Mirror of myself

Poetry & Prose

Admiring myself in the mirror

I’ve been traveling back and forth to see my mom since December. This was the fourth trip in six months. My partner and I flew in on May 12 and we got back home last Saturday. My mom is finally getting settled in assisted living, in spite of herself at times. She looks better than she has in a couple of years. Her skin is clear. Her hair, which she has washed and set every week, looks lovely, even better than when she went to her longtime hairdresser in Dallas. She’s finally getting the care she needs—and she wants to leave as soon as possible. She certainly doesn’t want to live with these old people.

When I pay attention, I see myself in my mother. They play a game at the assisted living called “baseball,” where they throw beanbags at a wooden target with holes for different bases. There are two teams, the red and the blue. Last week they were short of a complete team so they asked me to play on the blue team with my mom. I hit a triple and a single. All the players sat together, waiting their turn, lined up on two sides, on chairs or in their wheelchairs. After her turns, however, my mom would wheel herself so she was sitting between, not with, the two teams, with her arms crossed in front of her chest. It was clear she didn’t want to be there.

When I don’t want to be somewhere, I do the same thing. I close in by crossing my arms in front of my chest to close you out. We’re both extraordinarily stubborn. I call it persistence on good days, and it is, but I often go beyond persistent to stubborn. And everyone thinks they know everything in my family, and when I get around them any progress I’ve made in keeping my opinions to myself is gone.

I posted this poem¹ a couple of years ago but it seems fitting today.

The Mirror

Boys dipped
my mother’s hair in ink wells. 
She wore it long then,

in two braids of copper-blond. 
Those same boys’ sons 
called me “Pickle.”

When my red black death
smeared itself across 
white panties, she said,

I was the same age as you—
the unspoken threat I fought,
my breasts straining 

the cotton lace of my
blue training bra.
I try to imagine my mother

at thirteen, living in Homestead,
dungarees rolled to reveal
pale calves, 

blouse knotted at the waist, 
exposing a half-inch
of never sunburnt flesh.

The sailors whistled 
when they walked past our fence. 
I try to imagine her then

but see only myself at that age,
mowing the front lawn in my
bikini. Like her, I discover

wads of tissue in all 
my coat pockets. I own 
her breasts, 

the shuffle of her feet, 
that unsteady need to please, all her
silent screams.

---

Thank you so much for reading and spending a bit of time with me today. If you would like to read more of my poetry, my book Gathering the Pieces of Days celebrates the extraordinary in the ordinary moments of our days. You can get your copy from Unsolicited Press, Bookshop.org, or Asterism. If you use this link to check out all the books at Unsolicited Press, I do get a small commission.

1. “The Mirror” originally appeared in Red River River, 2004.