MOTHERS' DAY

A mother bird flies to the nest she built in a Boston fern outside my kitchen window. I noticed her the week my dog died, as if nature was reminding me that Life Goes On. The violins should swell now, I think. Doggie dies, bird arrives, wheel of life, god is good — cue the violins. Life has no soundtrack, life is not a movie, where the auteur commands, and we feel. Life has no such easy meanings. The bird doesn’t feel my pain.

I pick up the phone to play an unretrieved voicemail message. My friend Joan. Her words are slow, carefully formed. “I’m back home now, I needed to come home,” I hear her say.

“I’m not sure who I told what to, but… anyway, I wanted you to know, my mother died last Friday.”

I stare out the window. Should I give that bird a name? Mabel, maybe? Thelma? Libby? Oh man, Libby. Mama Libby. Libby Mama. Mama gone too, my mama gone. Mama long gone, almost 13 years ago to the day, this very day, could it be? Dead at 81. How could I not think of her, my mama, too?

Joan’s mother had apparently died the day they finally brought her home from the hospital. The nurse barely had time to get things set up in the hospice.

“It was so quick,” Joan says, when I call her back.

“She was ready,” I reply, trying for a tone of calm compassion. Out the window a breeze sways the basket with the fern and the mama bird tucked inside.

“She was ready,” Joan repeats. I hear the collapse in her voice, the struggle not to. I fiddle with some mail using my free hand.

“I’ll tell you more when…when we’re not on the phone,” she says. Words are the key. They unlock whatever holds it all in. I ask if I can help — dinner, a walk on the beach?

“I love you,” I say. “I love you, too,” she says and I feel the flood coming, even as the click cut us off.

The metal doggie flap clanks loudly as I swing open the kitchen door, causing the bird to fly away with a startling flutter. Jesus, you’ve made her abandon her eggs, you heartless foe of nature! Now what? What kind of bird is she, anyway -- a wren, a sparrow, a starling? — my friend Ed thinks she’s a finch. How long will this egg drama go on? I walk across the porch to the fern. When I first peered inside, I was so amazed to find a perfect straw nest cradling three bluish eggs, mottled and smaller than my pinkie tip. Now, as I peek in, I see, not eggs, but a fluffy mess of feathers, and a fleshy bit sort squirming in slow motion. This is new birth! She’s hatched one!

Oh shit! Hide me so that mama can return, so the little runt won’t die! I retreat to the kitchen to watch through the window. I stand frozen, like a predator. Maybe I’ll buy Joan flowers. Or a book? What did I want when my mother went? In a minute, the bird reappears, landing on a cross beam. She flicks her head about before darting onto the fern and her chick, too new even to chirp.

Mother love, mother gone, mother death. Only one, only one to love, only one to hate, only she can make you right, only she can set me straight, only she can make me gay, only she could make me an orphan, a widow, black widow, spider woman. I see another mother roaming lonely, kohl-eyed in the dusky half-light, musty, trusting nothing, waiting for an uninvented psyche drug that will put her on the front page: CRAZY MAMA REUNITES WITH LONG LOST SPUD, one in a gaggle of orphan spuds cast in an opera of lost mamas, all given up on, giving up their baby’s blood to the ones with the happy-birthday-Jesus cakes on Christmas Day. Hard-luck mamas lose their babies to the ones with the tarnished Walmart crucifixes over each major appliance, the ones who step up, step in, step over the bodies, like they did with my very own dear mama.

My very own flesh-and-blood-brother & his smirking fury wife found her on a Friday, yes a Friday, found in her bed, my big brother said, found dead from dreadful waiting, endless waiting for the end, she’s in a better place he said, he said it on that voicemail from hell, 13 years gone by, gone to a better place, he said, gone away and dragged my heart along, I said, crying and keening and pounding, sleep-walks and hot-baths, reading and re-reading Rilke, tear-ing up all over the translation. Damn God.

God damn. Listen to this, only a week before, just that very fucking Sunday before, my turn, first time sober, it was my turn to have the whole damn lot of ‘em over, three damn birthdays on a barbeque spit – and, to top it all off: Mother’s Day, it was Mother’s Day, then, and now, it’s going to be Mother’s Day all over again, they have one every year, I have read the decree by King Hallmark, one for every mama, one for Joan’s dead mama, one for your mama too, their own damn day to step over King Baby, bawling baby like I was, like the chick of the unknown genus, the mysterious species in the back yard of my own mortal ecosystem, mouth wide open, waiting for mama to bring more life, waiting for mama to come back to the nest, waiting for mama to regurgitate like she always did, waiting for mama to make the hurt go away, forever and always waiting for my mama, but it’s too late, too late, too late. Cue the violins now, goddammit!

Mother’s on her father’s throne, mother-lovers hover in the clapboard church where I stand without regret before the altar of God, ahead of the legions of professional finger-waggers with my puny entourage of fags and fag-hags and rag-tags, scorched by the lapping fire, the sizzling brimstone, melting into fear and nausea — I couldn’t help but get poetical.

faith shaped mama / living proof / giving proof to / unconditional / noncommissioned / mama type love / for us / for strangers / for Him / greater light in which she walked / humility / a dream / a nest / of love on earth / not just possible / necessary