�

Not to my liking, the word �mother�. Far too many vowels and a slurred finish, with a soft �th� in the middle making it even more flabby. Wide around the middle.

Mama. A doll�s cry, the fragile plastic voicebox giving sound a shape that calls the one who made it. Too many Pinocchio nothing thoughts in that word for me.

Mummy. Prissy dressed up Lord Fauntleroy, picking at his food with a silver spoon, desiring to leave the table to go and play with his train set. Clinging to her skirts as the train whistle blows to see him off for college � 35 years old and still in need of a titty.

It�s a hard �nough life, as Annie says. The responsibility of carrying a child to term, then feeding, clothing and caring for a helpless weakling who becomes a thankless renegade soon enough. The endless hours of making costumes for school plays, packing lunches braiding hair, putting bandaids on, washing soiled bedsheets, and trying to keep one�s self pretty for the daddy. A giving over of dreams, and a dissolution of spirit so that by 50 the soul is worn down an burnished like an old step at the foot of a courthouse.

I love my mother, and I battle with her. She seems to have an endless store of platitudes, and and even more endless store of unfinished sentences. We were an interruption � unplanned, and through tow divorces. The three of us, so different, all product of the same entry into the world, that fecund, dark-lipped and furred passage. Now old, living away, she is adrift without the need for bandaid putting and costume making. I see a light in her eyes that speaks of her joy at freedom, and a dimmer glow behind that tells of her sadness at the loss of her babies. She had three little souls at her mercy, and she did the best she could. I still cannot forgive her for failing to see the weakness within my brother that would lead him into the shadows he now lives in, and I cannot forgive her weakness at marrying THAT man, the second husband. Because she is my mother I can forget her own frailty.

Because she is my mother I can choose to ignore her pain.

Because she is my mother, I can laugh at her absurd habits.

Because she is my mother, I have inherited all her little ways, and I cannot laugh at that.

And because she is my mother I make a silent promise that when I become a mother I will not do the things she did, whilst ever knowing that there will be moments when I see her hands superimposed over my own as I fold a nappy, tuck in a shirt, or make one more packed lunch.

Destined to forever live out the human clause of repeating ways of being. I love her, but god forbid that I should have to live with her again. Hey mum, can I borrow the car to go to the mall, and can I have twenty bucks and you can�t talk to me like that, I make my own life, what do you mean I�m ungrateful.

I love her, and yet we battle.