my mother raised
three children
to be served

paranoid that any of us should
feel overburdened or have
anything done unwell �

which is to say, imperfectly � she did
it all herself: dishes, laundry;
and spent the sunny hours baking

in bad lighting, where petty
office battles and flourescence�s
endless quarrel with aluminum

raged. she wrote briefs
that wouldn�t let her rest, like
her mother-in-law whose mind

had phased back, over her eighty-six years of
midnites, to the lopsided, clumsily-
formed moon of childhood

Why not American rice? she�d
say petulantly evening after
evening when confronted noxiously

with cous cous. My mother strove
not to let impatience show while we children
snickered.

my grandmother called me "pepi,"
the second name of an unknown aunt
who died young from, my normally unromantic

father tells me, a broken heart:
her husband made her choose between
her ailing, fragile mother,

and him: cruel man: whose heart
wouldn�t give way like a crab under
such a mallet? The subtle lesson

of this was, Don�t intermarry.
I got her name and my mother got
her burden: a mother-in-law

whose damp sighs clouded
the inside of the windows as she and her
dangling armflesh lumbered up and down

the stairs at night, calling "Marge?" Once in my bathroom
on the top floor, she collapsed
and lay like a de-shelled mollusk

on the white tile til the white ambulance came
and white men lifted her onto a white stretcher
and took her away

After that, the waning of her mind accelerated
like a wind-up toy my little brother propelled
toward a wall. She died in a hospital.

My mother never said a word
throughout and if my father grew impatient with
her later, I never doubted he loved her

for that. My mother who lay the
job she wanted, the helping-people job,
on the altar to help us instead

three pampered children who sighed
and bitched and poemed our way
through 13 years of expensive Jewish school

returning home to ask Dad questions
when we had them and inform soapy-
handed Mom what different rabbis

ruled was the proper way to clean.
She invariably listened and she still
feeds the dog first because in sixth grade,

I told her to. Taking advantage of her compulsion
for order, we carelessly left smears and piles
for her to rearrange: in explosions,

sometimes, she reminded us that this
was selfish, and we were contritely diligent
for a while.

she wanted us to be mannered, sociable,
attractive, and polite, but while I hid
from puberty�s invasion in tee-shirt tents,

she allowed me � even as I did
so (reading instead of running, remaining
stubbornly content in my circle

of familiar friends) she called me pretty;
wisely, she kept
her frustrations sheathed.

essentially, she gave me freedom
not leashing me with even modest obligations
to the house

where she whiled away nearly all
of her out-of-office time.
and when I got into my first choice

college, twenty-pounds lighter
between the shedding of weight and angst;
contact-ed, gelled, expressive, Express-ed;

she built a Mayan temple from
the surplus bumper-stickers she ordered
from the school store

but never once said "I told you
so." I�ll be a mother someday � it�s possible,
even likely, but my generation wasn�t raised

to sacrifice like that; to bite our lips
and bide our time -- I don�t know how I�ll handle
motherhood. hopefully better than daughterhood.

and hopefully my mother, a perfectionist
to the end, will instruct me: what rice to cook,
and for how long, and when.