New Orleans' Ladies

Ya YA Sisterhood, Fried Green Tomatoes, Street Car Named Desire,

Crimes of the Heart, The Color Purple, Steel Magnolias;

All themes about Southern women.

Women who drink, do it all, or had it all done to them

Conspire to live out roles created for them

In the sultry heat of the South.

Perhaps the heat is to blame for the Xeroxing behavior

Or is it the expectations of our mother’s mothers?

Or the geographic proximity to the Gulf?

Do we walk in our mother’s shoes too long as little girls,

That our feet start to desire to follow the paths of

Those who came before?

Does playing “Grownup” create in us a space that can only

Be filled with the past; with no room for self discovery

And separation? The separation is the really painful part:

We are, and are not, our mothers: grandmothers, sisters, daughters.

We discover in brief sober periods the pain of our real selves.

Little-by-little we carve out a sculpture of ourselves

Editing and erasing as we go along

“ No, that’s not me; that’s my mother.”

We erase little pieces of her until there is nothing left.

Then we wonder why we are so shallow, small and little.

Like looking up to our mothers while we stand in front of her in a mirror

This is me; this is she; or are we us?

Why can’t we be all of this and more?

We are our mothers, grandmothers, sisters, and daughters and More.

Gestalt math teaches us we are and are not the sum of our parts.

Freud spoke of Electra Complex, Later the Cinderella Complex.

We are complex, ask any husband, brother, father.

And complex is Good, not evil.

Eve ate the apple and enjoyed it.

The fruit is good, Mother God made it so.

So let us enjoy the fruit of our wombs; labor and love;

And be all of those women who came before and MORE.

Rosalynn Moore