Egocentric. But Still…

I had a wonderful surprise this afternoon in our mailbox: while preparing for a move, my older brother Dave came across a notebook containing a number of my Mom’s poems, and he sent it to me. Many of them I’d read before, but some were new to me. What a gift!

My mom was a wonderful poet. Her poems are graceful, intelligent, insightful, expansive, direct. She deftly explores complex thoughts and feelings. She had a striking gift for words, and her gift for intense, reflective life was equally impressive. I feel my mother in every line.

Mom was also a fairly prolific poet. Through the years, I’ve read reams and reams of her poetry. They span decades. She wrote about my brothers, my dad, her cats, her childhood, her experiences teaching college English. She wrote about the weather, which gave rise to superlative metaphors for some of her musings. She wrote about plants and birds. She wrote a terrific poem about her encounter with a frog in a flowerpot.

What she didn’t write about: me.

All those poems, and I can be found in none of them. Well, there’s one in which I appear obliquely, as the future recipient of an heirloom she treasured—a cobalt blue glass swan that now sits on my bedroom dresser, where I see it every day. But other than that, there’s nothing in her poems that suggests she had a daughter.

I noticed this absence years ago, when I volunteered to type up a raft of her handwritten poems. After typing over a hundred pages of the collection of the experiences and impressions and artifacts that preoccupied and most impressed her, I realized that I was not among them. It struck me as odd, and it stung. When I pointed out my absence, she was baffled. “Of course I’ve written about you!” she said. But she when she searched, she couldn’t find me either. And, going through the notebook that arrived today, my absence in the most intimate, heartfelt work of her life stung again (but less, because this time I wasn’t surprised).

What can explain this lack of my presence in her comprehensive, detailed record of mattered most to her in her life?

I don’t know. I have no answer. The question is, what do I do with the question?

I’m writing it off as irrelevant. Any other reaction would repudiate our bond. And so instead, I choose to make peace with mystery.