My one friend is done with mothering. I say OK, that’s OK by me,
I’m not looking for one. Which is true, but I say it entirely for her
comfort. I don’t know the shape of the hole that I’ve been carrying.
I know it sits steady like a wisdom tooth, not too near my heart, not next
to a nerve. If it starts moving, there will be warning, there will be
inflammation, so I ignore it. A mother is a cookie cutter, full
of awkward angles. I still don’t know what that shape is supposed to be.
How would I decorate it? My mother never taught me to make icing.
I learned from a book. I’m better at flavor than presentation. I’m not
in the market for a mother because I have a poor imagination. I can’t
imagine what I could have had, or what I might want now. I need
to be one. A mother is what I am attempting to invent. A mother is aimed
forward in time. Blind. Reliant on instinct. Most memories of my mother
fall out of unsecured openings. I tear advice and ideas from my friends
like a vulture. I eat whatever I can find. I am immune to the bacteria
in corpses. My wings are fantastic but no one thinks I’m beautiful.
My friend who is done with mothering draws a boundary and holds it
tight as a warfront. Still she can’t wash off the guilt after she leaves
a grown woman sick on the cold tiles. I am not clean, but I have been
scraping expectations from my body so long that nothing sticks, not even
sadness, for long. I want to tell her it will be OK, you can send all that shame
back to the kitchen if someone else cooked it. I sleep just fine. I dream
of octopuses. Their skin and shape shifting to fit in. To disappear. In the face
of danger they have to decide how they want to save themselves—amputate
the tentacle, flee in a flood of ink. Yes, those are familiar choices. There are
many ways to let your timeline break but this one is mine. Let an empty
mother fall from your hands and shatter. I can’t pick up the pieces without
bleeding. I haven’t killed my mother but only because she is still alive.
–
Shana Ross is a recent transplant to Edmonton, Alberta, and Treaty Six Territory. Qui transtulit sustinet. Her work can be found in Identity Theory, Ilanot Review, Ninth Letter, Quarter After Eight, and more. She is the winner of the 2022 Anne C. Barnhill prize and the 2021 Bacopa Literary Review Poetry competition.