Lucy Hilmer "En Garde — Daughter In Residence" at "Poets 11" 2016
Channel: San Francisco Public Library
Date: 2016-10-05

It’s time to hunker down
behind the barricades — my daughter,
now a woman, is back.
She’s newly graduated from a university in a far off land,
where she majored in pubs, English Literature, long-term
live-in boyfriends, and love;
where she learned to suck in the smoke of
home-rolled tobacco, and greet many a dawn
with bottles emptied into the night.
Suddenly she’s in residence once again
after four years away playing free agent
in a parentless world.
In her absence, I’ve grown accustomed
to her sweet silences, brief emails, occasional transatlantic
calls crying for comfort, requesting cash demurely.
But now, she’s here — disdainful, demanding,
directorial, opinionated, sharp-tongued, steel-coated,
confrontational, and perhaps…just a wee bit scared.
But she’s looming large, close up, in my face,
full-blown — with bosoms, daring, defiance
— and she’s ready (or not) for the world.
She’s a tall “10” — blonde-maned,
voluptuous — a shy little girl
no more — she who once
hung on my legs at parties,
and only mouthed the lyrics of songs
her classmates sang out loud at lower school assemblies.
Suddenly she’s figurehead of her own vessel,
a Nordic presence, a forward thinking woman
with a caldron quick mind, a Viking princess
who can slip into any space and own it,
while I, her mother, wake to the morning mirror,
searching a gravity-fed face for its younger selves,
while she in her bedroom,
oblivious, sleeps off another
late night out in a bar.
I’m feeling suddenly the senior citizen I am,
bereft of all those glorious girls with open-hearted
wonder who live inside me even now.
Why is it that my daughter with her hard-earned,
end-of-summer tan, dressed in her short-short, blue jean shorts
and white, sequined, slinky, sultry, cleavage-baring,
electromagnetic, teeny tiny tank top
makes me feel my life is over? How dare
she do this to me, and at my age!
She’s my own flesh and blood, my longed-for baby,
my little, toe-headed girl who’s — presto! — grown up
into this kind of Daisy Mae with brains,
this walking, talking, Playboy centerfold,
a woman not of the 1950s or 60s like her mom
— not obliging, smiling, decorative, compliant;
not a slave to any man, this bold 21st Century woman,
my daughter — this woman with a well-planned agenda of her own,
this woman now living under my roof
without the kind of tight-faced smiles that created
crow-footed trails of indescribable pain
on my own 64 years of womanhood.