Motherhood Quote by David Antin

“Professional widow” is a cruelly efficient phrase: it turns grief into a job description, implying not only loss but performance, routine, even a kind of careerism. Antin compresses a whole domestic regime into two words, then lets the punchline land with a deadpan swerve from mourning to vocational bafflement. The comedy isn’t decorative; it’s diagnostic. In this household, identity has hardened into roles: the widow, the dutiful son, the sensible trade. If she is “professional,” then everyone else is drafted into supporting cast.

The subtext is a contest over what counts as a life worth narrating. Engineering reads as modern, abstract, upwardly mobile; chicken farming is concrete, local, legible to an older world where survival is tactile and status is suspicious. The mother’s confusion isn’t just ignorance of a profession; it’s an inability (or refusal) to imagine selfhood outside inherited scripts. Grief, too, becomes a script: widowhood as the organizing principle that freezes the family in place.

As a poet associated with improvisatory talk pieces and an ear for American speech, Antin works like a cultural stenographer. He captures how immigrant or working-class pragmatism can collide with postwar professional aspiration, and how family comedy often masks a deeper tragedy: the person you love can’t recognize the future you’re trying to build. The line’s brilliance is its tonal doubleness. You laugh at the absurdity, then feel the chill of what it reveals: intimacy as misrecognition, and mourning as a form of control.