Things My Mother Gave Me

A cast-iron bladder

is one of the things

my mother gave me.

 

‘That will be the Charvill genes,

my darling!

All the women have one:

the legendary

Charvill Cast Iron Bladder.’

 

I smile to myself

as I glance around

at the queue for the loo

at the pub, as you do

on a blistering July day

and I lift my chin aloft

above the crowd

proud

as I spot the tell-tale

twisted criss-cross legs

and frantic panic-stricken faces

in a sea of searching glances,

people seeking out some kind of

vessel or receptacle

to expel their desperate fluids into.

 

And

here I am

for once, the picture of calm

and grateful

for what my mother gave me.

 

My mother tells me again

about the rabbit brains.

The sickly sweetness to their taste

that fatty nectar

all slurped up

by hungry siblings,

how she craved it

in search of something

nourishing

like

sieving for gold in a river of shit.

 

I picture my mother, then.

A greedy child they said,

always too needy child

they said

always suckling too hard

and needing to feed

she couldn’t be weaned

she just wasn’t having it

and she always wanted more

than what her mother gave her.

 

Rolling hills.

That’s another thing

my mother gave me.

A flatness had enveloped

her

the fenlands of East Anglia

they made her run

for miles,

she fled

no break in the terrain

and the stillness

of that endless horizon

surely reminded my Grandmother

of the change she’d never make

the love she’d never give.

She saw in the distance that

rigid predictability

of stagnation

staring back at her.

Blond curls. The whiff of ethanol on breath.

(Hindsight’s a wonderful thing)

 

and with the beat of a starling’s wing

the silence wrapped my mother up

and trapped her in

and when she saw her

breath

forming like frost

on the morning air

she glimpsed the map

of her escape

suspended there.

 

My mother gave me

words

she taught me how to

speak my mind

a sense of self

a something that she had to grow

to cultivate

like

a green shoot emerging

through the concrete

that defiant, stubborn,

pretty little weed.

 

My mother survived

and she made me.