Tender Bitter - Sharon Olds

[Lawrence Robinson]

Tender Bitter

When I started having tender thoughts about
myself as a child—that long, pointed
chin, those tiny eyes—I started having
tender thoughts of my mother. She would look
up, a lot—short for an adult—
with a look of dazed longing, her fine
straight hair wrapped wet around
many small rollers, and bound back with combs
put in backward, to give her hair
some height, or with a fillet like a goddess. My hair was
loopy, soft, lollopy like
flop-eared rabbits’ ears, she wrote
about it in my Baby Book, “Shar’s
not conventionally beautiful—but that
naturally curly hair!” I don’t think she would have
traded with me, she remembered her cold
Pilgrim mother, in my mom’s sleep,
slipping the bobby-pins out of the dreaming child’s
spit curls. We were big on trading—you were
supposed to want to take Jesus’s place
on the cross, as he had taken yours. I think
my mother would have died for me—
and I think I would have died for her—
is that how the other animals do it? Who
dies for whom? My mom sometimes
liked my mind—the odd things
I said—she would write about my mind in my pink
Baby Book. She came from ignorant
educated people of self-importance
and leisure. She did not see that what I
said was funny, like joking, it was
metaphor. But it charmed her. She would not have
taken it from me, she would not have known
what to do with it, nor did she want to
mar me, as her mother had marred her. My mother . . .
loved me. If she had not beaten me,
I would have been purely enamored with her—she was so
sad, and pretty. Her eyes were a hundred
bright bright blues, like a butterfly’s scales
but crystal electric, like a shattered turquoise goblet.
She did not take away my ability
to love—with her elder sister, and my elder
sister, she taught it to me. And she did not
take my mind—the one thing
of value I was born with—my mother did not
take the simile away from me.

	- Sharon Olds