TRANSCRIPT

I’m Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about tenderness. How the smallest gestures can make us feel so much. Someone you love kissing your forehead, reaching for your hand, or rubbing the small of your back in a calming, reassuring way. A neighbor waving and saying good morning. A stranger simply making eye contact and smiling when you’re in line at the grocery store, or finding your seat on an airplane. These small intimacies don’t feel small at all—they feel enormous. 

I read something recently that said when you hug your children, never be the one to pull away first. Let them decide when the hug is over. In other words, hold them as long as they’ll let you. I’ve been mindful about that and have been practicing it, and I was surprised to find that my kids hold on for longer than I’d expected. It’s a beautiful thing to just stand in the kitchen and hold someone for as long as they’ll let you. 

In fact, hugs aren’t just good for our relationships with others, helping us bond and connect they’re good for us as individuals! Research suggests that a good, long hug—a hug that’s over 20 seconds—increases oxytocin, commonly called the “love hormone.” A long hug also decreases our stress hormones. So maybe we should be holding on longer to the adults in our lives, too! Lovers, friends, parents, siblings. Why not hold on to the people you love for as long as they’ll let you? 

The world feels like a hard place right now—a not very soft and tender place. In times that feel difficult, it’s tempting to retreat, to harden ourselves, to “numb out.” But I think, more and more, that tenderness is what we need—toward one another, and toward ourselves. We need touch. We need connection. We need soft places to land. We need to hold on to one another.

Today’s poem speaks to the ways we can care for one another, and of how profound and meaningful even the smallest gestures are. This poem reminds me that we can save, and be saved, by tenderness.

Lotioning My Mother’s Back
by Ama Codjoe

Because she lives alone and my hands reach
where hers can’t, she asks of me this favor.

It is narrow and soft, my mother’s back.
When I massage in small circles, my mother

circles her own mother, who is made
of whatever makes a shadow thin

and ungraspable. She wants to touch her.
The bones under my mother’s skin—ribcage,

scapula, spine—feel like sharp winter rain.
Between the clouds, I see a patch of sky, glimpse

my aging body: moles like a flicker
of paint, undersides of half-covered breasts,

patches of eczema my fingers soothe
with heavy cream. Is this what laying on of hands

means? Once my mother touched a garment
and said, full of an awe full of sadness,

She touched this, her skin was inside of this.
My mother’s back shines

like the hands I wipe on the towel’s face.
Weren’t miracles always beginning this way?

"Lotioning My Mother's Back" by Ama Codjoe from BLUEST NUDE © 2022 Ama Codjoe. Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Milkweed Editions.