Sunday, October 18, 2009

By Reviewed by Pam Strother

"Mother Poems"

by C. S. Gilbert

Warning: do not even think of giving "Mother Poems" to your mom as a gift.

A collection of poems and journal entries, it traces the poet's struggle to stay psychologically whole while enduring a constant erosion of self-esteem at her mother's knee.

C. S. (Connie) Gilbert questions, early in the book, in "Mothering Myself: Cleaning Out the Files," whether she has the fortitude to explore the heartache of this relationship. "...What dark epiphany still lurks/to stun ... to turn back time, until/my mother's daughter -- once again/I'm young, and stupid, and afraid?"

Her mother's lack of interest in her was so complete that the two instances in an entire lifetime when her mother was emotionally present for her each merit a poem of their own. "The Night You Held Me," a teenage remembrance of the one and only time of being held and comforted by her mother, is separated by five decades from "August Light," which tells of a moment of true attention, approval and caring from her mother during her mother's final years.

Throughout the poems, history repeats itself and intergenerational patterns persist. A pervasive theme is the shared incest experience of mother and daughter perpetrated upon them by the poet's maternal grandfather, "a synagogue founder, a pillar of the community." The intensity of these pieces emerges from the page so that the retelling of the pain is lifted to an immediacy of resonance.

"Guilty" explores one of her reactions to her own experience with her grandfather. It is followed by "Epiphany," when she realizes that her mother was also a victim of incest but would not betray her father in favor of her daughter. "You were a striking beauty, blessed with grace/and given all the gifts that one could gain/ except your mother loved your brother best. /In self defense you were a daddy's girl/adored a man unworthy of your love,/your silence. Surely all your gifts were soiled,/twisted to nightmare in your nimble mind/ molested, as your body'd been from birth. /You lied and you denied it when I asked/at 40 when my memory came clear."

Gilbert puts the matter to rest for herself toward the end of the volume in "Summary," saying: "...Yet I am whole, and left in liberty at last...."

There are a number of entries about family relationships as well. In "Shabbat" she recalls: "...Mother's smug with malice/having made me kindle candles/in punishment of Father, surely/because he so wanted her to share/ the ritual. My little brother waited/ for the wine."

Despite her tenacious will to be a fully functioning person, she laments in a 1982 journal entry: "Daddy, Daddy, all unwillingly you crippled me, causing me to live within a tough, almost impermeable shell, hiding for over 40 years the vulnerable mush inside. Appearance, not reality (Mother's mantra): I lived it while hypocritically scorning affectation (perhaps more innocent than hypocrite). And so here I am [in a psychiatric ward.]"

Yet she writes a loving poem to him, "One At Last For My Father," 25 years after his passing.

The family patterns persisted, of course, even after the death of her mother in 1999. Gilbert, in the final journal entry in the book, writes of being chastised by her brother for not making it clear in her poems that their mother had had an undiagnosed mental illness. This later-in-life explanation of her deceased mother's behavior due to a psychiatric condition does nothing to change the damage of the experiences, especially those of childhood. And her brother's unwitting collusion, even into old age, simply perpetuates the family dysfunction.

"Mother Poems" is a testament to Gilbert's courage to tell her story, to her tenacity to write these poems as her own therapy, but most importantly to break the silence that binds so many childhood victims of abuse and neglect in all its forms, so that they will become adult survivors who can, as Gilbert has in her own life, triumph by becoming nurturing mothers themselves. Triumph by not succumbing to the death of the spirit. Triumph by emerging into adulthood and later life with a generous heart.

Pam Strother, a retired psychotherapist, is the author of "Here at The End of the Road: Key West Poems."