Watching You Become a Mother

There are things I should have told you sooner.

My mother gave me her worry—that gene that runs through women in my family like a river that never learned to rest.

The baby sleeps through breakfast. Your coffee cools untouched. A card leans open by the fruit,

You are still my daughter. You are also the person a child searches for in a crowded room.

My mother carried me before I was a person. Carried me in the dark of her own body.

I have her laugh— the sudden kind that startles birds from hedges