Words on Words

As usual, I have been doing more writing in my head than on paper or a screen. My friend Corrie just had a baby, and I have been composing an elaborate "Letter to a New Mother" during the hours of 3 and 4 am, which is when Amelia now enjoys talking and singing to herself. I finished--or came to a stopping point on-- a long poem last week, and I am kind of stalled on poetry. (I reread the long poem this morning and was much less enthralled by it than I was last week.) I have been playing around with a series of essays on the first year of motherhood, but I tend to forget what it was I wanted to say. Par for the course, I guess. I also think that I am having trouble re-entering the space of very early motherhood, which is what most of the essays so far are about, as well as when I started some of the essays (noting that by "started" I mean I wrote about 6 words). Very early motherhood was a scary space for me, a fact that I think was at once both obvious all along and one I am just realizing). However, I have been working somewhat steadily, if also somewhat slowly, since we got here, so I have hope for a productive year.

As I have been writing this post I have also been opening news tabs and reading other blogs. I really enjoy my (recently updated) blog list even though there is really no cohesion to it whatsoever. Or maybe because there is no cohesion. I only know about half of the authors whose blogs I read. Some of the authors are pretty different from me. Most but not all are moms. I think what draws me to blogs is the personal aspect. I was the kind of child who would read someone else's diary. I really would. I didn't do it to be mean; I just (1) loved to read and (2) loved to know what other people thought, as well as how they worded what they thought. Only as a near adult--when I had a college roommate who was also my best friend--did my desire not to invade other people's privacy outweigh my overwhelming desire to know about them through their own firsthand accounts. (Meg, I never read your diary, if you had one. I promise.) Anyway, blogs are great because they are about life AND they are public! Perfect. (And speaking of blogs, Debra has some news, and Liz just announced hers, and here is a brand new blog by a very beautiful writer (by which I mean the writing is beautiful, as well as the author herself).)

I realized (while cleaning the bathroom sink, incidentally) that all of the blogs I read are by women. I was imagining some poor English grad student's dissertation 100 years in the future: "21st Century Women's Blogs (Insert Colon and Clever yet Insightful Play on Words Here)" . I was thinking about blogs, specifically "mom blogs", as "women's writing," whatever that is, and I guess about the intersections between the domestic, personal, and larger or more political or worldly spheres. In other words, how I write about Amelia a lot but also about writing. (Or used to.) And what it means. I came to no conclusions. I think MPJ wrote about this sort of thing much better than I am a few weeks ago. Yes, here.

I guess I am thinking all this (whatever "this" is) because, in the back of my mind, while, for example, my body is at Book Babies and my hands are helping Amelia stand, and my voice is singing "One, two, three four five, once I caught a fish alive," I am wondering just what it is I am doing here. In Denver. With, you know, my life. In the distant, pre-Amelia past, when I would think about having babies, I didn't exactly have a clear idea of what motherhood would be like. And truthfully, much of the time it is great. And when I hear that little whisper asking just what it is I am doing here, part of me has a quick answer: I am raising Amelia.

But--and should I mention I just reread The Awakening?-- but. A part of me misses being well-rested, having a place to be at a certain time, participating in a larger world of work and school (which has pretty much always been the same place for me, unless you count those summers I gardened or temped at the law firm ("Keller and Heckman, this is Pam.") I don't want to go back to any of the things I used to do, but I can't exactly see just where I am going with anything besides motherhood.

Still, if there is one thing motherhood has taught me, it's that there is no point over-speculating about the future. The path will appear when I round the bend. AND--here's where it all ties together--sometimes the blogs I read help me feel that path developing. Like when I read about Caroline's VBS projects or Liz's plans to have another baby AND get a PhD. I think, Oh, so this is how you do it. This is how you keep going, how you can be a mom (a role that, in an interview I was reading, Sarah McLachlan described perfectly as "unrelenting") and yourself. Not your old self exactly, but yourself nonetheless.

(I just realized I kind of answered the questions posed in Motherlode linked in MPJ's post. I feel unoriginal. But I really didn't reread her post till just now, after I drafted all this. And I promise I can't remember ANYTHING from May.)

Anyway--in conclusion--The Awakening was beautiful. I read it accidentally. I try to read during Amelia's afternoon nap and for poetry I am reading Lorine Niedecker, so for prose I thought I would read Virgina Woolf (whom the Neidecker introduction says she read a lot). But instead I picked up Chopin. She was definitely a Romantic. The book does make painfully obvious First Wave Feminism's focus on a particular class and race of women (white, wealthy ones). But I love the book's ending:

She looked into the distance, ad the old terror flamed up for an instant, then sank again. Edna heard her father's voice and her sister Margaret's. She heard the barking of an old dog that was chained to the sycamore tree. The spurs of the cavalry officer clanged as he walked across the porch. There was the hum of bees, and the musky odor of pinks filled the air.