Transcript

I’m Ada Limón and this is The Slowdown.

One of the things about being a childfree person is that you get to spend a lot of time with friends and their children. It’s a gift to watch kids grow up and change and go from weird little humans to weird larger humans. What impresses me is always how patient and kind my friends are with their children. How they set healthy boundaries and keep good routines and always encourage them to talk about feelings. I don’t know if I would have been that kind of parent, but maybe? I hope so.

Last summer, we had friends come by with their two children and the young boy loved the blow up pool we have on our patio during the hot Kentucky summer months. He spent all day in the pool and when his parents went to run errands and drop their daughter off at a friend’s house, I sat by the pool and made up a game for him. He loves puzzles and he’s wicked smart and so we decided to have a game where he guessed all the ingredients in a variety of foods: Doritos, Capri Sun, popsicles, and so forth.

He’d float on one of the long floaties and I’d ask him what he thought the first ingredient was and he’d say, “It’s got to be high fructose corn syrup” and we’d laugh and laugh because he got so good at it that he’d say things like “Well, it’s natural coloring so I don’t know, turmeric?” And he’d be right. I loved this game because in some ways we were just goofing off and in some ways he was learning about how many ways our food has been processed and puffed up with an unholy list of unhealthy ingredients. By the time his parents came home I was by the pool laughing so hard and he said to his dad, “Dad, did you know that Doritos actually have real cheese in them!” It was a sweet moment and we felt like we’d grown wiser.

Today’s poem ponders what it is to raise a young boy in this world and how we might help them be as tender and as wise as possible.

Cut Apple
by Richelle Buccilli

Cut apple, my son says,
He doesn’t understand the work of a blade,

why the male cardinal becomes September 
in a tree, showing off his bold flame

like men on the street who whistle at me.
I always wanted a son. Now that I have,

how do I have a son and make him 
the kind of man I want for a daughter?

Is it in the field of daisies I say to smell,
but not pick? Is it in my voice

as I comfort him, never demanding to be
a big boy, but instead, yes, that hurt.

Is it the way he already knows to kiss
a baby doll made of plastic, her flimsy

eyelids and lashes shutting then opening
faster than seeing any wrong thing?

Maybe it’s in the love I want for myself.
The kind that holds promises like a child

does a pinecone. Small, and always wrapped
in a soft fist. Protecting, but never

diminishing. As if the child knows
something this primal can always be taken.

"Cut Apple" by Richelle Buccilli. Used by permission of the poet.