I Love You, I Swear I Do

Saturday’s Gratitude List:
I’m sober and I can feel the feelings I used to treat with mind-altering substances.
It is great to be myself.
It’s great to have a daughter named Milo, who was a good sport on Black Friday.
There were 109 years of sobriety sitting at the birthday table today, and eight newcomers.
My mom was a good mom.

Leftover pumpkin pie
I have a marvelous husband who cleaned up the dog puke on the couch today.

Thanksgiving is over and Black Friday must have made the retailers happy. There are leftovers in the fridge and I munch on homemade pumpkin pie as I write. I drink hot tea trying to fight off a cold.
The confluence of mother, daughter, granddaughter struck a chord with you yesterday, and today it’s on my mind again. Mama losing her mind, daughter trying to be Mama to Mama, but also be Mama to 23-year-old daughter.

On Black Friday, before it was called Black Friday, Mom and I used to go shopping for sales. Now it is my own daughter I take, and we have fun buying gifts for Christmas. I leave my Mom at her care home because she would be too confused by the madness, of which there is little, actually, in our small city.

Traditions are changing as my parents’ generation dies off, and my generation becomes the teachers. When I was younger, we used to sit up late at night making gifts for loved ones: sewing shirts, knitting afghans, even recovering book matches with shiny paper for Uncle Fred.
Now it’s buy, buy, buy, run up the credit cards, who cares? I watch my daughter carefully parcel out money on her debit card, and it makes me smile. Her frugal mother has taught her something!

I’ve had the great honor of reading my story and poems on our local NPR station this coming week, and today I learned I’ve had two poems accepted on Bolts of Silk’s poetry blog (it’s on my blog roll).


Mama is missing
(All the king’s horses, all the king’s men…)

Are you in there, Mama?
Inside the prison of your brain
where thoughts crumple
like a wrecked train?

I want to believe some part of you
still thrives, disguised as a
tiny old lady lost in a maze
of days that all run together.

In some corner of that drifting mind
is the blunt strong woman who
deliberated carefully and behaved
sensibly, no fact left behind.

She is bewildered now by
the world of commerce, mystified.
She worships oak trees and
old barns, the totems of her life.

The physical world sends her
into paroxysms of wonder.
A round rock makes her smile.
The sky makes her sing.

You take good care of me,
she says, not knowing how
I hate what she’s become.
I hug her filled with grief.

I miss our conversations.
I wish I’d known the last one
was the last one we would have
and I could remember it in detail.

This transition from mother
to child has flummoxed me.
I love you, I do, I swear I do,
but I wish you would come home.

Chris Alba © 2009

Photo courtesy Southernfood.com