Mother

by Elaine Chang

How it must feel to be her; the Earth, the Creator,

The Mother who made all.

How it must've felt, for her skirts to billow; catching dancing, brazen gales.
How it must’ve felt, for her patient bosom to nurse the languid beginnings of life.
How it must’ve felt, for her palms to hold so many footprints from her childrens’ muddy feet.

Every mother was, once, a girl.

Her juvenile amusement, crinkles of amusement stroked the corners of her eyes, had laced the night
sky with its mischievous winks of light.
Her graceful dancing, leaving gentle marks in the sand, had lulled the waves into their restless
rhythms.
Her tender sing-song, airy through her toil, had weaved itself a place into the tapestry of earth and its
seas.

Yet, every mother is, by her children, made.

Her smile fades to maternal worry, as her children run amok in her front yard. Callow feet killing,
curious hands reaping sweet life.
Her dance constricts itself to a frenzied tango between nursing and cooking. Blood seeps through
fissures in baby skin that she must kiss better, mouths waiting to be fed.
Her song turns bitter and anguished when she returns home to see her beautiful tapestry shred by
Selfishness and Greed. Her two eldest and most terrible sons.

Every child grows; to leave their Mother.

Maybe, her heart houses more relief than grief at the sight of her childrens’ sturdy backs facing her,
rather than their faces.
Maybe, her mind whispers a hopeful prayer that her sons are taught a lesson by those who will not
have the same maternal obligation to love as she does.
Maybe, she wishes she was never made Mother at all.

How it must feel to be destroyed by your own children; broken, weary,
waiting. She waits to be sewed back together.

She waits for her children to come home,
lips spilling with hastened apologies for their naïveties and the errs of their youth.

She waits so that, for once, she does not nurse, but is nursed.
Restless patience tugs at her bones as she waits.