costume, a long white shift and a foil halo above her almost white hair. She is beautiful, of course, and has a sweet, proud smile on her face. I joke about the irony of this photo when people see it in my album, but it is dear to me. I also have one of her and her sister standing beside a helicopter. She is younger, maybe 5, and she has a big bandage on her skinny little leg. She is squinting a little, and looking like any child made to pose for a photo when they'd rather be looking at - or knowing my mother, flying in - the helicopter. In this picture it is the bandage that touches my heart. I wonder how she got hurt, and if it left a scar, and if it did, did I ever see the scar as a kid and wonder what happened.
I suppose in time I will have wondered about all these things, her as a child, a teenager, a woman, until she is real to me in some other way and not just this constant ache and lifetime of painful memories. Maybe by being apart we can love each other in a way that our real lives never made possible. Who knows. For now, it's just hurt.

I looked hard to find these poems, and I posted the lyrics to a John Mayer song that means a lot to me too.


Anne Sexton - The Breast

This is the key to it.
This is the key to everything.
Preciously.

I am worse than the gamekeeper's children
picking for dust and bread.
Here I am drumming up perfume.

Let me go down on your carpet,
your straw mattress -- whatever's at hand
because the child in me is dying, dying.

It is not that I am cattle to be eaten.
It is not that I am some sort of street.
But your hands found me like an architect.

Jugful of milk! It was yours years ago
when I lived in the valley of my bones,
bones dumb in the swamp. Little playthings.

A xylophone maybe with skin
stretched over it awkwardly.
Only later did it become something real.

Later I measured my size against movie stars.
I didn't measure up. Something between my shoulders was there.
But never enough.

Sure, there was a meadow,
but no young men singing the truth.
Nothing to tell truth by.

Ignorant of men I lay next to my sisters
and rising out of the ashes I cried
my sex will be transfixed!

Now I am your mother, your daughter,
your brand new thing -- a snail, a nest.
I am alive when your fingers are.

I wear silk -- the cover to uncover --
because silk is what I want you to think of.
But I dislike the cloth. It is too stern.

So tell me anything but track me like a climber
for here is the eye, here is the jewel,
here is the excitement the nipple learns.

I am unbalanced -- but I am not mad with snow.
I am mad the way young girls are mad,
with an offering, an offering...

I burn the way money burns.


Stevie Smith - Mother, Among The Dustbins

Mother, among the dustbins and the manure
I feel the measure of my humanity, an allure
As of the presence of God, I am sure

In the dustbins, in the manure, in the cat at play,
Is the presence of God, in a sure way
He moves there. Mother, what do you say?

I too have felt the presence of God in the broom I hold,
in the cobwebs in the room,
But most of all in the silence of the tomb.

Ah! but that thought that informs the hope of our kind
Is but an empty thing, what lies behind? --
Naught but the vanity of a protesting mind

That would not die. This is the thought that bounces
Within a conceited head and trounces Inquiry.
Man is most frivolous when he pronounces.

Well Mother, I shall continue to think as I do,
And I think you would be wise to do so too,
Can you question the folly of man in the creation of God?
Who are you?


Daughters - John Mayer

I know a girl
She puts the color inside of my world
She's just like a maze
Where all of the walls all continually change
And I've done all I can
To stand on the steps with my heart in my hand
Now I'm starting to see
Maybe it's got nothing to do with me

Fathers be good to your daughters
Daughters will love like you do
Girls become lovers who turn into mothers
So mothers be good to your daughters, too

Oh, you see that skin
It's the same she's been standing in
Since the day she saw him walking away
Now she's left cleaning up the mess he made

So fathers be good to your daughters
Daughters will love like you do
Girls become lovers who turn into mothers
So mothers be good to your daughters, too

Boys you can break
You find out how much they can take
Boys will be strong and boys soldier on
But boys would be gone without warmth of a woman's good, good heart
On behalf of every man, looking out for every girl
You are the god and the weight of her world

So fathers be good to your daughters
Daughters will love like you do
Girls become lovers who turn into mothers
So mothers be good to your daughters, too
So mothers be good to your daughters, too
So mothers be good to your daughters, too.

I am hoping that today finds you close to your mothers and your daughters, and wishing you happy birthdays and
Much love,
-s


* I think.