Why do I resent my mother? Mothers and daughters. Mother-and-daughter. That sordid female chain. That sordid female chain of teeming inheritances. An inheritance of ravaged, mute histories and hysteria, of suspended obscenities, of prohibition and domesticity. An inheritance of subjugation. An inheritance of engorged organs, of emptiness and fertility made golden, of penetration and witch hunts and pap smears. Of pretensions so thick and viscous and red, we have to seep them out monthly just so we can go on with our factotum subsistences, just so history can repeat itself, just so history can be made and shattered and glorified. Seep them out of our vaginas, purple lips and coarse hair, an orifice etymologically built from sheath or cover-of-a-sword. A sword's scabbard. A sword. That phallus of power withheld from us by biology and evolution and fate.
Mothers squeeze out these nescient, thankless scraps of humanity. They squeeze them out, bathe them, cuddle them, get chained to them by some quirk of biological survival involving neurons and engendered emotional bonds. And they spend the rest of their lives trying to compensate for that moment of penetration and pumping and release (rarely theirs), when they pulled these disparate people out of the ether of inexistence and thoughtlessly dumped them here. On this chair. In front of this computer.
I hear the same thing in my mother's voice when she talks to her own mother. That condescension. That spite that just snaps out and bristles with all the pomp and circumstance of imagined progress and repressed history. That coolness, that nonchalance that tears through flesh and sinew, and preens with all the self-righteousness of seized revolutions. I hear it and I feel shame. For here is another sordid chain, another noose around my fat neck. Something else I can pass on to whatever unfortunate penis-less demon evolution will allow me to spawn.
Mothers squeeze out these nescient, thankless scraps of humanity. They squeeze them out, bathe them, cuddle them, get chained to them by some quirk of biological survival involving neurons and engendered emotional bonds. And they spend the rest of their lives trying to compensate for that moment of penetration and pumping and release (rarely theirs), when they pulled these disparate people out of the ether of inexistence and thoughtlessly dumped them here. On this chair. In front of this computer.
I hear the same thing in my mother's voice when she talks to her own mother. That condescension. That spite that just snaps out and bristles with all the pomp and circumstance of imagined progress and repressed history. That coolness, that nonchalance that tears through flesh and sinew, and preens with all the self-righteousness of seized revolutions. I hear it and I feel shame. For here is another sordid chain, another noose around my fat neck. Something else I can pass on to whatever unfortunate penis-less demon evolution will allow me to spawn.
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