Thursday, March 24
MY MOTHER TOLD US NOT TO HAVE CHILDREN She'd say, Never have a child you don't want. Then she'd say, Of course, I wanted you once you were here. She's not cruel. Just practical. Like a kitchen knife. Still, the blade. And care. When she washed my hair, it hurt; her nails rooting my thick curls, the water rushing hard. It felt like drowning, her tenderness. As a girl, she'd been the last of ten to take a bath, which meant she sat in dirty water alone; her mother in the yard bloodletting a chicken; her brothers and sisters crickets eating the back forty, gone. Is gentleness a resource of the privileged? In this respect, my people were poor. We fought to eat and fought each other because we were tired from fighting. We had no time to share. Instead our estate was honesty, which is not tenderness. In that it is a kind of drowning. But also a kind of air. (Rebecca Gayle Howell)