I am again in a small blue room
with the bedroom windows open wide
and the breeze is alive in the thin
white curtains and the boy in the crib
doesn’t cry as he lies on his back
and my eyes are closed as I try
to be boring so he will sleep.
The music on the radio is smooth
and full, soothing and warm.
I had never heard slack key before.
Eighteen years later, it is easy
to feel the sweetness of those shaded
hours in a way I couldn’t then.
But I do not chastise that younger self
for not perceiving beauty. She was
tired. And hurting. A gaping wound.
I don’t lecture her about how
she should be better. I just hum
to the music now familiar and love her.
The notes shimmer like forgiveness in the air.
Posts Tagged ‘mothering’
When I Listen Tonight to Slack Key Guitar
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged memory, mothering, self love, self-forgiveness on February 1, 2025| 10 Comments »
Global Slowing
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged geology, love, mothering, parrenting, time on May 21, 2021| Leave a Comment »
It goes so fast, they say,
and clearly they don’t mean
today, which moves at the speed
of tectonic plates, not today
when holding a child
means not holding
that child because
they refuse to be held.
Sometimes, being a mother
is to move at the rate
of fear, the rate
of betrayal, the rate
of loss. Today,
to be a mother
is be ancient
oceanic crust that creeps
at ten centimeters a year.
Someday, perhaps tomorrow,
love will again be meteor,
but today it’s intense heat
at the core. It’s the slow scrape
of two great plates,
something cool
waiting to be warmed.
Motherhood
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beaver, home, mothering, parenting, resilience on April 30, 2021| 1 Comment »
—with thanks to the wise Rebecca Mullen
Today, again, I praise the beaver
who spends her life building,
rebuilding, rebuilding
her lodge where her young will live.
With small sticks and big sticks
and tall solid trunks,
with logs and rocks and mud,
with her teeth she builds a home,
builds it on moving water.
Because rain, because snow,
because warm, because cold,
because flow, because flow, because flow,
her home is forever in need of repair.
And so on a day when a surprise storm
has flooded the stream
and washed much of my lodge away,
I honor the beaver,
stalwart, resilient, habitual.
I notice the longing to move to land,
then I gather new sticks of courage.
Stones of forgiveness.
Logs of compassion
and the deep sticky mud of love.
I wade to the middle
of the current.
I, like all the other mothers,
I build this home again.
Inviting Obama for Dinner
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged dinner, kids, manners, mothering, obama, thanksgiving on November 28, 2020| 2 Comments »
I no longer remember much of etiquette
from reading White Gloves and Party Manners,
so when Obama doesn’t come to our house
for Thanksgiving dinner, I needn’t worry
that I’ve forgotten how to address a former president
in an informal setting. I do, however, remind my kids
that if Obama were sitting with us,
they would want to remember to put their napkins
in their laps. They do.
And you probably don’t want to lick the serving spoon,
I add, as it goes from the cranberry sauce
into an eager mouth. And we don’t talk about farting.
The whole time Obama isn’t eating mashed potatoes with us,
we wonder what he is eating with his family
and what they are talking about,
and if he might not just accept an invitation
to our home for dinner. If he did,
we agree we would refrain from using the knife
with the butter dish to butter our own bread.
And, uncertain how to address him,
we’d just ask him personally how he’d like be called.
I’d like to believe that Obama might actually show up.
He’d knock at the door in his elegant and humble way,
no fanfare, holding a side dish of roasted brussels sprouts,
and we’d listen as he told us what he’s up to these days.
As it is, it’s kinda fun when he doesn’t show up
and we act like ourselves. I eat my green beans
with my fingers—they taste better that way.
My daughter plays with the candlewax.
Sometimes, I lick my plate.
One for the Fencing Championship
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged competition, fencing, mothering, poem, poetry on March 15, 2018| Leave a Comment »
What Every Mother Knows
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged chores, love, mothering, poem, poetry on March 12, 2018| Leave a Comment »
And it’s scrub the floors
and wash and wring,
run to the store,
fix everything,
and wash and wring,
and straighten drawers
remember to bring
bags to the store,
clean anything,
then clean some more
fix everything—
it’s in our chores
that love finds wings.
One Wonder
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged mothering, parenting, poem, poetry, son on January 10, 2018| 2 Comments »
On the Morning of the Thirteen Year Old’s Birthday
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged loving, mothering, poem, poetry, September 11 on September 11, 2017| 5 Comments »
This morning, like every morning,
his mother rises with her heart open.
Somehow, overnight, it has healed.
She is not like the paper doll
that, when wrinkled by callousness,
will not ever return to its former shape.
No, somehow the heart not only heals,
it grows bigger—some miracle she cannot
understand. She thinks back
to the day he was born, the day
the towers fell. As she went into labor,
she thought no, not today, no not today,
until some strange grace slipped into her
and spoke the new words,
of course today, of course today.
How beautifully, how forcefully
love insists on itself. How astonishing,
the daily miracle that leads us
again to each other.
Independence
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged daughter, independence, mothering, poem, poetry, swimming, wave on August 1, 2016| 1 Comment »
The girl with her goggles on pouts when the waves end.
You didn’t stay with me, she says. She holds on to my arm,
as we bob in the clear blue water of the pool. You stay with me,
she says. All around us, the high sun of summer makes
everything gleam. We splash and bob until the bell sounds,
and a collective squeal erupts from the crowded pool.
I stay as I have been told. The waves begin, small at first,
and the girl hangs on. And then the man-made surf
thrashes at our bodies, tugs at our suits. I do not
remember her letting go. I remember watching her head
disappear beneath the wave and her smile as she
emerged on the other side before she dove into the next swell.
Foreign Tongues
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged language, mothering, poem, poetry on May 24, 2016| 7 Comments »
We sometimes slip into w-wanguage,
a tongue my son invented, though no longer speaks.
My daughter and I are the two sole speakers
and we often find ourselves saying
What wa wabulous way, or
Womma, wan wi wease wave wore wapples?
The rules are simple.
We break them anyway,
forgetting to w or tripping over
our own expectations of how a word should sound.
In the end, the desire to speak clearly
and to be understood always wins.
Other times we’ll speak in nonsense syllables,
long strings of babble bellowed or crooned.
We’ll wave our hands, as if there is something
really at stake—like the desire to be understood.
Perhaps this is why whatever syllables
she utters, I will eventually echo them back,
stroking her hair, looking her right in the eye,
letting her know for certain
I know exactly what she means.
From the Pod
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged dolphin, help, mothering, poem, poetry on April 20, 2015| 3 Comments »
Did you know, she says,
that dolphins will help
an injured animal
reach the surface so it can breathe?
She is six, and she shares
this new knowledge with anyone
she meets—a teacher, a waitress,
a woman in the airport, a man
in line at the store.
Perhaps she is already
somehow aware
that every one of us
is in treacherous waters
in need of a little nudge
from beneath that guides us
to emerge.
Tonight I Can Write the Saddest Lines
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged colic, love, mothering, poem, poetry on January 16, 2015| 6 Comments »
Sometimes I go about pitying myself, and all the time I am being carried on great winds across the sky.
—Chippewa, translated by Robert Bly
You have to love your baby.
I didn’t. Not the mornings
he woke, the wails already trembling
on his tiny rose lips. Not the twisting
and stiffening of his perfectly
muscled limbs. Not his face staining red
as he screamed in my arms.
Not the hours, not the days, not the
weeks nor months of bouncing
and rocking and swaying and swaddling.
I wanted to make it stop. I wanted
a different child, one that would
giggle and babble and gurgle and coo
and smile. It was only after I lost
my every hope and forgot my
last expectation that love came in
with its strong lungs and ferocious will
and it’s broken dreams, it arrived
looking only like the child I held,
not at all like the child I thought I wanted.
Though I Have Never Seen The Pieta in Person, It Touches Me
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Michelangelo, mothering, ownership, Pieta, poem, poetry on November 18, 2014| 3 Comments »
It is not so much the look on Mary’s face,
as if she is yet untouched by the tragedy.
It is not so much the diagonal drape
of the dead Christ’s arm, nor the empty folds
of the virgin’s dress. It’s the name that catches me,
Michelangelo Buonarroti, chiseled in the sash
that runs between Mary’s breasts, as if to say,
“This is my work, and it is good.”
Oh Mary, holding your son, dead,
what do you know about wanting to own something
that cannot be owned? Just this morning
my own six-year-old girl curled into my lap
and reached up with her right hand to clasp
my shirt in her fist. You never ever go, she said,
sprawling across me, loaning me all of her weight.
I love to find my signature in this girl—
the greenish gray color of her eyes,
the way she loves to read. The color of her skin,
her silly side. Mary, how did you do it, say goodbye?
I run my hands over the startling muscles of her legs,
trace the shape of her jaw, the length of her neck.
Oh the body, how it loves to touch, oh the soul, how
it blossoms by letting go. And the ego, oh how it wants
to say, this is mine, this is mine,
though the mind knows the way that all things go—
even the glass surrounding the Carrara marble,
even the marble, the cathedral, the square.
Even the girl, who leaps up to chase the cat.
Even her mother retelling the story of longing
and love and fear. Even the story itself.
Mother’s Day Poems
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged daughter, mother's day, mothering, poem, poetry, Telluride Inside and Out on May 10, 2014| Leave a Comment »
For all the mothers–two poems about mothering. One for my mother in specific, the other for all of us. Happy Mother’s Day, and I say that knowing that it is not always happy. Still, there are so many blessings on this path of being both daughter and mother.
Daily Round
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged chores, daily life, mothering, poem, poetry on July 6, 2013| 1 Comment »
Slowly
the
mower
the
woman
behind
it
and
slower
the
hoer
the
woman
who
holds
it
and
near
still
the
holder
of
he
who
is crying
and
nearer
his
whisper
her
shudder
his
why-
ing.
Wouldn’t It Be Funny
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged brokenness, children, gardening, mothering, poem, poetry, wholeness on May 29, 2013| 2 Comments »
It is hard to not resent the ants
and grasshoppers, even though
they are doing the only thing
their bodies know how to do—
to eat what is green as they find it.
They do not know that these greens
are the first pea shoots, that if only
they waited another week or two
there would be thousands more leaves
for the eating and still enough left
for the peas to mature.
But no, they take the first green,
and now in the row against the fence
there are long stretches of nothing
but broken stems and empty earth.
Just today my son asked me
what a mosaic was, and I told him
it was the act of making art
out of broken bits of things.
Wouldn’t it be funny, he said,
if the whole world broke and
we made a mosaic from what was left.
My whole life I have clung
to some idea that the world
could be more whole than it is,
and then today, a twist.
I’m not saying I don’t resent
the ants, the grasshoppers
and their wake of fruitlessness.
I’m just seeing that everything’s broken.
And then there’s the art of the mess.
Some Call it Noise
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged childhood, mothering, music, piano, poem, poetry, rhythm, sound on May 21, 2013| 5 Comments »
“Mom,” he says,
“I love this note.”
I sit beside my boy
on the bench
and I say, “It’s a D,
a low D.”
And he plays
the white key
again and again
and again and
again with animal
ferocity. “Can you find
another D?” I ask,
and he finds another,
to my delight, and another
and another and another.
Then he plays the Ds
with two hands—
one a bass and one
a thrumming, heavy beat.
Again, again,
again, again,
his body is a-thrill
with it. “I love this note,”
he says again,
his eyes electric,
wild with tone,
“Mom”, he says,
“will you write
this down?
Please mom,”
he begs, as he
hammers the Ds
with an almost
violent grace.
While he sleeps,
I draw the darksome notes
in his rhythmic trance
on two otherwise empty staves.
The notes are the Union
Pacific westbound;
and they are the boy,
his feet eager as he pounds
across the field;
and they are the railing
of hail in the orchard;
and they are the hands
of a boy who is banging
out his rampant joy, freed
from a language
dipped in lead,
God, he’s free,
he is pushing all of himself
into D; and they are
the boulders
tumbled by snowmelt,
thundering along
the full riverbed;
the sound of the heart
when it beats for no reason
except that it
was made to beat.
Vivian Learns Present Progressive
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged being present, daughter, language acquisition, mothering, verb tenses on May 13, 2013| 1 Comment »
Vivian Learns Present Progressive
Finn says to me yesterday, on Mother’s Day, “Mom, when is kid’s day?” My husband replied, “Everyday.” So in that spirit of the ongoing celebration of our children–how they teach us and undo us–here’s a poem published today in the beautiful Journey of the Heart blog.
Though the King Might Not Agree
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beauty, daughter, mothering, poem, poetry, rumplestiltskin, value on May 7, 2013| 3 Comments »
All this must be spun tonight. —The Brothers Grimm
She does not care
that the gems
are not real.
She wears
the necklace
and feels beautiful.
She does not care
that the shoes
are not true glass slippers.
In the low angled sun
she slips across
the scuffed maple floors
and dances in clear plastic shoes
bought on sale at Target
to music that only she can hear.
She hums and twirls
in the dimming light.
She is not like
the miller’s daughter.
She knows how,
all by herself,
to spin what is useless
and cheap
into gold.
How We Try to Shape Things
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged daughter, empowerment, letting go, mothering, poem, poetry on May 5, 2013| 2 Comments »
There are no arms
on the woman in the picture,
the one my daughter
drew and handed to me,
saying, “Mommy, this is you.”
She was so proud, her eyes
so alive, and the green crayon lines
show a woman with long hair,
long legs and a big lopsided smile.
And no arms.
It is not that I mind being elbowless,
but my friend Jack once told me
that children who draw people with no arms
are disempowered, and there
are studies to prove it, he said,
how their lack of agency
lasts into adulthood.
I want to show her, “Here,
darling, here is where the arms go.”
But instead I say, “The green lines
look strong. And her smile
makes me smile.” I kiss her,
and tell her thank you,
and she squeezes me, her two small
arms so strong, I notice, even when
they let me go.