A vengeful womb: A defiant letter to my mother’s past rage
Sometimes I think mother’s gave birth to their rage, not daughters. Were the two meant to exist separately?
They shove every gutted emotion, every snarky remark, every desperate plea and god knows what else; into a pocket of their very own perfectly malleable womb. One that could hold everything in. Waiting to bestow its brutality upon ours. Nevertheless- my own only ever had enough space for spite. Nothing else could survive.
So here I stand; yet another troublesome, loud woman who came out of a womb- with one more unforgiving and fiery than its creator’s had ever been.
It is not as if I do not feel the need to grow and nurture something; just that we harbor the resentments and wrath our mama’s forsook. Something that sinister is coloured opaque, it would drown out the light of the innocence it tried to cradle.
My womb is inflexible; unmotherly. She’s seen too much to be either of those things. It’s as if every new story we hear about the apparent sin of being a woman tightens her walls. Some days, I beg her to make amends with my heart. Alas, her screams are louder than mine. Her warnings are even more punishing.
Each time she loses her purpose just a little bit more.
Each time I lose faith in trying to find it,
Just a little bit more.
She refuses to make space for Utopian ideals such as love and obedience when she’s too scathed with guarding her right to provoke and irk. To string daring nooses around the screeching sounds around her that try to will her into my mother’s path.
“I’d rather the curse of blood-thirst than the doom of docility.”
She’s already made her cage, it would be fruitless to try and learn the ways of another. With walls held high- like the chin of a prideful man, she’s still just a mother’s grief and a daughter’s rage woven into one. All I can truly do is try to free her from a fate she did not ask for, and a doom that lingers, the moment she escapes.