What is a mother?
She is a home
She is comfort when I most need it
She is a sister
She's strong and supports me
She is a daughter
She is someone's daughter before a mother
She is a best friend
I am her best friend
What else is a mother?
She is a sacrifice
She spends her time worrying about me
She is a tyrant
She wants the best for me
She is a disaster
She is going through a lot
She is the best mother!
She is loving
She loves me and I love her
She is kind
She is patient and understanding
She is empathetic
She knows when something is not at its best
She is my mother!
My mom is the inspiration for this piece. Or at least it started as that. Soon it turned into writing about mothers, and how their kids might have experienced their mom's motherhood. I took a button with a butterfly carved into it, and the beauty of the butterfly began to inspire me to write about how the life of a butterfly is similar to motherhood. I started to compare motherhood with a butterfly, thinking of my mother the entire time. I kept thinking of her beautiful life, just as a butterfly looks. One could say the center of gravity is butterflies, but another person could say it is motherhood, it is my mother.
My approach to structure and style was different. In my head, I wanted it to be a generic poem, but I wanted to include more imagery in my poem. Imagination is a structure I used because one needs to imagine motherhood to understand the connections. The literary techniques I used were similes and metaphors, comparison and contrast, and imagery. The idea of a mother being a sacrifice is that a mother sacrifices her body and mind to have a child. Not many may know this, but a mother's brain shrinks when she gets pregnant, and the damage is permanent. This is why being a mother is a disaster: a mother is trying so hard to remember things she knew before, but can't reach them because her brain has gotten smaller. Her decision-making skills are not the best, and she may not always make the right decisions for you, hence "she is a tyrant."
My mentor texts were Blanca's free-writing "What should a Mother be?", J. Estanislao Lopez's poem "Independence Day In West Texas", and Valzhyna Mort's poem "Ars Poetica". Blanca inspired me to write about motherhood, she wrote the good things and the bad things about mothers. While J. Enstanislao Lopez's poem is not even close to the topic of motherhood, it is a strong poem. I tried using the same amount of imagery as him, but that didn't turn out. Valzhyna Mort inspired me to write and explain more of the complexity of my poem. I feel as if the words themselves speak a million images. I envision my piece to be changing and maturing as I continue to work on it, and I hope it gets deeper. I want to become a better writer and poet.
"Thank you for this poem. As you so clearly point out, a mother is very complex. I appreciated the structure of your poem, too."
--Jill Ribbeck