| Near the Source of Love Was This |
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Near The Source of Love Was This The un-Hallmark part of life is what many letters to younger selves express--that unattractive, deeply mortifying story of our inner journey. A classic is Cokie Roberts' letter about being the mother of young children. The most powerful piece of that letter is how she admits to being shocked at her capacity for anger toward these small beings--her children. Who admits to mother-anger at baby play groups?? One of my favorite poets, Sharon Olds, writes about this blaze of fury in a poem called "The Clasp," in which
she describes being in her apartment "for two weeks straight" with her four year old daughter and her one year old son, all sick with colds. To prevent her daughter from shoving her son over on his face, Sharon grabs her daughter's wrist and compresses it "fiercely, for a couple of seconds, to make an impression on her, to hurt her, our firstborn, I even almost savored the stinging sensation of the squeezing, the expression, into her, of my anger..." She closes the poem with her daughter's reaction: ...and at the first extra force, she swung her head, as if checking who this was, and looked at me, and saw me--yes, this was her mom, her mom was doing this. Her dark deeply open eyes took me in, she knew me, in the shcock of the moment she learned me. This was her mother, one of the two whom she most loved, the two who loved her most, near the the source of love was this.
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