Significant Mother (by Joy Katz)

A regular column on poetry and motherhood

Part Two: The Secret Reason Why New Parents Don't Write

Shortly after I finished a Stegner Fellowship, some years ago, a former workshop poet and I were trading news about our colleagues. One of them had just had twins. "Well," he said, "that's the end of HER life." A mean-spirited comment for sure, but I forgive him because he had no idea what he was talking about (it's not his fault; maybe no one without a baby could imagine it), and because I've become more philosophical since becoming a parent.

What he was talking about, besides writing, was: applying for grants, taking big literary administrative jobs across the country on short notice, going to residencies and conferences, et cetera. He meant that she was off the landscape, like a cactus at Los Alamos after the Trinity blast.

It's true that people raising young kids don't have a lot of time. But that's not why they don't write. The reason they don't write much, at least at first, is that they are in stupid, staggering, consuming love.

It's late, you're up holding the baby, your wrists are sore from holding the baby so his head won't fall backward and snap off, but you don't notice. You don't notice because you're studying the curve of his lips. Your free hour (there are free hours, and fifteen-minute periods) is all infused with joy, a narcotic bliss tinged with a fresh and alarming sense of danger and mortality. A good thing to write about, maybe. (Sometimes someone gives you the break you've been dying for and takes the baby for ten minutes — then you might not write because your wrists are throbbingly sore.)

Pretty soon the baby is older and crawling and you can't stop watching the way his knees propel him forward, and everything in the room takes on a different scale owing to this new proportion, and the sounds he makes are like moths batting themselves into the furniture and into the deadly hot light and you spend your time mostly keeping him alive, and in your free hour you stare out the window and think of the sounds he makes.

As for the jobs and conferences, the new parent is not a cooked cactus in the poetry landscape. She is like trinitite, the radioactive green glass the sand at Los Alamos turned into. In other words, still there, and with a long half life.

But being in love, and that disruption of one's writing life, is something any writer can empathize with, even my erstwhile poet-colleague.

Comments

[Arielle]

A lovely essay, and of course, yes, besides sleep deprivation, love is another reason new parents don't write. But I think, too, about the way interest and energy--not like tired vs. awake energy, but political/spiritual energy--is siphoned off by the kid. When I'm pregnant or newly mothering, kids and babies and birth and my family and all that kind of stuff are first and foremost on my mind. I just don't care that much about anything else. I want to read about children and women and birth, etc., and I want to think about it, and sometimes I want to do political action around it or write essays about it, but unless I want to write poems about that (which I don't always feel like doing), I just don't have so much literary interest outside of that sphere. Ya know what I mean?

[Joy Katz]

I had no literary interest in any sphere for a few months. The parent-sphere is, I agree, all-consuming, physically. I couldn't focus on a page. I worried that my writing had gone away. But it hadn't. I know writers who, after they have babies (I'm talking about both men and women), keep on with their projects, hellforward. I think that's respected. I respect it, even if I don't understand it. It was better for me to be wrecked and to come back, to let myself be affected by it. Even to risk (though I didn't think of it that way at the time) losing the writing.

[Laura Shoemaker]

Love, indeed. I'd like to add that for me the love I felt for my daughter when she was newly born was so transformational that not only did it keep me from writing for a while, when I got back to it, I was a different writer.

During pregnancy, I clearly recall thinking that becoming a mother would take adjustment, surely, but I hoped it would be minor, and I'd be "back to myself" in a few months. The fear I felt was for the unknown: by having a child I knew I would change, but how, exactly? If I would stop being the me I knew, what me would I become? Would I know her?

Now I hear my pre-baby self in the assured speculation of people who don't have kids, speaking about what they will be like when or if they become parents: "When I have a kid, I will still travel," or "Sure, I'd take my baby to poetry readings." The truth is, none of us knows what will be possible when we take that leap into parenthood.

So it’s understandable for the outsider to read the arrival of a new baby as the end of the new parent’s life. In fact, isn’t it just as reasonable for the new parent to feel this, and to be terrified by it?

For me, this is where the rage you write of came into play. Yes, exhaustion, yes extreme and unrivaled love. But also a great fear and anger about this strange, new person I was becoming, full of passion and commitment, but unable to work except in service of my baby, unable to think except about her, and most profoundly, unable to write. It was frightening to be so changed.

[Joy Katz]

I agree: frightening.

I'm always thinking of the experience of parenthood in terms of passing on some part of it to people who aren't, or aren't yet, parents. The deep, crush-like love is a point of entry for anyone: not only the feeling, but the bad writing and not-writing that happens. The rage — I don't know. I've never felt rage like the rage I felt in the first months of parenthood. I haven't yet found a way to get it into a poem. To get the essence of it, which is being robbed of yourself. The self murdered, maybe? The terror of having been so changed: I haven't written that poem yet, either. My first poems are about the trippiness of being with an infant, the weird sense of time that happens.

[Laura Shoemaker]

I’m also thinking of Plath’s poems “Child” and “Metaphor,” wherein she casts herself apologetically: “This troublous / Wringing of hands, this dark / Ceiling without a star” or tragically comic: “I'm a means, a stage, a cow in calf.” These are images of the self in response to baby, the self negated, as something smaller, less than human. One could find rage in that, but the poems don’t strike me as angry. Detachment is there, maybe rejection?

Then there’s “Morning Song,” with its title adjective a sonic sister to “mourning.” She writes: “I'm no more your mother / Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow / Effacement at the wind's hand.” Is this lament, or rejection? Rejection tinged with lament? It feels like she stops short of rage by rejecting her role as mother. The poem manages to end in celebration: “And now you try / Your handful of notes; / The clear vowels rise like balloons.”

I think the self robbed is an apt idea. What would push one toward rage is perhaps not knowing whether the self will be returned. One thing I have been wondering is how particular this dilemma is to artists.