"The Raincoat": A Poem for Parents

Regular readers of Mind Travel may have noticed that I gravitate toward older poetry--the work of John Donne, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, and others--but this week I'm focusing on a wonderful poem by a contemporary poet, Ada Limón, the current poet laureate of the United States.  As a parent, I find this poem deeply moving, and I suspect other parents will agree, but I think there's something here for everyone.

Great literature often helps us see the world or ourselves in new ways, opening our eyes to truths that otherwise might have remained hidden to us for our entire lives.  Sometimes—as in the case of, say, Herman Melville’s marvelous poem “The Apparition”—the revelation may be philosophical, offering a glimpse of some truth underlying the nature of reality.  Other times, it may be deeply personal, resonating with us because the poet has shared an experience that we ourselves have had, even if we have never named or even consciously recognized it.

 In “The Raincoat,” Ada Limón gives us a marvelous example of the second kind of poem.  While personal, the experience she describes is also universal because every human being has had a mother and a father, and many of us have been one or the other.  The complex relationship between parent and child is one that we all know, even if we have experienced it from different perspectives.

The poem begins in a casual way with a recollection from the speaker’s childhood:

When the doctor suggested surgery and a brace for all my youngest years, my parents scrambled to take me to massage therapy, deep tissue work, osteopathy, and soon my crooked spine unspooled a bit, I could breathe again, and move more in a body unclouded by pain.

Aside from a few poetic touches, such as a reference to “a body unclouded by pain,” the language here is informal and accessible.  We can imagine hearing it in a lunch conversation with a friend.  With these words, Limón has established the tone of her poem while also setting up her message by succinctly summarizing a situation that called for a special form of parenting.

She goes on to paint a scene from this time in her childhood:

My mom would tell me to sing songs to her the whole forty-five-minute drive to Middle Two Rock Road and forty-five minutes back from physical therapy. She’d say that even my voice sounded unfettered by my spine afterward. So I sang and sang, because I thought she liked it. 

The last sentence of this middle part of the poem drops a hint: “So I sang and sang, / because I thought she liked it.”  We adults, who all were children once, are likely to pick up on the childhood innocence the poem captures with these lines.  Children typically are self-absorbed, and their sensitivities are limited.  If Mom asks them to sing, then she must like to hear it.  Why else would she ask?  A child probably would not ask for something she didn’t want, so why would an adult?

The next few lines hint at a deeper understanding, one that the speaker, now grown up, has come to have—and one that most of us readers, especially us parents, also have: 

I never asked her what she gave up to drive me, or how her day was before this chore. 

The speaker then relates a recent experience, an observation tied to her memories because it came while she was driving herself.

Today, at her age, I was driving myself home from yet another spine appointment, singing along to some maudlin but solid song on the radio, and I saw a mom take her raincoat off and give it to her young daughter when a storm took over the afternoon. 

Now we are back in the present, and the speaker is the age of her mother, closer to the perspective of an adult, and she sees something vaguely familiar: the sight of a mother caring for her daughter.  The sight inspires an epiphany, which she articulates in the poem's final lines:

My god, I thought, my whole life I’ve been under her raincoat thinking it was somehow a marvel that I never got wet.

The great Irish poet William Butler Yeats wrote that “a poem comes right with a click like a closing box.”  Unlike Yeats in, say, his poem “Leda and the Swan,” Limón is not writing in rhyme, which can create a kind of satisfaction akin to the click of a closing box, but her skillful arrangement of details makes this poem come right in its sense.  Her speaker’s succinct summary of her childhood health condition leads naturally to a casual description of her mother’s care for her throughout her treatment. We then catch a glimpse of the mother’s sacrifice.  With all of this background in place, Limón then brings us into the present day, in which she, now her mother’s age, sees another mother making a sacrifice for her own child, and this scene sparks a powerful recognition of her mother’s sacrifice—set up with the interjection “My god”—a recognition that replaces a childhood naivete that seems to have lasted into adulthood.

As a parent myself, I cannot help but think of this poem as a tribute to all the mothers and fathers who sacrificed for their children.  Indeed, I once tried to read it aloud to my wife (and fellow parent of our two children), and could not finish without getting choked up.  The feelings that many of us parents have for our children—the unparalleled devotion, the willingness to sacrifice, the aching love that penetrates the depths of our beings—is like nothing else in the world. It’s something that our children typically never realize until they become parents themselves.  Seeing parenthood captured so eloquently in the space of a short poem was a moving experience for me.

Parents, read this poem from beginning to end and know that you are seen and appreciated.  

Then ask your children to read it, too.