Dear Ancestorettes

Dear Ancestorettes,

 

I'm sure you also hate the juncture of your ankles and your feet

and this is why I love you.

You lock your jaws and grind those teeth,  

you hate your mother's ambition, her snarled lip, her digestive sensitivities bean soup.

I hate my mothers calcified, gnarled toes, banana-ed up by decades fallen subject to the preferential high heel,

and the sound they make shuffling against the hardwood like splinter bait.

And my daughter will hate how my nostrils flare,

and my proclivity for attention-whoring, 

"I can do the worm/ Listen to my Shakira impression", but this is why her daughters will love me.

 

Maybe it is separation which turns the familial into the ethereal, romanticized sprites of women we all envision.

Starfished in a meadow, dew-kissed,

dreaming of the neighbors' gardener and how we so detest embroidery lessons.

Lest you forget my existence overlapped with that of the Roomba, 

and you all enjoyed a furtive piss on the asphalt a time or two,

but alas,

THIS IS WHY I LOVE YOU.

 

Because we actually are the same. 

Not even the same with the layers stripped away– you sans kerchief or whatever

and me sans freebie sweatpants and the cultural baggage both carry–

but the same even accounting for circumstance: because we are women and we are girls.

We have incidental double chins, 

we are berated by those who stand above us,

we hate when they brush past, bump into, reminding us of the space we occupy.

We have clammy hands which have in time served as, peelers, scratchers, mucus receptacles,

and have been exhausted by our cuticles, peach fuzz, neck cricks, nodes, our tone of voice

when we become uncharictaristically impassioned, revolted, perturbed,

and how it makes us sound like our mothers. 

 

This is our commonality and why

I love you. 

 

With love, genuinely, 

 

Me (Yours)