Mommies Can’t Tell Their Babies Why They Cry
…and she wiped away her mommy’s tears and said, you are sad, and
Mommy said, yes, I am sad, and baby said, why? And then Mommy spun a
tale out of silly string, and did loop-de-loops with her eyes until her
baby smiled, then laughed, Mommy’s tears on her tiny hand, all
dried and forgotten with the giggling bubbles floating in the
air and the heartbeat they had once shared. But then the little
girl, she shook her head no when she saw Mommy cry, so afraid, and so Mommy shook her head, too, and her tears, they crept back into her
heart like blossoms that shrink in the frost. Mommy wove her a
lullaby made of soft clay and the hearth odor of earth-roots, her voice
smoothing the crease between her tiny brows and her
song lulling little-girl-eyelids to meet in the middle and
Mommy’s song was for herself, too — shushing and
cooing and lu-la-lay. Years passed and the
budding young woman had no time for Mother’s tears, so
lost she was in thoughts of who made her heart beat, her
soul ache, and how he dismissed her in the hallways, smelling of pine-sol, soles of sneakers, not girl-souls; budding young men and women push and
pull. test their heartbeats. Then she heard something so familiar in Mother’s cry, a tiny tug in her own inside middle-place, a place that could easily bruise,
almost near her heart. The sounds Mother made were like her own when she felt her tenderest hopes and disappointments breaking in that
moment of wakeful sleep at the splinter of dawn sunbeams. She retraced steps to find Mother and say Something; but Mother had wiped her tears and had
become Invincible once more. And the young woman was both glad and afraid, all at once, as if her mother had given her a tiny glimpse into
a world she would grace; a
world of mothers and tears. And so
Time passed yet again, and the young woman, now with
milky breasts and her own tiny heartbeat bouncing on her knee, sits with her
aging mother. They talk with heads close, tales of shared milk-breasts, tiny toes lined up like peas, sticky baby-soft hands and shared heartbeats and the
young woman, she looks at her mother’s silver-shimmer tinsel in once-dark hair, eyes with Smudges of a life underneath, and she says,
Mother, why did you cry? But Mother, she only shakes her head, a smile in a heartbeat shared, because the young mother, she would
know in Time. Yes, she would
know why Mommies cry, and
why they can never,
Ever, tell their Babies.
