christine’s Reviews > Burning Butch > Status Update

“I bowed my head and thought of all the times I'd tried to be one thing or another, my body tugged between places, people, ideas […] I'd heard something about there being a right wing and a left wing, and one bird. The two sides I'd been pulled between were just two of infinite points on a circle. I had to stop trying to choose.”

“I tried to stop thinking about that rose-brimmed path, like rose-headed lettuce, rose trees, rose planets, roses blooming out of cages and eye sockets, palms, belly buttons, mouths, and pubes, like saints' bodies miraculously not rot-ting, smelling of roses, people said.

Was it true, or did they just say it?”

I smiled again, for the things I couldn't do that she could, and I knew it had nothing to do with who our mothers were but with our times, with the mother of culture that it took waves and waves of people to diminish. And the ones who'd come before me, they'd made the world a little more tender for me, beating against it with all their fists and firsts.

Jesus just had to die for us on the cross, but our mothers' personalities died for us in laundry rooms, kitchens, delivery rooms, backyards, stairwells, driveways, long after we kids had fallen asleep. Eventually Mom's eyes started to look different, more still than they used to be. Her face, and everything else about her, got harder and harder to recognize.