“All women become like their mothers” -Rebecca M

“all women become like their mothers”

your heartening bosom, all-enveloping embrace;
your forever silver hair, which I coveted as a child + readily don strands of now;
your garden-tinted jackets - lilac, scarlet, emerald, rose, violet;
your sheepish revelation of my first phrase, “mommy go meeting”;
your fidelity to summer backyard nudity;
your truth that sleeping was optional (until it wasn’t);
your giddy spirit that sporadically showed up for festivities & adventures;
your plebeian go-to lunch of a canned tuna salad & mug of milk;
your feigned indignation when I called your office at 2am & gentle promises to come kiss me goodnight (even if you might not make it back that night, still soothing me back to sleep);
your trust, evidently justified, in my capacity for hours of self-entertainment at the law school, tinkering with old typewriters, drawing comics in blue exam books;
your quaint term of endearment, “sweetheart,” which would be nauseating from others, but comforting from you;
your semi-informed funding of splurges on gaudy apparel & haphazard beauty buys from White Plains gallerias + strip malls (perhaps foresight that such excess would erode my promiscuous consumerism over time);
your steadfast allegiance to keeping the u.s. postal service afloat via your proclivity for snail mail & home-assembled gift bundles (moderated by your determination to reuse all envelopes, boxes, tape, paper, bows);
your creative spunk with counter-protesters (“why don’t you all just lock yourselves up in a room together + shoot your way out?”);
your sage voice admonishing me that actually, no one is looking at you;
your genuine curiosity, gregarious conversations with everyone, especially folks in the working class & service industries, to my chagrin & respect (cross-society political education or uncompensated socioemotional labor?);
your vague but arguably effective clickbait email subjects, welcome punctures to my procrastinatory afternoons + witching hour doomscrolls;
your faithfulness to adorning yourself with sunglasses after Wendy died;
your much-appreciated knack for discerning when to skirt the rules or stretch the law (sneaking onto another class’ field trip is more educational than sitting at a desk; stale Girl Scout troop cookie funds might as well be used for now-teens traveling to Barbados on a shoestring budget; how did you even get all of those PBA cards in your wallet?);
your redwells of old love notes, the “files of the men” in your life;
your willingness to communicate via GChat during my years in college & abroad, immortalizing endless dialogues of silliness & substance;
your devotion to remembering birthdays & deathdays + helping the rest of us to observe them too;
your distinctive scrawl, decades of labeling & caretaking & caring, pervading through the Pinecrest house + blessing so many others’ homes through cards & letters;
your vulnerability, authenticity, never hiding your whole self from me (even when that meant seeing you peck a Roman cop + smoke his cigarette after being pickpocketed);

(me becoming like you is a tragedy, I was taught + thought
but instead I find solace as I realize how so many of these yours are ours…)

(y)our record of chaotic, overlapping relationships (flying one partner to the Aspen Institute as another flew out; sequestering one in the attic while Mother distracts the other downstairs);
(y)our shameless airplane orders of tomato juice on the rocks;
(y)our preference for giving over accepting, to have more control (continuously topping up those inner wells of paternalism, saviorism);
(y)our range of corporeal forms;
(y)our banishment from local jails (Rikers Island, Contra Costa) for seditionary activities;
(y)our divine mandate to seek + absorb sunlight…


in another realm, 2020s me & 1980s you & 2040s Lu play cards
three thirty-somethings, thirsty to carouse + rebel, hungry for cheese & revolution
as the matriarch you lead, I change suit, and she creates a new one.

Rebecca M