a year postpartum

six postpartum publications -- #6 is here!

In this year and a few months since my second baby was born, I’ve been making zines. Just before my baby was born, in a wave of manic creative inspiration, I came up with the somewhat ambitious idea to go from not publishing anything at all to publishing six zines in one year and sending them to whoever wanted to read them. I’m not sure why I felt so confident that I could see this project through, but now I am so glad that I was. That late-pregnancy confidence inspires trepidatious current me! I think I wanted to catch lightning in a bottle — wanted to make new creative work about this postpartum period in real time, capture it for posterity somehow, and I needed an exciting container to put that work into. I didn’t feel like it should be a big full-length book, but it needed to have more heft that something published on the internet. So my basement very-small-press, Imaginary Lake, was born, and my Artist Residency in Motherhood began.

I didn’t realize that committing to this project would use pretty much all of my (very limited) working time this year. I intended to do other things — like sewing, maybe designing sewing patterns (which used to be my job! and could still be if I actually did it!), maybe making actual headway on some sort of book manuscript, other things that could actually make a difference in my now quite dubious “career”. But, I pretty much only made zines! It took more time than I expected, and I can see now that this is just as it had to be. This project was the right size for this year of so much challenge and change. And over and over it energized and satisfied the part of me that needed to see the fruits of my labor. Holding finished zines in my hands felt so special every time. To have made something whole, all on my own. Something tactile and physical. To send it in the mail to someone who will read it and keep it somewhere, maybe to read again in a year or two. This paper trail of this year of my life, scattered across time and space — that has meant so much to me, in a way that I couldn’t have expected. The labor of motherhood is so hard to see — it disappears like berries into the hungry mouths of growing children. To put this labor somewhere else, somewhere a little more solid, helped me feel more solidified too.

I decided I would make a series of six zines, and the sixth zine is available now! It’s called A Year Postpartum, and it’s a collection of very short essays. Read the first two essays from the zine here:

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MEADOW

Our kids are with my husband, and I am alone at the botanic garden. I find myself closer to prayer than I’ve been in — maybe years. Sitting in the small pergola on the edge of the meadow watching a wasp walk along a beam. Listening to ten thousand bugs moving their bodies. One tree is shimmering with wind, all the others are still. I am on my own, no demands on my body or my mind. The amount of relief I feel, sitting on the edge of the meadow, could make me weep.

I can see now that there is so much I did not understand about motherhood before my children were born. So much I could not have understood. For every mother, it is brand new. No matter how many times you have seen others cross this threshold, the moment you become a mother your own life changes — not someone else’s. It feels different for me than it does for you. In little ways, in big ways. Like living itself, I try to compare notes with everyone around me, try to find kindred spirits in the world, find places where I feel understood and at home. Motherhood is a new place to try to find companions, to try to become clear. Motherhood is the wildest terrain I’ve visited. Meadow bustling with life. It looks so peaceful from afar. This is a wilderness of hidden brutality. There are so many flowers.

YEAR

Ben was born at the end of last June. For a year now, I have been two kids’ mother. I think at this moment I feel more worn out than I’ve ever felt before. Hard to write from this place, hard to make out any thread for my mind to follow. I want to write a happy narrative. I don’t think this is an unhappy narrative, but I also want to be honest that I don’t think I’m doing very well right now. You can be happy and exhausted, but the exhaustion tends to blare like a horn.

A year with my second child, a year with my second child and my first child. A year with myself, expanding in capacity out of pure necessity. A year. How many diapers changed, how many hours awake during the darkness when I should have been asleep? How many tears, mine and my children’s? How many hugs and kisses, how many grapes carefully quartered? How many episodes of Little Bear or Zoboomafu? How many angry texts I didn’t send, how many curse words I said when I shouldn’t? How much baby smell sniffed, how much baby skin caressed? How many loads of laundry carried downstairs and then upstairs, sorted, put away? How much love? How much fear? How much?

I will ask myself: what has surprised me? What is the story here? What can you say that is true, not hyperbole? What is worth publishing in print about this year of your life? Where are you now?

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(Buy A YEAR POSTPARTUM here)

This last zine in the series feels like the most vulnerable for sure. When I was proofreading it, in my final editing pass, I had the fleeting worry — is this too raw? Will my happiness be misconstrued if it is so ribboned with other more difficult feelings — ambivalence, fear, anger, tension, pain, stress, worry. But then I remembered that there is literally no mother experiencing pure happiness, and that this is the project, to tell the truth and to remember, to tell myself the story of how it has felt. All I have is my life and my experience. It hasn’t all been soft and lovely, but it has all been good. My happiness can be a kaleidoscope of many different feelings, including more difficult ones. So this zine explores that spectrum, and seeks to feel the year’s weight in my life. It asks, “where are you now?”

I’ve published a wide variety of kinds of writing over the course of this project — a collection of sentences, a braided essay, a birth story, a poetry chapbook, a zine of book recommendations. This last zine feels somewhat quintessential, and like an internal callback to some of my favorite earlier writing on motherhood from my first postpartum year. As a series of six, it feels like a full expression of the many ways I have felt and the many things I have thought about this year — maybe moreso than a book would be or anything more official like that.

(If you want to read all six zines, you can buy them as a bundle here!)

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I feel so curious about my work as a writer and artist right now. As I publish this zine, I realize that I don’t have any clear next big things to tackle. I haven’t felt this much open-ness in years. It’s a little scary, to be honest. The more I offer to my family, the less I feel I have to offer to my work — and that transfer of energy is scary to me as a person who loves to make things. I don’t know where I’m going, and I’m worried it’s nowhere. My career as an artist has never been conventional, and lately it feels more vaporous than ever. There’s the vapor again. I didn’t realize I was feeling so much like mist.

I’ll put a pin in these existential fears for now, because I’m working them out in my own time, and I know I’m not the first artist/mother to feel this way. (Just read this generous essay from Phoebe Wahl that really made me feel much less alone.) But I don’t know when I will publish a zine again! I am taking a break for the next little while — giving myself space to shift and find my footing after this huge project. I’m so proud of the six zines from the A Year Postpartum series, and the other handful of zines I have published for Imaginary Lake. There will be more.

I writing in my morning pages about why I don’t want to give up making creative work, and I kept coming back to the notion that I want to be of service. I think I hadn’t realized how much that meant to me, to feel that my work has offered something to the world in some meaningful way, that it has served people outside of myself. I would write if I was on a desert island, but I would still send that writing in bottles out to sea in hopes it would find its way to someone somewhere. I feel so strongly about matrescence, about becoming a mother after not being one for one’s whole life, that true transformation that leaves no one unscathed — and I have this sense that my work is to be a kind of a matrescence “doula.” I feel strongly about sharing and writing birth stories, about sharing and writing postpartum stories, and about helping people do that for themselves. Imaginary Lake has felt like the beginning of that mission — and some of what I’ve published feels like the true start of that work, like my Birth Story workbook, and Little Birth Book. I’m interested in publishing more work in this category, and possibly collaborating with others to expand that mission even more. More zines by doulas and birth workers, more writing specifically about this period of early-motherhood-transformation that has felt so forceful to me, and the ongoing transformation of later motherhood that I’m so curious about and hungry for stories about. I feel excited about what is possible, but it’s so much to build, and right now I’m needing a lull. Still, this felt like a good time and place to share that little burst of hopeful energy, that maybe I will be of service in this way — and maybe in my way I also already have.

Zines are such a niche, but writers publishing little pamphlets of writing that doesn’t seem like it has a clear place in the mainstream is a tale as old as time. I’m proud to be a part of that legacy. To all the readers of Imaginary Lake zines, thank you so much, from the bottom of my heart. This project has really carried me along this year. I’m grateful for you!

Leave a comment with any thoughts or about any future Imaginary Lake zines you’d be interested to read! Or anything else on your mind.

Much love, more soon!