The Raincoat
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. 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, even my voice sounded unfettered
by my spine afterward. So I sang and sang,
because I thought she liked it. I never
asked her what she gave up to drive me,
or how her day was before this chore. 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. My god,
I thought, my whole life I’ve been under her
raincoat thinking it was somehow a marvel
that I never got wet.
Notes
Where Rita Dove demystified the heart into an unglamorous muscle pumping in the dark, Ada Limón traces that same visceral machinery outward to a mother's spine, remembering endless childhood doctor visits for scoliosis, and the quiet realization of an umbrella held overhead while the parent absorbed the entire downpour. The speaking subject experiences a retroactive rupture in the maternal signifier, recognizing that genuine care operates not through dramatic sacrifice, but through an invisible, one-sided shielding whose real cost can only be comprehended once the child stands fully grown in the storm. It anchors September’s theme of Echo in the bittersweet debt of memory, reminding us that love is an asymmetric shelter whose true weight only reverberates back to us across decades, returned changed into our own capacity to protect. #September #AdaLimón #Love #Mother #Poetry