The Mother's Teeth Are Set on Edge (Ode to Jacob)

Maybe God sent us into this world but the place has a way of making its own of you. It can take what’s alive and make it like a rock. Before I even met him he was like a rock. The seven years service for my sister’s hand had hardened him. Too easy then to take my father’s treachery out on me. For it was me he received in lieu of wages, not Rachel. Another seven years for the promise of her hand, the hand he loved. Not my hand.
But I knew my place. Seven years the unsolicited wife and, ever after, subject to my sister’s wrath. But here is the wasteland of my husband’s heart, not mine.
We and our slaves bore him many sons. Not so many he did not still quake before his brother, Esau. Quake he might. And I trembled too, lest the sins of their father be visited upon my children. My husband came into this world with a firm grip on his brother’s heel. They say Rebekah, his mother, sent him into his aged father with the smell of the field still on him to steal his brother’s blessing? Then he fled Esau’s wrath. First a thief in the night, then a coward.
They say Sarah gave the slave Hagar to Abraham, but bid him cast Hagar’s offspring out to clear the way for Isaac, her own. They say Rebekah bid my husband go into Issac, his aged father, smelling of the field to steal his brother’s birthright. What of it.
They do not say it was Leah who bid her sons lay hands on Rachel’s boy and cast him into a pit til death befell him. Her sister’s boy. They do not say it was Leah who bid her children lay waste to the last oasis of her husband’s heart. But I say it was I. That the last oasis of that desert may consume in scorching flames til God forgive him his vanity. Let the sins of his fathers be visited upon him and let his own sins be visited upon his son.

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