Lather, Rinse, Repeat and Never Stop

My mother washes my hair over the bathtub

I am twenty-six years old,

Kneeling, shirtless,

Waiting for the water to warm up.

I don’t need her help

Which is precisely why I ask for it.

She thinks I don’t need her anymore.

She thinks:

I don’t call her enough

I don’t ask her for money to buy the new jeans

I don’t ask her for advice on the new boy

I don’t even tell her when there is a new boy.

My mother hums, holds her wrist under the faucet

Tests the temperature like milk.

She lays a towel at the back of my neck.

This used to be our routine

Every Sunday and Wednesday evening

Before we got the electric shower.

She’s wrong.

I need my distance and space but still,

I need her:

reading true crime in the sunroom

pushing a grocery cart down the dairy aisle

coochie-cooing at a stranger’s baby on the bus

I need her at home in her fluffy socks

feet up on the couch,

hands tucked in between her thighs to keep warm

(Her circulation isn’t what it used to be).

I need her saying her Hail Marys at the novenas

I refuse to go to.

The blood runs to my head,

and the water — in seeming defiance of gravity— runs to my chin.

She doesn’t seem to realize that her existence is central to my existence,

that it would take only the smallest glitch in hers to instantly knock my own off-kilter,

throw me off my axis and launch me into orbit in the darkest ether.

So I kneel over the bathtub as she lathers Pantene into my scalp

and asks me if the water is too hot.