Motherly Love

                  Son Of A Snake?

I wonder sometimes whether my mother

was an evil person or just a reptilian one.

After all, crocs and snakes aren’t evil when they strike –

it’s just what they do –

and I wonder sometimes whether my mother,

with her self-obsessive narcissism

and total psychopathic insensitivity,

understood that she was gratuitously harming others.

But then, I sometimes saw

triumphant malice in her face.

                   Chapped Lips and Ipecac

From time to time

over the years,

I’ve experienced dry, chapped lips.

Sometimes when I was little

the bottom of my lower lip

would crack so badly that

it’d become covered with sores.

Chapstick and creams didn’t help,

so I naturally licked the dry place

to try to keep it moist.

My mother, of course,

not only accused me

of licking off her emollients,

she also announced

that it was my licking my lips

that had made them chapped in the first place.

She therefore – I suppose reflexively –

employed one of her common control tactics

and threatened me.

She threatened me

that if I didn’t stop licking my lips

she’d put ipecac on ’em.

Ipecac, in case you don’t know, is an emetic,

or as she explained it to me,

it would make me vomit if I licked my lips

after she’d applied it to them.

Doctors use it to save people

who have ingested poison,

so my GP daddy would have had some on hand.

I wonder whether she would have actually done it

if my daddy had let her.

I also wonder how many four-year-olds

have ever even heard the word, ‘ipecac’,

let alone been threatened with it.

                Tank Trunks

Little kids love splashing in pools,

especially in high summer,

but I once hid

in the walk-in wardrobe

under the eaves behind my room

to keep from having to go to one.

The problem was the swimming attire

that my mother ordered me to wear.

They were tight little things,

shaped like Speedos,

that she’d knitted herself.

I’ve always been highly sensitive to wool,

so when she’d tried them on me

after knitting them

my little bum and dangly bits

had felt as if they’d been on fire.

Somehow I knew it’d be worse

if the damned garment got wet,

so I’d pleaded to be allowed

to wear my tried-and-true, semi-baggy

board-shorts-type splashing gear.

My mother, of course,

would have none of that,

explaining that since what she’d knitted

were called tank trunks,

and since the pool was a tank,

I’d have to wear them, and that’s that.

So when the family

was ready

to head for the pool,

I hid.

Worse Than Physical Violence

I must’ve been eight years old

when I begged my mother

to hit me

when I displeased her,

which was just about every day,

instead of telling me,

“Don’t say ‘I love you, Mommy’,”

because I clearly didn’t love her,

because if I did

I wouldn’t do or fail to do

things that made her angry.

She therefore withheld affection from me

until I got it right,

which she made sure I’d never do,

even as an adult.

                                 Bad Timing

Rock and roll arrived at just the wrong time for me,

taking a prominent role in the realm of my consciousness

just a few months after my daddy died when I was nine.

I was soon old enough to join the school band

and to take music lessons at school.

Being besotted by rock and roll,

I desperately wanted to play a sax.

My mother, unlike my daddy totally non-musical,

bought me a clarinet, explaining that the fingering was the same,

that I could have a sax when I was bigger,

that jazz musicians called them liquorice sticks because they’re black

(I didn’t like liquorice),

and Benny Goodman, the King of Swing, played one, and he was Jewish.

I didn’t give a shit about Benny Goodman or swing,

and no rock and roll band that I’d heard had one.

I started going to school dances

and the high-energy, uninhibited

rock-and-roll dancing made me feel good,

so my mother decided that I needed dance lessons:

“Real dancing – not that jumping around you do!”

She sent me to ballroom and tap-dancing lessons,

about which I couldn’t have given less of a shit.

I craved a black leather motorcycle jacket

with umpteen useless chromium zippers,

just like the real rock-and-roll kids at school

were starting to wear, aping Elvis Presley.

My mother bought me a thick, heavy black leather jacket

that was so stiff I couldn’t move my arms with it on.

Elvis wouldn’t have been seen dead in it.

“This is quality,” she explained. “Look – see, it’s lined.

You can get a motorcycle jacket when you get a motorcycle.”

For years afterward she pointed to the unplayed clarinet

and the unworn tap shoes and jacket

as examples of my wretched ingratitude for all she did for me.

                   Under the Desk

Amongst the hundreds,

more likely thousands,

of times she did it,

one time when I was 12,

when accusing me unfairly

of either not doing something to her liking,

or doing something of which she disapproved,

my mother also,

as was her wont,

criticised with particularly inappropriate

anger and savagery

my worthiness as a son

and my value as a human being.

That time, however,

instead of quietly internalising,

as I had long before learnt to do,

I curled up into a semi-foetal ball

under my tacky little student desk

and chanted,

“I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself”

continually for more than an hour.

The door to my room was open,

as was the door to hers,

through which I saw her pass

several times.

She did nothing to intervene

at all.

My mother always did make a show

of enjoying being triumphant.

        The Cliché of the Clown

One of my cousins told me recently

that her mother, my mother’s sister,

had told her that when I’d been a wee child

the only time she ever saw me

when I didn’t look unhappy

was when my mother wasn’t around.

When I was away at a university

in an urban area other than the one

in which my mother resided,

she bought a large stuffed doll

representing Emmett Kelly,

the archetypal sad-faced clown,

because, she said, it reminded her of me.

She thought that this was hilariously funny,

and after saying it she inevitably let out

a loud, staccato bark of a laugh, “Hah!” –

one of the many parts of her repertoire

that always made me cringe,

but of course I could say nothing.

Sometimes when the mood struck her

she’d – from out of nowhere –

criticise my own timid way of laughing

with vicious and inaccurate mockery

and insist that I change it,

as if that were possible.

                  Kick in the Shin

Once, when I was in my mid-to-late thirties,

my mother came to visit me from the

 – not accidentally –

far-away place where she lived.

We were having a meal

with some other people

in a plastic-and-vinyl, coffee-and-bland-food

chain restaurant.

I said something,

I think about religion

or Middle-Eastern politics,

of which she disapproved,

disapproval being one of her passions,

but since other people were with us

she chose not to chop me down

with a series of malicious personal remarks,

as was her usual practice,

but instead kicked me in the shin

and threw me a warning glance.

I said, not loudly,

but I do have powerful voice,

“Don’t kick me!

What’re you kicking me for?

You have no reason to kick me!”

She said nothing.

She just stared at a spot

somewhere midway across the table top,

a blank look on her face.

I felt good.

It was one of the few times

that I ever felt good

when in her presence.

               Mother’s Day

Reading the blissful and laudatory

mother’s day postings on facebook

from people sincerely grateful

for their mothers’ love and support

really bums me out

by reminding me of how much

I missed out on

by having an inhumanly abusive mother

who provided me with neither love nor support

and who damaged me irreparably,

leaving me hating her memory

and the life her abuse left me to live

with a passion I cannot lose.

Okay, there you are –

you metaphoric personification –

tempting me,

making me desire you,

but remaining just out of reach,

beyond my psychological capabilities.

And so I suffer,

wanting you,

or at least wanting to do without your opposite (life),

but being devoid of any suicidal capability.

If, unfortunately,

death doesn’t mean

just going to sleep and not waking up,

and spirits survive

into some sort of afterlife,

I hope I don’t encounter

my mother’s hideous soul.

If they exist,

I doubt if spirits

can spit.