Hi all, I PM'd Eagle because I thought this poem had relevance to the current topic, and she asked if I could post it here. Some of you may have seen it before, as it's in "Cosmic Brownies".


Good For Nothing


For three hours each night
months and years in a row
mother confined her eldest daughter
to the slip-covered confines of the living room,
interspersed a litany of
“My children are rotten and they always hurt me”
with a repeating barrage of
“You’re stupid, you’re ugly,
you’re good for nothing.
You think you’re smart but eventually
the world will realize it’s all a facade.
You’ll never amount to anything.”
The girl was being punished
for talking back, speaking out,
asking questions, growing up.
She had to sit in the same chair
until mother grew tired and went to bed.
She assuaged herself by counting;
sometimes a given epithet would be
repeated as much as fifty times in an evening.
The girl, certified child genius,
was too smart to believe she was stupid,
but for years she thought she was ugly
and self-sabotaged every chance she had of success.

A decade later
on the brink of a nervous breakdown
the mother sought out her estranged daughter,
tried to rationalize the earlier abuse.
Mother, who was the youngest of a quartet of sisters,
spent three years after high school caring
for her dying cancer-ravaged father.
Afterwards she wanted to attend art school
but was told “Girls don’t go to college”
so instead married a soldier just returned from war.
They produced four miserable children
and moved to the suburbs where
she assumed the burden of full-time housewife.
She worried that her eldest daughter,
smart-mouthed stubborn wild-child,
would never find a husband
or adapt to a world where women
routinely squashed their dreams,
so she tried to make the girl fit into the mold
that she herself hated.
She thought she was doing the girl a favor
and was forever disappointed that she had failed.

It was well into adulthood,
and only after four bouts with near-death
that the daughter finally looked up into the dazzling sky
and sprouted wings.

©Meredith Karen Laskow