In “How Lies Grow,” Maxine Chernoff addresses one of the great conflicts of motherhood with wit and economy. I was a long, long way from being a mother the first time I read this poem, but it’s never left me. Conversely, since becoming a mother, I’ve read dozens of poems about motherhood that I couldn’t connect to at all. Something authentic shines through a poem that insists upon being a poem. I’ve learned from my own unwillingly fallow times that ideas hammered into replicas of poems have only the thinnest veneer. And I’ve learned as a reader that even when I don’t particularly care about the subject, if the poem generates the kind of heat that only a genuine impulse creates, I can still care about the poem.

Maxine Chernoff
How Lies Grow

The first time I lied to my baby, I told him it was his face on the baby food jar. The second time I lied to my baby, I told him that he was the best baby in the world, that I hoped he’d never leave me. Of course I want him to leave me someday. I don’t want him to become one of those fat shadows who live in their mother’s houses watching game shows all day. The third time I lied to my baby, I said, “Isn’t she nice?” of the old woman who’d caressed him in his carriage. She was old and ugly and had a disease. The fourth time I lied to my baby, I told him the truth, I thought. I told him how he’d have to leave me someday or risk becoming a man in a bow-tie who eats macaroni on Fridays. I told him it was for the best, but then I thought, I want him to live with me forever. Someday he’ll leave me. Then what will I do?