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“Mamacita, ay,” Yvonne wailed.

I didn’t know why she would call for her mother. She hated her mother. She hadn’t seen her in six years, since the day she locked Yvonne and her brother and sisters in their apartment in Burbank to go out and party, and never came back. Yvonne said she let her boyfriends run a train on her when she was eleven. Gang bang, she said. And still she called out, Mama.

It wasn’t just Yvonne. All down the maternity ward, they called for their mothers. Mommy, ma, mom, mama.

Suddenly I realized, they didn’t mean their own mothers. Not those weak women, those victims. Drug addicts, shopaholics, cookie bakers. They didn’t mean the women who let them down, who failed to help them into womanhood, women who let their boyfriends run a train on them. Bingers and purgers, women smiling into mirrors, women in girdles, women on barstools. Not those women with their complaints and their magazines, women who asked, what’s in it for me? Not the women watching TV while they made dinner, women who dyed their hair blond behind closed doors trying to look twenty-three. They didn’t mean the mothers washing dishes wishing they’d never married, the ones in the ER saying they fell down the stairs, not the ones in prison saying that loneliness is the human condition, get used to it.

They wanted the real mother, the blood mother, the great womb, mother of a fierce compassion, a woman large enough to hold all the pain and carry it away. What we needed was someone who bled, someone deep and rich as a field, a wide-hipped mother, awesome, immense, women like huge soft couches, mothers coursing with blood, mothers big enough, wide enough, for us to hide in and sink down to the bottom of, mothers who would breathe for us when we could not breathe anymore, who would fight for us, who would kill for us, die for us.

–White Oleander