Bittersweet

The turning of age,

sorrows of birth,

the ticking clock of time starts all over again,

and you are counting the days:

A baby in a cradle, shakes the mother’s world,

and her time is no longer her own.

She holds the weight of two;

the kiss of motherhood will abruptly change.

Caregivers will spend their days counting blessings,

or in resentment.

The daughter’s fate always lies in the mother’s hands,

the mother can honestly complain, or spend her whole life biting her tongue.

There is no sweetness, without first tasting the bitterness of discontempt.

Mothers know bitter better than any man ever could,

but they are more likely to appear sweet.

The woman always carries two faces

the bounded and the free,

the sensual and the insecure,

the girl, her hair in two billowing braids

And

the mother, lines growing in the lightness of her aging face.