In my writing cabin...

...a photo of our daughter sits next to the printer. She wears a red velvet dress, holds a peach rose, each petal fringed crimson. She’s leaned against the white marble statue of a hand, so large that the palm’s lifeline curves past her shoulders and she is cupped, the hand extending still three feet above her head. She likes the photo, she tells me, because of how she’s held. I tell her I love it too—but don’t wax on about how it’s a great metaphor for divine protection, for all the times I won’t be able to be with her. I tell her instead I love it because it reminds me of our girl date. The rose was for Sandy (that mom-who-happens-to-be-a-sculptor) and we were on the way to see her work on the town square. It was nearly Mother’s day, and we ran into a friend from my grammar school (Doug) who was out shopping for a present for his mom.

“I’m coaching softball now,” he said, and then leaned down on his knees towards my girl. “Do you know what we used to call your mom?” She shrugs shyly. “The Polish Powerhouse. You should’ve seen her hit that ball.” Watching her blush, I realize I want time to slow—she’s only 8, but I want her still to care more than anything about her ferals, the hat she’s knitting, buckeyes.

I can’t imagine being ready to let her go, ever. But I have, she’s in 2nd grade and goes most days. And every day she comes back to me, down the gangplank, lunch basket in hand and an octopus arm’s worth of clothing for me to carry to the car, trailing 11x13 drawings of Philomel and the King of Ireland’s son on horseback.

Later, standing in the stairwell, just outside the bedroom door, seventh milk-skin of the day forming on my tea, I’m reading Einstein’s Dreams by Alan Lightman:

A mushy, brown peach is lifted from the garbage and placed on the table to pinken. It pinkens, it turns hard, it is carried in a shopping sack to the grocer’s, put on a shelf, removed and crated, returned to the tree with pink blossoms. In this world, time flows backward. (p. 102)

If, somewhere in the universe, such a tree exists, well, then, I can stand to love my daughter, my sons, as much as I do. In loving them, I face every parent’s fear: losing them. Maybe you don’t just get to ripen once—but you can actually return to the limb, ripen at a pace dictated by season and sun, and fall again to Earth. That small window of brightness might recur, then, if one allows it. I write in hopes of stumbling upon such a sequence of words or images that alters the world so I might inhabit it more fully. Would that it do the same for someone else, reading.

For once you have a child you are host to a kind of dual citizenship as parent and child. Behind you: your childhood, which you pack up in a trunk until moments like now, or when you run into childhood friends. Before you: your parenthood, in which you must rise to the occasion and shepherd your little ones through their childhoods. There are many yous under your skin, and you empathize now with your parents, your children, and your own child self who comes out only late at night (when the rest of the family sleeps) to float soundlessly back up to the peach tree, ready to start over again, day after day.

When Elizabeth invites me to a poetry reading, I say to myself: I can handle this.

I, mother of three, can escape for a night. But I get a headache just trying to remember the last reading I attended...ten years ago, was it?! I think so...Tess Gallagher, talking about her life with Raymond Carver. I wondered what Gallagher meant when she mentioned the obligations of running a household (I was teaching a couple classes--using Carver’s Where I’m Calling From--pregnant with my first child, clueless). I remember thinking, Gallagher keeps house? Writers keep house? I clung instead to her next image: Gallagher and Ray looking over one another’s work (guests gone, dishes done) like a pair of horses, one black, one white, pulling the chariot of poetry behind them.

Everything’s lined up: the husband agrees to watch the kids, Liz will drive. I don’t even know who we’ll hear at the bookstore, but I’m busting out. Glitch one: my husband’s cross-country team needs a chaperone for the weekend. Liz’s husband graciously offers to entertain, in addition to their son, my three children; embarrassed by the last-minute ditch, I agree. My two-year old clambers up beside Liz’s husband, and says, Go away Mom, bye. Liz and I don our coats and head for the door. Until (glitch two) my middle child (the five-year-old) falls to the ground, wraps his arms around my ankles, and cries on my shoelaces.

Sure, bring him-- Liz says kindly, she in her lovely black pants, top, scarf. I disengage my son from my snot-damp sweats, zip up the old blue overcoat and take his hand. We’re late; when we walk in a poet’s wrapping up a stanza. We grab a couple seats on the fringe; my son plunks down on the floor. We make it through the next speaker’s comments about the book he’s compiled on Philip Whalen. Then my son (on his stomach) creeps towards the bookshelves on the far wall. The weight-loss section keeps him a few seconds: on one cover, a woman in tight scarlet pants holds a platter of fruit. A few headshots of perky brunettes, blondes, tilted and smiling. My son stealth-crawls, fist over fist, to Relationships: beaming couples that beat the odds and stayed together. I’m wondering where photos of all the couples that didn’t make it end up. My friend’s listening, probably actually absorbing the poetry. When my son starts drumming on the shelves, I scoop him up and step outside.

I’m sorry, I say to Liz when we reappear (my son and I having downed ice-cream cones around the corner and yet another poet at the mic), I have to go. I’m worried about the two-year-old (who informs me indignantly when we get to the house that he’d like to stay longer). It’s not that I can’t stomach poetry anymore--though, on occasion, I too, dislike it (as Marianne Moore opens with in her crucial poem Poetry)—but after eight years of either being pregnant or nursing a baby I’m used to sleeping by 9. I’m grateful we escaped, edging back to the public world of poetry, and for those rare minutes I got to spend alone with my son over scoops of mint-chip ice-cream. I’m just a bad date these days, I remark on the way out of Liz’s house. Don’t mention it, she says, and shortly scores us a pair of tickets to hear Mary Oliver, balcony seats, the parking lot and entire theater--we note with glee--full of people who came out just for the love of poetry.

(See also: A Dangerous Mission: Tess Gallagher by Gary Lehman on Gallagher’s trajectory as a writer and which portion of her writing defines her in the public eye at: http://jmww.150m.com/Gallagher.html )

(For complete text of Moore’s poem: http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/1169.html)

My husband is my Pretentious Monitor. I’ll hand him a fresh poem...

...and if he squinches up his face and says, “Dumb it down,” I know I’m getting stuffy. On the other hand, I can tell if he’s just using that line as an excuse not to focus for more than five minutes on something that doesn’t involve underwater hockey or chainsaws. We’re a good balance that way.

And he’s the one to harass me, when I get rejection slips in the mail, “Was it a poem about me?” I give him The Look. He shakes his head. “Write about me and you’ll be fine.” To appease him this Christmas, I compiled the thirty poems I’ve written in the ten years we’ve been married into a chapbook: The Ironman and the Poet. I caught him on the couch a couple of days actually reading it. Ok, so the poems were either about him or mentioned him. But I took it as a good sign.

At 3 a.m. (having weaned the youngest but unable to sleep after waking three times to rock him back down) I found myself skimming my husband’s copy of Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why by Laurence Gonzales (because the intersection of our secret lives, when we’re not parenting means The love poems of Elizabeth and Robert Browning sit next to Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army; The Warrior Athlete sits next to Richard Bach’s Illusions; Sfar’s graphic novel The Rabbi’s Cat sits next to Lee Child’s One Shot.

By 5 a.m., I finish reading the accounts of snow mobile accidents, disoriented hikers, sailors stranded at sea, a teenager who fell out of an airplane and navigated the jungle alone until she found civilization again (the17 others who survived falling out of the plane decided to stay put and wait for rescue, an iffy decision at best). Arms numb from the two hours of rocking and reading, my son snoring peacefully, I’m wondering how young is too young to sign the kids up for survival camp.

Though Gonzales notes that we start teaching them in the womb—as he observes a woman, pregnant, surfing: “Limor looked like Botticelli’s Birth of Venus out there, drawing the mana into her womb from the sea, filling herself with that energy (p.147)”... and a page earlier, describing what she’ll pass on to the child (surfing in utero): “Now there’s a child out there somewhere who began amassing a critical kind of knowledge about a certain type of energy system before he or she was born. True knowledge.”

Do I start that list, now, of things I did pregnant with the kids, chasing my husband? I’m thinking of the time we got stuck swimming in post-storm waves outside a coral reef just off the Big Island of Hawaii. Last morning of our vacation; “Last chance to swim with the spinner dolphins,” the husband had said to me. 3 month’s pregnant with my youngest son (the former nurser). My daughter, on shore, waving us in. The desire to run across that Kona beach house lawn to her so strong it hurt. A coral reef at low tide to skim with our bellies and chests, the disorienting suck and pull of the receding waves to withstand...

...(sneaking a read over my shoulder, the husband adds, “How about those half-dozen sea urchin spines we pulled out of my instep, or how about you, in your bikini, crawling out of that cove without a single scratch?”) Absolutely: I was in charge of the in utero lesson that day.

It is possible to nurse a 2-year-old and heft a log into the wood burning stove...

...without singeing the hair off either the child’s head or one’s knuckles. You don’t notice how absurd it is (nursing while multi-tasking) until your husband says Jesus, either put the kid down or let me get the pizza out of the oven. It’s easy just to keep on doing whatever works, in the eye of the storm of raising three children, but it’s time. To wean. Soon. Seeing nursing mothers with newborns is always good for bringing me abruptly into the present: my son is now a third of my body height and strong enough to maneuver the breast 360 degrees to stay attached to the nipple while in orbit.

I’m a little at a loss for how to cut him off—since I weaned the other two children when I got pregnant with their siblings. I used to call them 1,3,5,7 nights: my growling, hungry stomach woke me up precisely every two hours to eat. My doctor informed me 67% of mothers wean during pregnancy, even moms with a strong desire to breastfeed—simply because of the nutrient strain it puts on the mother’s body. I was kind of hoping this third child would be the one to just stop. On his own. But. He’s not. Interested in stopping.

The week we weaned our first child was hell—talk to my husband who had been training heavily for an important triathlon. Why now? I remember him saying, as he paced in the living room with our screaming daughter, Vineman race morning approaching. Because I can’t take it any more, I had said, hands on my belly, where the new baby rolled in his amniotic berth. We borrowed the family rocking chair, which would rock smoothly until we were sure our daughter was as on the verge of dreamland. Without fail, from somewhere deep within the crotchety wood—high pitched screaks began. Our girl would wake and whimper; my husband would launch into another round of All the pretty little horses while contorting his back to find the least noisiest place to perch and rock. In the morning I’d take out the Phillips screwdriver and tighten each screw.

Night after night that chair found a way to howl at the critical dropping-off-to-sleep moment. We decided it had to be the family great-great-grandmothers, with little to do in the afterlife except harass us out of our new-age attempts at weaning. Running through my head, in an oddly comforting way, was Plath’s line from Morning Song: One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral. I have so loved nursing each of my children, in turn, and that “cow-heavy” feeling of milk coming in. But I also think of the possibility of a night of uninterrupted sleep. There’s a new ridiculous line noodling its way into my head: All I want for Christmas is my two front breasts...(not that I have rear breasts). That I know of.

I am no Buddha, nor can I get me to a nunnery...

...though at times it is tempting to consider such an escape into the grace of a strict schedule spare of the demands of raising children and navigating marriage: cleaning, food preparation, ritual observance of prayer, the one goal of communing ever more deeply with God (who doesn’t backtalk, at least not 3D). Instead, I can overlay the home sphere with the awareness that reality has given my own temple: this 3-story cabin, the children in it, my husband, the feral cats, our acre of redwoods. There’s no holy removal from the elements—I mean both the four usual elements we speak of (earth, air, etc.) as well as the stormy emotionals. My friend Stephanie (mother of one, confidante-extraordinaire in our shared trackings of all things spiritual) calls it: the domestic monastery. I aspire to create such an overlay.

In the narrowed world of such a monastery, where one’s life revolves around carpool, subscriptions to literary magazines (procured through reading fees to enter written work in contests) provide lift. This week it was Calyx: Journal of Art and Literature by Women and in it I find this passage from a short but powerful prose mother/daughter vignette: After dinner I go outside to let the cicadas vibrate my skin. Sometimes I hum along with them, and if I hit the right note, it’s both good and scary. But I only do this when it’s still light out.—Claudia B. Manley, Of Love and Radishes, Vol. 24, #1, Summer 07 (which I was able to enjoy despite the rejection notice for my work that arrived tucked under the cover. Nothing to take personally—700 poems had been submitted to the poor judge).

So much beautiful work to read, so much to be inspired by, including our new icon of hope, President-elect Obama—consider the open letters to him from thinkers, artists, and writers circulating on the internet, such as the November 6th letter by Alice Walker, who advises Obama: remember that you did not create the disaster that the world is experiencing and you alone are not responsible for bringing the world back to balance. A primary responsibility that you do have, however, is to cultivate happiness in your own life. To make a schedule that permits sufficient time of rest and play with your gorgeous wife and lovely daughters. Imagine being the President and trying to balance your public life and your personal life...Makes me grateful for the tiny balance I’m trying to achieve between the quiet interior life of writing, and the slightly more public, boisterous life I am required, and love, to inhabit with my three little monks and fellow High Priest/husband.

I feel mediocre trying to do it all this season of pumpkins...

(which marks the gradual descent into holiday festivities that I’m struggling to keep simple enough to enjoy). Along with all the other good mothers of America, I stay up late putting costumes in bags and making lunches and baking...and the next day getting the kids dressed for school in the early morning dark since our first night of winter rain knocks out our power. My daughter shrieks, “It’s Halloween and the lights are out...” her joy infectious...and once finally behind the wheel, coursing past the dusky ambers and vibrant reds of the grapevines on Sullivan road, I begin to relax. Two children to deliver to school, one two-year-old to drop off at Grandpa’s, one stop at Long’s for paper napkins, and one final destination with a set of cloth wings, gold skirts and yellow leaves: my friend Karen’s house, where we will don our autumn harvest fairy outfits and head over to the kindergarten to surprise our sons. Karen (mother of four) calms me...when I walk into her house, she’s got a hot mug of tea, a sweet lilting woman singer crooning in the background, and something pumpkin baking for the activity past this one. Over her pot of eye glitter, we list our littany of must-dos and laugh. I’m ok again, in the company of another mother.

Which is why I loved this week’s article in The Bohemian featuring former Sonoma County Poet Laureate Terry Ehret, mother of three daughters: “Rather than fighting the situation,” (of trying to find uninterrupted writing time), “Ehret says she ‘embraced the aesthetic of interruption,’ as a way of mirroring her reality and honoring the fragmentation common to women’s lives” (Bart Schneider’s 10/22/08 Lit Life column). I embraced her philosophy all of Halloween, putting my thoughts about which poems to send Margie’s Strong Medicine Awards on hold until after the kindergarten celebration—when Grandpa and Grandma would take the three children home for the afternoon. If I was to meet my deadline, the power would have to be on at home again so I could print the poems; then there was the checkbook to retrieve from the van at Grandpa’s house. An hour later, wings sticking to my seat covers, I rushed to the post office where I watched the postmaster in Forestville put that magical red postmark on my envelopes. Mailing out submissions would have to count for writing day colliding with Halloween.

Not perfect, but good enough. Like earlier in the week when the kids were fighting and I sent my son to the yard to salvage the pie tin from its fate as second base. Shortly we had pumpkin shards simmering in the steamer, a container full of slime-stranded seeds to toast, and three happy kids with a handful of pie dough. Somewhere in the simultaneous popping of the pine rounds in the wood-burning stove and the vigorous undenting of the pie tin, I failed to notice we’d boiled off all our pumpkin steaming water. Another sacrificial pan, I sighed, at the sight of the electric range burner snake glowing through the bottom. Half the pulp went to the compost, and half to our pie. But even the husband had a second piece of our mediocre pie.

Backsplash--(while we're on the subject...

...of toilets) is the term for what happens to you when you do something for yourself that doesn’t include the kids and they’re loose somewhere in the house minus your hyper-vigilance. (I was going to credit New Jersey-momma-of-two Maureen for the word describing the phenomenon—until she corrected me: she’d actually said, “Blowback,” defined by Wikipedia as: “a term used in espionage to describe the unintended consequences of covert operations.”) I know she'd forgive the Freudian slip--it betrays a mother's position: close proximity to dirt, and other organic, earthy elements.

But we’re not the CIA, so maybe I should stick with backsplash: the 6 dresser drawers strewn about on the floor, because the five-year-old got his t-shirt without you (while you read the latest issue of Sow’s Ear), or the entire alphabet of Scrabble letters jammed between the deck boards (while you scanned Poets and Writers for upcoming deadlines), or the dismemberment of the husband’s G. I. Joe collection one fuzzy head and muscled forearm at a time (while you updated your blog), or the sleepless night after the long nap the littlest takes, when you foolishly wrote feverishly and thought, my God, I’m getting somewhere...when you really should have stormed the little trooper awake and gone back to gluing hairy bits of yarn and damp noodles to construction paper.

But would I go back to the immaculate mid-western post-graduate flat, with its shiny wooden floors, house plants I had time to water, writing desk at an angle to the corner of the room, one load of laundry to wash and sort, the routine of teaching two sections of literature, scoring essays on the side, vacuuming the floor of the crystal/gem store downtown on closing shifts? Nah—best to forgo those pre-marriage days of writing sour love stories with flowery titles better boiled down to include, “UTI in Paris,” “Panic attack in Grand Canyon,” “Chatting again, in bed, about your ex-wife,” or, “Abandoned again for the dog.”

So I remain anchored in time, here (with three children, a husband, five feral cats) in the beautiful mess of a house, and in Egypt, having just finished Michelle Moran’s novel Nefertiti: Queen of Egypt, Daughter of Eternity, imagining what it would feel like to be Nefertiti, birthing her six daughters while opposite her on the marital yoke, first wife Kiya birthed two sons. I ferreted out Moran’s novel because I am working on a series of poems written from various points of view—Nefertiti’s, her pharoah man’s, her sculptor’s, etc. The cost of finishing Moran’s novel? one gnarly morning making pancakes and getting kids ready for school with a reading hangover—you know the one—painful white fog between the eyes...somewhat mitigated by the delicious bliss of having gotten away with reading an entire book (between midnight and 5 a.m) without once hearing, “Mom? Mom?! Where are you?!”