Portable Milton raised over his head...

...my 5 year-old son tears past me in pursuit of his 7 year-old sister. Shortly I hear shrieking and the sound of my book hitting someone’s head or the deck. I retrieve the book, which I haven’t cracked since undergrad days (Paradise Lost and When I consider how my light is spent) noting the mildew creeping along its top edge. The 2 ½ year old son, ever soaking in the antics, opens the front door and the tousle continues underfoot. Who knew watching your children hurt one another would hurt so much? When my daughter was little a friend warned me: that out-of-this-world love you have for your firstborn quickly transforms to out-of-this-world rage when your firstborn injures your secondborn.

When I mentioned at pick-up yesterday that I’d put Siblings Without Rivalry on hold at the library, one mom wise-cracked wryly, “It’s a myth!!” I admit, I’ve read Parenting from the Heart, Positive Discipline, etc., the list goes on....and on an occasional good day I might muster the strength to think: what am I feeling? What might they be feeling? What’s the need underneath this chaos? How might we proceed in a calm and humane manner? etc. And come up with some consequence to still them ("Did you want to keep your play-date with so-n-so?!”) But lately the pull (for them) to get that hank of hair in hand or snatch back the favored fork has been too strong. Talking to other parents with a gaggle of children helps, like my friend (mother of three) who said to me on a walk, “My little brother--I see him once a week or so. I always look at him and chuckle to myself: why would you ever come near me after what I did to you when we were kids?”

Thus, I concede: fighting is normal, inevitable. Boring, actually, to be able to say, “My brother and I? Always got along. Shared our cookies, halved them neatly, kissed goodnight.” Taking my friend’s cue, and since there’s no shortage of psychological research at one’s disposal when it comes to family of origin, I turned to mine. I still remember re-biting the spot where my little brother Peter bit me, since the walk from the chicken barn to the Illinois farmhouse (where my parents were waking) was just far enough for his teethmarks—the evidence--to fade. And the distinct sound of the can opener, its hinged metal halves inches from my ear, whizzing by and hitting the wall. Or wrestling with him on a bean bag chair until his head cracked a pane of the glass door leading to the garden.

But I also remember, just as vividly, when we traveled across country in a wooden camper my father built by hand, my brother, sister and I in the loft, telling stories at night as we hurtled through Wisconsin, Colorado, and on into California...because it was so delicious to make Peter laugh. Not exactly the noble sonnets of Milton, but stories of the superhero we’d concocted, Diarrhea Dan, and his epic struggle to overcome evil using bodily fluids as a weapon. Not a bad way to spend your light: in perpetual tousle on the one hand, in pursuit of laughter on the other.

As long as you are matching socks...

...or removing pubic hairs from the base of the toilet, not a single member of the family needs you. But the moment you open the laptop and reach for the secret stash of chocolate, the kids, followed by the husband, come sauntering in, sensing the disruption in the force-field of attention. My fault truly—a bad habit from the days when the children were first crawling and the imminent threat of babies disappearing off decks or out of windows existed—so of course they’re all used to living in the waves of umbilical hyper-vigilance exuding from every pore of my body. And of course they’re curious...to see what’s so worthy of dropping the radar. A little white noise does the trick—turning on the dryer, or carrying the sock basket on my hip and plunking it down next to the laptop. Or browning the celery and onions for the chicken soup, so that little distinct click of laptop opening can’t be heard. When I consulted my writer-who-also-happens-to-be-a-mom friend and my sculptor-who-also-happens-to-be-a-mom friend, they confirmed I was not alone: they too had experienced this phenomenon.

Last Saturday, I got away with reading The Sun while the bacon fried, just long enough to get through page one of “Blind Love,” by Rosa Montero (translated by Claudia Routon in Hunger Mountain’s Spring 2008 issue) and arrive at this line: “The perverse reality is pretty girls, however stupid, are imbued with rich inner selves, always. Meanwhile no one bothers to imagine a lovely soul in a grey-haired, large-headed, wall-eyed woman. A constant companion to my ugliness, this truth festers like an open wound: it’s not that they don’t see me, they don’t imagine me.” You have to read the rest of this Cyrano variation yourself (totally worth it), but I have to say this paragraph made me think about the thoughts we hold about others, and the thoughts others hold about us. How beautiful to imagine beyond assumption, beyond the he-said/she-said of friends in marital strife, imagining instead a more vibrant under-core, their happy potential. Like the photo of my mother-in-law’s husband on his memorial leaflet—tan, barrel-chested, thriving, in his thirties. He’s off, for one last swim in the sea, and I, to my cabin to write, leaving the phone in the house, kissing the kids goodbye for the day (how dare I—folder of laundry, maker of killer organic meals, braider extraordinaire, one-stop healer—tempting them to imagine I might be all that and more).

Today it was possible to revise...

...two paragraphs about a childhood piano teacher—(from an exercise called “Spots of Light” I found in Your Life As Story: Discovering the “New Autobiography” and Writing Memoir as Literature by Tristine Rainer, which asks you to balance the writing of dark subjects with forays into bright moments from the same time frame: “from an artistic as well as a mental health point of view, you need light with dark memories. In autobiographic writing as in painting, you need to protect your light colors...”) laptop in the kitchen, the youngest nursing, the five-year-old squeezing a steady torrent of red and blue food coloring into his pancake mix, a good morning despite the shrieking that ensues when, flipping with one hand and balancing the nurser with the other, I accidentally break the handle on the purple purse pancake. It does no good to explain that the purse handle will taste the same whether or not it is attached.

Still, I’m happy here with my sons, the five-year-old asking how to spell “poison oak”, the nurser asleep enough to maneuver down into the bed for an hour nap. The laptop hibernates while I bake with the five-year-old; he’s singing the same three-note song over and over, then plinking it out mercilessly on the piano with his flour-coated fingers. But it buys me a few moments at my own keyboard to right a word or two.

Later when I sit down to play, D will stick to E, the lentil he used to mark Middle C now wedged between. But I know better than to think I can make it through more than a couple measures of Beethoven; besides, it is Wednesday: writer’s group; at 6: 17 p.m. I’ll be escaping with my miss-matched socks, dried pancake batter in the bangs, and a folder with the week’s worth of sentences, heading towards another human being who cares to discuss verb nuances over mugs of Earl and, if we’re lucky, something warm from the oven the husband has prepared: chocolate-chip cookies or a loaf of sourdough oozing with brie.

February, awash in doubt...

...regarding the ability to draft a decent poem or essay. The verdict: sleep deprivation.

So many attempts at soothing the middle child’s growing pains later (Tylenol, Homeopathic and Bach flower remedies, Epsom soaks, thirty-dollar bottles of liquid calcium-magnesium in orange-flavored serums, vitamins, bananas, jungle juice teeming with acai berry antioxidants, arnica rubdowns, tiger balm kneads, the sleeping prophet’s palma christi applied with heat, and the hundredth reading of Rip Van Winkle), I’m reduced to 4 a.m. Google searches for a promising? lead to a site out of the UK on emu oil, since the pain that started in the arches now also radiates from my son’s knees, elbows, and this month, hands.

While he folds his body back into mine, the youngest wakes, aware the source of milk has traveled into his brother’s room. The dueling crying begins and the grueling portioning out of care, nursing one, the other nestled against my back pleading for me to hold his feet, writhing his knees between mine, curling his hands into my spine.

An hour later they’re both asleep. Insomnia sets in; I too wouldn’t mind crawling into bed next to my mother, but she’s across town in the arms her lover. I extract myself from the boys, stoke the fire, make tea, find solace in a passage from Heather McHugh’s essay, The Fabric: A Poet’s Vesalius (December 2007 issue of Poetry): “The body’s blood network wraps a man into his shape, keeps him bound in influencies, fluencies. It is the tree of our family system, with one trunk and many branches and twigs curved about in interlocking bonds, a place of humming hammockwork. It’s a comforting figure. When you look at circulatory man, you see why humans had to hug. But when you look at neural man, you see why humans had to fly.” The exquisite quiet and steadfast company of another thinker, trammeling into the terrain I love.

When the first watery light comes through the skylight, I call a friend in Iowa City. “I feel so old, Mary. What’s wrong with me? Maybe I’m ill and I don’t know it.”

“Nah,” she says, “You’re nursing, that’s all.”

Friday-writing-day: here I sit, brainpower siphoned off into the breast milk, my youngest napping in the bed beside my desk, his eyes REM-darting beneath his eyelids as he dreams all I should be writing. In my altered state, Mr. Tart, the lab is here: I think I could follow my son into dream, awake, if I tried.

The Desk

A feather, the size of half my pinky nail, and the top panel of a butterfly wing (one of my daughter’s finds) sit in a one inch by one inch cube frame on my writing desk. The feather appeared several months ago, no doubt floomphed loose from the corner of my down pillow one of those endless nights as I switched sides nursing my youngest, Nikolas, who we refer to as the marsupial nurser for his ability to maintain his grip on the nipple as we descend stairs, fold laundry, or make fruit salad. I have also on my desk a miniature silver typewriter (a pencil sharpener my father gave me when I went off to college), and in its typing carriage sits Emily D’s #1263 (There is no Frigate like a Book); the feather initially found a home there between the tiny parchment and the typewriter’s rim.

I started my Friday writing days for several weeks with a reassuring glance at the feather, until it disappeared and I spent half an hour rifling through stacks of manilla folders with their subject titles (Poem on Chocolate: due ASAP, Camouflage, June 1, etc.), calming when I finally found it between the printer cable and my laptop, hazardously floating towards the window overlooking the backyard where my father plays with my two sons while I write, or, chase feathers. So tenuous, delicate, but essential, this connection to my secret life as a writer, while really my head’s still full of milk and laundry to fold. How much lift could a feather that small provide? Days when I hear my middle son ordering Grandpa around, commandeering toys from my youngest, or the husband comes home early unable to paint in the rain and wants that cup of coffee with me, or the phone rings below and I’ve forgotten to turn down the volume, I think, what am I doing up here?

But then I look at the butterfly wing smattered dusky orange, bordered by white and velvet brown, striated with hairline veins, and the feather with miniscule spine. Better get to it, I’m writing in a world of fragile beauty, half wings, hidden lift.

Writing, Raising Children: Heart of this Blog

"My upstairs neighbor, mother of three, lives in a chronic extremity of demand that I witness from below as a kind of human storm. I do not think she would want to read poems that posit the singular solitary investigations of the privileged 'I' of lyric poetry."
Ann Lauterbach, The Night Sky: Writings on the Poetics of Experience

I, poet and mother of three children under the age of seven, read this passage and laughed, recognizing that I am in fact both women Lauterbach describes, inhabiting one body. I have been living in the center of the human storm, biding my time until I could gradually return to my former passion of writing. To pass the time while my middle child raged in his room enthralled in tantrum throwing boots and shoes at the door I held closed with one hand, I began a habit of calming myself by grabbing random books down off my bookshelf and turning to the author bios: High Tide in Tucson, by Barbara Kingsolver: she has one child, published writer. Tombs of Atuan, Ursula Le Guin: three children. Mary Karr: Liar's Club: one child.

The process of writing, then, and the raising of my children, braided together, is the intended terrain of this blog. I belong to my children by day but the nights are mine (or will be mine once my youngest sleeps through the night). With one child in first grade, the second balking at preschool, and the third about to turn two, I resurfaced from motherhood long enough to find a fellow Mom-writer (Elizabeth) who gave me The Night Sky to read. We met at the park, sharing our grad school writing histories (MFA from Iowa Writers' Workshop ten plus years back; she: MFA from Bard roughly same time frame), while our boys kicked a soccer ball and my girl climbed trees, long enough to ascertain we'd pick out one night a week to leave the kids with the husbands so we could look at one another's work. How does one write, descending into the feral depths of the psyche, write well, and raise one's little people (with their equally feral demands), and raise them well, without one process compromising or eclipsing the other?