The Regretful Mother

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The Regretful Mother Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem “The Mother” is powerful and emotional. It is about abortion, an extremely sensitive subject. In her short thirty-three-line piece, Brooks portrays a broad range of feelings that probably any woman who had to make such a decision would face. However, her narrator is a poor African-American mother who feels sadness, disappointment, remorse, and ultimately love for the children she has had to eliminate. Additionally, she gives her readers some insight into why the narrator has committed these acts. Sadness is just the beginning of the narrator’s emotional rollercoaster. “You remember the children you got that you did not get,” she explains. The emptiness that she feels when “the damp small pulps” that had been given to her were taken from her body is almost unbearable. How could a mother forget her child? Even though the babies were aborted, she admits they “will not let [her] forget.” He was “…born, [he had] a body…,” “…with a little or with no hair,” “…[he] died”, there is no way for her to deny him. Because of the confession, the mother experiences disappointment in all of the daily events that other mothers get to enjoy with their children. She talks about how she “will never wind up the sucking thumb/ of scuttle off ghost that come.” These are everyday trials that many mothers take for granted. However, she expresses her disappointment in never being able to scold her child for sucking his thumb, or fight off ghosts and become his hero. Mothers hate being away from their children, even though they may express otherwise, there is an emptiness when they are apart. That is why the narrator talks of the “Return for a snack of them, with gobbling mother- eye”, that she will never possess due to her decision to terminate the children’s lives. Unfortunately, her rollercoaster has another hill to climb, remorse. The
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