Relationships with parents remind me that their parents had dreams, goals, and expectations which they passed along, pressed into them like clay, and which affected… us, their progeny. From the other side, my mother’s experiences with me must have been somewhat terrifying. I wasn’t the first child – by far – but the one who was so different than the others, it must have been a little off-putting.
Materhood
She told me, at birth
I was like a new gadget:
Boxed, with no handbook.
Just rows of shiny buttons.
Just so many ways to break.
Oof. All of my mother’s baggage from her own childhood was either stuffed in a metaphorical closet or reverse engineered so my brother and I would have some kind of imagined “perfect” childhoods…