whenever my mother finds a new hobby,
she becomes Obsessed with it.
Infatuated.
it’s an Overwhelming, Consuming,
Obsession.
but after a while,
After she has mastered her craft,
or achieved excellence in whatever she started,
the passion was gone as quickly as it came.
when I was Five,
I would watch my mother dance,
from the sofa.
tango, salsa, fox trot, waltz.
she would spin around our living room floor,
swept up in her own world,
Oblivious.
when she decided her feet were too tired,
she worked with her hands.
exotic foods no seven year old would eat
she made in bulk. indian food for the next week.
I was very skinny when I was Seven.
when I was Eight,
cooking was soon replaced with wildlife.
our house was filled with animal magazines,
tigers, birds, frogs, fish,
found their way into my mother’s heart.
my mother spent her weekends in the everglades.
then somehow,
documentaries on salmon soon became horror films,
and for a year, I couldn’t sleep at night.
the films turned into books,
and for days, she buried her nose in their spines,
held their backs gently like she was holding a child.
in the Seventh grade,
my mother couldn’t stop running.
running at speeds no Thirteen year old could keep in pace with,
I began to wonder if she enjoyed running, or running away.
panting and out of breath,
I realized I couldn’t catch up.
running wasn’t fast enough for her,
so bikes became involved.
her cycling was about as fast as her cycles of interest.
with her new body, my mother soon rediscovered clothes
in Eighth grade, I watched my mother have her midlife crisis,
piles of clothes, new with tags, spilled out of shopping bags.
her closet busting with clothes I could have,
should have,
worn.
the year after that,
my mother must have rode that macy’s escalator to heaven,
because she found Jesus.
she never really practiced what she preached.
then, christianity turned into world history in general,
which turned into soap operas,
which turned into the computer,
which turned into baking cakes.
now, the icing has been replaced with fertilizer
right now, my mother enjoys gardening.
she spends hours watering her flowers
literally watching the grass grow.
right now, I am Eighteen,
and I can’t help but to wonder,
was I the First?