Poems About Mothers

My mother carried me before I was a person. Carried me in the dark of her own body, in the months before names, before anyone knew whether I'd have her eyes or her stubbornness. She got both. She carried me home from the hospital in a car seat she'd installed three times because the manual was wrong or she was wrong or the world was wrong for making something so important so hard to click into place. She carried grocery bags and my backpack and the conversation with my teacher that I didn't know about until years later when she mentioned it like it was nothing. She carried the budget. The worry. The 2 a.m. temperature check. The knowledge of which friend was a good influence and which one she kept her opinions about to herself. She carried the weight of pretending she wasn't tired. She carried my sadness when I was fifteen and sure the world was specifically designed to exclude me— carried it without correcting it, without fixing it, just held the door open and said: I know. Come sit. I didn't say thank you enough. I didn't say it at the right times. I said it over text, over the phone, in cards I bought at the last minute with someone else's words inside. But here is the thing I want to say with my own words, on this day that barely begins to cover it: You carried everything. And when I finally learned to carry myself, it was because you showed me how it's done.

There are things I should have told you sooner. Like: the world will ask you to be smaller. Quieter. Nicer. Easier to carry. And you will be tempted— god, you will be tempted— because being easy is easier than being yourself. Don't. I know this because I shrank. For years, I folded myself into whatever shape the room required— agreeable, pleasant, no sharp edges— and by the time I unfolded, I'd forgotten my original shape. You are your original shape. Keep it. There will be a boy— or a girl, or a person who hasn't decided yet and doesn't have to— who makes your chest do something your brain can't explain. Fall into it. Not carefully. Not strategically. Fall like you mean it. And if it breaks you, I'll be here with tea and no opinions (okay, one opinion, but I'll keep it mostly to myself). You will fail at something that matters to you. Maybe publicly. And you'll want to disappear, to rewind, to become someone who never tried. But failure is just ambition with a bruise. It heals. The not-trying doesn't. Be loud when you need to be. Be soft when you want to be. Be angry. Be kind. Be the girl who reads at parties and the woman who dances in the kitchen and the person who cries at commercials and isn't sorry. The world will try to write your story for you. Take the pen back. Every time. And know this— carved into every atom of me: there is nothing you could do, nothing you could be, nothing you could become, that would make me love you less. That's not a promise. It's a fact. Like gravity. Like the way the sun comes back. You are the best thing I ever did without a plan. Now go make some trouble. I'll be here. I'm always here.

The first month, I kept calling. Not on purpose. My hand just did it— muscle memory, the thumb finding her name in the phone like a tongue finding the gap where a tooth used to be. It rang four times and went to voicemail and I listened to her voice say "Leave a message after the beep" like she was just busy, like she'd call back between loads of laundry the way she always did, half-distracted, half-everything. I never left a message. What would I say? "Hey, Mom, it's me. You're dead and I still need to tell you about my Tuesday." The second month, I burned her recipe. The one she never wrote down because she was the recipe. Her hands knew how much salt, how long to wait, how to fold without tearing. My hands don't know anything. The third month, I wore her sweater to the grocery store and a stranger said "I love your sweater" and I almost said "It's my mother's. She died. She had good taste in everything except how long she stayed." By the sixth month, I stopped expecting her to walk through the door. But my body didn't. Every time I heard keys, something in my spine straightened— the old posture of a daughter whose mother is home. By the twelfth month, I could say her name without the room changing temperature. I could tell a story about her and it would be a story, not a eulogy. I could laugh at the thing she said about the neighbor's dog without the laugh turning into something else. This is what they call healing. I call it learning to carry something without setting it down. Because I don't want to set her down. She is not a weight. She is the reason I know how to love anything at all.