The Fertile Source will be on a two-week hiatus while the editor is out of town. We will resume our Monday postings of great literature on August 2nd. Thanks!
Archive for the 'Uncategorized' Category
Monica Murphy LeMoine, Catalyst Book Press’s latest author, is interviewed on She Writes by by poetry editor Tania Pryputniewicz. Please check out what she has to say about losing a baby and writing with humor even when the subject is a hard one.
This week, I’m going to re-publish a guest post by Tania Pryputniewicz, our poetry editor, originally published on Everyday Intensity. We’re planning a changed look to the site sometime over the summer, to give it a more magazine-y feel. Along with that, we’re launching a more concerted effort to find great poems, essays, stories, photos, and artwork about fertility, infertility, and adoption related topics. Please pass that information along to any writers and artists you know.
“So You Say You’re a Poetry Editor…”
by Tania Pryputniewicz of The Fertile Source, with additional remarks by Christine Klocek-Lim (Autumn Sky) and Marjorie Tesser (The Mom Egg)
Six years ago when my daughter started preschool, I found companions of heart in other mothers. The director of the preschool hosted a book club in her home, bringing together two of my favorite subjects under one roof: literature and motherhood. Halfway through the year, taking advantage of Poetry magazine’s offer to send out free copies of its yearly Translation issue to bookclubs, I attempted to put poetry on the map for our little group.
I also (the teacher in me) passed out a handout of compiled poems which included Thom Gunn’s Baby Song, Brigid Murnagham’s For my Mother, Anne Sexton’s Pain for a Daughter, Eavan Boland’s Dawn, Sylvia Plath’s Baby Song, Joan Logghe’s twenty six, Mark Strand’s Where Are the Water’s of Childhood, and D.H. Lawrences’ Baby Running Barefoot.
Once we were all assembled with our coffee and spritzers in hand, I asked, “What did you think?” After a half minute or so of silence, our preschool director (who kept us frequently in stitches with her childrearing stories and really should write a book of her own) read a poem of Wendell Berry’s to us from a volume her sister mailed to her. One member read a sweet poem she’d written herself in sixth grade. And that was about it; my friends resumed an earlier conversation about fundraising money for the children’s school.
In fairness to the group, I found the introductions to each of the translations compelling and poetic, whereas the actual poems didn’t lend themselves so easily to newcomers to poetry. I found myself tongue-tied and unable to stand up for my first love (poetry), unable to woo my companions by reading aloud even Firefly Under the Tongue by Coral Bracho, which begs to be performed.
And frankly, I’ve been as guilty as the rest of the bookclub members (after three minutes of discussing The Bean Trees or Rain of Gold) of dodging the material at hand in favor of a second chocolate-chip cookie, steering the discussion back to what keeps me up at night: troubleshooting junior. But I left that evening questioning the importance of poetry-at least for a good couple of hours.
As a mother with an MFA, I wanted to know: what might hold the interest of these other women who infused my daily life with the energy to keep going, face my children, my husband, and most importantly: myself? When the opportunity arose to come on board as poetry editor at The Fertile Source (an on-line zine founded and run by Jessica Powers where one can find writing and artwork on all aspects of birth, fertility, labor, miscarriage and adoption), I said yes, despite the slow modem on our acre in the redwoods, my three young children, the five feral cats, the fact that our family is straddling two cities in order to stay ahead of our mortgage, and finally, the draw to write and send out my own work.
Despite such a list, here was the opportunity to be a small part of bringing accessible, unflinching, at times pithy, at times lyrical, poetry to an international audience on the web. I hope the poems not only provide a mirror for women and their families facing similar life experiences, but also that collectively they shed light on our understanding of what it means to be female and be born with the privilege, or at least the expectation of, the ability to give birth. And all that follows: the utter transformation of one’s marriage, relationships to prior children and oneself, the inescapable morphing of the physical body, the devastating grief that encompasses the inability to bear a child.
Saying yes to the job was easy; actually engaging with the nitty gritty of choosing poems and having to write rejection letters continues to prove challenging. With Jessica’s help, I settled on a standard rejection note, suddenly understanding one uses a form rejection not for lack of empathy or care, but due to the importance of keeping a respectful, professional relationship with the writers offering their work. When time allows, I will add an extra sentence or two. I also enjoy working with writers willing to make minor edits; when the work stays with me, and there’s some small change we can make to streamline the poem, I’ll go out on a limb and make a suggestion.
The joy of the job comes via the range of submissions and viewpoints. The subject matter can’t help but be rich and intense, whether writers are focusing on a miscarriage, the fears and joys they hold out for their unborn children, or the exhaustion and elation of those first few months as a brand new parent.
With a mere six months behind me as a poetry editor, I decided to ask a couple of more seasoned poetry editors about their experiences, specifically asking what they found the most challenging, and the most rewarding about the role. I also asked them about their own current writing projects.
Christine Klocek-Lim at The Autumn Sky replies:
What I find most challenging about being a poetry editor begins and ends with the submissions. When I first began Autumn Sky Poetry, I asked for work from poets I admired or whose poems I found on various public and private workshops online. Then, for a few years after I opened up submissions, the volume I received was small. However, the number of poems I’ve received in the past few years has been growing, and while I’m incredibly pleased that so many people like the journal, it’s been more difficult to keep up.
I set aside a few weeks before each issue goes live to read all the poems at once, but what used to take one day now can take up to two weeks and sometimes more. It’s daunting, especially sending out rejections. With every issue this becomes more difficult because though there are more amazing poems, there are also more poems that aren’t. And though many may not believe this, it’s almost as unpleasant to send out rejections as it is to receive them. Every time I send one out I remember what it feels like to get a rejection. I hate to have to send bad news out into the world.
What I find most rewarding about editing Autumn Sky Poetry is the people I meet. I never anticipated how many poets would send me their work, and how lovely it’s been over the years to find myself part of the poetry community. Even now I sometimes can’t believe that so many incredible artists would give me their work and trust me to get the poems out there where others can see them.
It gives me a great sense of accomplishment knowing that I’m helping to promote this art, this love of language by showcasing the work of both new and established poets. It sounds trite, but really, I love it. I couldn’t do this if it weren’t for the people. I don’t make any money from this, and I don’t anticipate ever doing so. I simply love the words and the people who create the poems.
At the moment I’m working on a new poetry manuscript titled “Glimpse.” It’s a series of prose poems told from different points of view, like snapshots of people’s lives, some based on current events and some based on emotional or philosophical conflicts that interest me. I’m revising my novel, “The Quantum Archives,” and have sent it out to a few contests. I have two other poetry manuscripts I hope to get published: “Dark matter,” a set of astronomical poems, and “Cloud studies,” a sonnet sequence.
This summer I’m hoping to write the sci-fi novel that’s been kicking around my head for the last few years and in between my personal writing projects, I will continue to publish Autumn Sky Poetry. Given the success of last year’s art issue, I’m planning another one for this October when I will publish ekphrastic poems and poems with accompanying artwork. I’m also hoping to release another issue of Autumn Sky Poetry on the iPad. The January issue looks fantastic and I can’t wait to see the current issue on the device.
And Marjorie Tesser, editor of The Mom Egg, replied:
The most challenging aspect of editing a literary publication is time-editing a work takes an enormous amount of it-not just selecting pieces, assembling the manuscript and publishing, but also communicating with the writers and promoting the book. Of course, in larger publications, these duties are shared, but there are a surprising number of small presses and literary magazines that are one or two-person operations.
Another challenge is communicating gently with those whose work is not accepted for the publication. For each issue, we must turn down more people than we accept. Often these are writers whose work is respected and has merit, but just didn’t fit with the issue. Or new writers, whose work isn’t so polished, but we don’t want to discourage them. As a writer myself, I appreciate publications that communicate respectfully, whether good news or bad!
Foremost in the rewards of editing is the little shock of pleasure when, in ploughing through a mountain of manuscripts, you read something wonderful! It is also rewarding to “discover” new writers. The Mom Egg (an annual collection of work by and about mothers) has been the initial publication venue for several poets who have gone on to publish and perform in many other places, to great acclaim. It’s satisfying to help nurture those talents and share those voices.
Selecting works and piecing together a manuscript is also enjoyable. Much like a single author’s poetry book, an anthology must live as an organic whole as well as a collection of great individual pieces. Discovering the “body” of the collection is often somewhat like sculpting, where you remove excess material to reveal a form. This is a creative exercise, and very satisfying. An editor of a literary publication is also creating a community, not only of work but of people. Through my participation in Bowery Books (an independent poetry press) and The Mom Egg, I’ve had the opportunity to meet an extraordinary group of writers, whose work and lives have inspired me.
Christine Klocek-Lim received the 2009 Ellen La Forge Memorial Prize in poetry. In 2010, her manuscript “Dark matter” was a semi-finalist for the Sawtooth Poetry Prize and the Philip Levine Prize in Poetry and her manuscript “The Quantum Archives” was a semi-finalist at Black Lawrence Press’ Black River Chapbook Competition. She has two chapbooks: How to photograph the heart (The Lives You Touch Publications, November 2009) and The book of small treasures (Seven Kitchens Press, March 2010). Her poems have appeared in Nimrod, OCHO, Poets and Artists (O&S), The Pedestal Magazine, Diode, the anthology Riffing on Strings: Creative Writing Inspired by String Theory and elsewhere. She is editor of Autumn Sky Poetry and her website is www.novembersky.com.
Marjorie Tesser is editor of Bowery Books, an independent poetry press, and editor of The Mom Egg, a literary journal (http://themomegg.com). She co-edited the anthologies Bowery Women: Poems (Bowery Books 2006) with Bob Holman, and Estamos Aquí-Poems of Migrant Farmworkers with Holman and Janine Pommy Vega. Her manuscript, The Important Thing Is… was the winner of the inaugural Firewheel Chapbook Award, and will be published by Firewheel Editions this spring. She curates a women’s poetry reading series in New York City and is currently working on a new poetry chapbook and a novel.
by Anne Champion
SMALL WRECKAGE
I.
The women stood at the door
with their rosaries, thrusting
the tiny beads into my hand.
I had been told to have my music on,
or maybe wear a hat, look down,
pay them no mind.
But I took them, repeating
quietly Dickinson’s lines
that had run through
my head all morning:
Shame need not crouch
In a world such as ours.
Shame-stand erect!-
The universe is yours.
II.
Who supports you in your decision today?
I pause, remember something he said
the night before:
Under different circumstances,
I could see you being a really good mother.
III.
You’d think I’d feel godless
the moment my body cried out
and the cramps came in waves
like fists beating at my insides.
But I imagined the Pieta,
in my blurred focus
of the woman standing over me,
not my mother,
cradling my head, placing
the cool washcloth to my brow, caressing
my hand, whispering
It’s okay.
You’re almost done.
IV.
My friend that came with me
said that sometimes she regretted it,
sometimes she still awoke
in the middle of the night
dreaming tiny palms beat
at the window to be let in,
but it turns out to be only a branch or rain,
as if the world wants to remind her
that it’s still there.
V.
The night I told him,
he slipped his hand beneath
my robe and caressed me.
Then he crawled beneath the blanket,
stood on his knees, and wrapped
it around his back, before he threw himself
upon me, so that the blanket followed,
inflating like a parachute,
collapsing above our heads.
And then it was like any other time
and every other man I’ve kissed:
everything went black,
and then went black again.
VI.
Sex is the only common religion
we all worship. On our knees,
we become both God and prayer,
devotion in its purest,
most fervent form.
Yet how consistently we
crush our idols.
VII.
I asked the woman to see it,
but all there was to see
was a dark spot on the screen,
the shape and size of a lima bean,
a blip on the radar of my life,
small wreckage to be sunk
in the vast ocean,
inconsequential.
VII.
When I came to, the woman
guided me to a wheelchair.
I asked for something to vomit in,
and began creating a hierarchy of pain,
running moments through my head
that hurt worse-the tattoo I got when
I was eighteen, the broken thumb,
the infected wisdom teeth,
a broken heart.
SINGLE GIRLS
for Adrinna Morris
We are not the women on TV,
not the women of light and shadows,
sitting at bars, looking at each other
through the transparent colors
of glowing red, green, purple, and blue
we sip on, no crescent lemon twist
lying at the bottom of the martini glass,
nothing to make us feel wild
and desirable.
*
This world was not designed for one.
The monthly rent and bills assume at least two,
a couple to justify the cost.
Everywhere we turn we see
“value” and “family size;”
a box of macaroni and cheese
becomes a waste of money and food
and then there’s the stench
of old produce and expired milk;
we scour grocery aisles
for small cans of beans.
*
I lay on your bed in sweatshirt and jeans,
and you’re in your pajamas listening
to me cry, again, over him.
You have your new baby on your knee
and she can’t stop crying either.
I ask relentlessly, When? How?
I am a broken machine.
*
Your daughter is marvelous
in her lack of a past. Her skin,
translucent with the first bloom of life,
her wondrous brown eyes,
shiny marbles gazing up at me.
I don’t want to believe
that she, too, will have to reinvent
herself over and over again
and, like us, hope
to be good at it someday.
*
Tonight the moon shows
only her good side.
The other side is slid neatly
into the sky’s darkness
like a slit in an envelope.
She does this sometimes, slips
part of herself quietly from sight,
forced to go under.
Anne Champion recently finished her MFA in Poetry at Emerson College. She has work previously published in Our Time is Now, The Minnetonka Review, Pank Magazine, The Aurorean, and elsewhere. She was also a 2009 recipient of The Academy of American Poets Prize. She currently teaches Freshman
Composition at Emerson College, Pine Manor College, and Massachusetts College of Pharmacy.
You may read some of her other work at the following links:
http://www.glass-poetry.com/volume-two/issue-three.html
http://foggedclarity.com/contributors/#anne
http://www.pankmagazine.com/?p=358
In honor of our founding fathers and mothers, we’re taking a holiday this week. See you next Monday!
by Leslie Contreras Schwartz
My right boot ruptures like a heart valve tearing,
tenderly and exact-a zipper splits while I think
of the being inside, housed in a pyramid
in the hushed, broad portion of myself that waits.
Sting hums in the abdomen, an invading horde
of hungry bees swelling to a foreign hive. Holding in
what must look like a just-discovered ruby,
stained with the soil of the body, rust-raw,
it climbs from the rooms of some god’s foggy breath,
as if to rise after the heat of a boiling rain that falls like a salve.
Yet who says I am ready to be someone’s mother?
What room of myself-O lord of seed and sinew-
will muscle, bone, blooming, find a place to reside?
What-part of me bubbles over, to disappear in the thirsty earth.
Leslie Contreras Schwartz is an MFA Poetry student in the Warren Wilson College program. She lives in Houston, Texas.
by Bobby Byrd
Esther Chávez Cano died in Juárez on Christmas Day. She was 76 years old. She was a hero, a fronteriza woman who in the early 1990s in Juárez saw the continuing tragedy of women being killed and decided to do something about it. With much help she started Casa Amiga near downtown Juárez. At the time it was one of only six rape crisis centers in Mexico and the only one on the U.S./Mexico Border. She brought international attention to the continuing murders of women in Juárez and the uncaring and apathetic response by the Mexican government on all levels–city, state and federal–to these murders. Indeed, as we now know, law enforcement was more concerned with supporting the flow of illegal drugs into the U.S. than it was with investigating and prosecuting the murders of women. If anything, the authorities wanted to keep activists like Esther quiet because she brought attention to the vacuum of justice in Juárez. She has received many awards for her work, as the number of obituaries state, but she never veered from the task at hand–helping the women of Juárez.
In 2002, when Cinco Puntos Press was putting together the anthology PURO BORDER: DISPATCHES, GRAFFITI AND SNAPSHOTS FROM THE U.S./MEXICO BORDER, three of us–novelist Jessica Powers, who worked for us at the time, Lee Byrd and I—walked over the bridge and went to visit Esther at Casa Amiga. She was a diminutive and very hospitable woman with a quiet way about her but she had a presence that commanded respect. Her work at Casa Amiga was self-evident–women and children were coming and going, and some were staying, being protected inside the walls of the center from husbands or boyfriends who would harm them if they had the chance. Indeed, in December 2001 her receptionist, who had come to the center as a client, was killed by her husband in front of Casa Amiga. When we asked her why she started Casa Amiga, she replied quietly–
“Because I am a woman, because I felt helpless and because I have a conscience.”
Below I am pasting the mostly unedited notes that Lee took during that visit that I found in our archives (Lee also took the photograph above), and below that I am pasting an article by Tessie Borden that originally appeared in the Arizona Republic and that we republished in PURO BORDER. But first, Casa Amiga as always needs financial help. Those who wish to help may do so by making a donation to their account:
**BANCO SANTANDER**
No. Cuenta: 65-50227820-0
CLABE 014164655022782007
Titular CASA AMIGA CENTRO DE CRISIS AC
1427 Suc. Plaza las Torres
Cd. Juárez, Chih. C.P. 32575
Notes from Esther Chávez Cano Interview, June 24, 2002
(taken by Lee Byrd)
There is terrible violence against women right now in Juarez. She will give us her list of the names of murdered women with pleasure. She gathered the list from reading the newspapers. She only includes the names of murdered women, not of children, or of people who have disappeared. We asked if she thought the authorities had a bigger list and she said it will do no good to check with the authorities. The authorities will not give us access to names. Everyone who has a list has gathered their information from the newspapers. But what of the women who never get mentioned in the newspapers?
She said, Here is an example of a girl who has disappeared and of what has happened with the mother. She shows us a photo of a girl, Brenda Esther Afrara Luna, who disappeared two years ago when she was 15. Several months ago (time is uncertain), the mother was told by the authorities that her daughter has been found. But the mother went and looked and it wasn’t her daughter. Then they told her again they had found her. It was not the body of her daughter, but the body was wearing her daughter’s dress. It was very confusing. Esther said there are many cases like this. The mother in this case has endured a lot of domestic violence herself.
Casa de Amiga was started on February 9, 1999, about three and a half years ago. Esther is the founder. We asked her why she started it. She said because she’s a woman, because she felt helpless, and because she has a conscience. It was funded initially with $31,000 from FEMAP. Last week they received $25,000 from the U.S. embassy [see article below]. It is earmarked for a project to provide therapy for women who suffered incest, rape or violence as children.
Casa de Amiga is the only center of its kind all along the border, the only one in Juarez. There is nothing for battered women.
She mentioned that there have been two deaths in Chihuahua that have similar M.O.s. [to the women being killed in Juarez.] Why is it different here, we asked. Why is there more violence [than the rest of Mexico]? This is the border, she said, with its traffic of drugs, its maquiladoras. Poor people come here to seek opportunities, they want to cross the river to live the American dream. In this city there are 500 gangs. There are no opportunities here, conditions are very poor. Have you been to Anapra? It’s a terrible place.
The police hate her. They don’t ignore her. “I would like it if they would ignore me,” she said. They campaign against her. One year and seven months ago, they began their campaign. Governor Patricio doesn’t like her: according to him, she doesn’t do anything right—she’s a terrible director, she steals the money, she herself is a violent woman. And so the stories go. When Esther began talking about the women, Patricio tried to silence her.
In this building, last December 21, 2001, her own receptionist was killed by her husband. This receptionist had four kids, eight years on down, and she was a wonderful worker, good, hard-working, prudent. The husband came to Casa de Amigo to kill her here. From jail, the husband has called for custody of the kids.
When we expressed dismay over this, she said that last week, she had to go rescue a woman who was impregnated by her father. She was 19 and had been raped by him for the last 8 years. She’d had two children. One, a little boy, died of malnourishment. The other, a little girl of 3.5 years, was asked by Esther what had name was. The girl said she had no name. When Esther took the 19 year old woman away, the father went to the Human Rights Agency and demanded that his daughter come back and they agreed to his demands.
There is another girl now who is 11 years old and in the fifth grade. She’s 7 months pregnant. Some woman, a neighbor maybe, took her to a man and he raped her. The father and mother of this girl are separated and she is treated like a puppet.
“JUAREZ CENTER FIGHTS FOR FORGOTTEN WOMEN”
By Tessie Borden
Arizona Republic Mexico City Bureau
Feb. 26, 2002 12:00:00
JUAREZ, Mexico — It’s 9:30 a.m., and Esther Chavez Cano’s daily personal war with the unwanted problems of this largest of the border cities has begun.
She rushes into her office at Casa Amiga, the rape crisis center that grew out of the violence that has claimed the lives of more than 200 young women here in the past nine years. Close behind is a staff member describing this morning’s emergency: a neighbor found two girls, 8 and 10, wandering in the city’s El Chamizal park the previous night. They told the woman they were running away from their father’s beatings.
Chavez Cano immediately calls the local district attorney’s office, and one gets the feeling she has done this hundreds of times. In a firm but friendly tone, she calls on the attorneys there to take charge of the children and investigate what they say.
“The authorities just don’t do anything,” she whispers while on hold.
Chavez Cano’s Casa Amiga is the only center of its kind on the Mexican side of the 1,950-mile line that separates the country from the United States. Established in February 1999, it receives funding from both U.S. and Mexican organizations.
Chavez Cano, 66, a diminutive, retired accountant whose mild manner causes listeners to lean in just to hear her, is perhaps the most outspoken and militant voice here on violence against women.
In 1993, she noticed a trend among crimes committed in Juarez: dozens of young women were turning up slain in the surrounding desert. The bodies showed evidence of beatings, rape and strangulation. Many of the women fit a distinct profile: tall and thin, with long, dark hair and medium skin, between ages 11 and 25. Often, they came from the ranks of workers who yearly swell Juarez’s population from other parts of rural Mexico to work at border assembly plants, or maquiladoras.
Prodding the police
“They try to pretend these are not serial crimes,” Chavez Cano said of the local authorities. “It just brings your rage out. It makes you boil.”
Chavez Cano and others formed the Liga 8 de Marzo, an awareness group that collected data about the slayings and prodded police to give the murder investigations high priority - often by picketing the police station, holding crosses bearing names of victims.
No one agrees on the exact number of killings that are related. Chavez Cano says about 230 women have been found in the past nine years, the most recent in November when eight bodies were discovered in a shallow pit. Some slayings have been traced to jealous husbands or drug traffickers. But a large number share characteristics that make investigators believe a serial killer and perhaps copycats are at work.
After raising awareness of the problem to a national level, Chavez Cano decided someone should work to prevent the deaths, rather than just clean up after the murderers.
Help from elsewhere
With start-up money from the Maryland-based International Trauma Resource Center, the Texas Attorney General’s Office and the Mexican Federation of Private Health and Community Development Associations, Chavez Cano opened Casa Amiga near the city center. A paid staff of four and an army of volunteers served 318 clients in Casa Amiga’s first year, providing a 24-hour hotline, counseling and group therapy.
Last year, the center added three staff members and served 5,803 clients, of which 1,172 were new cases.
Chavez Cano now worries about a troubling side issue: child sexual abuse and incest. Fifty-seven of her clients in the first year were raped children. So among her most successful programs is a puppet show that teaches children about “bad” touching and instructs them, in a gentle way, to respect their bodies.
The center takes most of her attention, but Chavez Cano does not let the police off easy when it comes to the slayings of women in the desert. They, in turn, have lashed out at her.
An attitude of disdain
Arturo Chavez Rascón, Chihuahua state’s former attorney general, came in for some of her sharpest barbs because of his comments implying the victims contributed to their own deaths through their dress or lifestyle. It’s an attitude shared by police officers on the beat, who Chavez Cano says discourage families from associating with Casa Amiga.
The center used to receive about $3,000 a month from Juarez for rent and salaries, but that stipend has been cut, Cano said. Now, the center relies on money it gets from donations and showings around Mexico of the hit play The Vagina Monologues.
Tragedy close to home
Recently, the center suffered a blow of a different kind.
In December, Maria Luisa Carsoli Berumen, an abused mother who had become a client and then a staff member at the center, was killed in front of Casa Amiga, witnesses say, by her husband, Ricardo Medina Acosta. The two had had a long and violent history that led to Carsoli Berumen leaving him. A court granted custody of their four children to Medina Acosta. She stayed in town, planning to wait until after the Christmas holidays to resume the custody fight.
On the morning of Dec. 21, the pair argued and struggled outside the center, and she was stabbed twice in the chest as she tried to flee. A black bow at the door expresses the staff’s grief. No one has been in arrested in Carsoli Berumen’s death.
Fighting for respect
“The death of Maria Luisa forces us to work more intensely to instill respect in children, men and women, and to sensitize the authorities to the grave risk for families and all of society that domestic violence represents,” Chavez Cano wrote in a column in the local newspaper.
“Rest in peace, Maria Luisa, and watch over your children so they remain united and sheltered by your loved ones who lament your absence.”
Editor note: Likewise, may Esther Chavez Cano rest in peace after her many years of good work protecting women from violence and murder.
Bobby Byrd is a small press publisher (Cinco Puntos Press) and poet. His latest work of poetry, White Panties, Dead Friends, and Other Bits & Pieces of Love, was published in 2006. He is currently editing Lone Star Noir, an anthology of noir stories set in Texas, forthcoming from Akashic Books.
Fertile Source’s Editor, Jessica Powers, will be presenting tonight at Inspired Birth and Families in Albuquerque, N.M. so we won’t post today as normal.
Anybody is welcome to attend: Inspired Birth and Families, 6-8 p.m., 4916 4th St. Northwest.
by Tania Pryputniewicz
Two weeks before our first baby’s due date, my husband became obsessed with his G.I. Joe collection. Why now, of all times, take three plastic bins full of naked G.I. Joes out of the basement, dress them, and auction them off one by one on ebay? I remember reading in one of those “for new Dad” books how “now is not the time to start a new hobby.” I cracked the spine at that chapter and left the book out around the house, including on top of his slippers, to no avail. I’ve heard of other husbands engaging in this “uh-oh, my wife’s pregnant” phenomenon, taking up antiquing, birdwatching or some other time-consuming activity. In my husband’s defense, we both have selfish other pursuits in life: his-triathlon (which requires you to be good at three sports: swimming, biking, and running) and mine-writing. Still, it was pretty hard to take-this ebay thing-with baby on the way.
Marrying at 32, my husband and I qualify as late bloomers, arriving at parenthood at the age of 34. I used to think PMS wreaked havoc, but it pales beside the hormonal ups and downs that accompany the hourly nutrient siphon of breastfeeding. I considered myself a sane and rational person-I had my undergrad and graduate degrees, right? But, the new degree: LUIOBH-living under the influence of breastfeeding hormones had me by the tail. Of course I loved nursing my daughter, knowing it delivered the universe’s gift of the perfect food, her warm body against mine, her little hands gripping my thumb.
AND, it was grueling. I’d hold her for the new routine of stillness (hours of nursing) with way too much time to reflect, finding all that feminist theory from the college days nearly useless when it came to marriage and raising children. It had been fairly easy to be good “partners” (my husband and I) and function like equals when we were not faced with a beautiful, crying baby. I went off to my poetry readings on Thursday nights, he went off the underwater hockey on Tuesday nights, Wednesday was date night. Monday’s and Fridays I made dinner, Sundays and Thursdays were his nights, Saturday was take-out.
Enter baby, who shared our genes and all of a sudden, everything was an issue. Who packs the diaper bag when you leave the house? Who changes diapers? Who makes dinner? Who pays the bills? Cleans the toilet? Feeds the cat? Who arranges for a babysitter for a date? Just because I can watch the baby and cook dinner and do a load of laundry, is it reasonable to expect my husband, who has been earning the money, to do the same? Is making dinner without the baby “down-time”? Logic failed me, as I tried to weigh and dole out our responsibilities in my head.
Now that we have three children, I can say with a sense of humor that while many a mother cleans her slate entirely for the first baby and gradually returns former activities to her pie, many a father keeps his former pie and tacks baby on the underside, somewhere between the shell and the pie pan…probably out of self-defense. Mothers don’t have a choice: the unmistakable growth in the belly during pregnancy makes it impossible to hide from the reality of being subsumed…some tiny creature…with arms and legs…growing, taking over. So I’d prepared myself, during daily cat naps I could no longer avoid, to let go of my routine. My husband, on the other hand, dressed and undressed his G.I. Joes and took a little extra time off work since soon he’d be the principal wage earner. The morning we drove to the hospital I had to beat him off the computer (ebay) with a stick (when I could stand up again between contractions).
But consider this side of the story: my husband would often say to friends (within my earshot) during those first months, years, really, of our daughter’s life, that he was at the bottom of the totem pole, barely breathing somewhere beneath the cat. I couldn’t see it… “What do you mean?” I’d say defensively, bristling (LUIOBH), totally unaware that I failed to look up from my darling nurser to greet him when he walked in the door, or made any attempt to move the nursing doughnut, the changing pads, or the stack of diapers and onesies so he could occupy his former spot in his former bed.
We laugh now about those initiatory trial-by-fire days, less concerned with equality than harmony, trusting that our workloads balance, even when we can’t imagine that they possibly do. Once the house quiets, and my husband’s finished straightening the handful of remaining G.I. Joes lining the shelves in our middle son’s room, we indulge in a glass of wine, amazed we made it this far.
Recent poems by Tania Pryputniewicz appeared in The Spoon River Poetry Review and Linebreak; her cover art and an essay appeared in Labor Pains and Birth Stories (Catalyst Press, 09). She documents the dual process of mothering and writing at Feral Mom, Feral Writer and has work forthcoming at Salome Magazine, The Mom Egg, Empire Report, and Tiny Lights. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she lives in the Sonoma County redwoods with her husband and three children.
Got a story to tell?
For Real Mama Stories: on New Motherhood, I am seeking mothers interested in contributing a story or essay about their experience of new motherhood (recent or reflective). This collection will include a range of stories – funny tales, reflective pieces, thought-provoking rants– but above all, real stuff. Stories should be authentic, honest, and be based on real experiences of the ride of motherhood. Continue reading ‘Real Mama stories wanted’
Labor Pains and Birth Stories
Mamapedia
Creating a Life
