Even the best mother-daughter relationships are necessarily tormented with issues of dependence versus independence, identity formation, role reversal, competition, and impossible desire. Some give rise to poems like today’s: fraught, even agonized at times, but also honest and still holding a place for love.
My mom’s roots run deep and strong, but for 13 years she was forced to be a wanderer—a refugee from the day World War II started, in September 1939, until June 29, 1952, when she came to this country with $10 in her pocket.
My father’s sister told me she had always loved my mother’s 19th-century sensibility. “Unhand me,” Mom would say if my cat rebuffed a caress, likening her to a Victorian heroine resisting the advances of an unworthy suitor.
Because the Keenan family ways are so familiar to me, it doesn’t really surprise me that my grandfather didn’t notice for nine entire months that his wife was pregnant—or that she hadn’t bothered to tell him. Times were tough in their household, and Grandma Lucy never did anything less than forge ahead.
Sketching my mother as she lay in hospice, I drew the heavy lids framing the beautiful, once warily alert gray-green irises, the “yes” and “no” eyes, vividly etched into my memory, that my twin sister and I could bring to an outpouring of tears or a ray of pride . . .
Bea was a card sharp. That’s how I think she earned the nickname “Diamond Bea.” She beat the boots off whomever she played with, of whatever economic level. Or maybe her efforts toward improving my dad got her the nickname: She often said my father was a diamond-in-the-rough and she had polished him.
Historically, both straight plays and musicals have been a little biased when it comes to maternal characters.
Judie Rae's tribute to her no-nonsense, yet nurturing, adoptive grandmother Hettie.
My mother's favorite annual event was her Kentucky church's Mother-Daughter Night. I was invited every year, but never made it. Mommie reminded me when my sisters were unavailable that she “had to adopt a daughter” for that night, but “Never mind." Well, she did mind, and I did know it.
My late mother, Marcelina, wasn’t a wild thing, but she had heart and she had grit. She could snake clogged pipes, wring the neck of a bound-for-supper chicken—and brag about being the only hospital worker on her shift to give a big hug to the AIDS patient in the corner room.
Mother did outrageous things—cut the telephone cord when she thought Father had gotten too many calls (you have to be old to understand that this was just not done). She covered our dog Hansy with Chanel No. 5 after he got into the dead fish by the lake water. She drove across state lines to get fireworks in Ohio, setting them off like a maniac in northern Michigan . . .