content warning: family dysfunction/emotional abuse

A Song for the Girls without Mothers

My Mom named me, her tongue curled towards the retreating sun.
Then she left.

She hugged me sometimes, told me I was beautiful,
But she’d only tell me that
After she’d scream at me, wineglass in her dripping fingers,
Looking past me, hazy towards a ballroom she could no longer enter
The sight giving her nightmares
That she gave to me like Mike & Ikes
Wondering why I didn’t understand her meaning.

She’d buy us groceries. Presents on holidays,
A grand piano
And a luxe sweet sixteen.
But when I asked her if she loved me, she blinked,
And turned away, towards the TV screen.

She scared me once, almost passed out near a hottub
In the middle of the night. Then, she began drunkenly singing Adele towards our sleeping neighbors
A concert she didn’t know I was attending
And the way her voice hitched on high notes
Made me shiver in my loose fitting henley top
Made me want to run away from her
Leg on knee on fiercest might.

Or, when my mentor told me
She would take me to my wedding
If my mother wasn’t able.
The subtext, the highlighted words,
The meanings hidden under meanings like blankets on blankets
In our linen closets, the ones we shed
When we no longer need.

The sadness I felt at the lovely words
She was saying to me. The way mother always sounds
Like the space between songs,
Or, sometimes,
Like a beating.

I ran away from her so fast I curliqued myself in heat rash.
I cried so hard the carpet in my bedroom turned another shade of green.
I was so scared of her that I listened to music on the smallest volume, so she didn’t know
I was in the bathroom brushing my teeth.
I hid behind rocks; I thought of ways to play hide and seek and make her count longer
Before coming to find me.

& when my friends laugh and say how tedious it is to call their mothers back,
Or how they’ve had their moms spaghetti a million times.
I catch the sadness like a violin string, plucking and too brassy
And trite.
I stare at those girls with their high ponies and their safeties and their memories
And I want to rip them all out
Like pearls on kitchen floors, skidding.
I want to tell them to stop talking – for the love of god –
Or make space for mean mothers,
Or there’s gotta be a way to listen
To find a world where there are songs about the girls
Without their mothers
Kayaks without oars,
Paddling
Their way back to
Put their naked feet
On the longing, sea-glass breaking, midnight tides roaring–
Shoreline. A place I can step, and be automatically welcomed,
Motherless, and dripping.