The sky has been dark
for many years.
My skin has become as damp
and pale as rice paper
and feels the way
mother’s used to before the drying sun
parched it out there in the fields.
Lately, when I touch my eyelids,
my hands react as if
I had just touched something
hot enough to burn.
My skin, aspirin colored,
tingles with migraine. Mother
has been massaging the left side of my face
especially in the evenings
when the pain flares up.
This morning
her breathing was graveled,
her voice gruff with affection
when I wheeled her into the bath.
She was in a good humor,
making jokes about her great breasts,
floating in the milky water
like two walruses,
flaccid and whiskered around the nipples.
I scrubbed them with a sour taste
in my mouth, thinking:
six children and an old man
have sucked from these brown nipples.
I was almost tender
when I came to the blue bruises
that freckle her body,
places where she has been injecting insulin
for thirty years. I soaped her slowly,
she sighed deeply, her eyes closed.
It seems it has always
been like this: the two of us
in this sunless room,
the splashing of the bathwater.
In the afternoons
when she has rested,
she prepares our ritual of tea and rice,
garnished with a shred of gingered fish,
a slice of pickled turnip,
a token for my white body.
We eat in the familiar silence.
She knows I am not to be trusted,
even now planning my escape.
As I toast to her health
with the tea she has poured,
a thousand cranes curtain the window,
fly up in a sudden breeze.
I don't think I am emotionally stable enough to academically analyze this poem. I'm going to personalize my response because, at this point, it's all my heart can handle.
I first thought this piece would be about the struggles of the daughter, which would makes sense because of the title and the first few lines. I was ready to sympathize with whatever the daughter had gone through. It seemed to be aging at first, she wasn't used to her body and face aging. But I then realized it was about both the daughter and her frail mother. The dynamic between a sick mother and her child as caretaker is something very peculiar and complex. The duty of providing care to a parents, especially one who was dying, can be very tiresome and heavy with burden. The obligation to care for someone who took care of you drives the daughter's motivation to care for her mother. But the daughter's desire and need to want to live on her own and take care of herself is crushed by her obligations to her old mother. It becomes a battle between selfishness versus selflessness.
I watched my father slave over his sick parents during their final years. My Mom-mom was sick six months before she died, bed-ridden and unable to take of herself in any form. She struggled to walk and to bathe herself while I was a little girl, so her completely sedentary state was an expected transition. For six months, my father and mother visited my grandparents three times a day everyday. As a tag team, my parents changed sheets, diapers, and clothes for my grandmother, as well as fed her medications and food. My Pop-pop could just barely take care of himself. I hated visiting my grandparents because I hated seeing them die. When Mom-mom passed, Pop-pop went crazy. Another year with him was all I unknowingly had left. He lived with us for a few months, but the burden to take care of him was too great. His delusional episodes cost my parents many sleepless nights as well as new worry lines taking up real estate on their faces. I couldn't bare to be home when Pop-pop was hallucinating. I hardly even visited him after we moved him to the nursing home. I don't recall what hurt more, watching my valiant hero crumble before my eyes or wishing he was dead in order to relieve my stress and pain. I love my grandparents, and their deaths have far more hurt me than any ordeal my family faced while they were living.
This poem perfectly captivates what it's like to watch your loved ones go frail and the intrinsic struggle you face when taking care of them.
*I'm sorry, I can not continue...
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