Our Duties, Ourselves

fiery hand

In a glorious Pieter de Hooch painting, rich and deep as amber, a mother does one of the many things that mothers do. She delouses her daughter. Last night, I forgot "A Mother's Duty." At 10:00 p.m., I went downstairs to retrieve the remaining laundry and search for the blanket for my daughter's bed. When I returned, she was crying. She cannot sleep when no one is upstairs with her; she's frightened of monsters (though she knows by now that the only monsters are in politics). My husband sat with her while she cried, and then he came to me angry that I had not been her mother, that I had avoided eye contact, that I hadn't gone to sit with her.

Maybe he's right. My thoughts, however, were that this has gone on long enough. My husband can't walk out of the room without my daughter becoming crazed with fear and worry that something has happened to him. I don't know the source for this fear; she says it's because I once told her he's "not careful," but I am certain she has taken something out of context. And since Sleepy Hollow, Serena has not allowed her bedroom door to be closed; for her first seven years, she wanted darkness like pitch in which to sleep.

So when he left to return to the backyard, where we had just watched Shakespeare in Love, all of us (fast forwarding through the sex scenes), with a nice blaze crackling beside us, I went into my daughter's room and nuzzled her, pulled at the strands of her hair, listened to her, quizzed her. She doesn't know why she's afraid of monsters. She doesn't know why she worries all the time. "I don't know." I don't know.

I have a poetry reading today, and one of the sets features some poems about motherhood. I've decided to include this one, written after the de Hooch painting. I like the sounds, the unintentional internal rhyme and accidental alliteration (yes, here, too).

"A Mother's Duty," Pieter de Hooch, c. 1658-60


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A Daughter’s Duty

When mother bent me over knee
was it to groom me or to weep,
to pick the nits through warp and weft
of tangled mop or, woeful, mourn
the warp and woof of motherhood
and unrequited life?

When mother knelt me on the floor,
my face in skirt folds, knees on tile,
my hairs between her fingertips,
her breath and tears upon my scalp,
I wished her hurry, wished to be
as carefree as our dog.

When mother had me in her lap,
my breath a hot and muffled steam,
the dog would watch the briery
that swayed outside the kitchen door
without a woof while mother wept
and, mournful, picked my hair.