Becoming our own Parents - a response to Red Clay Suite

I’m so angry with you and I haven’t yet learned
how much weaker than a girl a woman can be.
How silly I am to assume you are stronger than he. (47)

Recently, in a conversation with my therapist, I was discussing my thoughts, feelings, disappointments, and worries about my parents. Things I hadn’t thought about in maybe a decade came floating out of my mouth as if it was only last week they happened. In our session my therapist looked at me, sighed a big sigh with me, and then said something along the lines of “Maybe it’s time to take all your expectations of your parents, put them into a little box inside you, mourn the loss of what you wished they could’ve been, and then become what they couldn’t, care for yourself they way you wanted them to care for you — fill that wound with your love.” In essence she was telling me to become my own parent. This concept of transforming the ways in which our parents continue to cause us pain makes me think of the (heartbreaking) poem “The Little Boy Who Will Be My Father” (51-52). Jeffers writes,

Bread, jelly, lots of milk is what I wanted,
not to see my father naked in the light.
I’m closing my eyes to that memory.

I can still see him
I can still see him

Now.
I’ll open my eyes and see the little boy instead —
face like my own,

In a way Jeffers recreates this father in the image of the speaker with the line “face like my own.” The image of this little boy with a similar face and a smile is an image that the speaker can love, one that can be looked at and take the place of “him” — the father she “can still see” naked in the kitchen. Further in the poem the lines “I like to think of my father this way / before he is changed into what I should not say.” Often times we think of rhyme as having a childlike innocent tone associated with it and I think in this case there is a sense of reclaiming of innocence and a reclaiming of childhood.

The realization that your parents are human, that they are flawed in ways you may or may not be aware of is one of the recurring sentiments that pops up for me throughout Red Clay Suite. In the stanza I quoted at the beginning of this post, from “Lexicon,” brought those sentiments into focus. “I haven’t yet learned / how much weaker than a girl a woman can be.” That line cuts deep, we want so badly for the women we emulate to be strong, to be super and as a child we haven’t all learned what can break someone, or rather that there is strength in leaving.

The familial is imbedded in the text in the same way that it is integrated inside the land. A line I find beautiful and intriguing is “And first thinking of my prairie father, / poet, and then of my red clay mother, / muse,” the familial is bound to earth, to art, to the speaker.

xoxo,
Rai