Moms are funny. At least mine is. And hers was. And I am. I think it has to do with how as kids we’re in close proximity to someone who can’t help but show us all they are— their humanness and striving, as I discussed in a Mother’s Day post a couple years ago called “What We’re Doing Right.”
[F]or many of us as mothers, the messiness that is the mutual witnessing of mother-child relationships feels overwhelming at times. It’s not simple. It’s not assured. Some of us have extra challenges on one or both sides, disability or mental illness or lack of resources. And it is, like most human relationships, interwoven with grief or the potential for grief. There will be loss, there will be misunderstanding, maybe periods of alienation or distance. But what I think most of us are doing right as mothers is in the struggle itself. We try. We are mostly the “good enough mother.” We keep opening out toward our idea what it means to live a decent life and, if we’re lucky, to realize our talents. It’s so hard sometimes and sometimes we fail. But this is part of our gift to our children and what we are doing right. We are letting them witness our messy humanity. This is what a life looks like, in all its terror and beauty, we say. This is what it means to find the thread of love amidst it all. Watch me try.
*
When I think about how my mother’s voice and my grandmother’s voice have shaped my consciousness— and my writing— I think about those layers of voice that are in us all. The family discourses, regional and cultural discourses, generational ones … This is something I often talk about when discussing the development of “voice” in writing, how fascinating it is that our individual language choices exist at this very particular intersection of time, place, culture, family, what we read, who are friends are. I discuss this in a lecture I often give to Lyric Essay students. We have an entire, complex idiolect to draw on— the language that is particular to us— and bringing in our particularity, our mix of influences, and our strangeness, that’s what makes writing compelling. And then there is the interaction of voices, each against the other. And the interaction of voices that is a family, that is the mother-child dyad— it fascinates me.
When I started incorporating interactions with my child into my writing, I wondered what the limits were. I strive to show that this is always my experience of things, and that my kid may be having a very different experience. I don’t include anything that they might later object to, and now that E. is old enough, I also run things by them. The young child period is such a rich, fraught time, and as a (somewhat accidental) stay at home parent, it was a time of delight in discovering his personality and how it interacted with mine, but also a time of wondering how my internal idea(s) of myself matched or didn’t match what was going on in my life. The complex interaction of all that has been a main subject of my writing for several years now, and as E. grows, it will grow and transmute and probably become something else.
Here’s a prose poem that I wrote when Elias was less than a year old but already very much a particular individual:
Close Encounters
The baby looks up when Tom Petty comes on the Neil Young Pandora station, arches his eyebrows, then bobs his head to the music. He ducks back into the gated area on the carpet, putters around like a Hobbit. Puts a pillowcase on his head. Takes it off again.
Later, he is tired and fretful. I cup his face in my hands and say, "Transformation of consciousness." He laughs.
"How does weaning work?" I ask on the smart mom page.
I grow tired and fretful. My friend from high school responds to my message, saying that tomorrow when the weather's nice again, everything will be different. I'll even have moments of shimmering. I think of scintilla. Scintillate. SAT words. My soul feels all crumbly and damp like that time we went to Holland for MUN. Even Bob Dylan doesn't help. Even a new Benetton shirt.
Later C is here and we eat olive pizza and watch Close Encounters. He says there's a Native American story that goes with the mountain, two maidens being chased by a bear, and the mountain keeps growing taller. Smiles and nods, like he does sometimes. I look away. Say, I love Teri Garr! Bellicose. Warlike. Is another SAT word.
That laugh! I’m so glad I have a record of some of this time, as it is the seed of so much of what would come later— the unfolding of a bond based on shared discourse and humor. The pieces I wrote in the first few years of E.’s life show us as individuals having different experiences but also as buddies developing a shared discourse.
Recently I caught myself saying some jaunty nonsense in the car, half to amuse myself and half to amuse my kid, and I interrupted myself to say, “It must be funny to have me as a mom.” To which my kid replied, “Yeah, pretty funny.”
Here’s a writing prompt: Read my poem below, “Afternoon in the Garden,” and then write your own scene that incorporates (1) a bit of dialogue from this week; (1) a plant or flower; and (3) some feelings expressed indirectly.
Afternoon in the Garden
"Oh!" I tell E., who is four. "The rhizomes want to be near the surface of the soil." I've been reading up on thinning irises while he plays with the hose. "See the thick brown root here? Come look! They're all connected with this. It's supposed to be showing like that ..." I make him come to me. We both look.
*
I've come out to plant the grassy things with purple flowers I bought at the pottery festival. I've gotten a hand spade from the shed, and I go to the front to hack at the flower bed by the porch, loosening the roots of encroaching vines, upending old bits of rubber and plastic. Perhaps it's called a trowel, the thing I'm holding. Nothing in the shed is mine. Not really. I find something that I think at first is a squashed golden ring, but it's just a gold packaging tie. I'm a bit scared of it all. The digging. The finding.
*
I leave E. to do some of the loosening of roots while I run to the back to retrieve something. When I return to the front, he says, "Don't look," and I see that he's uncovered a pink worm and is afraid it's injured. I reassure him, move the worm aside. I pull out two hearty dandelion plants, continue trying to find space among the rocks and roots. "This is what's nice about gardening," I'm thinking. "You can be a little crazy, attacking certain things, nurturing others, red in the face, throwing yourself into a plan all your own." E. is backing away, holding his face carefully. He is having a much different feeling. "I feel bad for everything that grows," he says.
*
I get the grasses planted. I stand to inspect things. "All we have to do is mow the lawn, maybe trim those bushes. Later, we'll transplant some irises. Oh, I need new begonias for my big pots. I could have saved the begonias from last year in a bag in the shed, but I realized it too late."
"I'll remind you," he says.
*
Surveying the pollen-covered porch, I turn to E.
"You know what I need?" I say.
"A disguise?"
*
At bedtime, I'm telling my son's father about the irises. I've let E. replant the weeds in the back. I've washed us off and cooled us down, fed us dinner.
"They're all connected with that big root," I'm saying. "What's it called? Rhizome, right?'
"That's what I call it," E. says.
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Receive $50 off July/August courses at Muse when you register through May 30th.
Writing the Lyric Essay: When Poetry and Nonfiction Play with Joanna Penn Cooper
Memoir in Collage with Megan Baxter
Flash Memoir: Form and Fracture with Kami Westhoff
There is also still space in The Call: A Course on Creative Witness (which opens 5/22) and the remaining 2023 Generative Writing Workshops (the next is Saturday 5/27).
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