Mother - by Mills Baker - Rats from Rocks

I’m not sure that I do. I’m shocked at this fact: I am not nearly so squared to my mother in death as I was to my father. I don’t think it would surprise anyone who knew us, but I had always imagined that despite it all, my mother was alive in me in the deepest places and thus intelligible to me in ways my father was not. The course of my life took me physically and mentally and psychologically and culturally away from her and towards him, but it seemed to me that this motion affected mostly my “upper” or “outer” self. If nothing else, that like her I am described by medical literature as “having bipolar disorder” suggested to me that we shared a structure or metabolism. And we do. And perhaps that’s why it’s difficult for me to write about her. What is difficult about it? Oh, the usual: “words fail.” I cannot “do her justice.” That my father’s soul was hidden seemed very natural; he hid it, and his decision to hide it and keep it hidden was, for him, an act of deliberate and thoughtfu

I’m not sure that I do. I’m shocked at this fact: I am not nearly so squared to my mother in death as I was to my father. I don’t think it would surprise anyone who knew us, but I had always imagined that despite it all, my mother was alive in me in the deepest places and thus intelligible to me in ways my father was not. The course of my life took me physically and mentally and psychologically and culturally away from her and towards him, but it seemed to me that this motion affected mostly my “upper” or “outer” self. If nothing else, that like her I am described by medical literature as “hav