Giving Birth

Forgiveness 

by Warsan Shire

 

Baptize me

     now that reconciliation is possible. 

If we're gonna heal, let it be glorious.

One thousand girls raise their arms.

Do you remember being born?

Are you thankful?

Are the hips that cracked

     the deep velvet of your mother

     and her mother

     and her mother?

There is a curse that will be broken.

 

__________

Yesterday was Mother's Day, and I was okay. A year ago, I sat on a high open terrace with my friend Jane, just days before Mother's Day and we agreed to release all expectations of how that day should be. For me, Mother's Day had been silently fraught ever since my very first one, thirty two years ago now, when my husband, usually a man of romantic gestures, failed to observe the day as I had expected he would. He had grown up in an island where on Mother's Day people gave thanks for their mothers in church and didn't get into the Hallmark aspect of the day otherwise. Once he understood my disappointment, he rallied, but if I'm being honest, my disappointment on the only first Mother's Day I would ever have, gave this day a brooding quality I never quite outran, or rose above. 

Outwardly, I kept things light and bright. Even after my own mother died, and the day would pierce me with missing her. I cried softly on waking and then became breezy once I stepped out of bed. Then, last year, Jane and I sat on her terrace with the springtime sun falling around our shoulders, and we dissected all the things women feel but do not say about mothering, and how it all crystallizes on Mother's Day, settling into a tender ache about which we do not speak. And then we just decided that henceforth, Mother's Day would be just another Sunday, merely a Hallmark confection, and we would let go of all expectations of the day, releasing the people unwittingly chained by those expectations, because how could they know about things we never said?

There is true power in two women sipping seltzer under a sun colored sky and just deciding. I know because last year and this one, I felt no angst as the day approached. I happily welcomed my children last year, and this year, when I knew my son would have to work and my daughter would be out of town to attend a friend's wedding, I felt no twinge, because after all, it was just another Sunday. But then my nieces texted me, the two who lived with us for a spell after college before getting launched, the ones we playfully call "the roomies." They wanted to know what I was doing for Mother's Day because they wanted to come over and spend it with me. 

Maybe they were missing their own mothers, but they did come over in the early afternoon, and they stayed till well into the night. We set out a brunch feast of quiche and chicken maple sausages, grapes and strawberries, blueberry muffins and croissants, waffles and jam, and avocado slices, and we made mimosas with the Prosecco and orange juice my husband brought home. We noshed and watched movies, a cheesy rom com (Mother of the Bride) and a diverting comedy caper (Queenpins) and then sat around the kitchen counter and just chatted, and later we put a few pieces into the puzzle on my dining table, and it was lovely—all the more so because I had no expectations whatsoever about what or how the day should be.

I read once that disappointment is expectation unmet, and that if we release our expectations we will avoid disappointment and could it really be that simple?

__________ 

 

The poem is by the Somali British poet Warsan Shire from her chapbook Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth. It spoke to me on Mother's Day, but then all Warsan Shire's poetry speaks to me. The photo of her is by Amaal Said.