Poetry Sunday: What I Learned From My Mother by Julia Kasdorf

First of all, it must be admitted that not everyone has the blessing of an admirable mother. In fact, there are and have been some pretty awful mothers in the world and to the children of those mothers, all I can say is I'm sorry. 

I did have an admirable mother and I learned many things from her, mostly from her actions rather than her words. 

I think perhaps the most important thing I learned from her was empathy, caring for others. She spent her life caring for others. She had had a lot of tragedy in her life. The first one was losing her mother when she was only ten years old. She was a devoutly religious woman and I can still remember as a child hearing her pray that God would allow her to live until she could see me grown up. Of course, I did not then understand the source of the grief that led her to make such a prayer. 

Because she had suffered loss, she understood the loss suffered by others and she always made a special effort to be there for them, to offer what comfort she could. And that's what I remembered when I read this poem.

What I Learned From My Mother

by Julia Kasdorf


I learned from my mother how to love
the living, to have plenty of vases on hand

in case you have to rush to the hospital

with peonies cut from the lawn, black ants

still stuck to the buds. I learned to save jars

large enough to hold fruit salad for a whole

grieving household, to cube home-canned pears

and peaches, to slice through maroon grape skins

and flick out the sexual seeds with a knife point.

I learned to attend viewings even if I didn’t know

the deceased, to press the moist hands

of the living, to look in their eyes and offer

sympathy, as though I understood loss even then.

I learned that whatever we say means nothing,

what anyone will remember is that we came.

I learned to believe I had the power to ease

awful pains materially like an angel.

Like a doctor, I learned to create

from another’s suffering my own usefulness, and once

you know how to do this, you can never refuse.

To every house you enter, you must offer

healing: a chocolate cake you baked yourself,

the blessing of your voice, your chaste touch.

Reba Cromeans Aldridge, my mother, in the year that she became my mother. Now gone from this life since 2004. I miss her still.