From the Archive, for Mother's Day: A Collage in Progress

For the month of May, Harriet will feature blog posts from the archive, along with a brief introduction. This week's post, "A Collage in Progress" by Celina Su, was originally published in January 2020.

Despite its origins in the anti-war movement, Mother’s Day, like many such Hallmark Holidays, has become yet another symbol of American consumerism. Unable, or unwilling to find other ways to express our gratitude, we shop for the gift that we hope will articulate what words, we fear, cannot. Celina Su’s “A Collage in Progress,” captures, in exquisite prose, the joys and struggles of motherhood. Parenting, writes Su, “demands presence and constant attention to habit, to the mundane,” a presence that illuminates her “capacities for worry.” Like poetry, parenting is really all about “close attention. . .primordial love, hesitations and silences and lines askance and enjambment. . . amidst a torrent of words and errands and auto-aid bills and news headlines.” All of this feels profoundly relevant as we navigate a situation that has illuminated our collective “capacities for worry,” in a world filled with uncertainty and “jagged edges,” which, as Su suggests, may offer “shade as well as light.”

—Harriet Editor

Dearest Kendra, dearest Sahar,

I am trying to write this blogpost, and I am anxious. It is a garden variety case of impostor syndrome, perhaps, but maybe you didn’t know the depth of my manifestation. My entire first year of full-time teaching, for example, I vomited twice a week. I thought that motherhood would simply add a new layer to this anxiety about work, but maybe it has instead changed its texture. It is not just that finding the time to write has become so much harder. It is that parenting demands presence and constant attention to habit, to the mundane, and this presence illuminates my capacities for worry, and also thought and feeling and knowledge, in new ways.

Even though Wen sleeps well every night, I still wake up every few hours to her phantom cries, and my thoughts during the day feel like lucid dreams.

It has been so long since I have read and written on a regular basis. I used to love long flights or train rides as mini writers’ residencies. I am in Taiwan right now, and I spent the entire 16-hour flight here with a toddler wiggling in my lap, terrified that she might become so overtired that she would disturb everyone around us. Most of the time, what I fear is worse than what actually transpires. I am trying to learn from this.

Lately, I keep stating that I haven’t had an articulate thought since Wen was born a year and a half ago, but I’d like to revisit that declaration. For a good part of my childhood, I resented my parents precisely because I thought that their lives—no, their sensibilities—were so focused on the straight and narrow as to lack poetry. (Not long before she passed away, my mother had retired and was looking for new hobbies. I suggested that she combine her interests in engineering and sewing by experimenting with wearable technologies. She responded, in English, “No, that is too whimsical for me.” I was taken aback that she knew the word “whimsical,” and had suggested that whimsy was my thing and not hers.) Now, my parents’ priorities, their focus on the “basics” in life, have become my obsession. I am constantly, frantically consumed by the very mundane—naptimes, feeding times, bowel movements. And the speed of Wen’s development/evolution—that she feels like an entirely different human every six weeks—makes every observation I have feel like a compression of time and space, dense with meaning.

***

Lately, Wen will sometimes grab the sides of my head and bring me towards her, press my face against hers, and loudly sound, “Mmmmmmwah!” I didn’t teach her this particular form of sloppy intimacy. I wonder if she has an inkling of her power, that its punch comes from her relative inability to control her impulses.

My academic research emphasizes that embodied knowledge can be just as valuable as technical knowledge. Still, it’s hard for me to take this to heart. I tend to think of parenting as taking me away from thinking work, rather than constituting it. And yet, this is my grand project—an attempt to translate the values I hold most dear into everyday life. My book-writing goals now feel comparably urbane. This is a way of examining poetry/ research and habit/ the mundane as mutually generative rather than inversely relational pursuits, or rather than as my previous self thought.

For what is poetry but close attention, but primordial love, hesitations and silences and lines askance and enjambment that, once in a while, slow or even suspend my breath off the page—amidst a torrent of words and errands and auto-paid bills and news headlines. To aestheticize, in this case, is not to objectify, but to combat the anesthetic derision of care work as unintellectual, as immigrant, as gendered—to emotionally respond to, to sensitize ourselves to whatever we typically dismiss and inure ourselves to. I’m trying to look at these words and errands and moments anew, to give each its proper scaffolding of negative space and weight.

***

In her favorite board book right now, Ojos de Lobo, Wen traces the contours of each eye, each person’s scalloped collar, each winged dog atop each tree, as if it were a papercut on the smooth page.

Time with her is a collection of moments that feels more like a collage than a montage; I don’t see a remotely linear progression, filmic scenes set to the tune of an upbeat rock ballad. Instead, daily life with her emphasizes parataxis, on collation rather than curation. It is as if I have adhered everything together with a pasty, messy glue made out of sticky rice. It also underlines language as inherently relational, as borrowed and remade through juxtaposition.

To me, parenting feels like an exercise in the assemblage of particularly disparate, generational perspectives. I simultaneously relive my pasts, compare what I perceive as my child’s experiences with my own. And I relate more fully to my parents, to their sense of urgency with each of my first breaths, first steps, first words. I paste together images and texts across generations. Elizabeth Grosz writes, “The past survives in and through the present, or actualizes its virtual forces, through two means– in bodily habits and in recollections.” Parenting is a study in habit not as a lack of thinking, but as a special, plasticine type of reckoning.

***

Every waking minute without Wen feels furtive, stolen. I think and write in fragments now, and I am trying to recognize legitimacy in this. I am awed by your responses to my messages sometimes, that you seem to really get what’s going on in my life when I managed to send just a few words to you, and that your missives, too, contain so many layers of news and emotion in such compact ways.

I have to learn that in presence, the rushed, the partial, is still a whole, an experiment in form. In collage, my snippets of repurposed texts, ideas, and observations are not connected seamlessly; I see their edges. This allows me to cite, attribute, give credit to those who have contributed to my thinking. I am trying to think of different ways to bring collective thinking to the surface, of emphasizing writing as a relational act—especially when I spend so much of my waking time caring for Wen, feeling so tethered to another human being, and simultaneously so cut off from my usual channels for conversation, like lectures, readings, and seminars. Writing this blogpost as a letter to you is one way that anchors me.

***

These days, Wen articulates some recognizable words—“dog,” “book,” “up”—but mostly, she speaks in long sentences that sound like babble to me. Her babble sounds distinctly American, like the song in this video. Here in Taiwan, I listen for new cadences in Wen’s babbling—whether they reflect the syntax and rhythms of those around her right now. I can see that she has so much to say, but I am not always understanding—listening—in her shifting language(s), yet. So we communicate through sonic poems.

To love her is to constantly calibrate new distillations of interdependence, to glean new forms of sovereignty and interiority. To love her is to remember the process of becoming, without trivializing the fact that already, she is. What each of us notices is different. Each of our collages reflects a different color of feeling, a different skeptical glare. And in the jagged edges, we have shade as well as light.