A Poem, or Something, About Mother's Day, Neil Gaiman and Carnivals
I want to shrink inside of myself. I walk slightly askew and my waist has thickened. I gave birth once and parented thrice, I doctored entirely too much. Let me give this advice.
Don't take me advice, but rather crawl into the hole in the wall leading to the Other Mother where you might find better, button eyes. You might find weird and wild and wise women in disguises. Women baking magic cookies. Aromatic bread rising. Enterprising
Women make poor mothers. Clara Schumann, for example, always had other things to do. The fact is your career and ovulation peak together. And even while neglecting their children, women physicians make two million dollars less than men over their time in the profession.
I will make the concession that being a doctor is not an excuse for prison kid. I did the best I could but it was never enough and Other Mother, the one I dream about, would've put the lid on the drugs and the drugs and the drugs pervading our child's beautiful body. Invading their heart.
Though they say it was not because of us, still we are broken apart.
Other Mother might have breast fed longer, not rounding on the wards or taking exams. Time off to tickle toes. This mother's mother died just shy of 4 months of first baby's new life. Breast fed at the side of Oma's hospital bed.
So I fled from grief. Running five steps in front of sorrow, its hot breath on the nape of my neck. Big love thrown to baby, baby and baby. Happily ever after in our house by the big trees.
Mighty Other Mother in her perfection, much better than I at protection, I paled in her reflection, my kids demanded an election. Unseat the one with the screaming pager! Real mother, Shoo!
But let's keep her chocolate chip cookies and that one song she sings is pretty good too. You know, "Müde bin ich, geh zur ruh..."She is less than we expected and more than we knew. She took us to see Beyonce.
And plays piano much too early and too often. Demands perfection but never asks enough. Too white, too worried, too hurried, too busy, too
Unlike Other Mother. The one with just the right stuff. Like the astronauts in that movie. Like s'mores or peanut butter cups.
Three points from mid-court, all net, no drama, Other Mama
And yet this is what you get, the one with a stenotic spine, a love of Beethoven, a wish for more and more compassion and kindness, naive and not ever influential in the way, say
The Pioneer Woman is. Or that Perfect Mother on Instagram. @OtherMotherIsBest #ButtonEyes
I would do it better if I could do it again, be the mother that the Other Mother could only dream of being. The mother my three would seal up the wall to magic for, just so they could sit in the solid world of us, made of real eyes, stinky dogs, loud pianos, parents dancing, redwood-fronded, scratched, quarter sawn oak floors for sock sliding. Like some kind of carnival ride of love. Like the Scrambler or Tilt-a-Whirl:- thrilling, nauseating, with your companions shoved up against you with the gravity of life.
