I dreamed my mother cut off <br />my baby toes, the suturing so perfect <br />she left no gangrene, no scars, just a fine line <br />of invisible thread and four toes on each foot <br />instead of five. The job done, she left me <br />at the “crutches store” on Whitney Avenue <br />where I could find no crutches to fit <br />and so hobbled back toward home <br />alone and lopsided. <br /> <br />This is true, and she was a good mother <br />most of the time, which meant <br />that I never lacked for anything <br />she could buy, yet still I grew up lame, <br />disfigured (though not in any <br />noticeable way) and always with the sense <br />I had been abandoned before my time. <br />This has all been said before: our mothers <br />leave us, then or now, later or sooner, <br />and we hobble like cripples <br />toward the women in our lives <br />who can save us. Or else we limp homeward <br />knowing we will never make it back <br />before we wake up. And when we do wake up <br />we find we, too, are mothers, trying desperately <br />to save our daughters’ legs <br />by amputating their smallest, least necessary <br />toes, taking the toes to save the feet <br />to save the legs they stand on <br />in a world where we ourselves <br />are not yet grounded.<br /><br />Pamela Spiro Wagner<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/our-mothers-daughters/
