Mother

"...I imagined my mother, seventeen years ago, giving birth to me. Did she call for her mother? ...I thought of her mother... who could recite Shakespeare by heart while feeding the chickens and who drowned in the cow pond when my mother was thirteen. I couldn't imagine her calling out for anyone.

But then I realized, [the girls in the maternity ward] didn't mean their own mothers. Not those weak women, those victims. Drug addicts, shopaholics, cookie bakers. They didn't mean the women who let them down, who failed to help them into womanhood... they didn't mean the mothers washing dishes wishing they'd never married...

They wanted the real mother, the blood mother, the great womb, mother of a fierce compassion, a woman large enough to hold all the pain, to carry it away. What we needed was someone who bled, someone deep and rich as a field... who would fight for us, who would kill for us, die for us."

Janet Fitch, from White Oleander