Hiding from.. my mother
was often my goal–
To find a secret place
in a tree
or behind the cellar door,
Where I could read
and eat saltine crackers
with peanut butter,
and read my book
in solitude.
Hiding from my mother
was sometimes a challenge,
Where to hide my diary
(that I am certain she read
from time to time)
and would not have appreciated
my assessments of her–but to confront me
would have been an admission of guilt. (and
my mother never admitted or apologized
for anything–as long as she lived, I don’t remember
her ever saying she was “sorry”).
Nothing was ever safe
from her searches;
I once wrote a poem
about an unwed mother
and did not mean to leave it
on my dressing table.
I remembered it
when I was at the bus stop,
but to go back would have meant
missing my bus and being late
for school,
so I crossed my fingers,
and hoped she would not find it.
That afternoon I went to my grandmother’s
to spend the night but
my father came to get me.
In a rage, when we got
to the house,
he backhanded me across
the dining room and said
“How DARE you write
such things about your mother?”
I didn’t know what he was talking about;
The poem hadn’t been about her.
It was, as far as I can remember,
the only time my father struck me.
I never saw my poem again.
I imagine she burned it.
I became more cautious
about things I wrote
and kept them with me
at all times,
in my school notebooks,
buried amongst essays
and homework.
Hiding from my mother
was never easy.
Sandra Lee Smith
written in 2009
Updated September 3, 2018
Sandy’s footnote–some might ask couldn’t I have re-written the poem–but curiously enough, I have never been able to rewrite anything. One time my mother burned a story I was writing about a teenage girl. I think she said “can’t you just rewrite it?” No, I could never rewrite anything, especially a lengthy story all single-spaced. And my mother was fond of burning things in the back yard at our Mulberry home. She burned all of my brothers’ baseball cards and comic books–one time my son Steve asked her if he could take a comic book and some baseball cards in the basement back to California with us; she said no – and then ended up burning a huge collection of cards and comics, dating back to my brother Jim’s collection and handed down to his younger siblings. brothers. If it was something stored in her basement, she considered it her properly and could do with it whatever she wanted. true story!
