My Mother is Full of Water and Ready for Sonography

Our relationship to our mothers is a supple thing. Day to day, year to year, age to age, it changes. Beyond the evolutionary grounding, beyond the nurturing necessities, we are an amalgam of the obvious and the extraordinary. To be gifted the kind of unprecedented unflinching support we do get from mothers is a benediction of nature. Our steady rejection of it, and her holding tight to the tethers, is the obvious unravelling which this relationship goes through - her instinct becomes a need, the child’s need for her transitions to become a burden.

 

And then there’s an inflexion point when things come to a head. Often in the teens, often later - it doesn’t matter when. What does matter is that it’s almost a rebellion of a kind. Things start breaking down as if everything was fragile to begin with, as if the relationship was nothing more than that of a food-provider and laundry-doer. And the tie is suddenly fraught with the consequences of unreconciled pain.

 

Succour is often found elsewhere.

 

And therein often lies the genesis of the fracture - the bird seeks to fly out of the nest, but the nester is still not done with the chick.

 

But relationships are both the present and the unravelling. A lot of its pain is the passage, though it’s joy is retrospective. And though we might be nostalgic as we look back, we might actually have come out through a long tunnel of pain. But in spite of all its rockiness, a mother remains a symbol of our breath. The sooner we let that one thought overshadow everything else, we would have let ourselves understand the meaning of the most meaningful relationship in our life.

 

If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on our times with our mothers:

• Mother's Rambling Lessons on Life Imparted in Morning Walks in My Childhood
• My Mother's Lines
• How Mothers Are Nature's Return Gifts

Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup.

Get in touch with me on uncutpoetrynow@gmail.com

Subscribe to my incandescent and poetic newsletter The Uncuts here - https://theuncuts.substack.com.

 

The following music was used for this media project:
Music: AnotherDramaticScene by Lilo Sound
Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/6137-anotherdramaticscene
License (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license