Directly after Mother’s Day 2020 – 22nd March – the country locked down, and nothing has been the same since. Everyone has struggled in different ways during the pandemic. Some gave birth alone, and found themselves separated from the support networks of family and friends – not to mention the buggy-friendly coffee shops – they would usually have relied on. Others were locked down with their frustrated children, trying desperately to combine work, homeschooling and the provision of apparently limitless snacks without nearly enough hours in the day. Adult children who had flown the nest found themselves unable to see their parents for months on end except via Zoom calls (and to anyone who has coached older relatives through that minefield, I feel your pain!)
Night Feeds and Morning Songs
During the strange spring and summer of 2020, I edited an anthology of poems about motherhood. It had long been a passion project, and I found a literary community in its pages when I couldn’t spend time with my friends in real life. The poets whose work I was reading said things I couldn’t. They helped me time travel both backwards and forwards in my children’s lives. They made me feel so much less alone and overwhelmed, and they helped me lift my eyes from the mess and the madness and feel something of the magic of parenthood again. Here are a few of my favourites.
For My Daughter by Kim Moore
And later, when she asks, I’ll say
some parts of it were beautiful –
how in their brightness
and sudden opening
the faces of the neighbours
began to look like flowers.
I’ll tell her how we began
to look back at photos
of our younger selves
with our arms around a stranger
or leaning on the shoulders
of friends, and saw that touch
had always been a kind of holiness,
a type of worship we were promised.
I’ll tell her that in some ways
our days shrunk to nothing,
being both as long as a year
and as quick as the turning of a page.
I’ll tell her how she learned to crawl
in those days, in those times
when we could not leave,
when bodies were carried
from homes and were not counted,
that she began to say her first word
while death waited in the street,
that though I was afraid,
I never saw fear in her eyes.
I love how this poem evokes those strange, stilted days of the first lockdown, acknowledging both the horror and the kindness and community spirit that characterised those days. It has been wonderful to build stronger ties with our neighbours, especially the elderly ones. I can’t imagine how hard it must have been to deal with a tiny baby and all the accompanying uncertainty and exhaustion over the past year, but this poems also reminds us that children can keep us buoyant (partly because they keep us so busy!)
Extract from Mama by Lola Ridge
When mama sings Ba ba black sheep,
the stars seems to shine through her voice
so everything has to be still,
and when she has finished singing
her song goes up off the earth,
higher and higher…
till it is only as big as a tiny silver bird
with nothing but moonlight around it.
This is such a sweet, tender and gentle scrap of poem from a writer more often associated with political activism.
The worlds by Rachel Piercey
My mum made us many worlds
overlapping in bright circles,
and made us the shape-shifting shoes
to stride into them.
She made England,
and she made Australians,
mouths filled with eucalyptus phrases;
she made shop-owners,
plying our biscuits and lemonade
to ramblers in our lane
and she made ramblers,
free from the hard charm of destination.
She made an artist’s daughters,
story-hearers, and selective believers.
She made tree-dwellers,
Trend-leavers and fancy-dress wearers,
irregular pegs. She made the round holes
shimmy, she made silly,
she made kindness, she made calm.
My mum makes us the world
as wide as the world
and as small as the circle of her arms.
I love this poem for the childhood memories it brings flooding back. I also needed to be reminded that the window of imaginative play and worlds being created on the sitting room floor each day is so short, and valued the prompt to appreciate it again after months of gruelling homeschooling. Although it’s very hard to work while being served an eight course tasting menu of plastic food by two chatty chefs, there will come a time when their games won’t revolve around me anymore and – alluring though that sometimes feels right now – I’ll miss being the centre of their little worlds. I hope they’ll remember more occasions on which I enthused about the daily specials than ones during which I rolled my eyes.
The Red Hat by Rachel Hadas
It started before Christmas. Now our son
Officially walks to school alone.
Semi-alone, it’s accurate to say:
I or his father track him on the way.
He walks up on the east side of West End,
we on the west side. Glances can extend
(and do) across the street; not eye contact.
Already ties are feeling and not fact.
Straus Park is where these parallel paths part;
he goes alone from there. The watcher’s heart
stretches, elastic in its love and fear,
toward him as we see him disappear,
striding briskly. Where two weeks ago,
holding a hand, he’d dawdle, dreamy, slow,
he now is hustled forward by the pull
of something far more powerful than school.
The mornings we turn back to are no more
than forty minutes longer than before,
but they feel vastly different – flimsy, strange,
wavering in the eddies of this change,
empty, unanchored, perilously light
since the red hat vanished from our sight.
This poem is one of several in the collection that tugged on my heart with glimpses of the future. My eldest is seven, yet already there have been steps towards independence that were impossible to imagine in the frenetic newborn days, when I couldn’t put her down. (I recall it being almost a year before I was able to eat a meal with two hands.) The poems about children growing up also made me look through my own mother’s eyes. It’s easy not to look back when we step out into the world, and not to understand the grief of the empty nest we leave behind us. So many of us have a renewed appreciation of everything our mothers did for us after this hard and distant year.
Which brings me to the final poem: The Raincoat by Ada Limón. Understated and beautiful, and explaining in just a couple of closing lines the whole duty of mothers, it was the perfect way to close the anthology.
Night Feeds and Morning Songs: Honest, Fierce and Beautiful Poems about Motherhood, is edited by Ana Sampson.