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Show the floor. And when I tell you that for most of my childhood my mother never wore jeans in public, could will away sickness, and feed a hundred people with as much apparent effort as she took to make the three sack lunches my bothers and I carried every day to school, I am still not telling you about her. To say she was a saint is to only reiterate what my father said about her almost every day. I am not telling you about my mother when I write that one of the gifts she gave me was a smile that strangers will remark on. If were to tell you about my mother, I would have to admit more than the fact that she made casseroles or sang in a choir or believed yarn and felt would heal me. I would have to do more than describe the way she tilts her head for pictures, the same way I tilt mine, so that when the two of us are pictured together, our heads form a heart, hair falling between. It would not be enough to say she wears petite clothes and used to eat liverwurst. I would, rather, have to own the knowledge that she stood by as my father yelled at me as a child, that she allowed him to rage like a hurricane, and that she bore witness to an anger that wrapped my family in its arms and worked to suffocate us. And I am not ready to write about that mother. I find myself, at the age of thirty eight, unable to take my mother, the golden angel, off her pedestal and ask her why she would let him wound me that way. What I will give you instead is the way she tickled my face when she tucked me into bed, her fingers grazing my cheeks and running along my forehead, letting me know she was there, was there, was there. While my father made up stories to delight me and often stayed with me until I fell asleep, my mother would perch on the side of the bed, 185 |