Wishes for My Sons

Wishes For Sons
By Lucille Clifton

i wish them cramps.
i wish them a strange town
and the last tampon
I wish them no 7-11.

I wish them one week early
and wearing a white skirt.
I wish them one week late.

later i wish them hot flashes
and clots like you
wouldn't believe. let the
flashes come when they
meet someone special.
let the clots come
when they want to.

let them think they have accepted
arrogance in the universe,
then bring them to gynecologists
not unlike themselves.


Oh, to my sons. May you some day have the cramps I had when I birthed you and had to listen some son of a bitch tell me that having a child was like an exaggerated sexual organisms and that I would not remember the pain. Then during these huge wells of pain having to contend to the whimpering mass of psychic pain that was your father because I was not paying attention to him. One time, I reacted in anger and said one sentence to him and he never forgave me.

I moved to a strange town so your father could return to his job after he got out of the military. No thought was made to me and how lonely I was for my family and friends. It was expected that I would adjust. After all, my mother did it when she came to San Diego from Manchuria and no one gave her a thought on how she would miss her family who she never saw again.

May you two have the thrill of discovering that you are down to the last tampon in a full period and everywhere you look there is no store opened late for you to get more. You roll toilet paper and hope it does not leak through your pants and ruin your clothes. Then in desperation you go to your husband and ask him to go in the car and search for tampons from any open store and he is too embarrassed to do it. You get into the car without a license and do it yourself and hope you don't get caught or lost.

I wish they would experience being in junior high or high school and discovering that you are one week early or one week late and you are wearing a white skirt and the tell tale spot is there for the boys to make fun of you and they do. Your skirt is ruined. If you are late, you are worried that you might have started life and your life will be ruined because the father would not stop when you said no. Not rape because he was your boyfriend and you were making out in the back seat but still you would be the one to pay the price. The slow feeling of dread, the knowledge that all of life for you would be over.

Later, when all of the pain of raising you, going through the anger of you trying to be men by rebelling against one's mother and being like your father who is gone more times than he is there, I wish you those hot flashes that come unbidden when you are sitting at your desk trying to make a living and sweat starts to pour off of you. I hope you, my sons, go to the bathroom and experience the huge blood clots that fall on the floor and you have to scoop them up and flush them down. Even pads cannot absorb them now.

Or when you are at a special function and you meet someone you have been wanting to meet for so long and you start to sweat as if you have the plague. The other person looks like he can't wait to run out the door. Oh, yes I want you to experience that.

Then, my sons with all of your arrogance has to offer, I want you to be in a situation in which you are young, in a full pregnancy and needing help with the coming arrival of someone such as you and you are escorted into the presence of someone just like you who has no real idea what it is like to birth someone like himself.

You might think your mother is cruel, but I really wish all of the above would happen to you so you would know what it is like to have spent so many years being your mother and now that I am in my senior years to be treated as you two have been treating me. Yes, it would make me feel so much better.