Fractured Relationships

Relationships are a central theme in Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth, and nearly all of those depicted are fraught with difficulties, if not completely broken. These failed relationships show the complexity of human connections, as well as how fragile they can be. Poems like "Fire" and "The Kitchen" show the damage caused by infidelity. Where the slighted woman in "The Kitchen" holds her pain inside, trusting that her husband will never meet another woman who can cook as well as she can, the woman in "Fire" is destroyed by her husband's infidelity, and so burns the both of them alive. These poems cover the spectrum of responses to infidelity, and so the poems in Teaching My Mother How To Give Birth explore a myriad of relationship issues, and women's reactions to them.

There are a number of poems where the man is gone...