ELISSA NADWORNY, HOST:
Because tomorrow is Mother’s Day, we bring to you today a consideration of motherhood by a poet who’s brought up two sons. The story comes from NPR’s Neda Ulaby.
NEDA ULABY, BYLINE: When poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil learned that she was going to have a baby boy 18 years ago, she prepared like it was homework.
AIMEE NEZHUKUMATATHIL: And I am a Type A Capricorn, so I was reading, I was studying as if I was going to be taking the biggest exam of my life.
ULABY: But she was not even a little ready, she says, for the milestones, like the first time she heard her son reading out loud to himself.
NEZHUKUMATATHIL: Oh, I get teary-eyed just thinking about that. It’s the most magical – when you can see how 26 letters – suddenly, a world opens up for him.
ULABY: Then came son No.2. When it was time for her eldest son to go to college, she started writing this poem.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
NEZHUKUMATATHIL: (Reading) What they didn’t tell me about motherhood. Sometimes when they were young, I felt like I was underwater and couldn’t make out sounds or reason or rhyme, only coral clicks and distant whale songs, a shiver of eel near my ankle. But trust me, one day, you’ll surface. They start walking, then running, and then they sit behind a wheel. Then you sit behind a wheel driving away from their dorm. They grow smaller and smaller until they’re as big as a guppy, and soon, this bubbly sea is not at all where you want to swim. Even though it’s what you’d always wanted for them, that they’d grow strong fins, iridescent, fully unfurled in the morning sun and curious eyes, big, bright and shiny. But the only waves you know now mean goodbye.
ULABY: As poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil drove away and her oldest turn towards his freshman year, she was racked by the grief of leaving him and the familiar feeling she had not prepared.
NEZHUKUMATATHIL: I’m tearing up. It felt like I was being pushed, then pulled, pushed, then pulled. Like, suddenly, as I was driving away, thinking, did I teach you how to make a pie crust?
ULABY: Ridiculous, she says, but another example of feeling unprepared in spite of everything.
NEZHUKUMATATHIL: I think nothing prepares you how much love can still live inside a goodbye.
ULABY: Aimee Nezhukumatathil lives in Oxford, Mississippi. Her younger son is still in high school. Her oldest just wrapped up his second year at Tulane University. Her new collection of poetry is called “Night Owl.”
Neda Ulaby, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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