For Mom | Framed Poem 16 x 24

The Mother I Would Have Prayed For features my original poem, I Prayed for a Mom.

It's simultaneously a recognition of mothers.

It's for the women who encompass the kind of love this child was imagining. The mother who comforts her child when they're sick. Who encourages them when they fail. Who takes them for ice cream or shopping. Who makes memories that may seem insignificant at the time. Who isn't perfect and doesn't need to be. Who is simply there—and is genuinely delighted that her child exists.

A mother may see those things as ordinary.

A child can experience them as everything.

This framed poem holds all of those versions of me at once: the motherless child, the little girl who experienced pieces of motherly love through other women, and the woman old enough to understand the difference between having a mother and actually being mothered.

And it honors the women whose children will never have to wonder what that difference feels like.

If the child I was could have prayed for a mother before I ever entered this life, this is the mother she would have asked God for.

This poem isn't abstract imagination. I knew what the word mother was supposed to mean while experiencing the absence and rejection of that relationship. It holds the grief of having something that technically existed, but functionally wasn't mine in the way I needed it to be.

But the child in this poem didn't invent every detail of motherhood she imagined.

Some of my understanding of what being mothered could feel like came from the years I spent with my auntie before I was taken from her at seven. We went shopping. We ate giant pretzels. We had ice cream. I was cared for when I was sick. I knew pieces of that tenderness before I knew what it was like to lose it.

So when I wrote about weekends spent shopping, eating ice cream on hot days, holding a mother, making things for her, or simply spending an afternoon together, I was writing from both memory and absence.

The motherless child in me imagined what she should have been able to ask for. The child who had been mothered by others supplied some of the memories that taught her what that love could actually look like.

The adult writing it understands something the child couldn't: the window for receiving those experiences as a child has closed. I cannot go backward and have the childhood I didn't have. But through this poem, I can give the child I was a voice and allow her to articulate what should have been ordinary.

That's why I wrote:

“She may not cook or maybe she does
Whatever she does, she's herself
And the best part about her is she's my mom”

I wasn't imagining a flawless mother. The child's request is almost painfully reasonable: be human. Be yourself. Love me. Be glad I was born. And be there.

For all good moms from the sons and daughters who love them.

16 x 24 Black Frame

-Mother’s Day Gift
-Re-Uniting Gift
-Sentimental Gift
-Just Because
-Birthday Day Gift

Written and copyrighted by RuLetta Street