TRANSCRIPT

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

As not only a single parent but a solo parent, I think a lot about what I can offer my kids, and also how I might be coming up short.

I’m sure I’m not raising my daughter perfectly, but I was a teenage girl once, and I was raised with my sisters. But what about my son? How do I teach a boy how to be a man?

I realize that most of what my children need from me has nothing to do with gender. They need to feel loved, accepted, and supported. They need to feel safe, secure, protected, and nourished. And I think — I hope! — they do.

But I didn’t think I would have to teach my son how to shave his face, or how to tie a necktie. Then again, maybe being raised in a house with a mother and an older sister will serve my son in more ways than it will limit him. For a thirteen-year-old boy, he’s pretty emotionally intelligent and a good communicator. So there’s that!

When I think back to my own upbringing and what I learned from my mother and father, almost none of it has to do with growing up as a girl. I got my work ethic, sense of humor, and sense of fairness from both of them. I remind myself of all of that whenever I wonder if my son is getting what he needs from me. And I remind myself that he has a village around him.

Today’s poem grapples with parenting, and gender, and what we inherit — positive and negative — from the people who raised us.

This is a poem by Isaac Pickell.

When you have to remind me to do the dishes
by Isaac Pickell

I try to find a way to tell you I wanted to grow up
to be just like my mother, but you are 

too tired of living through all the lessons
I learned from my father to give that thought

much purchase: I learned to be a man from a man
frozen in gender and every year

my body forgets another way to be soft,
refusing to cave to the politics

of how it once moved. I grow
rigid, stuck in my ways, and more 

like him every day. Some people say
he’s a great guy  and they mean for his time.

I am tired of time moving over me:
I want to wield the past like an old god

and strike out at a future still full of the ringing
echoes of the long dead men this static country

tells us are natural.  I don’t want to become
another long dead, static man. I wanted to grow

up to be like my mother, but you
just had to refold our kid’s laundry

so he didn’t go to school all a-wrinkle.
The country’s distortion makes this sound

like a funny anecdote, the sound of history
moving through us. I hope he doesn’t hear it.

“When you have to remind me to do the dishes” by Isaac Pickell from THE SMALLEST MISTAKE WE CALL HUMAN © 2026 Isaac Pickell. Used by permission of Black Lawrence Press.