Your Mother’s Pawn

Poem on being manipulated and used

Your mother, yes, loved you, but at your expense.

She took what she could and held you in debt.

If it wasn’t for you, I would have left this circus tent.

Your father didn’t stand a chance against your mother —

She drove and controlled the narrative that he was oppressive.

He was old fashioned and thought women belonged in the kitchen.

This was in fact not true, but you were too young to ask questions.

So you took it as gospel — hook, line, and sinker, and repeated

the fiction to yourself, your friends, and eventually, your psychotherapist,

blaming your depression on your father, while championing

your mother; she even gave you feminist classics like Charlotte Gilman’s

Yellow Wallpaper and Ibsen’s Doll House, to fortify her claims.

Your mother needed those stories, because she needed a way out

of a marriage she was too young to choose in her right mind.

But you are forty years old and still telling her tale

as if it were nonfiction, as your father lays dying of Covid —

your Dad, who loved you, and spared you his own victim narrative

about the divorce, and never said a word about your mother.

You may one day wake up to the injustice

of being used and wielded as your mother’s weapon

of choice to get even with your father for marrying her,

but when you are visited with this inevitable sad epiphany,

the only one you will be able to tell will be your father’s tombstone.

When that day comes, be kind to yourself, and know nobody,

not even your mother, is to blame for such a sad farce.

© Carlo Zeno 2022

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