Why My Mother Made Me

Maybe I am what she always wanted, my father as a woman, maybe I am what she wanted to be when she first saw him, tall and smart, standing there in the college yard with the hard male light of 1937 shining on his slicked hair. She wanted that power. She wanted that size. She pulled and pulled through him as if he were silky bourbon taffy, she pulled and pulled and pulled through his body till she drew me out, sticky and gleaming, her life after her life. Maybe I am the way I am because she wanted exactly that, wanted there to be a woman a lot like her, but who would not hold back, so she pressed herself, hard, against him, pressed and pressed the clear soft ball of herself like a stick of beaten cream against his stained sour steel grater until I came out the other side of his body, a tall woman, stained, sour, sharp, but with milk at the center of my nature. I lie here now as I once lay in the crook of her arm, her creature, and I feel her looking down into me the way the maker of a sword gazes at his face in the steel of the blade.

-Sharon Olds