The Good Days

by Kerry Lynd

I tell her of the girl who cut her hair so she looks like a boy

And I feel bad as I do

For hair has no gender

And anyway, my mother has had short hair her whole life

(Or at least all of mine)

Is she a trans, she asks

And I laugh at her question

And feel bad again and to cover it up I say no she is a biological girl

But I can tell my mother is confused,

And that’s okay.

She is seventy-eight and when she was a girl they didn’t have to think like this:

Respectfully, I mean.

Instead, cis-men attacked women the old-fashioned way

And blamed the girls when they fell pregnant.

My dad says take us back to the good ol’ days, but they were only good for him.

My uncle was really my mother’s cousin.

They never told him,

Until one day he found out-

They didn’t understand why he was angry.

My mother had a tumor the size of a grapefruit and when they cut it out, they stole her uterus too,

And my dad had no sperm count.

She laughs when she tells

How I was adopted

Like it was an easy thing

And cost no one anything.

But I grew up and had kids of my own and I found out what it could cost-

And once I talked to my birth mother

But after that she didn’t want me anymore,

(That’s what it felt like)

Or at least we never talked again;

I tried not to feel fucked up when she messaged me happy birthday on the wrong day.

But it feels like pain and it is pain

And I have to hold that within me: my two mothers who don’t want me,

And some days it is too heavy to smile and my shoulders feel pressed down upon

And I hold my daughters against my breast,

It is all I can do.

And I breathe

And limp ahead

Dragging my feet across the broken glass of crystallized dreams

I carry the weight of all who came before me.

They, too, pasting smiles on their faces and kissing their children and

Trying to be enough.