somebody's home planet

The body of every mother is somebody’s home planet.

Whatever your relationship with your own today, this stays true: your mother’s body is, was, always shall be your home planet.

Early in life there’s an instinctive acceptance of this. It doesn’t occur to us to reject, or protect ourselves from, any element of our mother. Our initial stance in life toward her is simply, “that’s where I’m from” - too simple and dependent yet to scorn her or adequately survey her.

I can vividly recall my mother’s skin, which was pale and cool to the touch. It was stippled with moles and other small irregularities that I memorized, including a smallpox vaccine scar on one of her upper forearms. That scar was of particular interest to me. I considered it an historical oddity of sorts and pondered the symbolic heft of a whole generation being gouged for their own good.

I asked her about it a thousand times: did it hurt, and how big was the needle? A cluster of needles?

She always answered patiently, and she let me poke and prod her. She was my cratered home planet, and I had roamer’s rights.

I remember her hands well, too. They were never still. She’d hold them in her lap during Sunday mass and her fingers would twitch like cat tails for the whole hour. Veins stood out on the backs of them, green and plump, and her wedding band looked like it was soldered into her flesh.

I tried to slide the ring off occasionally and always found I couldn’t even swivel the thing. I was unnerved by the way it seemed at odds with her body, and her body with it, they two locked in some sort of glacial phagocytosis. She was never going to be free of it.

I’d stare at her hands and wonder about her in a vague way. She was all I knew, but I didn’t know yet how much of herself she kept hidden. I think she was in flight most of the time.

I grew older and I judged her, grieving the ways she hid from all of us (and worst of all, from herself); flumoxed at the way she piloted our planet into the sun.

That’s fallen away, now. Now, I remember mostly her skin and her hands, the slope of her weariness and her acts of love.

Her body gave me my body.
My body gave my boy his.

He told me my hair smells “like darkness and soap”.

Every night he kisses my eyelids, nose, ears, and cheeks like it’s an anointing of some kind.