You are one person.

One person with finite abilities.
One person with specific needs.
One person who should only take on one person’s responsibilities.

A mother needs time to be motherly.
A wife needs time to be wifely.
A worker needs time to accomplish her work.
A human being needs time to just be.
…to be quiet.
…to think.
…to dream.
…to plan.
…to refresh.

In this age of quick news, good and bad both happen fast. The good things make you want to cheer, to praise, to give money, to give attention. But you are one person, and you cannot cheer every good thing. One finite person needs to do one thing, need to trust that others will pick up the cheering, the praising, the fundraising, the attention-getting.

Since you are one person, you cannot do all the things.
You should not do all the things.
You are enough,
simply being you,
cheering when you can,
supporting when you can,
and spending your evenings being quiet,
breathing,
being,
thinking,
and dreaming.

I call you in the middle of the night
Ring your phone at this unexpected hour
To find my insulin.
A diabetic for almost 12 years now,
An adult, married, mother of one
And I’m calling you
Embarrassed
Sheepish
Needy

And you are there.

I hang up the phone
Insulin found (thank you, Jesus) here at home
Apologizing for waking you
Perhaps for hours as you sometimes are awake at night anyhow

And you don’t mind a bit.

I hear it in your voice
Know that tone intimately because now
I am a mother too:

For you, anything
Flesh of my flesh, heart of my heart
For you, anything.

I am an adult, married, mother of one
But I am still yours
And forever will be.

And you
You are my mother.

I love you.

To my shame, I admit I am quite ignorant of most copyright laws. Does anyone (Renae?) know how to correctly share the following column? Thanks, Karma, for passing this on to me.

American Life in Poetry: Column 033
By Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate

Katy Giebenhain, an American living in Berlin, Germany, depicts a ritual that many diabetics undergo several times per day: testing one’s blood sugar. The poet shows us new ways of looking at what can be an uncomfortable chore by comparing it to other things: tapping trees for syrup, checking oil levels in a car, milking a cow.

Glucose Self-Monitoring

A stabbing in miniature, it is,
a tiny crime,
my own blood parceled
drop by drop and set
on the flickering tongue
of this machine.
It is the spout-punching of trees
for syrup new and smooth
and sweeter
than nature ever intended.
It is Sleeping Beauty’s curse
and fascination.
It is the dipstick measuring of oil
from the Buick’s throat,
the necessary maintenance.
It is every vampire movie ever made.
Hand, my martyr without lips,
my quiet cow.
I’ll milk your fingertips
for all they’re worth.
For what they’re worth.
Something like a harvest, it is,
a tiny crime.

Katy Giebenhain, Best of Prairie Schooner: Fiction and Poetry