Portrait
She is not abstract:
blond-brown hair
blue-grey eyes
almond-coloured rosewood-scented skin.
She has never been very complicated:
crying comes easy
she can laugh at herself
love is her favourite emotion.
With a bic blue pen she seeks only to change the world
in a page and a half during the twenty minutes that her baby sleeps.
She sits in the sunroom with her eyes half-closed
full-breasted and hip-burdened
unshowered and unashamed
uninformed of the latest movies and unaware of the new restaurants
avoiding themes of domestication
and words that rhyme with mother.
“My patience, resolutions and beliefs are tested to the limits – sometimes daily.”*
Right at this moment one of my challenges is the constant, tuneless whistling from my elder son. When my boys were babies it was getting them to sleep or trying to figure out why they were crying. On any given day now, it might be squabbling, fighting, teasing, screaming, shouting or rudeness. Who’d be a parent? We might well question ourselves after the event, but we can’t very well put them back! Just how we find those inner resources, how we constantly demand more of ourselves, how we keep marching up that hill with a smile on our face and gladness in our heart at the sight of our ‘babies’ is one of life’s mysteries.
* © from Being Mummy by Anne‑marie Taplin published April 2007