Mother, My Muse | 21.1

1998

Digital only; out of stock in print.

My mother made me tea in a pop bottle on the mornings I spent watching Mr. Dress Up. She introduced me to Anne of Green Gables and proofed my high-school English essays, often suggesting better words than the ones I chose. She wrote me long letters in perfect penmanship when I lived far away and still sends me newspaper clippings she thinks I’ll enjoy.

She’s an eclectic reader and watches her soap opera reli­giously. She’s a gambler and a night person, she bakes braided bread and I’ve never seen her cry.

In one way or another I can trace everything I am back to her. Which, as this issue demonstrates, is what many, if not all, of us can do. In the following pages it becomes clear that mother is at, or somewhere very near, the heart of all of us. And in our heads and in our pens.

There are a myriad of mothers here, both on the lines and in between them. Mother as muse, mother as protagonist— and antagonist. Mother as a source of inspiration or exaspera­tion. There are reluctant moms and drowning ones, decrepit moms and forgetting ones. And the writers showcased in this issue portray mothers both plaintively and profoundly.

One thing is common: one body becomes two but there is always a connection. It’s not necessarily a happy thing as the confrontations between Sally McNall’s warring mother and daughter show. But it’s always intense. Jenny Charchun sings the strength of this bond in “Starting Sunflowers.” “Finger grip./ Of spring?/ My mother?/This is her season to draw me home… My body /is braced/ for the ‘happy birthday.’ / The day that pairs / my mother and I. / I imagine / seeds bursting. / The pain of birth. / Sunlight. / Tender leaves / opening / two by two.”

There’s tragedy too. Chris Wiesenthal’s essay bursts with the raw emotion of losing a mother too soon. She is haunted by dreams of her mother, buffeted by anger and anguish; yet, in the end, finds comfort in the love that was there.