Motherhood Quote by John C. Hawkes

The sentence lands like a recovered shard of childhood: tactile, practical, and quietly strange. Hawkes doesn’t give us the sting, the insect, the wound, or the setting; he gives us the mother’s action and the speaker’s astonished “somehow.” That adverb is the tell. It turns a minor home remedy into a small miracle, the kind a child registers not as folk science but as maternal competence bordering on sorcery.

“Mud” is doing double duty. It’s the earth’s most ordinary substance, the opposite of medicine, yet it becomes care. Hawkes exploits that tension: comfort arrives not from a clean, named product but from whatever can be found, pressed into service. The mother “finding” mud suggests resourcefulness in a world where help isn’t guaranteed. It also hints at class and place without announcing them; this is a life close enough to the ground that mud is available, usable, and not embarrassing.

The syntax is spare and unadorned, but the subtext is loaded. The memory is less about pain than about trust: when you’re stung, someone larger and calmer knows what to do. At the same time, the vagueness (“the sting,” not “my sting”) creates distance, as if the adult narrator can’t fully re-enter the scene, only circle the gesture. That’s Hawkes’ specialty as a novelist: letting a single domestic act carry the weight of intimacy, improvisation, and the uneasy mystery of how we were first soothed.