Moms in Hell

Mom collected and sold 18th-century American antiques. She would have loved this 1868 Winslow Homer,
Artists Sketching in the White Mountains

MOVING PICTURE



I once had in my home
a Hoosier Cupboard much like this

 God, I thank you for the mom you lent me to, and for
too short a time it sometimes seems... much more I
could have learned from her about serenity, I find,
now that I know what she went through. Well. What
an education from my infancy, to see her resurrected
from her private hell, and learn to celebrate her triumph.

Oh, I hated her and spurned her hugs and turned to
Dad for love instead. I only knew that she had left
and when she stayed she drank too much and stank
of wine and cigarettes and that the house was always
an embarrassment (I’d yet to learn that life itself is
messy). Well — except my siblings’ rooms and
Daddy’s dresser — little islands gleaming in their
tidiness amid the chaos that my mother left for Alma
to bring order out of, goddess that she was, on
Tuesdays, nine to five, and Friday afternoons.

Dear God, I praise you for this mother and the love
she kept in escrow for me when I came of age, and
that I did so while she lived; I thank you that we
had those blissful years of friendship. When I carried
Marian, I asked her, I remember, “What if I don’t love
my baby?” (I was, after all, the youngest. What could
I know of an infant’s sweet compelling winsomeness?
I’d been unlovable enough myself, unkind, to punish
her, as if she didn't have her share and more of
torment.) Well, she said. I promise, you would walk
through fire — no, you would run through hell to save
your child. And so I have, for all of them. And so I
would again. A mother suffers every pang her children

feel, and doubly, till she learns surrender.





Mom had a corner pie cupboard filled with this type of pottery, called "flow blue,"
which originated in 18th-century Staffordshire, England



Father-Mother, thank you for the scent of Shalimar that

sometimes drifts by... through the window... from the

sky. And thank you for the memories, which are not

fixed like pictures in a book; they are alive, as she is,

very near, I often sense. Well. I can see her now, the

way she’d sit, one leg tucked under her, in tennies on

her favorite chair, and how I wish I hadn’t sold it

years ago to pay the rent. She would have told me to,



Mom's chair, or close enough. This one is from
the website http://www.efi-costarica.com/. It's a
late-19th-century Eastlake; Mom's was
upholstered in dark blue veltet

 however. No regrets, then. Now she sits on air.


Creator, thank you for my funny mom, who would
have looked around, as I do now, at papers, manuscripts, and
laundry, at the baskets full of unrelated stuff and sundries,
at the dishes, pots, and pans; and she would not have been
dismayed. Well. She had Dad, I have three cats. I
can’t say Dad was much more help than they are, not

indoors, at any rate, although he kept the bills paid,

did the yard, and loved us all inordinately, as fathers

must. He didn’t dust, however, nor did Mom, except

for company, and that, once I had learned how wise

she was, how rare and good, was fine with me.