My Mother and Her Warrior Wounds

For The Lives of Women Held Back

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My Very Eager Mother Just Showed Us Correction and Capitulation. (A slightly different mnemonic to our planets).

The lives of three very different women wound so deeply together due to a mother’s mothering, that when my sister and I yell at life, we sound our grandmother’s fury. When we cross our legs and sit primly, we embody our mother’s staidness. When we laugh awkwardly while saying pleasant-sounding things that betray us, we commit to our matriarch’s power dynamics, one that she meted out generously to the world but never to us.

She makes up our blood and instinct archetypes. Unwittingly, we honor her as she honors others.

But what I never shed a thought on, are the mountains I did not have to move, because she had already done so.

I did not think about the depths of lovelessness she had to scratch her way out of, so she could fill our bottles up even three-quarters.

The Kitchen

She didn’t let us enter the kitchen while growing up. As if to cross that threshold would mean to make it our whole life. She looked at cooking as a chore that had found its last victim in her. She would not allow it to harangue the rest of her lineage. No, we would be educated.