Watching Mother Disappear

My mother's always been that woman.

The one you see, and don't notice. 

The one you'd fail to choose,

 if you looked through a hypothetical catalogue of a thousand woman

and were asked to choose nine hundred and ninety nine. 

I've seen pictures of her hey-day. 

The precocious teen that taught herself flamenco, 

 took inordinate amounts of pride

 in asserting that she, in fact, was not like other girls,

 who'd declare to her father that she'd live a life worth a bestseller of a biography,

unlike her boring mother, 

is not my mother. 

My mother is mild, she makes no fuss. Not when she's the last to eat dinner,

 not when Father tells her 

she'll end up dwindling the family fortune 

whenever she brings up that little bakery she wants to start

Not even when there are unexplained bruises the size of Fabergé eggs suddenly burgeoning on her, 

each hidden by a conveniently placed scarf, an intricately woven half lie. 

I watch on, only to see an apparition, 

a distant docile cousin of her own spirit,

 turning a shade more invisible 

with each admonition, each well-intentioned joke, 

another ember dying away in her eyes which once bore kernels of fire

It's only in those fleeting moments when she dares bring up her bakery 

when she speaks about someday selling out creme brulees and croquembouches

with the hurried breathlessness, the shining eyes of a child that believes in magic

That I see Mother, materialising again,

and for the tiniest instant in time,

her croissants, her ringing cash register,

 the tulle blue wall paper she wants for the walls

Are more real than Father's slights ever will be. 

And I see the one shimmering strand of hope, 

someone's surreptitiously woven 

into the fabric of her incredibly nondescript life

that keeps her from slipping away.