The Planned Child || Sharon Olds

The Planned Child
by Sharon Olds


I hated the fact that they had planned me, she had taken
a cardboard out of his shirt from the laundry
as if sliding the backbone up out of his body,
and made a chart of the month and put
her temperature on it, rising and falling,
to know the day to make me - I would have
liked to have been conceived in heat,
in haste, by mistake, in love, in sex,
not on cardboard, the little x on the
rising line that did not fall again.

But when a friend was pouring wine
and said that I seem to have been a child who had been wanted,
I took the wine against my lips
as if my mouth were moving along
that valved wall in my mother's body, she was
bearing down, and then breathing from the mask, and then
bearing down, pressing me out into
the world that was not enough for her without me in it,
not the moon, the sun, Orion
cartwheeling across the dark, not
the earth, the sea - none of it
was enough, for her, without me

--

I just love the reflection in this poem, and how the speaker suddenly manages to empathize with his/her mother to come up with the ending:

pressing me out into the world that was not enough for her without me in it,
not the moon, the sun, Orion
cartwheeling across the dark, not
the earth, the sea - none of it
was enough, for her, without me

As if the mother is ready to let go of the world just to let her child be. As if the world is nothing without a child. A planned child means to have a prescribed function, and in this sense - to add life to her mother. I do enjoy the quarelling inside the poem between being a planned or an accidental child. The former was already discussed, and the latter was brief in the poem. However, you come to realize that being an unplanned child could mean a lot to the father and mother. One could have been brought up by intense love between husband and wife and the result: a child, is a concrete symbol of that love; an extension.

The poem just speaks a lot of thought, a lot of emotion.