A Shield and a Weapon

You use your son
As a shield and a weapon
To get what you want
And get out of what you don’t want
Eschewing responsibility
Leveraging the patriarchy
To assemble a protective layer around you
Hiding your violence
Under the guise of motherhood
When you abandoned your own mother
To create your hi-tech child
Whose test tube incarnation
May have led to the autism
That you now beat your chest about
So that everyone sees you as a victim
And a hero
You cry out
The song of martyr
But it just might be poetic justice
That you’ll now be a caregiver
For the rest of your living days

©2019 by Loolwa Khazzoom. All rights reserved. No portion of this article may be copied without author’s permission.