This is our mother-daughter-women story.
Our story is one of careening through lifetimes
like undestroyed blast particles,
reuniting this time around as opposing forces.
Birth in a small Los Angeles hospital,
you holding me against your chest
like a beating heart, my body your body.
And after 18 years
barely meeting eyes
across a devastating crevasse,
here we are.
You, a ghost woman in your own home
while your family selfishly disintegrates
into themselves.
Me, a desperate ghost daughter
bitter in my never-enoughness.
I don’t know how we go on like this. But we do.
We do.
Until we don’t.
It takes 35 years
of barely balancing
on the untenable strain
of our bloodline
until at last
I see you.
When my boyfriend dies
and I find his body,
you tell me about your gay brother’s suicide,
how he shot himself in the head,
and how as a lonely Jewish girl in Texas,
you would lie in the grass
and leave your body
so you could be your own friend.
How you followed a man to Los Angeles,
joined a cult and stayed for 10 years
even though he refused to marry you.
How you began a liberated woman
who rode horses bareback and said “fuck”
and skinny dipped while stoned
and ended up a soccer mom in suburbia
driving car-pool and wearing pearls.
How you hated the float
from one vapid expectation
to the next
without feeling alive,
shriveling until the sight of everything
pale and perfect
made you scream
a silent Stepford-wife death.
How you struggled to balance
womanhood
motherhood
wifehood,
and isn’t every woman
born with the weight of that imbalance on her back?
How I flailed between
childhood
daughterhood
adolescence
without capacity to look up
or reach out
and steady myself, ourselves.
But here we are,
on even footing,
leveled, our story woven
into the greater yarn of mystery.
One of careening through lifetimes
like undestroyed blast particles;
at last, into reunited forces,
into woman form.
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