MAY WEEK 2: MOTHER'S DAY

Ada Limòn, “The Raincoat”

 When the doctor suggested surgery

and a brace for all my youngest years,

my parents scrambled to take me

to massage therapy, deep tissue work,

osteopathy, and soon my crooked spine

unspooled a bit, I could breathe again,

and move more in a body unclouded

by pain. My mom would tell me to sing

songs to her the whole forty-five minute

drive to Middle Two Rock Road and forty-

five minutes back from physical therapy.

She’d say, even my voice sounded unfettered

by my spine afterward. So I sang and sang,

because I thought she liked it. I never

asked her what she gave up to drive me,

or how her day was before this chore. Today,

at her age, I was driving myself home from yet

another spine appointment, singing along

to some maudlin but solid song on the radio,

and I saw a mom take her raincoat off

and give it to her young daughter when

a storm took over the afternoon. My god,

I thought, my whole life I’ve been under her

raincoat thinking it was somehow a marvel

that I never got wet.

 Ada Limón, “The Raincoat” from The Carrying. Copyright © 2018 by Ada Limón. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Milkweed Editions. milkweed.org.

 

 Jason Schneiderman, “In the End You Get Everything Back (Liza Minnelli)”

 The afterlife is an infinity of custom shelving, where everything

you have ever loved has a perfect place, including things

that don’t fit on shelves, like the weeping willow from

your parents’ backyard, or an old boyfriend, exactly as he was

in your second year of college, or an aria you love, but without

the rest of the opera you don’t particularly care for.

My favorite joke: Q: You know who dies? A: Everyone!

Because it’s true. But ask any doctor and they’ll say that

prolonging a life is saving a life. Ask anyone who survives

their surgeries, and they’ll say yes, to keep living is to be saved.

I do think there’s a statute of limitations on grief, like, certainly,

how someone died can be sad forever, but who can be sad

simply about the fact that Shakespeare, say, is dead, or Sappho,

or Judy Garland, or Rumi. There’s a Twitter account called

LizaMinnelliOutlives, which put into the world a set of thoughts

I was having privately, but the Twitter account is kinder than

I had been, tweeting things like “Liza Minnelli has outlived

the National Rifle Association which has filed for bankruptcy”

and “Liza Minnelli has outlived Armie Hammer’s career” to take

the sting out of the really painful ones, like “Liza Minnelli

has outlived Jessica Walter,” or “Liza Minnelli has outlived

George Michael” or “Liza Minnelli has outlived Prince.”

In my own afterlife, the custom shelves are full of Liza Minnellis--

Liza in Cabaret, Liza in Arrested Development, Liza singing

“Steam Heat” on The Judy Garland Christmas Special, Liza

on the Muppet Show, Liza in Liza’s at the Palace, and because this is heaven,

Liza won’t even know she’s in my hall of loved objects,

just as I won’t know that my fandom has been placed on her shelf

for when Liza Minnelli has outlived Jason Schneiderman,

waiting for Liza Minnelli when Liza Minnelli has outlived

Liza Minnelli, which is what fame is, and what fame is not,

and if Jason Schneiderman outlives Jason Schneiderman,

and your love of this poem waits for me on one of my shelves,

and will keep me company for eternity, thank you for that.

I promise to cherish your love in that well-lit infinity of forever.

In one theory of the mind, the psyche is just a grab bag of lost objects,

our wholeness lost when we leave the womb, when we discover

our own body, and so on and so on, our wholeness lost and lost and lost,

as we find ourselves smaller and smaller, which is why heaven

is an endless, cozy warehouse, where nothing you loved is gone,

where you are whole because you get everything back, and by everything,

I mean you.

 “In the End You Get Everything Back (Liza Minnelli)” © Jason Schneiderman, first printed in American Poetry Review, Nov/Dec 2021. Used by permission of the poet.

 
POETIC THEMES

            Mother’s Day. This week our culture celebrates the maternal powers of birthing, nurture, and attention. It attempts to mark the near-impossible demands of contemporary mothering (I think of Billy Collins’ poem “The Lanyard”—as if one holiday, like his useless bit of plastic, could make up for the societal lack of structural support for mothers). Mothering feels to me, at least, depleting, disorienting, and impossible to do with elegance or finesse. The canned sentimentality of this holiday fetishizes biological mothering over all other maternal expressions. And oh my God the guilt! If there’s any way to make guilt beautiful and moving, Ada Limòn’s “The Umbrella” accomplishes it. The speaker’s childhood voice, unspooling like her spine, sings to us of the protective shelter that we all want to have and to be. In fact, we crave this maternal cover so hard that we make ourselves crazy. Sometimes I wonder if this holiday might cause more hurt than it’s worth. But rather than claiming to speak for a collective, I’ll “mind my own business” as Rev. angel Kyodo williams teaches, and split into a picture of my own annual experience:

 

Every Sunday I wait for my children to be

returned to me.

And so I wait now, pausing for a drag

before vacuuming up last week’s lice,

and the grass that came in

clinging to their perfect, rounded toes.

grass at the prow of my new orange electric mower

before forecasted rain

grow my basil some roots

(maybe me too)

find capillaries into earth’s lung to breathe me new

Let it wash all this: the cigarette stink

the crayola contract never to smoke again

so mommy won’t die

the now-useless blood

one moon closer to dry

the promise of the crone in me

a second coming. 

 

Mothering is by far the hardest work, and I can only hope my kids become my best friends, as my own mother has become mine. But if they do, it’s by pure luck, not by virtue of my maternal capacities, which I prefer to imagine as a creative power available to anyone—a kind of witchy, mysterious, two-way sorcery, as in Sharon Olds’ “The Enchantment.”

            For sure it’s transformative to become a mother—that crazy deep, crazy-making form of human love. But also many of us find the thorniest deep-dives into the shadowy parts of our psyche through our relationship to other mother figures. Writ large, the nurturing, life-giving figures in our lives are our heroes, whose consciousness is blended in with our own. In an attempt to explode the boundaries of how we configure the maternal figure, I’d like to offer Jason Schneiderman’s poem for this week’s meditation. This homage breaks the conception of influence and nurture as a one-way street, even as it expands the strictures of mortality, selfhood, linear time, and the fourth wall between poet and reader. Our wholeness is lost at birth, along with our dear, wrinkled, weird placenta, “lost and lost and lost.” Our selfhood shrinks into the size of a figurine that might fit on an afterlife shelf, and that’s a comfort. The second-person address of the final line gathers us under the umbrella of this poem because of our love for it! What could be more nurturing than the notion of maternal care as an endless regress, or a forward proliferation, of the capacity to just love stuff? If we hone this capacity, and promise to cherish one another’s love as Jason does, we will keep one another company for eternity.

 

 

PRACTICE

            There’s a Buddhist meditation Eve (Sedgwick) taught me and wrote about someplace, where you imagine everyone everywhere, at one point or another, in one lifetime or another, as having been your mother—or your child! This meditation seeks to cast a spell of tenderness between us and anyone, cultivating an instinct of care toward all people, alive and “in that well-lit infinity of forever.” Maybe that is the loveliest power to celebrate on Mother’s Day.

            Or, if this feels disembodied and abstract, to explore the seat of creativity in the physical body—any physical body, any way it’s gendered—we might focus on the pelvic bowl and low belly. Any form of caretaking has its demands and its costs. You might toy with contracting the abdomen, Martha-Graham-style, while stirring the cauldron of the belly. Sweeping one hand like a scoop to the belly embodies not just cauldron-stirring but also the way we actually carve out of our bodies what’s needed to generate beauty, contribute to new worldings, or nurture life—not just with biological wombs and breasts, but also with the daily rhythm of doling out our life force.

You might close by testing out the magic of yoni mudra (thumb and pointer fingers join, extend in opposite direction, with the other fingers interlaced and tucked into the palms), placed in front of low belly, pointer fingers facing down. Consider jotting down what’s behind the feeling in your wombed-up fingers—what and whom are you gestating, at present? What and [RH17] whom are you cherishing with your nurture, what’s the endless regress of figures contributing to your magic, and how can you cultivate the trust that you will get all of you back, whole?