31 MOMents: Mothering Me

For Christmas the year I was fourteen, I asked for a subscription to Poetry Magazine. Yes, I also read Sassy and Seventeen, but it was Poetry that I tucked inside the front flap of my backpack to read between classes at Huntington High.

I read each one front to back and over again, studying the shapes the poems made on the page. I learned more about imagery and structure and internal rhyme pouring over those words than I ever did in a college classroom.

But I also learned about love and loss. I learned about dreaming through days and can’t-sleep nights. I learned the stories of people I’d never met, people whose names I collected like beads on a string. I wore their words around my neck and felt for it when I needed to know that they were still there.

In words I found safety. And like the satin-edged blanket that’s frayed in the corners, I left the words behind when I thought I was grown up. Too big for security objects. An adult.

But you already know about that.

So why am I suddenly thinking about the stack of magazines that sat on my shelves so long ago?

Last week I had a dream. I was in my childhood home, in the bedroom with the lavender walls and eyelet curtains. I was interviewing myself, or maybe it was my daughter, for an assignment at school. We sat Indian-style on the four-poster bed, both of us barefoot, freckles dotting our noses.

And in her- my- (my daughter’s?)- hands was a robin’s egg blue edition of Poetry.

We are never more Ourselves than we are at fourteen. We spend the rest of our lives looking for that missing child. We spend our adult lives mothering ourselves, giving those ghosts what we needed and didn’t receive.

 

 I’m sharing 31 MOMents in 31 days.Each Wednesday I’m encouraging you to link up your own MOMent on My 3 Little Birds. For the month of October I’ll do a giveaway for each of my favorite MOMents. Will you join me?