What is it to be a mother? My friends who have children tell that it is the most amazing thing in the life – to have a baby, to feel a new life growing inside of you. Nothing can be compared to it. Sooner or later the maternity instinct wakes up inside every woman, but beside the instincts there are social, financial or other issues, that make it impossible to have a baby. How often do we hear now from women that they need to do the career first, or that the time is not right or I do not have enough money to provide myself? What if she did get pregnant? Abortion? It is very touchy topic to discuss. I do not know if its right or wrong- each situation is different. Some women may never forgive themselves and this decision will affect all their life. In any way I think it is up to woman to decide to keep the pregnancy or not. Gwendolyn Brooks in her poem “The Mother” describes the woman’s feelings after abortion, her regrets and anger. I have a friend who had abortion and was able to recover and to start a new life. She had 5 years relationship back home in Ukraine, but it was not working out. They broke up and she decided to leave the country. Luckily she got visa to US, but she discovered she was pregnant. She did abortion and could not forgive herself for a long time. Two years ago she met a guy, fell in love with him. They got married and had a beautiful baby-girl this May. She told me no matter how hard it was back then, she made a right decision. We all make mistakes or decisions, that might be wrong, but the biggest mistake will be to let the past to destroy the present and the future. I do not judge anybody; it’s not for me to decide what is right or what is wrong for another person. Nobody’s life is easy. We all need support at one point or another, because: “nobody, but nobody can make it out here alone”
Poetry
The Mother
by Gwendolyn Brooks
Abortions will not let you forget.
You remember the children you got that you did not get,
The damp small pulps with a little or with no hair,
The singers and workers that never handled the air.
You will never neglect or beat
Them, or silence or buy with a sweet.
You will never wind up the sucking-thumb
Or scuttle off ghosts that come.
You will never leave them, controlling your luscious sigh,
Return for a snack of them, with gobbling mother-eye.
I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed
children.
I have contracted. I have eased
My dim dears at the breasts they could never suck.
I have said, Sweets, if I sinned, if I seized
Your luck
And your lives from your unfinished reach,
If I stole your births and your names,
Your straight baby tears and your games,
Your stilted or lovely loves, your tumults, your marriages, aches,
and your deaths,
If I poisoned the beginnings of your breaths,
Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate.
Though why should I whine,
Whine that the crime was other than mine?--
Since anyhow you are dead.
Or rather, or instead,
You were never made.
But that too, I am afraid,
Is faulty: oh, what shall I say, 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 loved you
All.
From A Street in Bronzeville by Gwendolyn Brooks, published by Harper & Brothers. © 1945 by Gwendolyn Brooks. Used with permission. All rights reserved
Alone
by Maya Angelou
Lying, thinking
Last night
How to find my soul a home
Where water is not thirsty
And bread loaf is not stone
I came up with one thing
And I don't believe I'm wrong
That nobody,
But nobody
Can make it out here alone.
Alone, all alone
Nobody, but nobody
Can make it out here alone.
There are some millionaires
With money they can't use
Their wives run round like banshees
Their children sing the blues
They've got expensive doctors
To cure their hearts of stone.
But nobody
No, nobody
Can make it out here alone.
Alone, all alone
Nobody, but nobody
Can make it out here alone.
Now if you listen closely
I'll tell you what I know
Storm clouds are gathering
The wind is gonna blow
The race of man is suffering
And I can hear the moan,
'Cause nobody,
But nobody
Can make it out here alone.
Alone, all alone
Nobody, but nobody
Can make it out here alone.
Destiny
by Rosario Castellanos
Destiny
We kill what we love. What’s left
Was never alive.
No one else is close. What is forgotten,
What else is absent or less, hurts no one else.
We kill what we love. Enough of drawing a choked breath
Through someone else’s lung!
There is not air enough for both of us. And the earth will not hold
Both our bodies
And our ration of hope is small
And pain cannot be shared.
Man is an animal of solitudes,
A deer that bleeds as it flees
With an arrow in its side.
Ah, but hatred with its insomniac
Glass eyes; its attitude
Of menace and repose.
The deer goes to drink and a tiger
Is reflected in the water.
The deer drinks the water and the image. And becomes
-before he is devoured – (accomplice, fascinated)
his enemy.
We give life only to what we hate.
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2 comments:
Hi Lana,
I would have to agree in that you can't allow the past to dictate your future. You should definitely learn from your mistakes, and adjust accordingly however. But,the minute that you allow your past mistakes to prophesy your future, you are doomed to the mistakes of the past and unhappiness is sure to follow. I had a similar friend who basically is in the same position. She couldn't live her life until she came to grips with her decision, became more aware and careful, and now has a daughter that is the pride of her life.
Hi Lana,
I also believe that the gift of being a mother is irreplaceable. As my mother says: you will understand why I'm so protective when you have your own kids.
=]
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