The Need to Breed

Too often we parents tend to hide behind our children;
I speak as a parenting one, from a time considered golden.
I was raised by a pampered princess who taught to me
How the life of a mother of a patriarch was meant to be.

My mother fell from the princess' bed, after her motherhood;
She punished her children whenever she felt less than good.
The cure was to have another child that sent her to her bed;
Many other mothers and fathers would stand in her stead.

The problem was that without a baby to her own breast,
Other people in her community held her to their other tests.
She refused to see her value, but as a superior breeder;
This was the role by which she'd allow others to need her.

My older sister then married a poor prince, which was a mistake;
She had no family strengths in her family, to hold a higher stake.
She had no choice but to defer to the mother of her husband,
The only one on whom she and her children could depend.

This is not in an age before the New World's civilization;
But was before humans had easy ways to prevent procreation.
Every woman has, at times, been honored only as a family's womb
After they finished with it; they didn't fear her physical tomb.

Spouses were not asked to break away from fathers and mothers;
Those they took to their beds were considered as \"the others.\"
It is time that people stand up as, in their own families, entities.
The way that humans will break, from being only breeders, free.

I fared better than my sister, as my prince was financially supported;
This is a lens by which both our families were distorted.
I also was not dissuaded by our religion's worship of poverty;
I was, by virtue of my own motherhood, from this value, free.

But I paid a dear price when my husband's mother died
I didn't know, it was on her financial strength we thrived.
Neither of us had become complete adults, standing on our own.
Would I have lived my life differently, if I had only known?