Amma Alter

I wrote this short piece after my friend's mother was attacked by a lover. I have seen first hand, second hand...I know their stories have been built into my DNA...I have watched my mother long grieve over the still open wounds of a long-dead marriage, and the mothers of the women I have loved dearest throughout my life still searching for themselves after so many years of being silenced.

Amma Alter

There are questions we use to fill the silences of places where we sometimes find ourselves in need of saying things out loud for the world to make sense.

"How was your day?" happens to be one of them. She exhales a cloud of smoke through the window; there we are elbow to elbow, four years between us and little to say.
"My mom needs to come and stay with us for awhile. Her boyfriend dragged her out of bed by the hair and smashed her face into a tile floor. Her jaw's broken."
I prepare clean sheets. I wipe down the tile with magnolia soap and clove oil. I plant cauliflower, blue moons and arugula. I water the garden every day.
It changes that quickly. I light jasmine champa and her mom slips in blood reaching for a door handle because someone who loves her needed to express his superior sense of strength through abuse. Our mothers are still in cages, they've just been invisible so long they can't see them.
"Know thyself." I guess Shakespeare was never abandoned with four kids and searching for himself in every fleeting crevice of silence discovered throughout the years that noise and loneliness construct.
Will she be tired and wordless when she arrives? Do we hand her the tea kettle? Will she look into our eyes and feel too far away from herself?
I plant mint. Kale. Pansies. I kneel at the alter I have built for our mothers who are lost on the docks where they first met our fathers dressed in petticoats, full of stories from overseas while war was just a possibility. There is no cross or prayer to offer, but I fill a teacup with rice and sage. I fill crystal with daffodils and birds of paradise. I hang half out the window with both hands up in the air. The kettle screams, I exhale. I realize saving ourselves is as much about going within as it is carrying our mothers from the smoldering temples they have been left to burn in.