Something Else to Do

A few months ago I tried to quit the blog. I emailed the po foundation honchos and my fellow bloggers to say I didn’t think I had it in me to blog more regularly, and I was tired of feeling so guilty about my erratic postings. Well, actually, this is what I said:
i feel really rotten that i'm the lamest blogger on the blog. i
cannot put my baby down without him screaming and i've been
cavilierly using my "free time" to: eat, sleep, pick up older
children from school, buy 15 brands of pacifier (none of which judah
will take) and try to get judah a passport. every single day i think
of a blog entry but i literally can't write it down or type it.
(this is a rare moment when he's sleeping in the sling and i have my
hands free)/
i meant to write this entry:
dear jeffrey, you were wondering how i can be a poet and a mom of
three kids? i can't.
but i couldn't even manage that much for the past 3 weeks.
i don't want to quit but i do want to stop feeling like a flake. but
i am a flake.
crap.

Kwame wrote back right away, urging me to stay. He wrote:
...Anyway, if you quit, then all my woman friends who like to say, "You
know Kwame you write s much cause you are a man and you didn;t have to
have those children, and yur wife is why you can write so much, or
her..." will have so much more to say. Pleas,e pleasse Rachel, stick it
out for me. For my guilt-ridden gonad carrying man-self who really
studied the ins and outs of pacifiers, removed diapers constantly.
mopped up vomit, bottle fed, soothed, played with, and on one rather
desperate night breast fed his children...
You are doing fine. seriously.”
His email felt like a friendly pat on the shoulder or perhaps a gentle kick in the ass. It also inspired me with several blog ideas on the topic of wanting to blog in order to prove that a woman with a newborn could post often and also thinking that probably party of the reason Kwame can write so much IS his wife. Then Jeffrey emailed:
Hey Rachel,
I am with Kwame completely. You just gave birth to a baby. The last thing in the world you are is lame. You have got real life going on in the biggest possible way. I can not even begin to imagine how tired and exhilirated you must be. It will settle down. First things first. Best wishes, Jeffrey
ps I can totally relate to your decription of the overwhelmedness.
So, I resolved to blog more and feel guilty less. I resolved to post about trying to quit, about Kwame and Jeffrey’s responses, about “what I’ve learned from Kenneth Goldstein,” about trying to steal some of Patricia’s energy, about the Poetry Foundation, about Mark Doty and descriptive poetry, about a new trend in poetry I’ve noticed: the use of novelistic syntax in poetry (still working on what to call it, see the past few issues of Columbia Poetry Review for examples), about new “experiential” poetry exercises I thought up based on starting to exercise again (“poetry for athletes/ ‘exercises’ for poets”), about my response to Kwame “coming out” as a Christian on the blog, about not having a teaching job, about motherhood/poetry, about Canada, about my mother, about my husband’s idea to make a site for poets trying to publish books based on the Sellaband model, about my idea to start a poetry colony in Maine, about my “plan” to take the kids out of school in fall ’08 and spend the year traveling around the world, about my friendship/readership with two important and very different poets: Arielle Greenberg and D.A. Powell, about how I think I might voluntarily cut off my right arm to have written The Yiddish Policeman’s Union and Gilead and why, about my newest collection that I wish I was working on, about Matthew Zapruder, about the difference between writing poetry and writing novels, about food, about cooking and poetry, about nursing and poetry, about the email tirades I got from editors when I asked for permissions, about Wesleyan University Press and the financials of publishing my books with them, about the craft/fine arts divide and where poetry fits in, about music (why I love/hate it) and its relationship to poetry, about the books of poems I am really, definitely, absolutely going to read…
I had so many post ideas and half written posts and I kept thinking, “next week, next week,” but the weeks go by and between baby minding and boy minding and sleeping, eating, other people always being on the computer, spending my computer time searching Berkeley Parents site to see if I should worry that my baby goes 5 days+ without pooping… you get the picture: there wasn’t a lot of time left to blog. I was barely able to keep up with reading the blogs even when that only required one hand and a half-calm baby.
The past few months have been wonderful. I’m enjoying baby Judah in a deeply satisfying way. I am experienced enough as a parent to have very little anxiety and I know how quickly these stages pass. I know, for so many reasons, including my miscarriage a year and a half ago and my two big, fast-growing boys, how precious this baby is. Even when I wake up in the middle of the night to his hungry demands (still every 2-3 hours all night long), I feel grateful to be doing what I’m doing. To be holding and feeding this new person, to calm and satisfy him. And my older boys are thriving and we are coming together as a family of five! in good, healthy ways.
Of course there are hard moments. Moments when I glimpse the kind of post-partum darkness I felt after my second son was born—I was overwhelmed and terrified, sure that my writing life, my non-mother life, had been extinguished—and I wonder what the hell I’m doing with three kids and what will happen to me (us) in the fall when everyone else’s “real life” starts again but mine.
Meanwhile, I have another on-line “relationship.” Don’t be jealous; it preceded ours. I am a member of the poet-moms list serve started a few years ago by Arielle Greenberg. It is a group of, as you might have guessed, poets who are also mothers. A few women on the list recently had babies (some their first and others a second or third) and someone asked the question that gets asked every few months or so on the list, “how/ when do you write.” And the poet moms started confessing to not writing or saying they wake up at 3 am and write or go to sleep super late or how they divide time with spouses, work out babysitting, etc.—suggestions and general sympathy and reassurance and terror all around.
Yesterday, Sally Ball posted this:
William Gass has this (increasingly) famous quip: each child costs one book. He was my boss when I was first pregnant. And Louise Gluck was my teacher as an undergrad, and when I told her I was having a third child, she said, "Well, we all have to do something else, too. This is yours." (So many people seemed to write me off completely at the third pregnancy--Louise's imperturbed reply was like HONEY) anyway: I think these two perspectives sort of cohabit on my shoulder like the Good Cop and the Bad: and they sit there so solidly b/c I feel them both as TRUE: this is the life I chose, the life I love, I'm pretty good at it, & pretty happy in it----- and ALSO, all the parts of it want ALL of me, and therefore want to kill each other. I have to keep the balance and sometimes that's overwhelming, or irritating, or seems like it might be annihilating... and sometimes they all seem to feed each other so fantastically....
I started crying when I read that. I was sitting in my husband’s aunt’s house in Littleton, Colorado, the baby strapped to me for the 3rd straight hour of a badly needed baby nap. I was still a bit shaky because of a near Sophie’s-Choice-moment an hour early when Chester, the aunt’s dog, jumped into the swimming pool onto my 8 year old son who was practicing the crawl. My son, Moses, started to swim to the side wall but Chester was pawing at him and scratching him, and Moses was swallowing a lot of water, his eyes big saucers of fear. Baby strapped to me, I couldn’t jump in. I yelled at the dog and my husband (who was gabbing it up with his grandfather in the shallow end) and managed to grab Moses by leaning over the side of the pool. As usually happens, I am very, very calm when my kids are hurt or in danger, but afterwards, as the adrenaline starts to ebb, I feel dizzy and panicky. So I was stealing a few minutes at someone’s computer while the women put dinner together. My husband’s grandparents had flown to Colorado from L.A. to see baby Judah, but I was just desperate for a moment of “alone” time though I should have been helping with dinner because that’s what women do, right—help with dinner.
For the past week and a half we’ve been staying with my husband’s mother, who also lives in Denver, trying to keep her house in order, not let the boys wreck the place, going from one in-law’s house/ event, etc. to another with the baby wedged in between his brothers in the back of a rental car, not sleeping, sometimes screaming (I swear that sound releases some poisonous chemical in my bloodstream) and then strapping him on so he can sleep all wrapped up against me in the 90+ heat. My husband and I have barely said two words to one another in weeks (he’s busy carting the children around too and cleaning the house and showing his love for me by spending his precious few free moments making an index for my anthology, how romantic is that?!) and all the while I’m not blogging, not reading, not writing, and trying not to care, trying to be in the moment. Sometimes it’s crazy, mostly it’s O.K., and sometimes, I even feel, as Jeffrey said, “exhilarated.” But at that moment, I was just sitting there strapped with the baby, reading my emails, I was shaky and panicky and unsettled.
An hour before I read Sally Ball’s email, right after the incident with the dog, my mother had called. I hadn’t spoken to her for a few weeks. I’d been in Canada with the baby strapped to me, playing various card/board games with the big boys and not sleeping through the night. My mother had been in Wales, writing. When she called, my mom asks the two questions she always asks: “how’s the weather?” and “are you writing?” I get smaller and harder like a shrinky-dink in a hot oven when she asks the second question. It’s 94° in Colorado and I’m wearing the baby in a wrap sling for two hours and I’m trying to stay in the shade but also be close enough to the pool to make Moses feel safe. I want to scream at her: “AM I WRITING?! DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA WHAT MY LIFE IS LIKE?”
But what would it mean for her NOT to ask? For everyone to assume that I would NOT be writing or, heaven forbid, SHOULD NOT be writing? As much as it pains me, I know it’s right of her to ask.
Anyway, I’m quitting the blog. I accepted the kind offer because I was pregnant and teaching and not really writing, and I thought it would be good for me to HAVE to write something, something small and frequent. But now I am not teaching and not pregnant and really not writing poems and not even writing the blog and the guilt about not posting is taking up too much time.
It’s always been and probably always will be confusing to me: am I a writer who’s “something else” is motherhood or am I a mother who’s “something else” is writing? Usually I feel like (and fight hard to be) the first. Right now I am clearly the second. In the fall, when school starts, things will shift a bit. But no matter what—if I am a poet-mother or mother-poet, I think it’s clear that my something else isn’t (and right now can’t be) baking bread or gardening or painting or keeping a spotless home or taking classes or teaching. And my something else isn’t blogging.
Thanks for having me, Rachel