A poem about my mother’s cervix
“A Poem About My Mother’s Cervix”
She had 3 kids carved out of her—“guts in a bucket,” estradiol dreams, and a reopened scar in the shape of her name: a ‘C.’
The first, though, was natural: a perfect baby boy who “hardly ever cried,” who played trombone in band and straddled straight A’s his whole life.
“He was such a good baby,” she still says, and you could see it in the photo-print collage, the only one the couple made: “Our baby’s first year.”
The second one came soon and brought, this time, a girl.
Difficult from day 1: ADD born with her in the womb: his Irish twin.
The family fractures had begun.
Despite the quick succession of kids (and you know how babies are made), the tensions grew.
A woman’s body floods with hormones after birth—to forget the pain. To seek the pleasure again and again.
But the body remembers… and the pain comes back around.
After decades of glue and of turning the other cheek—
a quarter of a million dollars gambled away (plus the cost of raising a kid, to boot),
of slut-shaming and victim-blaming,
and the daughters who, finally, tore her away.
The cervix the boy had passed through remembered
and atrophied in pain; in squamous cell disease.
The bleeding began at the same time as the lawsuits and divorce.
If your family member’s evil, is what you feel for them still love?
Beyond the hurt they inflict, you mostly just feel sad.
A mother wants to protect her son from harm.
But I think he had to make a choice: defend her… or protect himself.
Maybe in the next life, he’ll be born a woman, too, and know from pain built into us
from scars
from platitudes at bars—
and stop his seeking it out.
If you like to follow along the recording:
Before I moved out of her house, I had a very complicated relationship with my mother. As my sister likes to put it, we’re so similar, we get under each other’s skin. It’s much better now (and she did survive the cancer, baruch hashem), but here’s my reckoning with where my life was going during my Saturn return… and how my mother’s possible death played into it.
