wildscape. literary journal

Un-mothered
by Casey Jo Graham Welmers

I 
	In high school you turn into a fragile porcelain doll. Your mother can’t watch the transmogrification, so she places you at the tippy-top of a high shelf and shoves you back toward the wall where you won’t be visible to her or anyone, really. You do not hold this against her. You are starving yourself and she cannot conceive of a girl actively seeking to become dust and bones. She decides to disappear on you before you can vanish on her. It is all just too much. One day you are coming home from school and feel your soul or possibly your failing heart as a hummingbird in your sternum. You lie on your bed and hold your splintered piano key fingers over your ribcage and decide you don’t want the hummingbird to escape the sanctuary of your chest. You eat a monstrous plate of spaghetti that night and pray for the noodles and tomatoes to please keep you alive and strong and the hummingbird safe. Two years later your mom’s left carotid artery spontaneously dissects and she passes away unexpectedly. She leaves behind pie crust, two large balls of dough not yet rolled and floured and pressed into tins. You grab one from the refrigerator and sit on the tacky faux-brick linoleum with your back to the door and consume the whole thing, the last thing she ever made in this life, made with love and butter and a dash of nutmeg and no clue that she would disappear before she could savor the fruits of her labor. 

II
	Your favorite yoga nidra narrator speaks of a cosmic mama that loves you no matter what. You long to crawl into the nebulous womb of this celestial Eve and ride along as she busies herself creating the universe. You have mothered yourself for so long. There there, it will be okay. You pat your own back, smooth your own hair, hug your knees to your chest so very tight. You pack up your CD’s and drive yourself to college and arrange your own wedding dress with self whispered reassurances that everything will be fine,  just perfect. You hold your own hand and answer your own questions about breast size discrepancy and mascara removal and shuddersome men in all shapes and forms. I do not want children, you tell your college boyfriend before breaking up with him and fighting over who owns the vacuum cleaner. I do not want children, you tell your fiancé, terrified he will collapse like an unmastered puppet. He pulls you into the crook of his arm and holds you like his own child and tells you that you are all he ever wants, anyways. Wet atmosphere bursts from your eyes. I do not want children, you tell your dead mom as you paw through her hope chest of musty old baby clothes and crocheted receiving blankets and jaunty plastic toys frozen in time. To this there is only ever silence, and a sad knowing that all of those items were carefully folded and packed and saved for the future babies of her own precious babes. 

III.
	You are the un-mother. You sit on the scorched desert floor, red desert floor, rock dust and sand in your hands and your hair and the tiny bubble pockets of your lungs. Perhaps the ground is red here because you bleed, every month, until you don’t. You are not the mother. The mother sits in fertile soil amidst the sleek grasses and frilled flowers and small tiny seeds, tangles rangy vines in her fingers and collects translucent insects in her braids. You, the un-mother, once put your toes in the mothers’ beautiful soft earth and said I don’t feel anything here speaking to me, or hear it or see it. You were escorted to the town square where they questioned your choices and the fact of  your breasts. You decided it looked awfully beautiful out there in the desert with the cacti and mesas and wild desert blooms, so you went and now here you are. You and the mother visit each other in turns. You are eternally grateful for the mothers and all they bring forth and hold up and cradle in arms so Earth-building strong. You have given birth to other fine things here in the arid terrain, courageous words and un-polished music and laughter like rogue ocean swells. You eventually will turn to dust and bones in this place where the stars never go out, every night a spray of phosphorescent pins flung into the firmament, all the cosmic mothers and un-mothers dead and gone, emitting their love from far burning suns.

about the author // Casey Jo Graham Welmers