Mother

The pain begins in the way she spoke of trauma as if it were geography -
a landscape she had charted long before I arrived,where the strange became ordinary through repetition alone.
Chaos ran in the bloodline:
a grandmother weakened by hidden poisons administered by foes, or so I was told at seven, a toddler abandoned and frightened,
a grandfather whose abuse was named to me at nine,
and the meaning of these things never quite settled in my mind,
hovering somewhere too abstract to hold.

Hypnotherapists and priests lurk and she had been a student nurse, living alongside others with Munchausen-like symptoms,
diagnosing them - or perhaps only herself - as she hid me as a baby in the midst of it all.
Drifting quietly through the household, her drinking went unquestioned,
necessary, untouchable, unquestionable.

I learned early that I was the problem she had already named:
clingy, immature, too costly to keep alone.
She married him, the story went, because of me.
His presence scraped her nerves,
and somehow that tension became mine as well.

Sex was spoken of as a joke,
handed to me as a child,
and I laughed, uncomprehending,
as if laughter could stand in for understanding.

I acted out, then grew older,
and somewhere along the way the damage named me.
Illness carved its own sentence:
a womb gone, a body altered.
When I tried to speak it plainly,
she reduced the loss to something smaller, sharper,
as if one surviving piece could hold the rest.
I had no answer.

My brother retreated into his room,
into images grotesque and ordered in ways I half understand.
Perhaps there is comfort there -
familiarity, control, or merely the logic of inheritance and algorithm.
He is gentle, thoughtful - he deserved steadiness we never had.
We both did.

We live now in the shape of the world she made,
one she never recognised as hers.
And I still do not know what to call her:
author, victim, witness, or something harder to hold.
A creature, perhaps,
shaped by storms long before they reached us,
and passing them on anyway.