Sublime

Tillie Olsen wrote: “In the twenty years I bore and reared my children . . . the simplest circumstances for creation did not exist.” It was a physical problem, a time problem; it was also a question of selfhood. “The obligation to be physically attractive and patient and nurturing and docile and sensitive and deferential . . . contradicts and must

‘Lyds,’ my mum said when I was leaving. She looked out of place in her new room, which was decorated with someone in their eighties or nineties in mind. Mum has for the last couple of centuries looked like she is in her early forties. She still has black hair, just with some streaks of grey here and there. Her eyes are still bright.