Writing About My Mother While She's Still Here
Every draft feels like a rehearsal for a grief I refuse.
My mother thinks the poem is about someone else's mother. She said so at the kitchen table, holding the magazine at arm's length because she will not admit she needs new glasses. "This poor woman," she said, tapping page thirty-one with a finger still dusty with flour. "Her daughter counts her breaths while she sleeps. Can you imagine?"
I said I could not imagine. Then I stood up to refill the kettle so she would not see my face.
The poem is called "Inventory." It lists the contents of my mother's handbag, the exact rattle of her cough every November, the way she hums the first line of a song and abandons the rest of it mid-air.
I wrote it at two in the morning in the flat I rent three hundred kilometres from her, and when I finished it I felt sick, because writing it felt like packing a suitcase for a trip I have refused to admit I am taking.
She is sixty-eight. She is fine. She walks to the market every morning, argues with the tomato seller, and wins. There is nothing wrong with my mother... except that she is mortal, a fact I have known properly since a hospital corridor in 2011 that smelled of phenyl and burnt coffee, when a doctor said the word benign and my knees buckled anyway.
Since that corridor, I have written about her constantly. Secretly. There is a folder on my laptop named "Recipes," because I am the kind of coward who hides love in plain sight. Inside it are forty-three drafts. Poems, half essays, one letter I will never send. All of them about a living woman.
All of them, I noticed one night with actual horror, written in the past tense.
That is the part I could not say out loud for years... The tense.
Every guide I ever found on writing about living parents repeats the same three commandments: ask permission, change the details, be kind. Not one of them tells you what to do about the tense. Not one of them warns you that when you write "my mother kept mint in a chipped blue cup on the windowsill," the word kept will arrive on its own, uninvited, like a relative at a funeral nobody has scheduled.
A friend who edits a small online journal read three of the drafts last spring. She sat with the pages longer than politeness required, then looked up and said, "These are elegies. You know that, right? You are grieving a woman who is currently alive and, if I remember correctly, currently undefeated against a tomato seller."
"It's not grief," I said. "It's attention."
"It's rehearsal," she said, and I hated her for a week, which is how I knew she was right.
I kept writing them anyway. I even started sneaking lines out into the world, the way you test cold water with one toe. I entered the least dangerous one into a monthly poetry contest under a version of my name my mother would not recognize, and when it was shortlisted I felt caught rather than proud. Then, this month, the journal took "Inventory," and my mother, who has subscribed to every publication that has ever printed me, found it on page thirty-one and did not recognize herself.
Or so I thought.
That evening she washed the flour off her hands, made two cups of tea without asking if I wanted one, and sat back down with the magazine. "Read it to me," she said. "My eyes are tired." My mother's eyes are never tired. My mother can spot an unswept corner from another room. But I took the magazine.
So I read my own poem out loud to the woman it is about, in her kitchen, with her spoon clicking against her cup like a metronome. I made it through the handbag... I made it through the cough. At the line about the humming, the spoon stopped.
"The blue cup isn't chipped," she said.
"What?"
"The cup with the mint. You wrote chipped. It isn't. You chipped the white one, in 2004, and I threw it away the same day." She sipped her tea. "You always remember things a little bit wrong. Your grandmother was the same. She wrote about me too, you know."
I did not know.
She went into her bedroom and came back with a school exercise book gone soft as cloth at the corners, and there, in my grandmother's slanted hand, was my mother: aged seven, stealing sugar and blaming the cat. Aged twelve, standing on the roof during a storm. Aged nineteen, leaving for the city with one suitcase and, apparently, "a mouth on her that would survive anything."
Pages and pages... written while my mother was alive and in the next room, carried since through four house moves and one flood.
"I used to be furious about it," my mother said. "I found it when I was thirty and it felt like she had been measuring me for a coffin the whole time. I didn't speak to her for a month." She smoothed the page flat with the side of her hand. "She has been gone twenty-two years now. This notebook is the only place left where I am still seven years old."
We sat with that for a while, the kettle ticking as it cooled.
"You are not rehearsing my death," she said. "You are learning me by heart while I am still here to correct you."
So I told her. About the folder called "Recipes." About the forty-three drafts and the letter I will never send and the tense that keeps breaking in like a burglar. She laughed so hard at the folder name that she had to put her cup down. Then she said, "Read me the worst one," and because honesty is only worth anything when it costs you, I did. It is the one where I count her breaths. She listened all the way through with her eyes closed, and when I finished she said, "Seventeen a minute. You counted wrong," and that was all... and it was everything.
I went home two days later and renamed the folder "Ma." A few of the drafts now live where people can actually read them. I have finally stopped writing around the grief that hasn't happened and started writing toward the family that is still here, which turns out to be a completely different muscle. Present tense is harder.
Present tense has a witness.
Before I left, she did one more thing. She took a blue pen, opened the magazine to page thirty-one, and crossed out the word "chipped" in the middle of my published poem, pressing hard enough to emboss the next page.
On the train home I kept the magazine open on my lap and looked at it for a long time. One word struck through in blue ink, steady hand, no hesitation.
It is the most honest line in the poem, and I did not write it.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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