Tag: mother/daughter (Page 1 of 2)

Hold and Release

7 February 2025 / Editor

Nonfiction by Tracey Ciccone Edelist

I am floating on top of a smooth blue sky with dappled clouds that break apart with each dip of the paddle. When the wind picks up, the sky in the lake becomes partially obstructed by privacy glass ripples, obscuring both sky above and underwater life below. Gliding further south, the ripples swell, and now I’m riding dark molten silver waves, the paddleboard gently rocking across the undulating liquid metal. I expect the paddle to drip silver-plated out of the water, but the splashes on my feet are clear and wet. Entering a small bay where the sun peeks through tree canopies, the water becomes like an oil spill, smooth and slick iridescence. I listen to the rustle of the trees as blue jays flit from branch to branch just above the water, breathing in the earthy smell of the damp bank and the leaves lying in varying layers of decomposition on the forest floor. As I drift away from the shoreline, the faint hint of a bonfire wafts through the air and I see a wispy plume of white smoke rising from a cottage clearing across the lake.

Sitting on the silver waves ahead, I see the young loon I’ve watched grow all summer, enjoying an independent swim. The sun reflects brightly off her long beak, not yet having turned black. She startles when she sees me and dives underwater. When she pops back up seconds later, she’s still close. She is almost fully grown, but her feathers haven’t changed from baby gray to the signature black and white adult markings, and she hasn’t yet earned her white necklace. She disappears again and I wait for her to surface. One minute, then two minutes.

Just as I’m wondering where mama loon could be, she swiftly swims to the place from which her loonlet has disappeared. Mama dunks her head below the water’s surface, searching the dark depths for her chick. She raises her head back up to scan across the lake, calls out loudly, and dunks again. I too continue scanning the lake. At last, the chick appears a few feet away and mama and baby swim quickly toward one another, baby bumping up against mama’s breast. The loonlet makes herself as small as she can on top of the water, scrunching her body down close to the surface near mama, hoping I can’t see her, but I can.

I remember how our youngest daughter took a few weeks after birth to unfurl her body from the position she held in my uterus. Born a couple weeks early, I imagined she’d rather be back in her confined amniotic home, riding the waves of my body, than out here in the open where air hit her skin and filled her lungs, and where she had to learn to feed herself from my breast. She wailed to be held at all times, heart to heart, eyes pinched shut, in protest against the vastness of this outside world. Holding her tiny compact body with curved back, arms and legs folded and tucked in tightly toward her center, was like holding a roly-poly hedgehog curled in on itself. We called her Scrunchie, until she began to relax her legs and straighten out her backbone.

Now she stands taller than me, straight-spined, long arms and legs swinging freely in the world she explores on her own. I find solace on the lake, and call her to me when she strays too far for too long.

Tracey Ciccone Edelist has a PhD in social justice education and is a critical disability studies researcher and educator. She had a previous career as a speech-language pathologist, and then as a fine chocolate entrepreneur. Now, she’s making sense of life through creative nonfiction.

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Sikwate

12 November 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Nicole Hirt

a steaming cup
rests in my mother’s hands
water and cacao mixed
into a comfortingly bitter brew
while rain thuds on Philippine palms
water knocking at the door

twenty years later
her feet have found American soil,
and her hands now rest on mine
helping me crush saltines
to plop in the cocoa

now
I am alone in my apartment
raindrops slamming on the windows
a cup of sikwate
warming my hands

I have exchanged water for milk
and added a spoonful of sugar
but the crackers are getting soggy

so I take a sip and a bite

Nicole Hirt is a freelance writer based in South Florida. She is an editor at Living Waters Review, where several of her poems and prose have appeared in past issues. In her free time, she enjoys wandering through cemeteries, much to the confusion of the general public.

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When the Column Blooms

1 October 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Jackie McClure

There are green things
we’ve planted here.
There are things that grew
which we never planted.

Had I weeded more
while my mother was dying
I would have never
discovered the poppies,
dormant in their seed-encased husks,
under the matting of grass,
masking an old garden spot.

So you see,
we did some good here:
ripping up squares
of thickly rooted sod
to unwittingly scatter
millions of seeds,
and, unknowingly,
we fed them.

When first they rose
above the weeds
in the new-broken soil
I was spending daylight
hours by my mother’s side,
urging her to eat,
helping her to move.

When I noticed they
were to be flowers,
she had gone home,
lonely, broken, and frightened.
It took longer to reach her.

When they burst
into scarlet bloom,
dwarfing the hearty weeds

I knew they were for her:
tall, lipstick-red poppies
garish, erect, unexpected,
floating
on the thin stems
upon which everything rests.

Jackie McClure writes poetry and fiction aiming to illuminate commonplace segments of our shared landscapes. She has an MFA from Goddard College and has published most recently in Humana Obscura and Hellbender. She lives near the Salish Sea in Northwest Washington State. Her preferred state of being is swimming.

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Impossible Love

1 September 2024 / Editor

Nonfiction by Leslie Lisbona

Mom and I were talking. “I know what you mean,” she said. I didn’t have to explain much and somehow she understood. She got me in a way no one else did. She used to say, recalling Oscar Wilde, “Take away all my necessities and give me only luxuries.” But for me, having this mom—my mom—was everything. I didn’t need anything else but her.

I was unmarried and about to turn thirty. My boyfriend lived in Mexico, and if I married him, which everyone wanted, I would have to leave her and live there.
Mom and I sat side by side on the couch. I held Paul Auster’s book, Leviathan, on my lap. We had both just finished reading it. “I want to go to the Strand during the week,” I said.

“I’ll meet you there after work,” she said.

We both sighed simultaneously, and this made her laugh.

With my toe, I pushed the ashtray a few inches over on the coffee table. It sat unused and shiny since she had quit smoking. Still, her asthma came suddenly sometimes, and the furniture had a faint smell of cigarette smoke. She examined her nails and looked disappointed with them.

“Shall we go to a movie together?” she half-whispered.

“Yes!” I said, and I reached for New York Magazine to do research. I found My Fair Lady in the city.

“Let’s go now!” she said.

I ran upstairs to get ready. I felt like I was five and someone had handed me an ice cream cone. Afterwards, on the drive home on Queens Boulevard, we sang “I could have danced all night” as we both looked straight ahead.

It wasn’t long after this that I lost her—with no warning. Her not being with or near me was inconceivable. I married a year later, someone I really loved and who lived nearby. We have two grown sons. But the luxury of having someone who understands me so deeply remains elusive.

Leslie Lisbona has been published, most recently in Wrong Turn Lit, The Bluebird Word, and Dorothy Parker’s Ashes. In March, she was featured in the New York Times Style section. She is the child of immigrants from Beirut, Lebanon, and grew up in Queens, NY.

The Marimekko Dress

10 August 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Katharine Davis

My mother bought me a Marimekko dress,
a dress from Finland, a cool and distant land replete
with fjords, icebergs, wild reindeer and elk.
A dress to wear following my wedding at
my grandmother’s farm, a dress for going away.

All went as it should: a tent in the garden,
dahlias robust and in bloom on a blazing August afternoon,
with views of the covered bridge across the field.
A small gathering of family and friends,
my father in a blue blazer, my mother in gauzy watermelon pink.

Tea sandwiches followed by cake and French Champagne.
No music, no dancing, the scent of mown hay wafting in the white haze,
my sisters, flowers in their hair, sneaking cigarettes behind the barn.
After tossing the bouquet, I slipped on my Marimekko dress,
neatly pressed, blue and white, wavy horizontal stripes.

My Marimekko dress was cool against my skin. Expensive, well-made,
the perfect fit, just right for starting another life.
My mother died two years later. The farm was sold, and fifty years have passed.
But in my dreams, I see it still, a shirt-waist dress with silver buttons,
worn by me, but chosen by my mother.

Katharine Davis is the author of three novels: Capturing Paris (included in the New York Times suggestions for fiction set in Paris), East Hope (winner of the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance 2010 award for fiction), and A Slender Thread.

Maternal Fabric

1 July 2024 / Editor

Nonfiction by Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew

The Christmas before she died, my mother gave seven-year-old Gwyn a mint-green Hello Kitty sewing machine. Believe it or not it’s a decent machine, she said, despite its small size and ridiculous color. The two of them spent the week making Gwyn’s first patchwork pillow, my mother’s gray chemo curls mingling with Gwyn’s untamed ginger. Gwyn took to sewing as I never had. Afterward I told myself if my mother were to die tomorrow, at least this happened, at least grandmother and grandchild shared days of fingering fabric and winding thread and loving what they both love.

She died that May. And one month later we needed fabric for Gwyn to sew pillow cases as a wedding present for her birth mom. Time was short so I took her to a tiny store just a mile north, a store we’d never been in because the faded mural of a quilt chipping off the exterior made me assume it would be filled with quilt kits and the cheap fabric my mother scorned. As soon as we walked in I knew otherwise. The shelves were saturated with color: bolts in batik, Japanese indigo, elegant floral cotton. It was my mother’s dream store. While Gwyn pranced between shelves I stood in the doorway, aching for my mother. Gwyn discovered the enormous bank of thread and pulled me over: “Look, Mama!” A tidy, exuberant rainbow, and she adored every spool. Gwyn’s delight soothed my sorrow. At least she’ll carry forward my mother’s sewing legacy.

Then, from the thousands of lovely artisan cloths, Gwyn chose a cutsie retro kitten print. In red, teal, and baby blue. My mother in me reared up—no, no, no! Wide-eyed cats pawing balls of yarn were the epitome of kitsch—beneath us, somehow. With every other fabric in this store Gwyn could make something beautiful. Except that Gwyn and her birth mom love cats. Gwyn was the seamstress. She knew what she wanted.

The fabric was perfect.

And just as suddenly I was grateful my mom was gone. She would have held sway in the name of good taste and reputation. For decades I’ve heard her voice in my head, sometimes heeding it, sometimes rebelling, but now her voice is disembodied. She’s dead. She’ll never see the pillowcases, which are adorable and of which Gwyn is terrifically proud. Her birth mom rests her head nightly on Gwyn’s love. The woman at the counter thumped the fabric from the bolt and snipped with long, black-handled scissors, cutting for us both a measure of freedom.

Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew is a wisdom teacher and writing coach dedicated to facilitating creative emergence. As a writer she elicits the spirit’s movement within stories; as a teacher she supports transformation within writers and on the page. You can connect with Elizabeth at www.spiritualmemoir.com and www.elizabethjarrettandrew.com.

At the Lakefront, beside Sunshine

1 July 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Stacie Eirich

Glittering waves in wind
sunlight high in the sky
beaming into blue
you marvel at the beauty
in a dandelion, proclaim it
not a weed but a flower
pick its yellow head
put it in my palm.

My hand in yours, you skate past
girls on scooters, boys on bikes
a dog you call Toast.
We listen to the roar
of a mower, the slap-slap of water
the cries of shorebirds
from beyond the beach, where two kids play
in cold waters, brave in bathing suits.

You turn on pop songs, sing along beside me
dance a jig, weave your arm in mine, say thank you
for bringing us here, stop to swing, then ask
for snowballs & ice cream.
We savor mint chocolate and cherry chip
in the warmth of the shop, you watching and listening
to a little brother and his sisters, me watching you
quietly spooning cold sweetness to our lips.

I finish first, sit content, tell you
to take your time.
That it’s what we came for
to take time.
To hold and warm each others’ hands
to find and follow sunlight
the rush of the wind, the sweetness
of this life.

A gift to open slowly
you singing like starlight
you next to me, beside the water
your fingers pressed
into mine, time shimmering
like waves on sand
tall white sails
rising into the distance.

I touch the dandelion head
in my tote pocket
spread its yellow cup
in my fingers
feel the sun
feel you
beside me
still shining.

Stacie Eirich is a mother, poet & singer in Louisiana. Her work is forthcoming in Synkroniciti Magazine. Her poem “Blossoms” published in Susurrus Magazine in 2023 was nominated for The Pushcart Prize. In 2023, she lived in Memphis while caring for her child through cancer treatments at St. Jude. www.stacieeirich.com

Swing

1 June 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Rachel Beachy

Pushing her swing back and forth
with the baby on my chest
I do not know
the day the time or how
to finish a thought
all the hours go into something like this
returning to baseline
a pendulum swinging from
mess to order
hunger to fullness
chaos to calm, repeat.
And all along
they are growing —
I see it now
her hands wrapped tightly around the chains of the
big girl swing
she could not reach last week
how I watch her flying forward and yet
going nowhere at all
these days
thank god
thank god
how they always come back
to me.

Rachel Beachy is a graduate of the IU School of Journalism (2014) and worked in broadcast radio/tv before several years in marketing. Since 2020, she has worked from home and has enjoyed finding an enthusiastic community of writers and readers. She resides in Louisville with her husband and two daughters.

One Out of Ten

1 May 2024 / Editor

Nonfiction by Stephanie Shafran

“No one has feet like mine,” my ninety-three-year-old mother announces to the hovering doctor.

“Well, let’s see what brought you here today,” the young doctor smiles as she pulls up a stool directly facing her new patient. After removing the sock as if it were a ticking time bomb fastened to my mother’s foot, she examines the flame-red toe yielding to her curious, slender fingers. It is the third toe on her left foot, rubbed raw by my mother’s second toe, which has long ago snaked over the big one—and twisted itself into an awkward, but permanent position. This deformity is a logical consequence of my mother’s lifetime habit of jamming her foot into ill-fitting shoes.

When I arrived at her apartment yesterday, I found my mother sitting on the bed, cradling her bare foot in her lap. Spotting me in the doorway, she stood up— a grimace spreading across her face as her left foot touched the floor.

“It’s my damn good-for-nothing toe again,” she’d scolded.

My heart slumped, remembering her excuse for refusing to undergo the surgery years ago to remove it. Three weeks off her feet and out of work! she’d whined. I knew the truth—her fear of misshapen body parts. At the Boston skating rink, there was a girl whose stumped arm had barely developed beyond the shoulder. After three Sundays of spotting her on the ice, my mother made excuses whenever I asked why we weren’t going skating anymore.

“Let me see it, Mom. Sit down.”

Plunking her body back on the bed, she lifted the foot an inch from the floor and pointed to the swollen, tomato-colored toe.

“Yikes, that looks infected. We’ll have to see a doctor.”

“You’ll take care of it, won’t you?”

“Yes, of course. By tomorrow, I hope.”

I’d have to take her to urgent care, take time off from work, cancel my afternoon hairdresser appointment most likely.

A day later now, we’re seated side by side on grey metal chairs in the clinic’s examination room. The throbbing in my head has finally quieted.

The doctor’s slender fingers wander across the bloated flesh.

“Does this hurt? Or this?”

Savoring this caress, my mother lets out a deep sigh. She shakes her head from side to side, yet her brow furrows and her eyes shudder as the doctor probes the toe.

“I was wondering, Doctor, will you have to amputate this corkscrew toe?”

The doctor lifts her soft brown eyes to my mother’s.

“Heavens no. We’ll just treat the infection on the toe next to it. You’ll be free of pain in no time.”

My eyes moisten. This doctor’s reassurance to my mother—like a mother to a needy child.

Now the doctor swivels her stool to face me.

“I’ll write a prescription for a two-week course of antibiotics. I’d like to check her toe in three weeks.”

Then she swivels a half-turn, shifting her gaze to my mother.

“You must be proud to have a daughter who takes such good care of you. I imagine she learned that from you.”

“Well, I don’t know if she’d agree.” My mother’s eyes ping pong between the doctor’s and mine. “At least I made sure she had a new pair of shoes every September. For the new school year, of course.”

She offers me a shy nod. I can’t deny it—yearly trips to Stride Rite Shoes in Brookline each August, just before the start of the new school year. Choosing a new pair of shoes with sturdy soles and laces, sized correctly to fit my feet, whether I loved the color and style, or not.

As the consultation wraps up, I lift the sock from my mother’s lap. Like a suppliant, I kneel at her feet and lift the bruised foot into my hands. As I do, my mother’s hand reaches to rest on my shoulder. After a long intake of breath, she announces,

“Nine miscarriages. I almost gave up—your father convinced me to try for ten. And then you, one out of ten, like a miracle.”

Her foot still in my lap, I give its heel a gentle squeeze.

Stephanie Shafran’s recent writing appears in literary journals such as Emulate, Persimmon Tree, and Silkworm. Her chapbook “Awakening” was released in 2020. A member of both Straw Dog Writers Guild and Florence Poetry Society, Stephanie resides in Northampton, Massachusetts; read more at stephanieshafran.com, including monthly blog posts.

For Every October

12 October 2023 / Editor

Nonfiction by Stacie Eirich

The leaves have begun to turn from green to yellow to brown, falling from branches to land in the lawn beside me. The grass is littered with them, the hard cusps of acorns rolling beneath my toes. A cooler wind wisps against my cheek and darkness falls earlier each evening; summer heaves her last breaths as October’s notes become the steady hymn of autumn.

Before last October, autumn would have been my answer to the question: What is your favorite season? Like so many artists, my muse is found in a cool darkness stitched with stars, in nights fragrant with the scent of smoke and glow of firelight, in walks through forests thick with trees that shiver in the breeze, their leaves shimmering green-gold-rust in sunlight as they fall to hard ground.

Before last October, I would have told you that October was a beautiful month, one where nature glistens wide with colors, the one in which my son was born. The month of pumpkin spice, sweater weather, homemade chili and Halloween. I would have told you that October felt lovely and comfortable, a relief from the stifling heat of summer.

I’m not sure how I feel about October now. How I feel about that fateful day: October 12th — Diagnosis Day. The day an MRI revealed that my fourteen-year-old daughter had a brain tumor.

The day was blissful with sunlight and a soft breeze that welcomed in the beginning of my favorite season. In the early afternoon, while she and her brother were still at school and before we knew anything of scans or tumors — I took a journal out on a nature walk. I gathered leaves and wrote verses, pressed them in. That journal sits in my bedside drawer, untouched now since then, almost a year later.

Like autumn, I’m nervous to revisit it, to open it and find whatever beauty is left there. Beauty that is evidence to how October gives life and changes it, evidence to how different the world felt last October from this October.

But as we approach October 12th this year, I find myself drawn to the journal, drawn to touch and examine the leaves I pressed into its pages, to read the words I wrote before I knew anything of brain tumors or intracranial pressure or hydrocephalus or medulloblastoma, of MRIs or lumbar punctures or biopsies or surgical resections. Of shunts or ports or proton beams or absolute neutrophil counts. Before I knew what it means to have a child with cancer.

Yesterday we decorated the house with balloons, celebrated my daughter’s NED status: No Evidence of Disease. She has completed her treatments, completed a year’s worth of life-altering experiences that have both saved her and changed her. She has shown us her resilience and breaking point, her incredible strength and heartbreaking fragility.

I watch the balloons bounce lightly in the breeze on our mailbox, their colors and confetti bright in October’s sunshine. I walk through the lawn, unraveling ribbons to watch them travel higher into a clear blue sky, listen to the chirps of blue jays in the branches.

I hear the sounds of my daughter waking; she comes to sit beside me as I write. We watch the squirrels chitter and chase each other through the lawn, gather acorns and bury them. I tell her about the journal, and she fetches it from my drawer, anxious to see the memories left in its pages.

We touch the dried, spiny pressed leaves and read my words together, October’s light vivid with sun in a clear sky. I feel something loosen, something lighten inside me, and a warmth despite the cool breeze that brushes my skin.

Before last October, I didn’t know light would still be possible through darkness, that survival meant looking for it in each hour. I didn’t know joy would find its way to us through grief.

I look up into the sunlight of this October and see the beauty that remains, glimpse how nature and life are colorful and changing and resilient. I accept that this October will never be the same as the last, that life and experiences have ways of changing you that cannot be undone. And I breathe.

My daughter hands me a clutch of pink, purple and blue ribbons and we walk across the grass together. Slowly, we release strands of ribbon upward, watching the balloons confetti swirl into a cloud of rainbow in blue. We twine our fingers together and look up, up — up.

We breathe in the scents and sounds of October and tell each other we are glad to be home. We talk about her brother’s birthday; how much taller and bigger and stubborner and smarter he is now that he’s almost fourteen.

I think of how amazing it is to be awake together to watch the wings that fly between the trees, the squirrels rush through the grass, the green-gold leaves shimmer in autumn’s light. Present, familiar, yet ever-changing, and wondrous — this month with a heart for so many things, this October and the way it unravels me, the way it breaks me apart and stitches me back together again.

Stacie Eirich is a mother of two, poet & singer from Louisiana. Her poems have recently appeared in The Healing Muse, Inlandia Journal and Susurrus Magazine. During 2023, she lived in Tennessee, where she wrote while caring for her daughter through cancer treatments at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. www.stacieeirich.com