Hush, Little Baby, Don't Say A Word

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My mother’s older sister calls me three times a year: Christmas, St. Patrick’s Day, my birthday in July. Always works into the conversation how I should be grateful for the “choice” my mother made not to abort me, her Catholic pride inflating the link between us. The frothy fervor over my birth is quickly followed with rebuke: stinging stories of my mother’s incompetence as a woman, how little she knew about sex, how stupid she was, getting pregnant out of wedlock; and how unfit a mother she was, feeding me raw potatoes as a toddler and letting me run around for hours on end in soggy diapers. My pious aunt wanted to take me away from her, she tells me, to rescue me. But she just couldn’t. Her own family duties and all. My mother, the Madonna-whore, dead now some twenty years, and me still here, mascot for the cause, a grown-up fetus with tape over its mouth.