Crie du chat
Brooding on my ongoing waves of emotions,
Tears flooding in suddenly from the strangest triggers
Of memories of mother.
Even my father refers to her now
As “of blessed memory”
Having processed the facticity of her absence
And its permanence.
He no longer awakens to an empty bedroom
Asking me if Mom is coming home.
I still cry for my mother,
I used to cry with her present in my life,
As a child,
Often in outrage as to her petulance
And obstinacy,
And facing my father’s rage at my inability to control my tears,
(His Prussian sense of the British upper lip,)
Extending to a 6 year old whiny olive-skinned kid (too dark for him)
But suddenly, in an insight, that came from nowhere,
In the back of Berditchev, that enclave of outcasts, miscreants, and dropouts
Where all are accepted, and the singing is beyond,
In the holy city of black and white Lakewood that tolerates only conformity,
Where the Hallel in this shul, brought me joy for the first time since her death
I am surprised at my tears of joy.
These tears come from such a different place
Than the broken heart, a different anatomical region,
a different planet of being.
And it was here,
At the back of shul,
Of Berditchev
I realized
Those childhood tears from the moment of birth
(they tell me I cried a lot)
To the tears of this moment
Are a long continuous stream of lachrymosity
For the world, for the broken self, for the past, for the future.
But even more so
I realized in a flash
That the tears of this newborn
Were prescient tears
They are the tears of an unconscious feel
for the tears that will be shed
One day, one day
Having left the cradle of the cosmic egg
Nurtured by this woman
Who gave her life blood and carried me through term
Suffering the weight of twins
And the agony of delivery and post-operative pain
And being told by the nurses “you had your fun carnally
Now you must pay the price”
That this woman
My mother
Would one day
Without my consent
With no ostensible rationale
(Other than the “Nachash Ha-Kadmoni”)
Be lost to me.
Even then, that first crie du chat
At the moment of entry into this world
I was already crying for her,
For the loss of her,
That was to be.
And despite the guardian angel Lailah
Who supposedly taught me truth
about the world of righteousness/wickedness
And adjured me to be good (much good that did!)
And warned me of the perils of this world
(I would forever be attracted to those!)
And promised she would meet me
at the time I will be ready to leave this world
To see if I had lived a good life…
And supposedly my birth cries come
from leaving this idyllic garden of the womb, into
the world of suffering and retribution,
Or the cries were from the amnesia
for the Torah I had suddenly forgotten
when she slapped me on my philtrum…
I know better
(I always thought I did which infuriated my grammar school masters)
I know better
The cries are not for the past
The idyllic womb and hankering to return to it,
a place of serenity and warmth,
Or even the learned discourses of the Torah,
No…They are for the future
This little baby cried for the tears I now shed
In a continuous stream of salty consciousness
For the mother I would one day lose
As I have now done
And the circle of tears is now complete.
