Our Mother’s Day gift to you, a poem from Jill Bialosky’s The Players:
The Mothers
We loved them. We got up early to toast their bagels. Wrapped them in foil. We filled their water bottles and canteens. We washed and bleached their uniforms, the mud and dirt and blood washed clean of brutality. We marveled at their bodies, thighs thick as the trunk of a spindle pine, shoulders broad and able, the way their arms filled out. The milk they drank. At the plate we could make out their particular stance, though each wore the same uniform as if they were cadets training for war. If by chance one looked up at us and gave us a rise with his chin, or lifted a hand, we beamed. We had grown used to their grunts, mumbles, and refusal to form a full sentence. We made their beds and rifled through their pockets and smelled their shirts to see if they were clean. How else would we know them? We tried to not ask too many questions and not to overpraise. Sometimes they were ashamed of us; if we laughed too loud, if one of us talked too long to their friend, of our faces that had grown coarser. Can’t you put on lipstick? We let them roll their eyes, curse, and grumble at us after a game if they’d missed a play or lost. We knew to keep quiet; the car silent the entire ride home. What they were to us was inexplicable. Late at night, after they were home in their beds, we sat by the window and wondered when they would leave us and who they would become when they left the cocoon of our instruction. What kind of girl they liked. We sat in a group and drank our coffee and prayed that they’d get a hit. If they fumbled a ball or struck out we felt sour in the pit of our stomach. We paced. We couldn’t sit still or talk. Throughout summer we watched the trees behind the field grow fuller and more vibrant and each fall slowly lose their foliage— it was as if we wanted to hold on to every and each leaf.
