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One emotion present in "The Mother" which was not mentioned in class is RELIEF: "I will never be a bad mother, I will never hurt my aborted children. This poem begins with relief and ends with love (saying "I loved you all" does not constitute an apology). There's a good deal of other emotions in the middle, but to focus on them is to miss the overall ambiguity. To interpret the end as an apology is to put words in the poet's mouth which she never said. To focus on the negative emotions is to make assumptions about what a person ought to feel when remembering her abortions. I am NOT saying that grief, guilt, regret etc. have no place in such a reaction. I AM saying that those are not the only possible emotions, those are not the only emotions present in the poem, and to ignore the positive emotions is to risk seriously misinterpreting the poem. This isn't even a grieving poem, though there is grief in it. She has already mourned, it's all in her past ("I loved you all"), but "abortions don't let you forget," and so she's remembering her emotions. I think the saddest thing about "The Mother" has nothing to do with emotion; it has to do with the way memories stay with you, an unnecessary piece of furniture that you keep banging your shins on.

I really didn't like politicizing this poem/watching the poem get politicized*. A couple vague(?) references ("this crime wasn't mine") to the outside world does not make it political, does not mean it has made a political decision.

Also, when I said that in law there is always a decision already made and thus much less room for ambiguity (even as the decision is contested, it is already made), my point was that literature and politics are different methodologies, and that the political methodology leaves much less room for ambiguity than literature does, and that law leaves practically none at all.

*Perhaps this is because I am currently disengaged from all three political ... units I may be considered part of - the United States, Israel, and the SGA of Bryn Mawr College - and that I am content that way, aside from niggles of guilt. Perhaps. But I think it's because that to try to make "The Mother" make a political decision is to misinterpret its (her?) goal.

To get more general, and to go out on a limb: making decisions is a process with multiple steps. First, explore the ambiguities, the impossibility of making a decision, via literature, academic writing, etc. All those wonderful spaces denigrated as bubbles (as if a bubble were a bad thing! Or an ivory tower! The view is amazing!). Then, join in the clamor of politics. Pretend you have made you decision (or perhaps you actuallyl have, if you skipped the first step). And then a decision will ... occur in the midst of the clamor. The clamor won't stop, of course. Go back into your bubble, or up your tower, get away from the clamor (what a RELIEF!), and be indecisive some more.

This is a method which is agreeable to my personality and my approach to difficult questions (the knee-jerk reaction is just the barest beginning). Also, I don't get intellectually turned-on until there's a critical mass of complexity and ambiguity. But then, I'm a Libra.