looking back~this poem celebrates that precious time between father and mother before the child is born
Jardine/detail (visipix.com)
we lie in bed side by side
clasping hands
awaiting your arrival
if we are quiet
and still
and if we are patient
you will rise to the surface
of these warm waters
like some
giant sea serpent
brushing
the shore of my belly
we gasp in wonderous delight
as you somersault
in the waves of amniotic fluid
parading first a foot
then an elbow
kneeling reverently at this water’s edge
our souls overflow
with an awareness too huge to fathom
united
by the tides of our breath
to the great leviathan
inside my womb
After telling my son that he wasn’t allowed to date until he was 18 (I was only half-kidding), I shocked him at 15 with this (private) Facebook message:
I’d rather you have real sex–with a real girl–than use porn.
His response was priceless–and was actually in person–because as a mother I opted not to send my teenager a message with the words “porn” and “sex“–but instead invited him to read it on my laptop before deleting it.
It took him a moment before he “got it”–and then he drew a quick breath and attempted to suppress a shy smile, saying:
Woah…that’s intense.
I smiled too–satisfied that I had driven my point home (despite how it unnerved me.)
It’s important to me that my teen not confuse my parental attention to his choices as a lack of passion for life itself. I want him to know that I celebrate all that is good in life–including sex–but I want him to be intentional with his choices.
That’s how we ended up in a half-hour conversation around the word “whore” last week after he relayed a comedian’s skit that included the label.
“What does that mean to you?” I asked him.
Right away, he turned to leave the room, wishing he’d never stopped in to say goodnight to his parents or made the mistake of sharing something funny with his mother.
“Have a seat,” I said, with my–this is not an optional conversation voice–which I reserve for “these” kind of talks.
He sat himself down at the edge of my bed, prepared for a quick escape.
“So, what does ‘whore’ mean to you?” I asked again, keeping my tone light—while making sure he knew that this question was NOT going away.
He fumbled a bit and then said something like:
…That a girl is easy.
“What does ‘easy’ mean?” I probed, wondering where he was gaining this socio-cultural literacy and how much he had already been informed by it.
“Well how about guy?” I asked. “What are they called when they’re ‘easy’?”
Our conversation continued in this manner with me asking lots of questions with the aim of greasing his thinking away from convention so that his mind might open beyond these gender stereotypes.
Some of his responses were surprising (given that I was certain that I had the final word on the subject.) My son thoughtfully spoke to the “economics” and power dynamics of the male-female exchange and how that determined why women would be called “easy” and men wouldn’t.
I pressed him further on this distinction, reminding him that women wanted sex too. He was taken off guard by this response and then took me off guard with his own followup:
Mom, are you a feminist or something?
My husband and I looked at each other with suppressed smiles. We both wondered how it was that our son could live with this particular mother for 15 years without knowing this about her–and we also wondered where he had learned the concept of feminism–and what it actually meant to him.
“Ask your grandfather about that,” I said, knowing that my dad would love to give his grandson an earful about this particular first-born daughter of his.
“What would Poppop have to say?” he asked, still bewilderingly unclear on my stance.
“A lot!” I said, and then to his dismay, I began the next chapter of our bedtime lesson on culture and sexuality–with this new leading question:
There’s a lot of talk about the “right way” to use spanking as discipline–and to my beloved father’s credit, he always used it in a disciplined manner–only my body/spirit didn’t register the difference.
My family (before the fall), Circa 1981
“The past is an Aladdin’s lamp which (we) never tire of rubbing” Phillip Lopate
Sitting in Amy’s Bakery next to a plate smeared with jam and butter,
a half mug of hot cider in my hand,
the fog drifting over the river, and yoga in my
bones, I am the only one who jumps when a man drops his umbrella.
No one else even flinches.
I ask myself:
“What’s up?”
Deep breath, and I hear the hammers banging away at my therapist’s office–yesterday–and the sound of my dad’s footsteps coming up the stairs–a lifetime ago:
belt snapping
heart seizing
muscles tightening across my back and chest.
i cower in the corner of my bed;
while my vertebrae freeze with rage.
A voice rises from deep in my gut:
GET AWAY FROM ME!
But that is now;
Then, i only plead,
“No, Daddy, no!”
as I cover my thigh with my hand,
and scramble to fit even further into the corner
till my spine burns itself into the wall
and still,
i don’t disappear.
The belt slaps, once,
twice,
three times,
and i am…
Silenced
Like a dog
Some day…
SOME DAY!
i will escape this tiny body, this whimpering tone, and rise above him, like an evil genie out of a bottle,
green and black
terrifying
overbearing
booming with power and threat
and he will be vanquished
turned to dust.
Until then, I
speak up;
I fight injustice;
even though it always ends the same
spanked or sent to my room for hours
Until
the fall
of my freshman year at college;
home for the weekend;
playing the white baby grand in the parlor;
the theme song from “Endless Love.”
As he calls to me from his room above,
“Kelly Ann, Time for bed!”
My back bristles and hardens.
“Kelly Ann, did you hear me: Time for bed!” he hollers again
As I continue playing, finally dismissing his voice like he dismissed mine.
“KELLY ANN!” he booms, shaking my entire life.
I pound the keys.
I hear his footsteps down the stairs,
his 6 foot 4 body appearing in the doorway:
“If you want to see what happens then you can just keep on playing,” he says,
childishly, exposing his hand.
I twist from the keys and throw down all my cards.
“And if you want to see what happens you can just keep on playing…” I say back, mocking him, my hands on my hips, just like his.
Silence.
In two strides he crosses the room.
I rise to meet him in my power;
But i am not the genie;
i am 5 foot 2.
He strikes
once, twice…
Swiping my eye, my cheek
I fall
Stand up again
Hot words fly
We move from the piano
toward the couch
beside the marble table
where my grandmother, his mother, in what was once her house, lined pretzel gold fish to entice me to toddle across the room on my feet instead of my knees
He swipes a third time
and leaves me there
on the floor
I do not cry
I have won
or have i?
He has never hit me
like this before;
not like a wife.
I have always been
subordinate;
splayed out over his lap
pants down, age 4, 7, 9;
or bed shirt lifted above the thigh, age 10, 11, 12.
I stumble toward the kitchen for ice;
for a drink of water;
for my keys.
My mother arrives there in the dark, shrouded.
I hold back tears, knowing she’s come to comfort me;
but she doesn’t even look up when she says,
“You shouldn’t talk to your father that way.”
I am stunned, and suddenly I see her, really see her:
cloaked in a robe of fear,
unable to feel, anything,
leaving us each alone, in this dark kitchen, where we have laughed and confided and cooked his meals together.
“You need to know how to make mashed potatoes,” he once bellowed at me when she was gone.
He has hit her too: “Only once or twice when she couldn’t get control of herself,” he explained.
I drive the empty island blocks
toward my boyfriend’s house on Palm;
where everyone is sleeping.
He’s not home.
I lie down on the sectional under the bay window;
and stare at the street lights
bringing my fingers to my swollen cheek, my eye,
until the cold of the ice I placed there moves inside.
When my boyfriend arrives, he offers to go in my defense,
but he’s not much bigger than me,
and it is over now anyway.
I have swallowed it whole.
Alone.
My father often remarks
that one of us will leave
before I turn 18, adding,
“And it ain’t gonna be me,” he says with a snarl.
Didn’t his mother say the same thing?
In the same room?
Of the same house?
But it is he, who leaves, again,
when my mother takes a lover,
half her age,
my boyfriend’s best friend.
She thinks she’ll escape from her frozen life,
until she realizes;
that it’s her life’s pain that needs to thaw.
I return
to college;
and when that’s is enough distance between me and the pain at home,
when my sisters still call
to say,
“Mom is lying, drunk, on the front lawn,”
or
“The car window is smashed and there is blood,”
or
“Dad has called us horrible names, shouted terrible things about her,”
or that
“He’s threatening to send us back to her if we don’t behave,”
I open the doors onto Overbrook Avenue in Philadelphia,
and scream…
and then return to my studies,
putting an Ocean between me and that pain,
with a semester abroad;
so far away, that no one calls,
not even to say,
that my grandmother has died;
that her funeral has already taken place.
Lonely and adrift and estranged,
I anticipate
my father and his soon-to-be stepmother’s trip visit.
They check out of the modest hotel that he had me meticulously find;
and move into the Savoy at Her bidding.
My sister sleeps on my floor while they go shopping without us, and later, when they are out to eat, she orders room service from their palatial accommodations, delivered
in a silver tureen; and is later scolded at the price (and the audacity)
though they know nothing of the luxurious bath she took in their tub,
or how she lounged in the thick terry cloth robe.
At the restaurant, the next night, before he leaves,
we fight;
my father and I;
our hearts and tongues loosened by the succession of wine,
that my stepmother orders,
in the hope of dulling our connection.
We scream about my mother, my sisters,
about everything that’s been lost, needing someone
to blame, to hold accountable for all the pain.
I leave our velour booth
and stumble into the dark lobby, sobbing,
at the disarray of hearts that I cannot put back together.
I am 20 now.
My father follows me in quick strides;
Comes at me in the empty lobby;
Towers above and raises his hand;
To strike…
and
My Genie
Finally
Appears
I become twice his size,
no three times,
and a hiss leaps from my gut…
“DON’T you touch me!”
Stunned, he retreats
to the dinner party,
tells them,
in me,
he has seen both–
his (dead) mother
and his ex-wife.
Alone again, I crumble to the floor;
it is too much to be so strong
too hard to hold so much pain inside.
But he will never touch me again
and of this, I am sure.
The Empty Nest Diary 