Triptych
by Esther Ottaway
My daughter explains how it happened: Grandma is your mother.
The same sapphire eyes, set in the frames of our ages, from a line
of Irish genes: a series of sketches, as if the edges
of each of us are uncertain, our bodies
a triptych, attempts at the same idea. When
the idea of my daughter began sculpting my self-
image, I was as shocked as if I had been born with self
tattooed on my belly and now saw the letters ballooning: mother
in the making, wary of the crossing - less a borderline
than a no-man's land between selfhood and the mythic edge
of the world, over which women named mothers have fallen. Their bodies
tried to explain, in foreign tongues thick with milk, how it would be when
I split like a fruit and shivered at my baby's cry, or when,
a revenant, I would begin to remember myself.
When she opened her tiny sapphire eyes, I wanted my mother
to be the first to see her. I shone like a jewel, fulcrum in a line
of matriarchs, unaware that I'd been edged
out of the present. My mother held her, their bodies
slotting together, genes in a double helix, as the bodies
of my mother and myself did once, and I visioned her when
she sat in that hospital bed, her self
slipping away; as if from being a mother
we thought there was hope of return. Any line
separating us, any edge
between us burnt away, and freed from edges,
bearing every woman and their bodies,
I plunged into the selfless dream. Today, I am found out when
my small daughter rages: I will do it myself!
I can't stop my practised hands, the hands of a mother,
from fastening shoes or brushing hair; she pushes them away, a line
drawn between us, firm as those furrowed lines
of determination on her forehead, primal as the edge
of consciousness. And I see she has to love and hate me, our bodies
driven to fight suffocation. I turn bitter when
she says from her car seat I don't need you any more, Mum - can't stop myself
trying to sully her clarity: sharp-tongued, I say I still need my mother
and I'm grown up. Everyone needs their mother. I weave through the line
of traffic, recall screaming at my mum, pushing her to the edge. Our bodies
speak truth: what I say to my daughter, I say to my mother, myself.