My mother and I, we have an interesting relationship to say the least. My brother and cousins and friends and insert other sources agree it is because she is jealous of me. I would not go so far as to say she loves me. I am not sure you can love the thing of which you are jealous. She has most definitely hated me from time to time. I have hated her more than that, but I will not go to far into detail. Suffice it to say her weight gain, general aging in appearance and lack of success in life are somehow mostly, if not entirely my fault. Or so she seems to believe.
She has of late taken to trying to repair our relationship. Which, really, just makes things awkward. I do not like her. I have not liked her since I was 5. We have very little in common. As I strolled through my gallery of literary pieces I have constructed I realized a good deal of them are about mothers and daughters and most if not all are negative. It would seem the creative juices that flow through my veins are tainted with my mother. Perhaps we are all tainted by our mothers when we come down the birthing canal. Perhaps they imprint some kind of symbol or design upon our blood cells that marks us.
Anyway. Of the mother stories/poems of woe and misery I have Maternal Caress, Mothers Don't Want Their Jills, 20 Weeks, Premature, The Faces Inside My Coffee Cup, Belly Fruit, and Jack and Jill
Now, granted, most of these are not about my actual mother. All the poems about fathers, however, are about my actual father. My relationship with him is far more complex. I can not boil it down into a simple feeling of dislike. It is rich and has layers. It is miserable and full of treachery but every now and then, the gleam of love shines through the grime of mistreatment and negligence. My father loves me, this I know. I have always known it. I can feel it pulsate from him and it makes me feel so awkward. I do not know if I love him or not. I know I do not dislike him most of the time. But can you love someone who is content to watch neglect and abuse without intervening? Can you love someone who was not present during your childhood for various reasons, none of them good enough and all of them pathetic excuses? I do not know. I know I feel tender toward him sometimes. I know I enjoy his company sometimes. I also know he embarrasses me. It is conflicted and therefore requires the truth. The brutal truth that strips the breath from your lungs and pulls the tears unwillingly from your eyes--that punches you in the gut like only the truth can.
My father has taken up poetry and nonfiction; I have never written a fictionalized version of him, for how can I? How can I fictionalize that which is so deep and multifaceted. No. I must stick to the truth and tell it as it is, not as I would like people to see it. My mother, in her simplest form, is a monster. A maternal monster, but a monster all the same. My father does not have a simplest form. I cannot boil him down or condense him into bouillon cubes. Here is what I have written on my father: Mary J and The Imperfect: Past Continuous.
I have a non-fiction piece that is long and brutal. It started as a tale of my family and morphed into something more about my father. It goes into my mother and my brother, but my father is the only multidimensional character. My mother is a monster, my brother is my psuedo-child (or rather, someone I try to save from his inevitable future) but my father is an unknown. I have never posted it and I don't know if I ever will. For now, this is enough.
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