Mother Tongue

Can’t say I’m committed to my blog, but some spam action reminded me that I had one. I also thought about why I don’t write on it and it’s pretty much the same excuse I use for not writing that much poetry and prose on a daily basis. I’m too busy. Psychically that may be true. I have a job I’m not terribly comfortable with, my children are struggling in school even though they are quite bright, my marriage is in deep doo doo, and the year of thesis is looming ominously on my grad school horizon. My mind whirs round and round all of these things, sometimes serially, sometimes simultaneously.

Selfishly enough, I find myself trying to shift the focus to the thesis. I am entering into advanced poetry this semester where we will be working on creating a book length manuscript and really thinking about the structure and substance of that book, which is often considered to be a rough draft of our thesis. I also am on the editorial board of the poetry section of our college lit mag–by virtue of paying for the class. This is the first time in my grad school career that I’ve taken 8 credits, so I’m a little spooked but also glad to be immersing myself in the life of a writer. Yet there is the marriage and the kids and the job promotion that I didn’t want all competing for brain space.

So here I am in January, that famous set-up for the fall month, and I’m asking myself what I need to do to change myself into a writer. Quit my job? No not possible, I have next year to pay for as well as a child entering college next year. Get a divorce? Not sure that would be a help as I have lived most of my adult life as a married person and don’t know how to decide what is love and what is habit, which of my shortcomings is completely my own and which is perpetuated within my relationship. Am I using relationship troubles as another excuse?

All in all I think I should work within the framework I have and use the actual abundance of time that I have. I just have to re-frame my thinking and fill it with writing. My husband can start relating to me as a writer, my kids are old enough to deal with the fact that I’m a writer and can’t do everything for them, but I will do whatever I can that they truly need, and most importantly I need to start relating to myself as a writer. That has been the problem so far. I have always thought of myself (for the past 20 years anyway) as a wife and mother who writes on the side when she can. I have to rework how I define myself and live it. This is not a new idea, there are tons of bad (and good) writing books out there that say the same thing. Its just taken me a long time to internalize the message.

I’ve tried to understand why I don’ t have the ambition to be a novelist. I have never pictured myself writing a book and even a book of poetry does not strike me as a cohesive whole. Lack of ambition might be a part of it, I have a hard time sustaining drive towards a goal over the long run. I get interested in something and then another pretty shiny thing pops up and I am pursuing that. I can’t imagine story line over a sustained period of time, in my life or on the page. The title of this piece is really kind of a misnomer because I don’t think that poetry is not representative of complete thought. Great poetry is perhaps some  of the most complete thought we have; ideas explored not only on a cerebral level but a sensual one.

Perhaps it is not the completeness of the of the thought sustained in the novel but the seeming need for cause and effect. The novelist seems to know what is going to happen to their characters because of what happened in the preceding scene. I don’t know my psychology that well, but I have a difficult time figuring out why I do what I do and even though I know a certain amount of what I do or do not do comes from my upbringing and the events of my past, if I suddenly change course, will others see me as unbelievable? unreliable? Will they fault my unorthodox use of punctuation and the incompleteness of my sentences? Somehow I feel like prose would wag its finger and ask me to explain myself whereas poetry would sigh and say “Ah, yes!” I like to consider the possibilities as much as I like to sift through the bargain racks of a department store. Readers don’t have the time for such indecisiveness, such questioning of outcomes and inputs. Or do they?

I am forging into the world of creative non-fiction. It’s a term that some writer’s hate but I think it gives a lot of latitude if you aren’t strictly writing memoir or essays even though these areas are engulfed in the broader term. There are many definitions, each seemingly more vague and shape-shifting than the last. And I like that. There is room for poetics there is room for self-questioning and self-doubt, for a morphing of cause and effect that allows the occasional miracle to be believed. Rhythm can play a part and fantasy can play a part and incompleteness can sometimes be the point and the most poignant thing about the piece.

Well, I have proven my inability to follow a thought through to logical conclusion, so please let me know your thoughts on the forms of poetry, fiction and creative non-fiction and share any books that you think do marvelous melding of forms or stretch the boundaries of their form. One of my favorites is The Winged Seed by Li Young Lee, just in case you were looking for a good read.

    Or perhaps I should just say ‘here we go’. This is a start, a beginning. As usual I’m not sure what I am beginning or where I want to get to, but at least this is a start and often times I don’t even get that far. I have made other beginnings; almost 19 years ago I began a family by getting married, a year later started another life by having a child, about 3 years ago I began my master’s degree in writing.

With all of them I’m not sure that I want to get to the end. My marriage is changing and morphingwith the years and the changes in we two participants. We are separate and apart, we are mostly friends but sometimes lovers when our roles as money earners and parents haven’t rendered us comatose. My husband is always trying to find new and better ways of doing things and I’m trying to learn the first best way and actually do it. He touches the lives of hundreds of teenagers a year while I manage the lives of a dozen toddlers for a year. We both are trying to find a way to be something different to our kids than our parents were to us, but we fail a lot and have to take turns treading water and holding each other up.

My first child is nearing her 18th birthday and I still haven’t figured out how to absolve myself of who she is and how to quit taking credit for her. I can’t quit feeling she is mine even though I see how tenuous and frail my hold is. I can still remember those early swimming lessons, wanting to reach out to hold her up, realizing she was never going to learn if I did. But how far should I stand back, what if she heads for the deep end, what if she swallows too much water? Some days, I’m still back in that pool shuffling towards her laughing and splashing form.

My writing fades and surges like a tide though I often feel nothing but ebb. With all of it I am learning to relax and watch the flow, wade in from time to time and feel the water pull at my ankles but realize that I can wade back out or jump in. Where to go from here? I have always known the answer is just keep going.

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