MILO MELDRUM

Mother is a Contranym

Milo Meldrum
text only version with image descriptions

SLIDE 1:
L: "The only poem that makes sense on the cover of this book is the one that goes, 'We're just young people singing the blues/We're just young people, being blue ain't news.'"

Me: "Why do you think that makes sense?"

L: "Because everyone gets blue sometimes."

G: "WELL, I get red sometimes if someone doesn't do

what I want them to."

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Comic by artist’s child. They say “I’m bored” and then jump up happily when they remember “POETRY!”

SLIDE 2:

It is 1996. I am told not to repeat what I said about having a crush, or no one would want to be my friend.

It is 2010. I marry someone whose warmth makes me feel safe. We are children. We are stupid. We are not sure what love means. We will learn.

It is 2011. A non-consensual c-section confirms the failure of my body. It will take me eight months to desire intimacy again. I’m jealous, a religious friend will say, that your husband didn’t make you have sex earlier. You got eight months off?

It is 2014, and I am almost two weeks post due-date. My spouse grills me shrimp on a worn-out balcony while my mother chastises me for not giving birth yet. She traveled all the way out here, and the baby still hasn’t come.

It is 2023, and on my birthday my spouse comes out to me as my wife. We walk together in the cold January air back from a date, our breaths hot and visible as we share the truth.

It is 2024. I hold my child as they cry because their friend told them they are going to hell for who they love, for what they wish to be called. There is not enough love in my body to excise this pain, only to accompany them.

SLIDE 3:
Carrying Low at 40 Weeks

2011

Swollen, a dream on its way to fruition;

Nothing rose-colored; lens (soft-focus) gone.

Real fruit bruises; a real fruit stays the motion

We make ourselves. Our unkempt pieces drawn

Into alignment; some beings are too real

To skew with soft words. Some beings delight

In waking up the small pith in the chest

With beating limbs. It is a sudden sleight

Of soul, not hand; the itch will soon persuade

My self to love my stippled skin far more

Than when it held just me. I am arrayed

In old humanity -- naked and sore.

SLIDE 4:

When I became pregnant the first time at age 23, I felt a warmth from my religious family members I’d never felt before. My body had always been too loud, too big, somehow too sensual and not feminine enough all at once. It was finally doing what it was made for, they believed. I had a secret within me that God, at last, approved of. He hadn’t wanted the other secrets.

I wrote poetry while pregnant, determined that if I wrote enough I would persuade the world I delighted in how my body stretched, how I wanted this lack of control.

Is this the price that had to be paid to love a child?

I was clearly a terrible woman. I wasn’t allowed to be anything else.

SLIDE 5:

L, 2019: "Before I was born I had a language that was just tapping. You didn't know what it meant. I should teach you on my day off. I don't remember it but I'll try to remember it while I sleep."
IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 2014: L fell asleep with his wings on, unwilling to stop being a bug.

SLIDE 6: 2015
Another minute and this would be a different story.
I stepped out of the room with the stained claw-foot tub
To look at something in the kitchen.
Something pinched in the back of my mind.
My son, still fat and wordless,
Lay on his back, thrashing, just beneath the surface.
His eyes, too helpless to be angry.
I grabbed him and we calmed together.
These days, my son is old.
His hands clench as he tries to relax.
He looks sometimes like a trapped animal,
but the vise is in his ribs, not on his foot.
He tells me what other kids say to him.
He tells me what he imagines in the night,
the monsters he hopes aren’t real,
The aliens he hopes are.
My words are ineffectual as a shadow puppet.
What is it? A rabbit? A dog? Some flop-eared sacrilege.
We are lying flat on our backs. We can’t lift our heads.
The water is covering us both.

L, 2018: "I love you, and when I’m an old man I’ll always think about my mom.”“When I’m an old lady can I visit you?"“Yeah, you can live on my roof.”
IMAGE DESCRIPTION: A child’s drawing of a tardigrade saying I love you.

SLIDE 7: L, 2016: "I wish I could find a BIG bug with a BIG brain who could think about love. Like a FRIENDLY praying mantis."

IMAGE DESCRIPTIONS: A child’s detailed sketch of a bee. A child’s bug comic. 

SLIDE 8: A collection of pandemic emotions (children’s drawings). 
IMAGE DESCRIPTIONS:
A dragon roars at a cat, who yells “What the frick!”
A man picks up clouds from the ground (gathering my thoughts).
A child sits and writes while saying “sigh.”
People look at an art exhibit labeled “Sir Pbbbbt.”
A cat points and says “That’s cringe.”

SLIDE 9: From “Wearing a Human Face”

After one summer party, sleepy with heat and cake, my friends lingered into the evening in the starry grass of the yard. When the shapes plummeted from the attic, like witch and familiar both, my friend’s mother startled. “We have to leave,” she told her children, panic tamped down in her voice. “My mother always told me, they can make nests in your hair, you know. Nests!” But a hair-nest, logic tells us, would not allow you to hang upside down.

No, bats certainly preferred attics to scalps. An attic as protection is a sweet, dusty fantasy; if I were an attic, I’d hold someone’s hidden wife and keep her safe. If I were a hidden wife, an attic is better than a basement, anyway. I’d give Jane Eyre a run for her money if I could hide in an attic to recoup before I burnt the house down. I wonder, sometimes, if hanging upside down helps you think. If you were the wife in the attic, would you want a window or not? What if you looked out to find yourself replaced? If the woman who replaced you was identical, would you know who was the woman and who was the bat?

Now I am a mother and bats look like children to me. I myself am an unexpected mammal with delicate membranes, a big reach, and a moderate amount of fur. It seems counterintuitive that I give birth to live young and only rarely drink blood, but it’s true. I haven’t made a nest in someone’s hair for years.

SLIDE 10: 2022: A contrast in sibling love languages on my whiteboard.
IMAGE DESCRIPTION: One child has drawn a butt, the other child has drawn “I love you, you’re the best.”

SLIDE 11: When G was 2, the most beautiful thing we’d ever seen, my father said to her, nothing but affection in his tone: “That’s it, you are beautiful! Inspire men to build civilizations after seeing your beauty! That’s what you’re here for!” I will not forgive myself for staying silent. G will make their own civilization. It will be the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
IMAGE DESCRIPTION: A series of stars drawn by a child. The child has labeled each one as “good,” “wrong,” or “perfect.”

SLIDE 12: “Her arms bend. Her legs bend. She’s more fun to play with. When I was a child, I was given a Happy to Be Me Doll instead of a Barbie.

The commercials promised that a waistline a quarter-inch longer and flat feet – feet that couldn’t fit into heels – would ensure I never hated myself. My stomach wasn’t fat yet but I knew, I knew something was coming, something was coming faster than I could stop it. I wasn’t fat yet but I was given less ice cream than my sister because if I had as much, I might become so. Metabolism, I will think later, is a bitch. Look, I’ll play the whale, I said, being animals with friends, I’m fat anyway. A blue whale has a heart the size of a car, but I wasn’t that big.

The Happy to Be Me doll was a pirate and a princess and wore carnival-colored clothes. Years ahead, the weigh-ins began, and my weight each Monday was written on a calendar that stretched over a whole door on the coldest wall in the kitchen, a door you could really feel a draft under. The Sharpie marker squeaked as it wrote out the numbers, and it was very important, somehow, that it was all public. The relief when the numbers went down was so sharp it was almost pleasure.

At 16 I become sick of my face and my prickly body and the ritual of eyebrow plucking kicks into overdrive. One day I overpluck and look like a clown; I am told I am grounded because she’d be embarrassed to be seen with me like this. It takes a long time to grow back. I have disobeyed. I am always disobeying because I can make my voice loud, too, louder than it should be.At this point the doll was packed in a large plastic tub and no one could see her waist anymore. Her arms bend. Her legs bend. She's more fun to play with. She looks and moves like a real person.”
IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Doll:Happy To Be Me High Self Esteem Toy Corp.1991

SLIDE 13: 2023:

“Are you drawing her?"
G: "No! I'm her therapist."
"What are you discussing?"
G: "OH, she had a bad breakup."
Me: "What happened?"
G: "I can't tell you because that is ONLY between a THERAPIST and her CLIENT.”

2020:
G's Teacher: Do you have something to say?
G: Yeah! I love my mom!
Teacher: That's great! You look so much like her! Do people tell you that all the time?
G: Yeah! Except I DON'T HAVE FRECKLES ALL OVER MY BODY LIKE SHE DOES!

2019:
A: I love you, G.
G: And do you love G?
A: I do, that's why I said I love you.
G: NO! I'M ASKING MYSELF.

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: A child’s hands hold a notebook and pen as they listen to a headless Barbie doll.

SLIDE 15:G, 2024. 

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: A large illustration of the side-view of an eye. A child’s drawing. 

SLIDE 16: Uterus
Who can tell when they might arrive with their angry skin?
You know the deal. Each month a bloody reminder
Of my horrible miserly heart.
I am neither barren nor old.
You, you, would you love me in my old age?
You are not an insurance policy, you cloudy infant,
You fake laugh, you imaginary number, you bitter orange.
You kaleidoscope of possibility, you gray slate,
You unbled scrape!
I'm a foolish tycoon,
Fertile as a fat bruise,
My selfishness insulates, thick as a fur coat.

It was not enough to stay alive for my two children. When my second child was two, the subtle questions began. There are only three reasons a woman in my religious tradition might have so few children: selfishness, infertility, or incompetence. It is a game I cannot win.

SLIDE 17:
G, 2019
Child’s illustration with large lettering reading “I love the earth, but my mom the most.”

SLIDE 18:
IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Photographs of notes the artist AND their child each wrote at age 5 in their respective childhoods.

Me, 1993: I LOVE MY DOG. MY MOM. DAD.
G, 2019: I LOVE MY MOM. I LOVE MY DAD. I LIKE MY BROTHER.