poet mama

Being pregnant and accepting this new motherhood thing is so much easier when I can simultaneously embrace the things that keep me sane and creative. However, those very things are as likely to drag me into the undertow of major moral questions as buoy me past the big waves. My hobbies and passions sneakily create in my mind dilemmas over how to raise my child and/or what world will be waiting for this baby, to serve as its background noise while it tries to make its way and its own moral choices. (You mean, I don't have to/get to make all the decisions for my offspring??!) So, I'm trying to rally to maintain self during the first trying months. Poetry must not be set apart from mommy-ing, for example, or mommy will lose it.

I run a poetry slam. It's fun, and perhaps something to put on the "do not discard" list for my postpartum world, but it doesn’t automatically make me a poet; it makes me an organizer. However, I do write poetry. And sometimes that makes me a poet. This week is a particularly good week for that. Three appearances under the title "poet". After the famine, the feast. The first of the week was last Friday. I got to do a featured reading at one of the local bookstores along with another poet friend of mine. It was so much fun, not just because I read stuff I felt confident about that had been begging for an audience, but because so many friends came out to support me. Friends rule. I still maintain that the highlight of deciding to get married, was the reward of having so many friends in one place at one time.

Sometimes the coolest stuff is just that – cool. What more can you say? While stuff we thought might be weird or boring or potentially less than cool, holds our interest the most in terms of the analysis we do in retrospect of it, or the stories we seem to keep telling about it. Yeah, so, I did this other reading this weekend. It was a 15-minute slot in a line up of various entertainment for an event held in a shi-shi-foo-foo hotel to benefit the local hostel. While the word "hostel" brings up images of bedraggled backpackers clutching maps and bumming cigarettes, the word "benefit" brings up images of clam shells bursting open to offer their single pearls, jewels of nature, to be strung and hung around the necks of blunt cut blondes in hounds tooth. Slightly incompatible mental pictures in my world. And I wondered how my pedestrian poetry was going to fly with the over-55 bling-bling crowd of the central coast. I know it's probably an unfair assessment all around. Life is unfair, get used to it.

So I read my stuff. They chuckled and nodded and in general seemed engaged and attentive. Hmm. Nice. In one piece of mine I read, there is a brief line in Spanish that repeats and is integral to the poem. I asked beforehand if there were any Spanish speakers present. Not a hand went up in the packed room. Not a single hand. In a room of people sworn to be undying supporters of travel and cultural exchange, hostelling their way to a better understanding of the world. In a room of people all living for most of their many decades in a state originally held by Mexico, in a city that was the center of Mexican California, in a town full of streets with names of saints and topographical elements all in Spanish, where so much of daily life is posted bilingually, you'd have to really go out of your way not to pick up at least a skeleton vocabulary just by osmosis. Maybe there were Swahili speakers there instead, or perhaps several people knew the basics of Urdu. Still.

I couldn't help it. I was shocked. You would have thought I'd asked who would be willing to come in the servants' entrance. I tried to hide my horror and amazement and move on quickly, translating the line, as I would have even with some bilingual souls at hand. But if anyone was watching closely, I'm sure they would have been able to detect those suspended moments of incomprehension in my eyes before I recovered.

I want to believe that it's different now. It's a generational thing. I want to believe that my child will grow up in a world where this kind of thing just couldn't happen. I want to believe that I'm not just a snobbish linguaphile, and that being monolingual is no longer an option. But I'm concerned. I'm thinking about the distinctions among cycles, evolution, and that simple pendulum effect. What brings about one or another? Which is truer? Will ethnicity matter more or less in the foreseeable future? Will the painful realities of global markets and the undeniable truths of global interdependence be reconciled? Will it be the age of GMOs or CSAs? Can we cherish our neighbors across the globe while demanding local justice? Will poetry be in vogue when my baby is a hip high school hormone factory?

Nonetheless, in the moment, we carried on, the audience and I, each with our judgements, our scripts firmly secured.

At the break after the reading, I was surrounded by half a dozen well-dressed women who wanted to compliment me on my work. The first to corner me, daintily holding to her tiny square of brownie and her glass of purple punch, wanted to discuss a poem of mine I wrote about my ESL students. "I cried when you read it," she told me, and promptly proceeded to well up again. Dude. No way.

Sure, I've had people cry around me and writing before, but usually in writing workshops. In these incidents, it's the unsuspecting novice who thinks they'd just like to take this class and --what-the-heck-- try out writing, who ends up going with some seemingly innocuous prompt until they find that unexplored pain – it's always right below the surface – and much to their surprise are weeping through a reading of their free write. Writing is dangerous territory if you plan to tuck away your blemishes and remain guarded. I try to warn them, but they have to experience it themselves. I let them marvel when they tell me, "I can't believe I'm crying!" I keep it to myself that it means we're both doing something right. They've dealt with enough for one day.

But this was different. Something I wrote brought someone there. Well, whaddaya know. And since I'm usually such a leaky Sally, it's so nice to have someone else do the crying for a change! Foiled again, Batman, a pearl necklace does not an insensitive soul make. Now maybe I can also hope that someone really did catch the momentary flash of fright in my eyes when no hand lifted to claim knowledge of Spanish, that they saw it and they got it. Give me evolution. Pendulums are for politics; we are people.

All this, food for thought. Feed me poetry and I can manage anything. Even motherhood. But despite prettied lines or eloquent commentary, the questions you're left with don't get easier.