Our mothers know time as a face on the band around their wrists. They know seasons as months they tear off the wall. They know love as a circle around their left ring fingers. Life is palpable, a comfort they can rub between their fingers.
Our mothers can’t caress the rips in our lungs from the words they didn’t want to hear, the silence they demanded. They can’t taste the emptiness in our stomachs they didn’t fill with love. They can’t see their faces in our mirrors when midnight tells us we’re just like them.
I am haunted by how much our mothers do not know.
inspired by:
published in Substack:
i could feel this one! very well done. thanks for sharing! -- Ren: https://therenclub.wordpress.com/2024/09/15/janes-mother/
The haunting you describe is incredibly painful, palpable ... a prosery well crafted.
The trauma carried by the past in situations like you have described weighs very heavily. I know you must have felt it as you wrote. All my love
So sad with all those barriers...
A powerful piece of Prosery, Nolcha, which reflects on mothers who did not know instinctively how to mother, mothers who wanted their children to be seen and not heard – but was that the mothers, or did the fathers demand that of them? Kim R.