INADEQUACY

Mother’s stretched out on her divorce settlement win, the seashell fashioned couch
father had carried across the threshold of their new home, crying over Susan Lucci’s
forthcoming severance. Carpel tunnel has confined mother to living vicariously through televised dramatizations of reality, twice removed.

What if she was Erica Kane and I, her lesbian daughter?
Would she approve of secondhand inhalations through us?

She watches in awe as the cast-iron certainty in television’s
representation pales in comparison to her truth, her lies, her
qualms. Reality’s starring lady, distant by no state of removal as it
poisons television’s conjured ideals, agonized a C- section
dependent on the path I was to embark upon.
My delivery summoned her reliance
in tranquility not in humanity and its sequence of making
mistakes and confronting self-doubt.

She harps, “How about beauty school? It’s easier than mastering Poetry.”
She harps, “I am not saying you can’t. I am just saying it’s easier.”
I bawl, “Reason always has its reason. I know exactly what you are saying.”

Identifying yourself in the world separate from the womb comes with liabilities.
The best ones are those found in the process; her projected inadequacy confused for
your disbelief in self.