Honoring Mother-in-Law

 Super-sized Series  

 

 Mary Talley and her son and grandbaby

 

Two poems by Mary Ellen Talley

Pantoum for Mary Talley
(1921-2016)

Her default setting – dust to dust.
Four Holden girls with one young son
grown in Missoula and now gone
from their piece of Big Sky Country.

Four Holden girls and their brother son
baked and swam off docks in summer,
lived in their piece of Big Sky Country.
Mary Theresa, she chose nursing,

baked and swam off docks in summer.
Nation in wartime pulling though,
Mary Theresa she chose healing—
St. Pat’s Nursing School for women.

A worried nation pulling through,
new First Lieutenant Army Nurse
young grad of St. Pat’s Nursing School
trained soon at Camp White, Oregon.

This First Lieutenant Army Nurse
met First Lieutenant Arthur Lee
training at Camp White, Oregon.
Blind date then sending love letters.

She wed Texan Lieutenant Arthur Lee
and after WWII new home Spokane,
love letters became anniversary cards.
She raised Ken and Mike and Leslie Ann.

All the years she stayed in home Spokane,
picked huckleberries in Montana, then gone.
She raised Ken and Mike and Leslie Ann.
Her default setting—dust to dust.


Is it too late?

Is it too late for me
to apologize
for not calling you. Mom?

I just couldn’t bear the thought
when you exclaimed
after your son and I exited the church
of our wedding, Call me Mom now.

It wasn’t a reflection on you,
the perfect mother of the full cookie jar
and the part time nursing job.

I knew then my reluctance hurt you.
It’s just I bristled at your request
since I already had a mother
even if she objected to my engagement ring
and you helped me plan my wedding.

You crocheted us afghans, put clean sheets
on the hide-a-bed when we came to visit,
and invited my parents to holiday meals.
 It grew easier when I could call you Grandma.

Then in later years, I slipped into calling you
your first name, Mary. Truly, you were the best.
But I could only call out one mother.
I’m sorry for the sting of my omission.

 

 

 Ruby Morris, left, and her son and daughter-in-law

For My Mother-in-Law by Wilda Morris

          In honor of Ruby Morris                                                 
 
Not the mother-in-law of old folk tales
who steals her granddaughters and grandsons,
who says her daughter-in-law ate them,
the kind of woman everyone should shun;
 
not the kind that sit-coms like to show,
the one set up as the story’s goat
who competes for her son’s attention
and wants his wife to remain remote;
 
not like the butt of mother-in-law jokes,
the common kind in which her son’s wife
wants to take revenge for many misdeeds,
the way she ferments unrelenting strife.
 
No, this time let’s be very clear about
a mother-in-law deserving of praise
like the woman of Proverbs 31,
clothed in strength and dignity always.
 
Throughout her years, filled with sorrows and joy,
she is more precious than jewels or gold,
grounded in faith and in hope and love,
she’s never a schemer, never a scold.
 
Instead, she’s a model from whom to learn.
Look at her and find what to invoke.
See what mothers-in-law can be—
rewrite the tale, the sit-com, and the joke.
 
First published in Quill & Parchment   

 

Mary, the former mother in law of Elaine Sorrentino 

Spelling Things Out by Elaine Sorrentino

It was a liberating Scrabble game;
she loved me, this woman who was my mother
yet not my mother,

soothing her burdened heart with a sip of gimlet
she confesses I cannot believe my son
does not want his little piece of the sod,

and as she places the tiles for ABSOLVE
on the triple word score, for 45 points,
her surprising instructions set me free,

If you find someone
who makes you happier than my son,
go with him.

first appeared in ONE ART  

 

 
To Betty Nester by Robbi Nester

In a world of broken jugs, you were a mender.
You could knit a sweater without a pattern,
make the bed, draft a will, or clean a house. If time
and circumstances had allowed, you could have
designed and built a house. Instead, you took orders
from men not half as capable as you.
You used to board those narrow airliners
despite your claustrophobia, just to see
your son and grandson, take the baby
to the park, feed him his first ice cream cone.  

I still struggle with my clumsy hands to wash
the dishes, make the bed. I wrestle with my fears,   

unable to offer what you most hoped for:  

a daughter-in-law like yourself. But I 

wanted you to know how much I valued

who you were, and everything you made.

First published in Quill & Parchment
 

 

Luanne Castle’s mother-in-law the artist Diana Dale Castle

Debris by Luanne Castle


The day after my mother-in-law’s funeral
we collected all the paintings
from her studio and damp basement,
the thank you card from Irving Berlin,
her sketchbook for The Birdland murals
displayed for sixteen days
at the Smithsonian (now
owned by a private collector)
crated them for shipping to California
where we stacked them in rented storage

That’s when I imagined
some extent
of all the art
not saved
at the Uffizi, the Getty, the Kamakura

And now, I can’t get the image
out of my mind:
dried paint chipping,
the spread of mold pockmarks,
velour paper edges fraying, canvas rips, a gradual
flaking into sand, then dust sifting down
to be layered over by debris
of another generation
always the shifting sand
like a dust storm.

From Doll God.

 

 

 

 

 

 Lori Levy’s mother-in-law, Chaya, and father-in-law, Tzion, cooking together in their kitchen in Jerusalem.

 

AFTER GROCERY SHOPPING WITH MOTHER-IN-LAW by Lori Levy

First thing she looks for every Wednesday are the figs
as we pull into my driveway with soaps and tissues
and Persian cucumbers.  Not in the bags with the olives
from Syria, pickles from Israel, but there on the tree,
its leaves like hands, hanging over from the next door yard
as if my neighbor sent it, bearing shade and fruit.

But my neighbor and I have never met; in half a dozen
years, we’ve shared only a border and that tree.
I don’t know her name or the pattern of her days,
just the coughing and music on her side of the hedge
where—so I’m told—two men with AIDS
live in a shed beneath the fig and her palms, the scent of
marijuana floating by the roses.

Chaya reaches skyward to pick what she wants,
and I, standing back, wonder what it is
in the plump brown flesh, the pear-like shape
that fills her with desire, seduces her.

Is it the taste she likes, plucked fresh from the garden?—
she, who grows lemons and peppers, mint, avocado.
Is she reminded of Jerusalem?—the stalls of the shuk,
a basket on her arm, choosing loquats and sabras and figs.
Or perhaps it’s the inside, pink and moist,
like that part of her forgotten in her widowed years.
Perhaps she bites into the sweetness and tiny seeds
and thinks of Tzion in the early days:  how he opened her and
touched her there, planted seven children in her womb.

All week long, on the way to the trash, I step
over the squashed fruits, chewed on by squirrels,
and ignore what’s before me, ripening.
Only on Wednesday when Mother-in-law’s here
do I remember to indulge in the lushness of a fig.

 

 

Phyllis Knutson on her 98th birthday 

 

 Don’t Give me a Birthday Party by Sharon Waller Knutson

my mother-in-law says every year
during the two decades I know her
so since her birthday fell four days
after every annual family reunion
we’d celebrate it at the same time
with her own cake and cards
since No Presents was a firm rule.
The family reunions stopped
when her husband of almost 70
years died. Since hospice was helping
us care for her, I was determined
I was giving her a 98th birthday
party as her final sendoff.  She shook
her head when I revealed my plans
but said nothing more when I said,
Your family and friends will come
anyway so why not have something
for them to eat. She even wore
the purple dress and tiara I bought
and blew out her candles. Eight
days later she took her last breath.
I still wear her purple dress.