I’ve been thinking about loons. When I feel very off balance, I listen to this weird album I found on spotify of various loon call soundscapes. It’s so comforting to me. I lived for a few summers and then for a year in Wisconsin’s northwoods, on a big chain of lakes. So many loons. The sound of them is pressed into me like you’d press a flower in a book. It’s such a sad sound. So haunting. Not unlike the call of the mourning dove, another sound I love. My friends always teased me for loving sad music. If there’s any animal I feel most connected to, I’d think it must be loons — and in new motherhood, I keep thinking of them. So I wrote a loon-mother poem a few weeks ago.
a new mother I imagine myself as a loon
floating atop the water for a little while
then dipping under, swimming far in the
murky quiet, just to pop up somewhere
else, never where expected, can’t pinpoint
any spot on the lake’s surface until my
body reappears, a surprise.and I sing a haunting song, sad, mournful,
all night long — calling across the waters,
while my sleek wet head turns toward
the shore,sounding somewhat like a child screaming
and somewhat like a hymn.
In motherhood, a long quiet swim underwater. (It figures, I just used scuba diving as a metaphor in my last essay, I guess the mind only has a handful of ideas). I remember being in canoes on the lake and watching a loon go down — playing a game to guess where they would pop up again. Sometimes you’d be able to see them come up, many seconds, even a minute later. But usually they’d swim too far away to be seen, or surface behind your back, undetected. It’s impossible to guess where they’re headed down there, and why.
In motherhood, you must just expand, slowly. I guess you just get bigger. I’m small. I’m not very big. Little capacity. Little energy. It needs to get bigger. For the long pull underwater, slowly your lungs get a little larger, hold more air. Like pregnancy, all your organs shifting, quiet consent — yes, you can lessen the room in me for my stomach, yes you can separate my abs. The baby takes up so much space. The baby wakes you up. The baby needs you every three hours at the very least, pulls you down deep under the water. Have I relaxed for more than thirty minutes in four months? Have I come up for air? I can’t tell. No answer.
I was talking with my friend Emma the other day, in a rare real conversation, about the difference between decentering and erasure. She reminded me that decentering is good. I was happy to hear that. I’d forgotten a way to spin what I’m feeling back toward goodness — beyond the goodness of my baby, his hands and feet. Yes, good to feel humility. Yes, good to forget myself, to not have even my own world revolve around me. But bad, bad to feel erased, even only within myself. And bad how society erases mothers, forgets them, fails them, over and over again. I’m not sure I’ve been failed like that, but I can see others who are, can hear them even in the very difficulty of taking care of my own “easy” baby, in my own “easy” life. I haven’t been erased, but sometimes I feel that way. I think that’s my own problem. It’s the curse of the poet maybe to constantly be centering back toward their own middle — it’s hard to be de-centered when your work demands a sort of personal core always being available, ready to be articulated. It’s easily the stuff of personal crisis.
My words have dried up. My self-interpretation is worn thin, turning round and round on the same railroad tracks, nothing switching. Just like when he was first born, sometimes the baby cries and I can’t think of how to soothe him — no creative energy left in me. It takes ingenuity sometimes, detachment, energy, ideas. I have none of those things. So I need to expand. The capacity I have now is simply not enough. That feels bad. It feels bad to be too small for what is required of you. Of course we are making it through either way, and I’d say my baby is happy as can be.
But no space really for work, though I imagined returning to work would come easily. No space for writing. No space for thinking, for any sort of sorting out of myself.
Early on when I was messaging with a new friend about art and motherhood, I was given this very good advice: “don’t force it.” I think that’s what I really needed to hear. At first I’ll admit that I felt a little taken aback by it, thinking why would I force it? It just flows! Now I know what she meant. Four months in, I have settled somewhere very still, no wind. My mind’s foggy quietness. My wanting to write but having nothing at all to say. It’s bewildering, even scary. I could force myself to write. I could squeeze it out. But from where, and what? I needed that permission to be very quiet, to have nothing to offer, to let full weeks slip past me, empty except for my own exhaustion, and my own thin quiet memory of these days. Don’t force it. Now I know I couldn’t if I tried. Permission. A benediction. The only motherhood advice that has felt actually relevant for me, and it isn’t about mothering at all, it’s about work. You could want to force it, but don’t. It’s a comfort and a sadness to me that only I will remember this time — not Tommy. All we do together, all these days we spend in each other’s company, I am the record-keeper, the historian, the mind that will remember. He is the silent forgetful partner to my days, his ever-watchful eyes, his forgetting, his need. All this time so deeply matters and doesn’t at once. It’s brick-laying, it’s the underground part of his childhood, it’s roots. But it’s my own stem peeking up through the dirt. Everyone can see me mothering, including myself. What do I have to show?
Don’t force it. Sometimes, nothing. Sometimes, exhausted. Almost always alone. Sometimes, days go by and the baby is somewhat miserable and I just go around the house with him from thing to thing, meal to meal, sleep to sleep, and the time just slips over and around us. He’s laughing, he’s grasping objects, he’s grinning, screaming, sleeping. And I have no words to describe how I’ve felt, except, maybe “sad”. A thin strange word, and not the right one. I have no poetry. Artless is my heart.
That’s a poem. It keeps coming to mind. By Brenda Shaughnessy. It’s the first poem in her collection, Our Andromeda.
Artless / is my heart. A stranger / berry there never was, / tartless.
Gone sour in the sun, / in the sunroom or moonroof, / roofless.
No poetry. Plain. No / fresh, special recipe / to bless.
It goes on. I wrote the form wrong to take up less space — that must be a metaphor. I’m typing while my baby lays on his playmat, puts things in his mouth. He rings the bell that hangs from the wooden canopy. I read the poem to him, he was motionless, or I didn’t notice him move. It’s a really good poem, and I’m grateful for it. Read it out loud if you would like to feel words on your tongue and remember your heart. I’m grateful for any mother who has ever written poetry. Hers are laced with much more tragedy than I have in my life, her baby sick, her life upended. My baby is well. And, still. And still. Can you write poetry about motherhood that isn’t tragic? Can you be inconsistent, inscrutable? Can you search for the words and find none?
I feel afraid that someone, anyone, would read what I write and think I don’t like motherhood. That isn’t it as all. Am I committing the crime of ambivalence, but the sort of ambivalence that is red-hot with love? Maybe. No, I’m just exhausted. And bewildered. And unsure. And alone. And growing. And afraid. And strong. And there is more of the day left. Thomas is sort of starting to cry now, hitting his legs with his arms, making noise, unhappy. I’ll put the computer down and scoop him up. And then what?
Then I’m holding a person in my arms. And what can hold all that?
I think this is one of the best descriptions of motherhood I’ve ever read. The ambivalence of being a mom can be so confusing; you want to sleep so desperately but you never want to put your baby down, etc etc. I think the full spectrum of maternal feeling and experience is what brings such vitality and depth to the work. Thank you for your tenacity to write so honestly about motherhood in all forms, not just those that are positively skewed and gushy.