Unmother

How we lace away The hours interminable, Intricate and Pale, we nuns And all such unmothers of men;

There is experimentation with sexuality, monogamy and nonmonogamy, mothers and "unmothers," parenting by groups of bilogical and/or fictive kins, living in separate households and coparenting, etc.

So there are mothers and unmothers, and while neither choice is the easy one to make, motherhood is at least the comfortable one.

One day modi mother and unmothered. True twinnes in birth and death ; together drown in this sad stream.

My father is departed, I with thee am fallen — thyself art dead and gone : but our foes laugh ; and our unmothered mother is frantic with delight; on whom thou oftentimes wouldst send me word in secret that thou wert on the point thyself to come an avenger.

I e'en quake to proceed, my spirit turns edge, I fear me she's unmother'd; yet I'll venture.

The dead daughter presents the already complex mother/daughter relation and unveils in it the (abject?) desire to unmother: in Beloved, the killing of the daughter is done to free her from a future of slavery, and in this it discloses another story,

Whatever keeps me from my beginnings, whatever chops me off and isolates me from my whole life is to the harm of my spirit; it unmothers me; it dispossesses me of my heritage and of my truth, and how can I pass on what is mine if I have not received what was others' and passed on to me? he thought.

In his poems, Jarrell can finesse the emotional trauma of having been unmothered by a mother who betrayed him both with a divorce and with a displacing younger brother, by now being the mother in the domain of his poetry, wholly on his own terms.