there are two main, personal influences for this piece. The first of these were two expressions that my late, Maternal Grandmother (1920-2014) often liked to use.

As a member of the Greatest Generation, she (obviously) came of age in, and had her worldview shaped by the Great Depression and World War II, and like many of her age, she had a number of turns-of-phrase that are now, pretty much meaningless to anyone born after about 1980.

The first of these was when she was in somewhat of a jovial mood, she’d sometimes say: “Wanna buy a duck?” which was the signature line of a slapstick comedian named Joe Penner (1904-1941), who was highly popular in the early 1930s, but who is virtually unknown today.

She also had another classic expression, when she was so exasperated or flabbergasted by something that she had nothing to say that didn’t involve words that were not for the ears of children. Those times, when there is a double-facepalm event in play, Grandma would heavily sigh and say: “Lord, Love a Duck!”

From what I’ve been able to find out over the years, some linguists have said that the expression originates from Cockney Rhyming Slang for: “Holy f**k!”

The second personal influence in this piece comes from another long-dead-and-nearly-forgotten toxic past relationship that I once had (since I seem to be in a framework of exorcising old relationship ghosts in a few of my more recent pieces).

However, I will say that certain, major details have been deliberately blurred, left vague, and/or even somewhat conflated with unrelated stories that I have heard from others, simply because I do not want the person that this (obliquely) refers to, to possibly recognise themselves within the words…

The biggest reason for that is that this is not about trying to cause them any long-past-its-possible-relevance discomfort, more than it’s about continuing to remove toxic material and/or unwelcome ghosts from my memory.
It’s about finding the last fragments, and finally letting them go…

The simple fact is that we’ve both have long-since moved on to other things, and it’s enough that I finally have the strength to kick the last remaining ghosts of regrets associated with that relationship to the curb, and I certainly don’t intend to tempt some kind of Candyman sequel, by speaking the name into the mirror. :P

Likewise, as part of the blurring process, the “Momma” referred to in this piece is not my own mother, but merely a bigger, symbolic representation of mothers’ expectations for their sons, and many of the cultural tropes and stereotypes that go along with that. Same with the grandmother archetype, who only has those two, aforementioned expressions in common with my own grandmother (simply because I’m positive that many grandmothers of that particular generation used those same expressions).