Wake Up Child

The kind that is found on the roof.
The one with the boys.
The one who only eats apples.
The listening one, the one who listens to mama, who lays down in her permanent bed and takes her out for bread and coffee.
The one who calls collect.
The one you can't wake up at noon.
The one in the taxi in the middle of the night heading across town to pay for her ex-boyfriend's girlfriend's abortion.
The one who takes the doors off of cars on highways.
The one who takes every shift available at work.
The one with the case of filterless cigarettes from Colombia.
The one with the old women in the train station.
The one with a book of questions.
The one with her mother in a Chinese restaurant.
The one who swims underwater the longest.
The one who sees static shadows move in the field of light.

I was a difficult teenager and now I am the mother of two, who, just like me, feel everything and don't want to submit to the program. My mother loved that I didn't play by the rules, she thought my dislike of school was proof of some kind of genius, she also liked that it meant that I was home with her more than with my friends. Rather than continuing to swim competitively, I joined the disaffected club, she called it the "Girls Forever Club." We would drive all over the north east thrifting and scavenging antique shops for treasures, we drank a lot of coffee and smoked cigarettes and dissected the psyches of our family members who had rejected her. I thought they were all crazy and cruel and I loved her like a mama cat loves her kittens.

She followed me closely around my life. Slept on the floor of the brownstone I bought in Bed Stuy when I was 25 and had some money from a car accident that almost killed me on the Williamsburg bridge. She woke up in the morning and asked me what the plan was every day. She was linked to my partner in a way that made them sort of extensions of each other in my imagination, they were my people, the only ones who could hold my storms and trace my extreme exercises in discomfort and self discipline.

The one who only drinks water.
The one who only eats popcorn, kale and almonds.
The one who only writes poetry and can not talk.
The one who doesn't sleep.
The one obsessed with Central Asian textiles.
The one who nurses a baby for 4 days straight.

The first time my mother was intubated, before they took the breathing tube out she was semi-lucid and she wrote on a paper. You and I holding hands. You are my person.

I want to be my person. I don't know what that means, but it's what needs to happen next.

My mother was more than my closest friend, she was the organizing principle in my life.

Something reorganizes when someone you love dies.

My mother died when I was in labor with my youngest son.

This is why I know God loves me and wants me to learn a lesson while I'm here on earth.

Wake up child, wake up child, wake up.

HK