Brian Ascalon Roley is a professor and award-winning author of Philippine and American descent, and a recent National Endowment of the Arts Literature Fellow.
In “Bathing My Mother,” John C. Mannone (Intima, Fall 2017) uses the perspective of a caregiver and adult child who is bathing his mother. He takes us through the process with a keen eye for interesting concrete details:
To the tub filled with baby warm
water I guide her disrobed frailness
from walker to bath chair, she lifts
her arm from my shoulder to wall’s handrail
shiny in the half light.
He adds: “I wash / her face that’s sometimes wrinkled / with confusion…,” giving us clues about both her mental state and the arc and present nature of their relationship, which now includes the dynamic of caregiving. It’s a beautiful moment, revealed through vivid imagery, between vulnerable parent and child.
As both caregiver to an adult son of growing weight and son to an aging father recently diagnosed with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, I was really drawn in; I could relate not just as a caregiver, but also in the way that you do as your parents grow older. Your relationship changes, and you start sorting through memories of the past.
My poem “A Partner’s Secret” (Intima, Fall 2021) is based on a childhood memory between my father and I, walking out of the 1988 John Cleese movie A Fish Called Wanda. In this film, one of the characters (played by Michael Palin) is mocked for laughs because of his speech impediment. Exiting the theater, the audience was in a great mood, as was I, from exuberant group laughter. But I noticed that my father seemed subdued. He hesitated, then mentioned that his brother had a stutter. “I’m glad he wasn’t in the audience.” He added that until his 20s he’d had one too. Immediately, I blushed. I realized that I’d been laughing with the audience at the expense of a vulnerable person, that my father had noticed, and that he disapproved. I couldn’t meet his eyes. Suddenly it seemed obvious that what we—me and the audience—had done communally was wrong. Ironically, I had my own challenges with speech (still sometimes do), which until then I hadn’t thought of as a speech impediment but rather simply as personal failing and incompetence. This was a significant moment in my process of learning about myself, my father, and our evolving relationship. The strong emotion—the humiliation—and vulnerability had been an important catalyst. It resulted in my poem “A Partner’s Secret” decades later.
Brian Ascalon Roley is a professor and award-winning author of Philippine and American descent, and a recent National Endowment of the Arts Literature Fellow. He is Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Miami University. He has received additional fellowships, research appointments, and awards from the University of Cambridge, Cornell University, the Ohio Arts Council, the Association of Asian American Studies, the Djerassi Foundation, Ragdale, Hambidge, and the VCCA, among others. His books include American Son: A Novel (W.W. Norton; Christian Bourgeois Editeur), which was a Los Angeles Times Best Book, New York Times Notable Book, Kiriyama Pacific Rim Prize Finalist, and winner of the Association for Asian American Studies Prose Book Award. More info at brianroley.com.