Late for motherhood/ Big Useful Birds III

How can you not be late for your M(other)s Day post when

Motherhood does equal m + other, ongoing and forever

Part tedium, part exhilaration

A humbling and bumbling occupation of unquantifiable dimension

M+otherhood = where you are you, plus slices of you and him

Woven into other living miracles such as children, who open you up

To see that you too are slices of this old that and some odd new

Tough part that you don't understand yet

To be able to be a m(other) or to have been m(other)ed is honor enough

To never have the same alone

Motherhood is m + other because

it is, we are

one and not one

once umbillical

On Mothers Day proper, we were being visited by my mother, Phoebe, who sees that we have furniture polish on nearly every surface and a lot of paper themed napkins for all occasions. So my children can have Christmas angels in their lunch in March.

My mother Phoebe is afterall named after a kind of bird, which was also the name of her grandmother, who knew how to laugh yet not how to stop. Her father, the legendary Erle, died too young and was the handsomest man in all the land, according to my grandmother, Lanelle. From Erle, we were passed down a watercolor painting of two men loading a green canoe at the edge of a lake. Erle was a chicken and hog feed salesmen who traveled a lot and brought home little changelings and runts from the farms he would visit. The chickens would follow Phoebe around the yard and learned to untie her shoelaces and lay an egg directly into her hand. One year arrived a white Turkey she named Pinky (but that’s another story). Anyhow, the aforementioned mother, now 78 and 10/12ths, is not only full of energy of a steady, fun and lively sort, but she is FULL of sayings such as this:

clean as a pin

warm as toast

dark as pitch

From which we spun

Edition 3 of BIG USEFUL BIRDS

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXLzPvpXDw0