The Children Who Were Here
“The Mother” by Gwendolyn Brooks focuses on the departures of a woman’s children through abortion. This woman is reminiscing on the fact that she has passed through children that she wanted but couldn’t keep. Now that the children aren’t here, she is starting to feel a sadness for taking upon abortion. The author also gives the mother the opportunity to talk to the deceased children. The poem is about a female experience that is founded on a woman’s involvement of aborting a child and then feeling guilty about it not only as a mother but as human being.
Gwendolyn Brooks writes as a starter in line 1, “Abortion will not let you forget”, to give the crowd the knowledge of how this woman has been taking it. Abortion has been on her mind and has not faded from her memory because it’s been putting a hole in her heart that doesn’t feel replaceable. “You remember the children you got that you did not get” / “the damp small pulps her audience how this mother is thinking about all the good things her child could have accomplished if they were still here. She feels as if she stopped a person from pursuing dreams that they may have wanted to complete. In lines 24-32, “since anyhow you are dead/ or rather, or instead, / you were never made/ but that too, / is faulty; oh, what shall, how is the truth to be said? / you were born, you had body, you died. /it is just that you never giggled or planned or cried / believe me I loved you all / believe me , I knew you , though faintly , and I loved , I love you”she tries to make justifications in which they all fail, and she ends up by just saying that she loves “all of them”. It seems that she can’t get rid of her guiltiness. She can only acknowledge and express her love for them hoping to give her some liberation.
As the reader you can tell that she has become sad about her decisions she took upon in her life, but she notice that she can’t do anything about it. It’s too late for her to turn now. “Believed that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate/ though why should I whine” (line 21-22) can show how desperate the mother is about her children.
A lot of women have made mistakes but the ones that concerns other human beings are the hardest ones especially a child. Brooks shows the world that is easy now when you can decide something to heavy, but it becomes a face of regrets later down the road. The wishes of what it can and could have been can sit substantial on a woman’s heart leading to depression. The struggle of abortion has turn out to be a part of the mother. Brooks explains this so well and gives some readers something to connect with.
