Motherhood Quote by Paul Simon

Paul Simon hears a menu item and instantly converts it into myth. "Mother and Child Reunion" is a pun you can taste: chicken and eggs, the family unit rendered as dinner. The dark joke is obvious if you linger on it, and that’s why it sticks. Simon’s gift is noticing how everyday language smuggles in whole storylines - tenderness, violence, comfort, guilt - without announcing itself.

The line also captures the way pop songwriting often works in public: not as solemn confession, but as opportunistic scavenging. He’s downtown, in a Chinese restaurant, and a piece of kitschy translation-English becomes a title with emotional gravity. That friction matters. The phrase is slightly off, slightly too formal, like something bureaucratic trying to describe intimacy. Simon seizes that awkwardness because it sounds like fate. It’s the perfect example of how a song can borrow authority from a phrase that already feels like it has a history.

Context sharpens the intent: "Mother and Child Reunion" was one of Simon’s early solo statements, a track that pairs buoyant reggae-lite rhythms with a lyric shadowed by loss. The title’s origin story exposes the move: take something mundane, even macabre, and alchemize it into a container big enough for grief and release. It’s not that the restaurant phrase explains the song; it’s that it gives Simon plausible deniability. He can point to the menu and shrug, while the title quietly does the heavier work of haunting you.