July 25: Baby Carriages, Motherhood, Siv Cedering, "Poem for My Mother," New Cartoon

And for weeks she [Annie Ives] thought about what he had said, fear tingeing every hope for happiness.  She saw mothers pushing their baby carriages who seemed wonderfully content, and mothers who were glum and remote.  She had memories of the house in Glen Cove reeking of her brothers' diapers, the safety pins nicking her fingers, their cylinder-shaped washing machine chugging all day, babies crying all night, the young boys running their mother ragged.  But whenever she even came close to making a decision, her thoughts always came close to making a decision, her thoughts always returned to Ives and how he had been a foundling [orphan], and how much it must have hurt him even to consider giving up the child to make her happy, and she felt more in love with him.  With that she thought how having a family would not be so bad a thing to do with this considerate and moral gentleman.  And knowing about his past, she could not imagine giving up the child.  He never raised the subject, maneuvering those waters quietly.  He simply treated her well, and in time, despite her doubts, she let the issue drop.  They married in December, as they had wanted.

At first, Annie Ives isn't sure she wants to be a mother when she gets pregnant for the first time.  As this passage shows, Annie's view of motherhood is colored by her own mother's experiences.  She watched her mother--dead weary, washing diapers and settling disputes and dealing with Annie's alcoholic father--give up everything for her family.  All her hopes and dreams.  Annie isn't sure she's ready to buy a ticket for that train ride.

Motherhood is a hard job.  In the mornings, my wife has to get up with our six-year-old son around 7 a.m., even though her bipolar meds transport her into a Walking Dead state in the early hours of the day.  Yet, she knows that's all part of the job description.  Sacrifice.  Exhaustion.  Hugs.  Band-Aids.  Bug spray.  Worry.  Tears.  That's just what mothers do.

My mother did it for nine kids.  I'm the youngest sibling in my family.  I always joke with my brothers and sisters that my mother was too tired to really be tough with me.  I probably got away with a lot more.  I remember the first time I came home drunk.  I was a junior in high school, I think.  I crawled through the dark house, climbed into my bed, and passed out.  At 7:30 the next morning, my mother was at my bedside, shaking me awake to go to the 8 a.m. service at church.  I sat in the pew, nauseated and dizzy.  Then, after Mass, my mother decided to take me out to breakfast "as a special treat."  It was a long, long morning.  But, my mother made her point.

My mother's memory isn't so great any more.  She repeats herself all the time, asking the same questions over and over.  "Is it warm outside?" and "Boy, it gets dark fast, doesn't it?"  She can't see very well, either, due to macular degeneration.  She can't read anymore.  Or watch TV.  She plays gin with my father, but she has a hard time seeing the cards in her hands.

It's hard to see my mother diminished like this.  She was always the person in charge.  Everyone listened to her, including my dad.  She cooked dinners, attended parent-teacher conferences, sent out the bills for my dad's plumbing business.  And she pushed us kids to be the best people we could be.  She wanted to see her children succeed, even my sister with Down Syndrome.  My mother never settled for mediocre.

So, today, I just want to acknowledge the mothers in my life.  My wife.  My own mother.  Through all the struggles in life, they never give up.  My mother believes my sister with lymphoma of the brain is going to get better.  My wife watches my daughter dance and cries.  Because that's what mothers do.

By the way, Saint Marty never came home drunk again when he was in high school.

Poem for My Mother

by:  Siv Cedering

Remember when I draped
The ruffled cotton cape
Around your shoulders,
Turned off the lights
And stood behind your chair,
Brushing, brushing your hair.

The friction of the brush
In the dry air
Of that small inland town
Created stars that flew
As if God himself was there
In the small space
Between my hands and your hair.

Now we live on separate coasts
Of a foreign country.
A continent stretches between us.
You write of your illness,
Your fear of blindness.
You say you wake afraid
To open your eyes.

Mother, if some morning
You open your eyes to see
Daylight as a dark room around you,
I will drape a ruffled cotton cape
Around your shoulders
And stand behind your chair,
Brushing the stars out of your hair.

Confessions of Saint Marty

August 29: Give Mother a Kiss, Julie Brooks Barbour, "Come to Me and Drink"

"Well.  Go to sleep.  Give Mother a kiss.  Did you say your prayers?"

Holden Caulfield's mother is a small presence in Catcher.  She only appears briefly in person at the end of the book, when Holden sneaks home to visit his sister, Phoebe.  There's something tragic about Mrs. Caulfield.  She's struggling to hold her family together after the death of her son, Allie, from leukemia.  Holden is flunking out of another school.  D. B., her oldest son, has left for Hollywood to work as a script writer.  Her husband is a workaholic lawyer, and she, herself,  suffers from migraines.   In the above passage, all Mrs. Caulfield has to offer her daughter are the standard bedtime tokens of motherhood:  a kiss, prayers.

Holden's mother is suffering.  Yet, she tries to stitch together something close to normalcy for her children.  That is what mothers do.  They feed their children, protect them, correct them, and, eventually, let them fly away.

I recently read a chapbook of poetry by Julie Brooks Barbour titled Come to Me and Drink.  The poems in this book are tender and hard, compassionate and unforgiving.  Barbour writes of motherhood in all its complexity.  She doesn't flinch away from blood and bone.  No, she shines an intense, clear light on the beautiful pain of being a mother, and, in doing so, creates a collection of poems that breaks and binds the heart.

The title poem of the book taps the very root of motherhood.  The imagery is both natural and mythical, calling to mind the intimate ecstasy between mother and infant:

Come to Me and Drink

I know what she tastes:  the ambrosia
that one morning fell in drops
from my breast to my arm.  Tasting it,
my tongue recalled the white and yellow
blossoms of honeysuckle sprouting wild
along a field's edge.  Collecting vine upon vine,
I'd pluck each sweet blossom, pull out
each green stamen, careful not to lose
the drop of nectar at its tip, delighting
my tongue with the watery sugar.

Now the gods put me on the vine.
The buds of my nipples are pink
and dripping.  An infant plucks me dry,
a sweet smell on her breath.  This liquid:
a heal-all for a stomachache, a sedative
for the sleepless child making her bed
in the field's tall grass.  Her lips suckle in sleep.
Her tongue clicks in her mouth, an exercise.
The passing breeze my voice,
whispering around her ear.  My arms vines
coaxing her to come to me and drink.

The poem reaches beyond the stereotypical icon of Madonna/Christ child.  Barbour's mother is nectar, honeysuckle.  Barbour's child is honeybee, hummingbird.

Come to Me and Drink offers bitter milk, as well.  A later poem reaches beyond infancy, shows a mother on the cusp of release.  Present in these lines are the distant push of birth and present ache for freedom:

Seduction

The infant on my lap is theirs
and he is warm and soft.  He smells sweet,
like cake, a morsel of something I could eat.

I had my own baby once, but she is grown--
all knees and elbows now, gangly and gorgeous.
When I look inside my own heart,

no desire glows there.  His scent wafts away.
There are oceans of want ahead, sickly sweet.
I open my sail.  I have all day.

That is what is truly remarkable about the poems in this collection.  They are full of love, but this love is tempered with the knowledge that motherhood is a journey.  A voyage.  Baby to girl to woman to mother to baby.  Over and over.

Julie Brooks Barbour's poems are all about that voyage, filled with oceans of sweet want.  They are gorgeous.  They are tender.  Come to Me and Drink sails into the soul.

And that's a piece of Saint Marty's mind.

Read it and love it