Lizbeth’s Mother’s Morning 1961

The house is quiet now. Her husband and daughter have left for work and school. She stands by the kitchen window and stares out at the country view of fields and trees. She lights a cigarette and pours a glass of white wine. Housework can wait. She turns on the radio and music enters the room: Ravel. She prefers Mozart, but Ravel will do. The wine sits momentarily on her tongue, then she swallows it down. The sky is a Monet blue with white clouds that seemed dabbed in for effect. She rowed with her daughter over breakfast, something she would never have done with her own mother. And her husband said nothing, just sat there gazing at them both as if he was watching a TV programme: miserabile mucca, she had heard her daughter mutter in Italian. A language she herself doesn’t speak, but her husband does, but he said it meant that their daughter felt miserable, but it meant miserable cow, which he never said. She sips more wine and inhales on the cigarette. Ravel has given way to Bach on the radio. That was more to how she felt, but Bach didn’t move her like Mozart did. A few birds cross the sky. Inside she feels low and wants to cry.

Reviews

[Neha agrawal]

This is a beautifully restrained and emotionally nuanced vignette. It reads like a scene from a European art film — quiet, inward, but brimming with tension beneath its stillness.

You’ve captured that liminal space of a morning — when the family leaves and the house is momentarily hers — yet it’s not peace she feels. It’s ache. It’s solitude pressing inward.

Lines like:

> “The sky is a Monet blue with white clouds that seemed dabbed in for effect.”
“He said it meant that their daughter felt miserable, but it meant miserable cow…”



— strike that perfect balance between poetic imagery and the sting of emotional realism. The Monet sky is beautiful, yes, but distant, almost artificial. And the daughter’s insult, mistranslated by her husband, reveals not just familial tension but a deep loneliness — a lack of allyship.

[abbypullanlitandpoetry]

A quietly powerful piece full of subtle emotion. The details are beautifully chosen and the atmosphere lingers with real weight. Well done.
AP x