As If My Mother, and: Never Saw, and: Before, During, and After the First Birth, and: After We Have Gone Our Separate Ways, I Take Mercy on Myself, and: Dream of Mrs. Sly

Abstract

As If My Mother, and: Never Saw, and: Before, During, and After the First Birth, and: After We Have Gone Our Separate Ways, I Take Mercy on Myself, and: Dream of Mrs. Sly Sharon Olds (bio) As If My Mother When I realize my mother is one of the womenin history who has had the most poemswritten to her, it irks me—as if she wasconducting music, or science, when she wasbeating on me. What was wrongwith my family, the generations of mothersbeating the daughters—and what was wrongwith the men. My mother nursing—her breast as representativeof the female, the doe, the mammary goddess—has been sung. And her singing, her sharps and her flatshave been sung. When I was born, there weren'ta lot of songs of women doingwhat my mother had done—given birth,nursed, bled, beaten oneof her children, as her mother had beaten one—always the second daughter, the secondone who had been supposed to bea son. When the farmer beats his wife whobeats the dog who beats the cat whobeats the mouse, who does the mousebeat? She does not beat her young.Maybe she beats the cat-skin drum.Four! beats! to a line! and I'm done!I'm putting it here as morning comes,as the full day moon is going downinto the mountain, deposited,dissolving in the light, mouth open, eyes [End Page 61] open unseeing. When our species began,language and tools and ritual burialbegan. I want to bury my mother,if possible, with both truth and honor. Never Saw I never saw my maidenhead,I knew it by its resistance, it heldfirm, a minor organ, a permanentpart of my body. The pain was so sharpI felt disappointed in myself as if I wasnot goingto be able to gothrough with it. And his grunt of surprise—his resonant, male grunt, so genuine, soordinary—he had not knownI had never done anything like that before. I wasmonths out of high school, it was still "going all theway" for me, with this man from outsidethe world I grew up in, who could have been sleepingin the woods instead of in his car, as if he hadhorns and a tail and hoofs as well as ared beard and that bright-eyed laugh and thosepaintbrushes and that zazen sitting-pillow.And the blood, it was a flawless red,so smooth, so bright, so much of it, asif I was a natural creature, atree which swayed and almost spoke,like a spring between rocks, up out of the earth.Later, I would picture my hymenas the soft bole or burl of a trunk, or aBoulogne oyster, with its papoose lumpon it, but as its wholeness was going, [End Page 62] and when it was gone, I did not miss it,his getting rid of it was like cuttingmy mother's throat without hurting her,without her even knowing. And whenhe did not call, when I did not see himfor a year, it was like the Rose Fairy Book,he'd been summoned for a task and was completing it.And nothing had been removed from me,except the scarlet gush, and in ita few cells of the torn edges—I still had a maidenhead, split in half,in a way I was still a virgin, but a virgin opened. Before, During, and After the First Birth For months, something pulled back, inside me,as if into hiding. There was a beinggrowing in me, larger and larger,who would have to come out, through the delicate passage.Something in me backed up in terrorfrom that. And when the pain of birthing seemed totear the center of my center, somethingtried to flatten its back as ifagainst the back wall of some closet in someanti-immolative chamber. But thenshe was here, so slight, so touching. But whenthe milk came in, and my breasts hardened,as if they...