Dream we can Evolve

The kitchen drawers are almost filled with things. Little pieces and scraps of maybe’s that all too quickly swallow what space I allowed for them in the early days of kitchen planning. I remember being fascinated by my mother’s church clothes as a child. The smell of them, the itchy texture and secret relief that I didn’t have to wear them. The delicate prospect of one day wearing jewelry, of sliding fully grown feet into tan sensible heels. The great mystery of panty hose. Somehow attracted to tiding myself up, to buttoning away the awkwardness, the wildness, the strange pieces that didn’t really fit. Buttoning away love, controlling my sensibilities, I would know what to do, I would be at peace. I would have traded the uncertainty of my strange little self for a scratchy waistline, for paste pearls, for what I dreamt maturity tasted like.

The woman she was before our mother is so tantalizingly close when we are children. Her clothes even remain in the back part of the closet, the part the folding door hides as it opens. She made the choice to have you, she made a choice she couldn’t have expected would affect her so deeply, and she left a path thereby, one she had been forging since her own parents loosed their hold. All my mother’s old things have the same smell, and a similar imprint of her thoughts. She was making the same mistakes I’ve made; she was choosing a life by trying, too. Forgive me, then, for being so angry with the self I see in your eyes. I tried so hard to be different by your experiences, I tried to prove we could evolve, and leave our daughters with a bit more. My clothes are different from those you used to wear to church, but my heart fell down the same hole, tried to button itself away behind that which is ideal.

Let’s set up a mini-wish, along the way: healing my relationship to other women. For a while now I’ve simply avoided the question, and made a little womanhood on my own. But what does womanhood mean in the larger sense? What could be possible when individual efforts meet, when one plus one equals three? I don’t want to be a threat to any woman, and I want us to heal, to collectively preserve the glory lent to us, in each shining point of light. I want to forgive this womanhood, and I want it to forgive me, too.