As a child, I had four ambitions:  To get a poem published in the New Yorker; to be a kindergarten teacher; to live happily-ever-after; and to have six children.  I accomplished none of these goals, although I’m still working on that third one. 

My mother supported my dream of being a writer.  In her earlier days as an EKG technician at St. Louis County Hospital, she took one or the other child to work with her during the summer.  Of course, her goal focused on having fewer bodies in the line of my father’s hungover wrath, but I gleefully volunteered whenever I got the chance.

There, I would cut EKG lead strips (in the days before computers) to mount them on report pages, organize storage shelves, and, joy of joys, use her typewriter without interruption from a curious little brother.  That hospital office, with its curtained cubby for walk-in clinic patients, saw the first stacks of paper bearing the transcribed scribblings of a poet wannabe, before I realized that my feeble attempts at verse barely rose to the level of amateur.

Mother praised each short, structured missive.  When I had a project to submit some of them in English class, she organized and typed them herself, deeming herself superior in the hammering which produce clean copy.  The heavy strokes necessary to force key to page challenged my small hands.  She got a yellow three-pronged folder from the cabinet and showed me how to use the hole-puncher.  We created a book of my poetry.  I cherished that folder until it finally succumbed to the vagaries of time or too many moves.  

Over the years, I dabbled in poetry.  Eads Magazine in St. Louis published three of mine as a trio.  My mother insisted that I bring multiple copies of the edition to her.  She mailed them to unsuspecting relatives who feebly thanked her, I’m sure, and threw the issue into the basket on the floor by the couch.  I often wonder how shocked they would be to know that the imagery of the third verse referred to a miscarriage that I had in my mother’s bathroom.  “A child, once real, then gone” read one line.  My mother and I never spoke of it but she herself had nursed me through that episode just months before I submitted the lot for consideration.

I wrote several poems about my mother.  She never read them.  One I wrote during a period of uneasy alliance between us; another I composed after her death.  I do not know how she would have felt about the approach that I took to these odes to her resilience and my affection for her.  But every fiber of my being sings of her legacy.  All that I am; the choices that I’ve made; the way in which I make decisions; rises and falls on the strength I inherited from her.  Even my mistakes echo some that I realize she herself indulged.  My faults come from her but so does my endless capacity to forgive others, to nourish even the tiniest flicker of hope, and to open a window wide enough to allow healing breezes to fill the cramped space of my damaged heart.

Although I did not raise six children, the universe gifted me with one.  Some would say that I emulated my mother’s clumsy parenting in both its virtues and its flaws.  I do not speak for Patrick on the issue.  I struggled with parenting, though I unquestionably experienced the unbridled, unconditional love that a better poet might more deftly describe.   Perhaps that love drove me to fear loss so intensely that I fumbled the rest.  Perhaps my own damaged spirit never stood a chance to truly excel at raising any child.   Either way, I do not excuse any remission by blaming my own childhood.  I only pray, to paraphrase the words of Murry Burns, that my son speaks well of me when the opportunity to speak at all arises.

 I can honestly say that I see a lot of my mother’s gentle spirit in my son.  If a village helped me raise Patrick, my mother’s genes supported his psyche as he navigated the white waters of the home that I created.  For my part, I tried to channel the humor and perseverance of my mother’s style.  I realized early in my son’s toddlerhood that I could never have raised six children.  My admiration for my mother’s determination to bring the eight Corleys from infancy to adulthood bloomed as I struggled with just the one.

My mother’s greatest strengths revealed themselves in crises, large and small.  When a car struck me during my second year of law school, consigning me to a two-month stint in the hospital, Mom used all her vacation time to move herself and my father from St. Louis to Kansas City.  She camped in my apartment, made friends with the neighbors, and collected notes from my professors.  She dragged my father to my hospital room and greeted my visitors.  When one teacher asked if the accident had damaged my good leg or my bad leg, she loudly informed him that she hadn’t known I had a good leg and then uproariously laughed at her own joke.

Mother’s Day provides an opportunity to honor my mother.  But I try to let my admiration of her shine in everything I do.  I hope the best of her endures in me.  I certainly strive to bring it forward.  Time will tell if I have faithfully credited my mother’s example.  Until then, I shall just endeavor to put my best foot forward.

It’s the twelfth day of the one-hundred and twenty-fifth month of My Year Without Complaining.  Life continues.

From A Daughter

What do I say to this woman
sitting across from me
over a society lunch?
What do I say to one
who changed my diapers,
and coaxed me through a pre-adolescent limp
and post-pubescent cramps?
How do I treat someone
who learned to drive at 40,
fought the maybe-giants and
organized picnics
When she wasn’t at work,
or scrubbing floors
or despairing?
There are no words for one
who is too familiar
with emergency rooms,
airports, and
Jails.
So I sit, choking on idle conversation
about the silver market
and over-sprouted beans,
neither of which I understand.
If I appear tense
it is because I also choke
on unexpressed devotion
and overwhelming sorrow.

© M. C. Corley, 1980, 2024

Most days I understand that any problem with which I struggle can be characterized as petty.  In my heart of hearts, I recognize that my bank account rises and falls at my own discretion, my pain substantially abates if I rest, and the awkwardness of my body does not inhibit a fulfilling life.  Occasionally temptation lures me to self-pity.  But I know the truth.

The powerful images of this historic time struck my senses and wrenched sobs from my defenseless psyche.  In the midst of my workaday hours, a CNN alert drew me to open a browser.  A stunning photograph of professors standing with linked arms, holding the line between two groups of protesters, greeted my disbelieving mind.  What is this, I asked myself.  Who are they.  I read the caption, my immediate obligations forgotten.

I scrolled other sites, studying terrible pictures of wounded children wailing in fright on the streets of Gaza.  I am neither Palestinian nor Jewish.  I am in fact half-Irish, a quarter Austrian, and a quarter Syrian.  But I am a mother; I have taught; I have studied.  I have walked a protest line.  I have gone to jail for taking a stand in defense of civil rights and against inequity.  However  for most of my life, I have been a thoughtless middle-class American with a reasonably comfortable existence  Today I keenly understood the principle that silence equates to complicity.

I want to stand in that brave line of faculty.  I long to fly across the world and gather those children to my breast.  Instead I can only raise my monthly donation to World Central Kitchen in the hopes that my dollars will suffice to fill a tiny, empty belly.   I shed hot tears, lamenting my feeble stand against the senseless tragedy devastating that small sliver of someone’s precious homeland.  

When I came home tonight, my fingers had swelled from the constant typing during eight hours of work.  I shrugged and thought about my favorite Isaac Bashevis Singer anecdote, the last line of which defines catastrophe as an incident in which little children die.  If I accomplish nothing else in my time on this earth, I pray that some act of mine will forestall catastrophe, here at home or in a distant corner of this troubled world.  I stand with those who protest yet another senseless onslaught of the innocent.   In the old way of my oft-lamented catholic childhood, I pledge to silently endure my suffering that theirs might somehow thereby lessen.

It’s the second day of the one-hundred and twenty-fifth month of My Year Without Complaining.  Life continues.

My friends:  I do not usually talk about current events in this blog.  I have a social-political blog though it currently has been rendered inactive for technical reasons.  Because I lack that forum, and because my observations dovetail with my journey to joy, I chose to use this platform for these comments.  Take them as you will.

A phrase snagged my attention during a mindless social media scroll the other day.  Land of the Dead.  I didn’t catch it with sufficient speed to read the article. Its specific reference escaped me.  But the imagery stuck.  I feel that.  I dwell in a pool of memory.  Its ripples take me farther and farther  from the safety of a sturdy shore.  The pool meets a river and the current hastens.  I cling to a log, a floating pile of driftwood, a flat expanse of board from a long-forgotten shipwreck.

In the middle of the river I come upon a small island.  I grab the brambles and drag myself to the muddy edge of its uncivilized contours.  Half-submerged, half-saved, I cast my eyes into the woods.  Then I see them:  Their eyes fixed on my weary brow, their hands reaching for my trembling fingers.  I recognize each face.  I have come to the land of my dead, and I can only escape by making my way across its wild woods.

The arduous task nearly overwhelms me.  My head falls.  The spirits whisper my name in voices that I can never forget.  “Mare bear,” says one, low and calm.  A figure that endlessly hovers below the age of forty, the youngest of my siblings who surrendered to his own struggles.  “Oh my baby girl,” whispers a small shape in a throaty voice.  The cadence reminds me of an old country that I shall never see but somehow regard as home.  I close my eyes.  

A lovely cottage sits just beyond the untamed forest. I sense its nearness.  In that house, the living wait for me.    My clumsy hands force heavy branches to part so I may pass.  I do not yet see the light streaming from windows as lace curtains unfurl in the soothing breeze.  But it cannot be far.  I draw a breath and forge ahead.

It’s the first day of the one-hundred twenty-fifth month of My Year Without Complaining.  Life continues.