An Introduction by the Poet

The good mother, the bad mother, the other mother

These poems all have motherhood as their subject. Some of the mothers delineated are very plainly good or bad. Others are ambiguous, more nuanced in their shading.  Still others are that "other" mother. The mother that doesn't give birth to the child but who shapes and bends the child in the way that a basket maker weaves rushes or twigs into the shape that can inform the basket's purpose. And three of them take their inspiration from fairy tale and myth.

So, with gardenias, with white sheets and with all due Band-Aids and kisses,

Happy Mother's Day

- Annette Marie Hyder

Latrino Gals #6. Photo by Jacqui Bellamy

Gardenia Petals

Every summer morning
Mother picked gardenia flowers
cluttering the 'fridge
with water-filled jelly jars
boasting bouquets.

Every evening
she plucked them
like exotic chickens
scattered their petals
onto our sheets
cool and creamy soft
against my skin

I fell asleep
crushing her benedictions.

We had no air-conditioning
but we had electric fans
and gardenia petals.

Mother was young and pretty
with a French nose
that she quietly suffered.
I loved the way it said "arrogance"
where she never would.

Some nights
winds would blow the curtains wide.
Hurricane winds we called them
as they rustled the palm fronds
bullied mangoes from our tree.

Those nights
Mother would sing us old French songs
her mother had sung to her
lonely songs
filled with regret.

She sounded so sad
I forgot the wind
trying to make her smile.

That's when I
hated her big nose, too.
It got in the way
wouldn't let her smile
climb up into her eyes.

It is summer,
but I live in a colder place.
I have little occasion
to remember electric fans
and goodnight wishes
scattered on sheets

But when I do
I think of tears
falling like petals
from a flower in the wind. 

Aunt Effie

Her self-important step fanfared her arrival
and her pompous clicking gait never failed
to leave marks, muddy prints and residue
from the garbage she dragged in.

Her handbag overstuffed with rubbish,
Kleenex, coupons and coins,
trembled a little as she dropped it on the counter.
And so did she as she opened her mouth
equally stuffed with cheap and banal things
to spill in a heap on our afternoon table
like some tacky pile of pennies
left for the waitress
at a lunch break cafe.

Mother sat and suffered her outpourings
had contention with her tea
for as long as she could stand it
finally excusing herself to get back to her chores.

Aunt Effie insisted on accompanying her
even in the high heels she inevitably wore.
She had plenty of dirty laundry to hang
on our clothesline beside Mom's clean sheets.

Clotheslines filled with laundry drying in the fresh air and sunshine is something you don't see that much of anymore. I love that fresh crisp smell and remember playing tents under the sheets when I was little - lying on the grass and watching the sheets billow out fat and puffy. I loved to help and when the dry laundry was gathered I enjoyed throwing myself into the laundry basket on top of the clean, breeze kissed warmth.

Flash Bulb

You tried to give us pretty perfectly framed snapshots of him. You showed him at the beach laughing, his laugh so big it filled the picture, his laugh so big, I could almost feel it where my finger touched his glossy-finish chest.

In another, he was at the kitchen table carving a centerpiece turkey on one of those generic family occasions. I was always hungry for, wished on every wishbone for, him.

How smart he was, you said. He'd kissed the blarney stone. And handsome, I could see that for myself in the flash you popped for him. But still, he left and I was only three and I didn't know that there wouldn't be any more "Kodak Moments" for the other kids and me.

Mom, you didn't have to sepia tone those pictures, delicately tint them for me. I would have loved him; I would have loved him anyway.

From the book The Real Reason the Queen Hated Snow and Other Stories by Annette Marie Hyder

A Lioness and Her Cubs

I'm going to start being more of a mother to you,
the lioness said.
And she began to lick, to wash her cubs ferociously.
As she was taking care of them something terrible, something
horrible to behold, began to happen.
The cubs started to disappear.
First she licked their color off.
Then their defining features
were tongue sponged away.

When there was only a shadow left,
a simple outline of who and where
the cubs had been,
the lioness opened her mouth into a huge yawn
and swallowed what remained.

The Mothering Instinct

The devouring mother is an especially feared figure in fairytale. One prime example would be Baba Yaga. Baba Yaga, with her house that walks about on chicken legs, her fence of human bones and skulls, her iron teeth and flying mortar and pestle and her great big oven is a terrifying figure indeed. The domestic details that always attend her stories underline the maternal/domestic nature gone wildly aggressive.

Another devouring "mother" figure is that of the witch in Hansel and Gretel. She creates and prepares a lavish domestic offering in the form of her gingerbread house. It is an extension of herself and she uses the attraction of its apparent sweetness to lure the children to her, in their desire to eat it, that she may in turn eat them!

But while these devouring mother figures from fairytale are obviously and hugely threatening and destructive, there is a quiet psychological horror that is equal to all of their theatrical symbols in the quiet, "natural" mother that only means the best and in administering such "best" does immeasurable harm.

A mother shelters and feeds her children and is an entire world to them. The danger inherent in that scenario is that of too much mothering, mothering that becomes consuming and obliterating.

I have attempted, with "A Lioness and Her Cubs", to emulate Hans Christian Anderson in creating a new story to express a psychological truth that was there all along.

The Real Reason the Queen Hated Snow
(A perspective looked at through the queen's eyes)

Snow White's obsession
with darkness, with stains, with impurities
had her scrubbing floors and scouring self
until the cobblestones were bloody
from her knuckles;
her moonlight skin gave off a bleachy gleam.

She had no mercy for the cobwebs, the dust balls,
the mealy balls of matter
she rubbed her fingerprints
right off her busy tips
sent her imperfections packing
for some place called Normal Heaven.

Her wild wringing of washcloths
and Brillo blasting bathing
are what really bugged the queen;
finally blanched White's goose.

Demeter's Soliloquy: Winter as an Expression of Love

"A mother is forever a cellular chimera, a blend of the body she was born with and all of the bodies she has borne." - Woman: An Intimate Geography, by Natalie Angier

My smiting sorrow
snow raped of promise
icicles stiff like limbs in final freeze
howling harridan winds set free
to shriek and curse
might seem to have been borrowed
from some other deity
perhaps Norse Thor
whose thewsome hewing
fits him like his scowl -
habitually.
Or, perhaps my sib Poseidon
whose trident gives signal
of his three moods:
incensed, furious, and foremost, angry.

This excess of hardening
brought to bear
on withered land
this malevolence shaken
in crystalline form
like salt over witches' brew
falls short
cannot begin to express
my mother love
rampaging in garments of grief
the sackcloth of emptiness, ashes
of impotence I fist-throw
on barren land.

My love has curled itself
into a claw
ready to rip
every shred of beauty left on earth
because such beauty mocks my loss
makes light of the tumescent lack
of my Persephone.

And this is all
meagerly sufficient.
I am left wanting.
My rebirth, realized
through the fulfillment of promise
in my daughter, has been seized.

I, a goddess, do not speak
merely of corporeal rebirth
inherent in reproduction.
Our children are us
refined and sublimated.
And thus we love them better
than ourselves
and better than the world
that merely seems the frame
to take our hammer to
should that frame contain within it
our child loss.

Kumquats as Pomegranates
(My mother's mother)

Kumquat trees skirted the issue
of the sidewalk;
informed the air slyly,
blending their acidic sweet
connotations
into the exact squalor
and neat incontinence
of the nursing home.

Trodding these
orange pocked little oblongs,
congealed on the cement,
that led to automatic doors
yawning yellow,

I could hardly keep up
with my grandmother
who couldn't walk fast enough
when we came or when we went
as she paced a race beyond my ken
dragging me
and my six year old legs
along.

And that's when I learned
how to eat kumquats.
Pop one in your mouth and bite;
sweet and bitter and oil of orange,
pulp and seed and rind.

We were the only real visitors
I ever saw.
The other guests were there by proxy
of their cards, candy, fruit and dolls
all paltry offerings for former household gods;

gods that lived in a world of yellow
from the old wax glow
of the tiled floor
to their false teeth and parchment nails.

They had no voices
that were not stolen from them
by vacuum walls.
Seamless surfaces of freshly made beds
mocked wrinkled sheets on faces.
I was a wayfarer in that land of the dead
and my grandmother tricked me
into eating its fruit,

accepting the bitterness
of their orange peel rind,
the sweetness of spirit,
seeds of knowledge,
pulp of experience
and juice of need
which was their pomegranate.

I came to love them
skin and all.

"Sunday Lessons"

Sundays were not for playing
as Saturdays were.
You could not play hooky from them
as you could from school.

Sundays dragged you out of bed
with the grim promise
of spiritually upbuilding association
which really meant sitting,
your legs sticking out over the edge
of the wooden chair,
contemplating the dips and valleys
of freshly laundered slip and dress,
fending off the demons,
Headnod and Gapemouth,
who attempted to possess you
through the enticement
of the speaker's
soporific voice.

You had to wrestle,
like Jacob with his angel,
with your own imagination
which could easily betray you
to a head thumping or a thigh pinch
from your reverent grandmother
who did not intend to tolerate
the disrespect of legs pumping
(however, they were horses running)
or fingers fraying the fringes of her shawl
(however, they were princesses dancing
in dresses dear embellished).

Following these lessons was the mortification
of  long suffered curls
wooed by old lady fingers
touching them for luck
and breathed over adoringly.
You thought you couldn't
hate them more
(the curls that is)
and that reminds you
that you have freckles
and how they clash with everything
(however, you've heard that they can be bleached,
have resolved to influence your mother
into buying buttermilk and salt
but will not tell her why).

Could anything equal the unfairness
of not being allowed to spend the rest of the day
as you saw fit?
It was squandered on a mandatory family dinner,
the fame of which far exceeded its taste,
and must be downed in the appetite dampening presence
of the great matriarch, she of the woefully strong arm,
the spaghetti cooking grandmother.

T.V. following dinner was not a treat
but rather a further trial consisting of 60 Minutes
that could be tolerated
only by fear of the aforesaid strong arm
combined with the patterns on the carpet,
which harbored further worlds than dust mites
and dust motes,
which in and of themselves
were golden messengers
of relief
spinning stories as they spun
in slant of setting sun.

Bedtime following that
resurrected your autonomy
and you viewed Monday with a martyr's patience
and the hard won knowledge that even Sundays
have to end.

lunch at that italian place

thick white plates and schmaltzy music
loaves so fresh that steam rises off them
as they purr heatedly just waiting
to lick that butter up

the chocolate on the desserts here
is aggressively dark and delicious
holds your taste buds captive
makes them beg for more

and the wine is crisp and authoritative
insists on one more glass
as i contemplate crushed red pepper
and think of my grandmother
who always had to have her spaghetti
sprinkled with fire petals

kept a glass shaker with silver top
of that flecked dynamite
on her dining table
right beside her black pepper and salt

how i resented her

maybe because she was
much like her seasoning of choice -
hard to take
so bossy and strict
i hated the strong hand she had
in raising us

until today
i hadn't realized
how generous she was
to give so much of herself
over
to helping her daughter/my mother
the waiter comes
asks, is there anything else we need?

huh
sometimes our biggest sacrifices
are resented the most by others
i say to myself as crushed red pepper
inflames my throat and tears my eyes
making my nose runny too
and i resolve that
(after david sedaris)
me cry pretty one day

Mothersongs: Poems For, By, and About Mothers, Edited by Sandra M. Gilbert, Susan Gubar, and Dana O'Hehir

Woman: An Intimate Geography by Natalie Angier

The Myths of Motherhood by Shari L. Thurer

Mothers and Other Monsters: Stories by Maureen F. McHugh