OCR Text |
Show Motherlunge a novel 156 23. You Won't Know Me Of my formal education-K through 12, plus a Bachelor's in Communication-there are artifacts, and they are like things in a curiosity shop. The location and chief products of Dahomey, a West African kingdom that no longer existed by the time I glossed its encyclopedia entry for my third-grade report. A description from The Martian Chronicles: "Delicately sensing decay at last, the regiments of mice hummed out as softly as blown gray leaves in an electrical wind." The accounts of certain women in the Middle Ages, whose ecstatic religious experiences included marrying Jesus using his snipped-off foreskin as a wedding ring. My point is: who knows what you'll remember? And of what you remember, how much is true? My point is: you won't know me. You'll be tempted to think you do-I have mastered my mother, haven't I, in the neatest possible way?-but darling, no. I was a person before you were conceived, and inside, your mother is (I am) as weird as love, as lonely as a survivor, as gone from you as a vanished nation. I was there for you, but inside the disfiguring crust of motherhood. Not so you'd know it. |