Bouquet
by Nancy Simmonds
glance
ignore
long
flirt
blush
sweat
pursue
heart
ribbon
glitter
XXX
smooch
spoon
desire
satin
love
propose
rebuff
age
regret
Coming Home
by Chuck Kellum
Your love is the candle
That glows in the window of your eyes,
Telling me you, too,
Have longed for my journey’s end.
Lessons Of Love Unlearned
by Ndaba Sibanda
With a heart loaded with love
She leapt into the nuptial waters
And whirled as if unlearning to learn
Habits of drowning in spidery chitchats
That came in several sizes, shapes and flavors ~
Brown-sugar or fine- salt-begging pleasantries
And discovered lessons unlearned about love
And the depths and dimensions of nuptial pools
Teachings whose basis for progress was positivity
Persistence, proof ~ not the whispers of the buzzing bees
I Hurt Because I Choose to Love
By Sophie Doell © 2012, Revised in January 2020.
Ever since I left her home for college, I haven’t spent more than a couple of weeks at a time with my mother (often just a few days). In my early to mid-20’s, I had gone through the whole healing process, from being angry and not wanting anything to do with her (because after all she doesn’t accept me as I am), to forgiving, accepting, and loving her as she is (after finding God’s unconditional love for me to be all I need, I was freed from the need to have her approval). But still, whenever we come together for more than a few days, there would always be a moment of high drama where she would be mad at me because I’d somehow failed to do something she’d hoped I’d do (but never told me). We’d part with many things left unsaid. This has been the pattern for over 30 years.
But My mother is getting very old now, and I’m not so young myself anymore. In recent years, with many older friends passing on to the land yonder, I’d been wanting to really talk things over with my mother, in hope that we can somehow live the rest of our time together in true peace and mutual acceptance. So in March of 2012, when my mother called to say she would like to come for an extended visit, I talked it over with my husband Paul, and we both thought it would be a good chance not only for me to finally have time to talk things through with my mother, but also for us to test the waters about the possibility of her coming to live with us in the future when she’s too old to live alone.
Summer of 2012 was both the happiest and saddest time I’ve had with my mother. I enjoyed reminiscing with her as we looked through the things from my childhood that she’d kept but now wanted me to keep. I loved seeing her smiling face as she enjoyed the flowers at the various conservatories we visited together. I was glad to finally be able to hug her and show her some affection that was impossible to do over the phone. On my 50th birthday that July, I was glad she was here to celebrate the milestone with me, and we laughed till we cried at my son Tristan’s gag gift to me (a package of Post-It notes for my failing memory). I still chuckle whenever I think of how, after being the subject of my photography and taking directions from me for a few weeks, she began to pose herself and directed me to take pictures of her, and I will always cherish the photographs that I’ve taken of our time together.
I was sad though, when she scolded me as if I was still a child for laughing too loud, for wearing my hair loose instead of tied up, for not wearing the jade earrings she gave me (they didn’t go with what I was wearing then and I was saving them to wear later), for not sitting next to her at dinner one time at a restaurant, and a multitude of things I didn’t even know were offensive to her. I was sad when she misinterpreted what I did (or did not do), and no matter how I tried to explain, she still believed that her version was what happened. I was sad when she became jealous whenever she perceived that I was paying more attention to anyone else, especially Auntie Sarah, a family friend, whom my mother had invited to come along for the extended visit. Auntie Sarah and I have been close ever since I was about 13. She’s the one whom I talked to when things got rough at home. But I guess my mother had no idea how close Auntie Sarah and I were until these past couple of months when we were living together.
The saddest thing of all was seeing and recognizing patterns of narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) in my mother’s behavior. I am not a professional psychologist, of course, so this isn’t an official diagnosis (and she would never willingly go to a psychologist to be evaluated), but I have studied psychology enough to know what the characteristics of NPD are. Moreover, I know how impossible it is for someone with NPD to change, to grow, to have healthy relationship, to truly love, simply because one of the characteristics of NPD is that the person cannot see or accept their own fault. It’s a fact that one cannot grow or change if one is unable or unwilling to see one’s fault or mistake. What this means is that I will never be able to truly talk heart-to-heart with my mother, for she cannot see anyone else’s perspective but her own. This is the reason why all attempts in the past years and these couple of months had failed.
As I said good-bye to her at the airport, I looked into her eyes and saw her longing to be close to me, and her sadness that, once again, things did not turn out as she had hoped. There were so many things I wanted to say, things that I had been saying for years, and especially the past two months, to her, but she couldn’t hear me. I saw the pain in her eyes as she suffered inside the prison of her personality disorder, and there wasn’t a thing I could do to free her from it. All I could do then was to hold her close so I could take my eyes off of hers and cried silently to myself.
I’m hurting, but not because she doesn’t accept me or love me as I am, or that our relationship isn’t good. I had dealt with that loss long ago when I realized that I could never be the daughter she wanted me to be. I’m hurting because I love her and I can empathize with her pain, the prison that she’s in. The only way I can stop hurting is to stop loving and caring about her. I can’t stop loving her because she’s my mother, not some unrelated person on earth that I can just cut out of my life. And so, I hurt, because I choose to love.
Labyrinths
by Ndaba Sibanda
Her lover walked out
On her on their anniversary
And left her lost in her mental cobwebs
A shockwave swept away with her to a sea
Of bewilderment when she was expecting
Nothing short of entertainment
Recoiling Into Oneself
by Ndaba Sibanda
she struggled to surmount it
it sought to turn her inside out
she battled with a wild thirst
it pierced the walls of her heart
he was making a calculated move
like a chess player he knew how
the tour left no pore unexplored
it left a trail of wows and murmurs
it pitted her heart against reason
she had to contend with its rage
to grapple with its bold blindness
but her mind lit up and took it on
he was fast throwing away himself
his garments tumbled on the floor
with careless abandon and whispers
her flinching brought his tour to a halt
Not That Path Again
by Ndaba Sibanda
She gave the wind’s bait her back
For experience was her conscience
She who had heard hounds infested
With rabies bark wildly all day long
The wind had a way of being fulsome
Its tongue was sweeter than honey
But then it hid rabies and rubbish
She had trodden that path before
