I'm Maggie Smith, and this is the slowdown.

Sometimes I wonder what my children will remember about me when I'm gone.

I wonder what they'll tell people who ask,

what was your mom like?

Or what did you learn from her?

I know from experience how difficult it is to talk about our mothers. When I was young and

still living at home, my mother was the water I swam in and the air I breathed. I don't think there

was enough separation between us for me to see who she was.

I joke that it took me until my twenties, living apart from her, to see her fully, as a person with

her own regrets, desires, anxieties, and pleasures.

I joke about that, but like most jokes, there is a little kernel of truth inside.

Today's poem references the Lunar New Year, which happens in February, but it's a timeless,

seasonless poem. It has me thinking about the relationship between mothers and daughters

and between one generation and the next.

Before Lunar New Year, our mothers go missing.

By Yuan Fong Dong.

So we learn how to hang our clothes,

how to carry rice on chopsticks, to cleave things, to braise ox bones and slice lemon grass and pan-fry morning glory, to regrow green onions and small glass jars,

how to read tea leaves like their knuckles, to pleat a dumpling

until it inherits the folds of their foreheads, their hands, the wings around their mouths.

We learn how to scrub the toilet until our palms steam,

porcelain haze floating over our heads for days.

...