motherhood and peace

 I seek a peace in the world, watching from my time alone, thinking about the words I’m not writing. I sit, uncertain in myself. When was the last time I felt good in this space? I live for the questions I leave myself. In my otherness, the peace I look for is found in the mothers before me, the mothers I do not talk to, the mothers I reject, and the mothers who reject me. I am a body built of the otherness of a woman who cannot be a mother, an art left for another to transcribe.

Before my brother was born, my mother would take me to galleries of her choosing, some she had designed, some she found interesting. There were some I understood, some I found boring, some we took down together. These summers were spent removing art with my mother from cold, white-walled rooms, leaving them with less, but leaving the air fuller.
The last summer, there were the pencils. I remember this sculpture in perfect lighting, then recovering pencils about the house from lifeless corners. The pencils were strung together with thin wire string, like a graphite childs mobile. The structure descended from a single nail in the ceiling, as horizontal black pencils hung from other pencils, moving in ambiguous air. 

I pricked my finger on the pencil when we were putting it up. I wasn’t a woman then, hardly a girl. I embody that child as a reckless deluge of myself now — I was something different, comfortable and ignorant to live in a world without reflection. The child saw these great empty rooms, not a place too well lit to expose her browline.
Nothing had to live there. If she shouted, my mothers voice would be heard everywhere. In the noise and quiet, there was a child who could love to be alone, but instead cried when the cheap pencils were sharpened too tight, and her mother shouted too loud to be alone.
There were pencils and string all over the house then. The child tried to use them in school but these were pencils made for art. These were to be strung up and displayed and to swing in the air, not to be chewed on and snapped and sharpened by a child whose hands smelt of dirt and sweat and paint. Simple tools struggle in my hands. Don’t mothers adapt to change more quickly?
Now, I wipe my hands on a polyester skirt. The skirt stretches over my leg, my hands feel just as sweaty. I drop my pen. A clumsy excuse for a woman who has come further than she expected.
A mother buys her daughter a toy from the electronics shop across the way. The daughter is happy, and thanks her mother in a politeness that does not make sense for her age. How can a child know gratitude as sweet and as loud as she shouts ‘thank you!’ down the corridor? Sweet, clumsy thanks.
The toy is not made of quality material, but the child has not pricked her finger. The mother is happy for the child, and the child is entertained. There is a material between them, a material without medium. A designated bond that exists to allow the two to exist as one known child, and one known adult. Two trusting of each other, a child safe to rely upon her mother, but still to learn the boundaries of the world. Boundaries, and much, much more.
They are only people, living a life far separate from my own onlooking. I moisturize my hands but it only makes them feel worse, slick and saturated. The material feels off, but I would rather keep that to myself. The mother’s patience remains. Their dynamic is loving, earnest and caring. It sounds too nice for my words, for my mouth. I sit comfortably alone, keeping my irony stained tongue quiet, while a perfect world exists in a mothers love, just across the way.