Motherhood
The poem focuses on the unnamed woman’s role as a mother, upending the cultural assumption that women enjoy motherhood. The first stanza introduces both the woman and her children but creates a tonal distance between them. In Line 1, the mother sits in the park, seemingly alone; Line 2 introduces her children simply as “Two children” and Line 3 reveals “[a] third” child. Harwood does not explicitly say that these are the woman's children. By forcing the reader to draw their own inference that the mother is sitting with her own children, Harwood both subtly establishes the emotional distance between the mother and the children and leads the reader down the same stereotypical thinking of the 1960s, that a woman must have children.
Furthermore, the first stanza depicts the children in a negative and demanding light—they “whine and bicker,” and “tug” on the woman’s skirt, appearing both auditorily and physically distracting to the mother as she sits calmly. The use of the word “aimless” to describe the third child’s drawing introduces a new component to the emerging theme that motherhood is hindering the woman’s independence. Just as the child draws aimlessly, the mother feels a sense of aimlessness as her identity is subsumed by her children.
Harwood further establishes the theme that society expects women to be mothers, often at the cost of their own independence, in the third stanza. Contrasting with the negative tone of the first stanza, the woman falsely tells her former lover that “It’s so sweet / to hear [the children’s chatter].” By contrast, in the first stanza the children “whine and bicker” rather than chatter; while these words all describe the children’s speech, they carry very different connotations, one irritating (whining, bickering), and one upbeat (chattering). The lover’s presence is a vehicle that shifts this tone, from frustrated and exhausted (in stanza one) to falsely cheerful (in lines 9-10 of stanza three). He symbolizes the broader social expectation that women will recast the challenges and exhaustion of motherhood as uniformly positive.
Accordingly, once the lover “depart[s]” with an unsuspecting “smile,” the tone again becomes exhausted and bitter. The woman announces to the “wind”—a listener that cannot judge her or impose social expectations on her—that her children have “eaten [her] alive.” Harwood herself has stated that this line is an allusion to Christ giving up his body and blood for mankind (Sheridan 146). Like Christ, women make the ultimate sacrifice to their children. They do this both literally (through breastfeeding, as referenced in the stanza) and more metaphorically, as mothers look after their children’s emotional and psychological needs, sometimes at the cost of their own. Collectively, these details work together in the short, fourteen-line poem to present a starkly critical view of motherhood that contrasts with the dominating cultural view of women’s universal suitability for motherhood.
Expectations and Regret
Regret and longing for the past is another theme explored in the poem. On a structural level, the poem strategically mixes the present and past tenses to emphasize the disconnect between the woman’s past life with her lover and her current life with her children. Almost all of the poem is in the present tense. For example, “[s]he sits in the park” and her clothes "are out of date.” However, the fourth line switches to the past tense—"Someone she loved once passed by"—firmly situating the lover in the past and creating a dramatic contrast between the present and the past. This introduction of the past is further established by the ambiguous line break at the conclusion of the first stanza. The stanza concludes that is “too late / to feign indifference...” By utilizing this enjambment, particularly between stanzas, Harwood places emphasis on the words “too late," suggesting that the woman is not only feigning indifference but longing for the past more broadly.
The remainder of the poem reveals that not only is there a disconnect between the present and past, but the woman wishes she could return to the past. Her conversation with the lover includes the line “[t]ime holds great surprises,” implying that the woman never expected to be a mother—it is surprising that she is now in this situation. Lending a negative tone to this revelation, the woman then imagines that her former lover is glad he is not in her position, envisioning a thought bubble above his head reading “there but for the grace of God go I.” The conversation itself conveys a sense of passing time by using phrases such as “et cetera,” and “they stand a while.” The "flickering light" also suggests this passage of time. Finally, the mother mentions “watch[ing]” passively as her children “grow and thrive” over time. Taken together, these references create a sense of quickly passing time, which serves two purposes. First, they create a temporal break between the woman’s life with her lover and her life as a mother. Second, they imply that the woman will remain trapped in her exhaustion and frustration for a long period of time. As such, the references to the passage of time in the poem point to the woman's nostalgia for the past and the surprising truth that she will now be trapped in the demanding and exhausting role of motherhood for a long period of time.
