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Jean Florence

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Daughters

My mother was an honest woman.
She said to me when I was
sixteen or maybe seventeen:
‘when you were little I loved you, but I didn’t like you much’
believing that I was old enough to understand.

I cannot remember that she ever held me.
Through all her long pain
I cannot remember that I ever held her.
I was not there when she died. I did not forgive her.

I did not forgive her till my children were born
when it was too late to tell her.
Through twenty years I have fought
to love my daughter and to like her,

to stay beside her through her toddler tantrums,
never to put her away from me,
to say sorry when I lost my temper,
never to let the sun go down on my anger.

And sometimes, so often, it has seemed
that there is no way we can do it right.
I have listened by the hour through the teenage years
to her hating her body, her shape, her face,
wanting to top herself.

But now when she comes home from college, solid
and curvaceous in her multi coloured layers
of underwear worn over trousers
she has made out of old curtains

with arms full of bangles and every toenail
painted a different colour, she walks
of f the train and into my arms
and we hold each other.

 

 

 

 


 

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