Gwendolyn Brooks in “The Mother” explains the pain that every mother has to face in case her child gets aborted. Here the mother fantasies the little itsy bitsy activities that the child would have done if he or she was born. The inner pain of abortion of the child is far greater than the external pain that the mother faces. “The Mother” is the exact representation of what a mother feels like if she loses her child.
In the poem, it is portrayed that a mother equally loves an unborn child as much as she loves the child who is born. The poem truly reflects the softness of a mother’s heart and proves that a mother is the living God on Earth. She cannot bear the pain of losing the child who she has never seen but who was once a part of her body; the part she loved the most.
The mother as described in the poem is sad about the beautiful future, which will never come into existence because the child will not come into the world. In the line “You will never wind up the sucking-thumb or scuttle off the ghosts that come,” it is clearly explained that the beautiful future is lost.
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In the line “I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed children,” the sad mother is hearing the dead child crying over the grief that it was not given the right to see the beautiful Earth. Throughout the poem one thing is made clear for sure; the mother cannot bear the pain of losing the child as a result of which she breaks down and is unable to control her emotions. The mother forgets about the readers and even asks them to understand the exact pain that she is going through; though she knows that this pain can only be understood by a mother who has experienced this situation in her lifetime.
Though the mother explained in the poem chooses to abort her child on her own will, because at that point of time, she was not in a position to handle the child, but the society now makes her feel that she has committed a horrendous crime. The mother rightly knows that she has committed a crime but still she wants to justify herself. Her justification is visible when she says that “Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I loved, I loved you All.” She knew her child simply because of the reason that it was a part of her, a part she had to kill because of the unexceptional circumstances.
The poem brilliantly explains the fact that whether a woman takes the decision to abort her child by herself or out of compulsion, once she loses the child, the most important part of her forever, she becomes heartbroken at any condition. The softness of a woman is beautifully explained in the poem once she experiences motherhood.