A Father to my Mother (poem)

Little in 2013. "A Father to my Mother", like all the poems appearing in Hell in a Basket, was first written in the book shown in the picture.

A Father to my Mother is a poem written by Matthew Little. The poem is a confessional telling of Little's life growing up in a dysfunctional home, and then gets into his bouts with dealing with an alcoholic mother, and some of the traumatic emotional abuse he was given. It is the central poem in Little's debut collection of published poetry Hell in a Basket.

Background

Little wrote the poem on June 7, 2013, during a period where things were getting strenuous in his life. After a crucial move he and his family had to make and leave the house where he grew up, his mother took it extremely badly and began drinking heavily, causing him much emotional stress and anxiety. Also before this, she had other addictions to various substances throughout his childhood and teen years. He said about the poem:

"Nothing in the poem is exaggerated. I wrote it probably about a few weeks after I discovered she was at it again with the vodka, because she had gone to detox for it a few times. There was one night, basically the night I put two and two together, I went up to her room and she had her music blasting, and it was the same country music she would always play when she was drunk, and she asked me to dance, and I could just smell it, and I knew. I'm not stupid. But she told me, 'No, I've been good' and then another night I find a cup full of diet coke and vodka, so I ended up drinking it on her and I got wicked mad and teased her about how disappointed I was and whatever. So then, I sat down and wrote [A Father to my Mother], and in about three hours it was finished."

The poem is one of Little's first where he's totally confessional, and he considers it a milestone in his writing development. When he told his mother, who was getting better with her addiction, about the poem she initially didn't want to read it, but finally she allowed for him to read it to her, and she cried, because "it was all true".

Style

Like a majority of Little's earlier poetry, A Father to my Mother follows no specific rhyme scheme, and follows no exact number of lines in each stanza. The first stanza has no rhyme but the second stanza follows an "uzz" rhyme with words like "buzz" and "was" but then switches to words like "cup", "Bud", and "up".

Synopsis

The poem starts off by mentioning when Little was born he was yellow, and that he and his mother were both sick "for a year", the yellow indicating he suffered from jaundice. It discusses how his parents would throw "tattoo parties" and that everyone around him would drink and all he could hear were the sounds of tattoo needles, and it mentions they would give him, as a young child, "Bud in [his] sippy cup" so he could sleep, meaning he was given alcohol so he wouldn't bother the party. It goes on to say when his parents separated his mother chose a guy over him because of his drugs and he felt like nothing, and that because of the drugs he was the brunt of physical abuse (which he says only happened once, but it stayed with him through his life). The poem fast-forwards to the present day, where now Little smokes "packs away" worrying about his mother who is self-destructing before him. He goes on to say that he feels like a father to his own mother, and that he's a "warrior of worry", and ends the poem with "I hope you see what you've done to me".

Reception

Because of its subject matter, Little never shared the poem on his personal Facebook account for fear that people who knew his mother in real life would see it and judge her, so instead he posted it on his personal Tumblr blog, where some of his followers greeted it positively, and commented that it was inspirational and brave of him to write about something so personal. He submitted it to "leaveyouapen", which is a poetry blog where poets can submit their work, and there it received a wider range of views; it gained 65 notes, which was significantly larger than the amount when he posted it on his personal page.

However, when he posted it to the poetry forum "DeepUndergroundPoetry", it was met with a more mixed response. People commented the most positively about its confessional style, but the stanza where the words "drug", "rug", and "bug" were used as a part of the rhyme was criticized as being "crude" by one member.  The same person however complimented that it "...reads like some of Anne Sexton's earlier confessional poems."

See also

• Daddy by Sylvia Plath

External links

Text

• "A Father to My Mother" on Tumblr.
• "A Father to My Mother" at For Love or Nothing.
• "A Father to My Mother" at Deep Underground