How To Tell Your Mother

Intense but ultimately compassionate, even hopeful. Award-winning author PRETI TANEJA pens an advice column written as a prose poem, where a daughter finds the words to tell her mother her story of abuse.

Treat her kindly, wait until after dinner. She may be tired, her fingers curling. Her beloved palms the only balm you’ve ever allowed to touch your skin. (But do not hold her hands, for your own safety.) Now is the time for singularity. It begins with this: watch for the light in her eyes as she looks at you. Around the room, recall yourself, as a child, from the time before. As a child. There was the place you fell once, dancing with her to ABBA, and split the corner of your lip. There, in that  corner you and your sister made a den of cushions and fell asleep for what might have been one hundred years. She left you there, left home. You woke in a strange night room. Knowing that: something had happened.

Older, now, there was the time, that when mother was away (for a birth, a marriage, missing a death) you dropped the cherry from your first joint, and he covered it up. It was your fault, you thought. Which might not now be true. It remained, a hole burned in softness, unremarked upon as you aged. You believe she never noticed.