extracted raze you walk through the door with no breakfast in your belly and five less teeth in your mouth, biting down on gauze to make the blood clot, one cheek swollen but not bruised, the other the same size it was when you woke up. for the better part of two hours, you show me all the things you can't say. i get about half of them right. the others get lost in laughter and bad guesses. when you tire of holding the flexible ice pack that used to live inside my lunchbox against the side of your face and you've waited long enough for the last slow trickle to stop, you spit out the gauze and chew up the leaves on the front lawn. but not with your own mouth. it's still got some healing left to do. 211120 ... ovenbird Sometimes motherhood means holding your nine year old child’s hands while her mouth is forced open, while needles prick the soft pulp of her gums, while two baby teeth are gripped in a stainless steel vise and ripped forcibly from her jaw, while she screams, while tears find the openings in her ears, while you watch the long roots shake free from the bloody sockets they were planted in just moments ago, while you insist that she can live through this enameled nightmare and find a resilience she didn’t know she had. Sometimes motherhood is swallowing your own nausea and keeping a straight face when what you really want to do is cry. It’s taking your child, bloodied and just a little broken, home and watching her wander the house like a ghost searching for its own mouth with desperate fingers and finding nothing there, while moaning “it feels like my face is GONE.” It’s going out for ice cream after, as if that fixes everything. And maybe it does. Maybe sometimes survival tastes like vanilla and oranges. 250813 what's it to you? who go blather from