motherhood poems/a natural history (process notes for a manuscript ever in progress)
In writing the motherhood poems—I am trying to approximate. A sensation of how it feels to radically change. To become a mother, non-biologically, far outside the cultural narrative. To be, not exactly a mother, but a young, skinny person caring for a young, skinny child who only rarely calls me mom.
(I’m thinking I guess of the tone of Don’t Let Me Be Lonely; and in the past my aesthetic stance of a sort of—socially aware bewilderment—the feeling of feeling without knowing how to engage. But parenting-- motherhood-- like other things, doesn’t allow us to navel-gaze too long, to get caught up in dreaming without doing)
Don’t Let Me Be Lonely was I think the first book that taught me about what it was to approximate sensation-- to write a text that was on its surface, “plain” but that was also performing, as well as documenting, emotional labor.
But my concern or feeling is that—is it interesting, or does it matter if it’s interesting, which gets to the public/private concern of parenting (motherhood, because no matter how reluctant I am, it’s gendered)—it’s boring, and hard work, and it is private. And the fact that the labor is private and boring is what makes it isolating—and doubly so because there was no biological transition or cultural script (baby shower, birth stories, maternity leave).
How writing is both—like motherhood, with all these creepy metaphors about birth, yes I said it, I think birth imagery is creepy--and its opposite-- that writing, in some way, assumes a public performance, or reader, no matter how small, and requires interest from someone else to be “successful”; contrasted with the idea of motherhood as “thankless,” dull and boring, unpaid and unrecognized, economically--and yet the ways we perform parenting (”motherhood”) in this culture, in particular the old, tired, easy-target Pinterest Mommies and Mommy Wars and all these things we mostly associate with overachieving, white, middle/upper middle class women-- how I cannot fit into that, even if I tried, I don’t even look like a mom; I got mistaken for our boy’s teenage brother over the weekend--)
Is it internalized misogyny that I feel like my poems about motherhood are boring? Is it okay that they are boring? Is it internalized misogyny that taking up the label of “mom” is hard, our cultural script around moms as dorky and de-sexualized, perpetually sacrificing-- or is that just about gender, that I don’t-- really don’t-- look like a mom.
writing these motherhood poems is a really interesting challenge-- i think a lot about the form of motherhood, the perpetual intrusion and being emotionally available to someone else, needed-- as a form-- the line break. the interruption. the short attention span. the five minutes while the coffee is brewing or a few minutes in the lobby during an appointment, notes taken at the city pool or while playing Legos. the child is a line break. the prose-- cracks.
looking for some resources for a thirteen year old student of my mine who just came out to me last week. her family is far right/conservative Christian, and, while not openly hostile to her they are not accepting. I know her faith is really important to her and I want to drive home the point that there are a lot of LGBT/affirming churches, individuals, and theologies. I've already given her information about a peer support group (non religious) that meets at the library and the youth group at my (UCC) church, but I'd love to send her some websites or blogs where she can connect with others and learn about what it might mean to be a lesbian Christian teen. (Most of the websites I'm finding are geared more towards adults and welcoming them into a church)
i feel really humbled that she wanted to share this with me, and grateful that i can be a support person for her (especially if she's not getting that at home)
looking especially at my ministerial/seminarian followers...
we had a little visitor for a few days and she was pretty scared of the dog. on the second day she got close enough to pet him on the back while he was occupied with a toy. "ohhh, he's cute!' she exclaimed.
hearing her voice, he turned around suddenly, showing his big white teeth and slimy beard.
hi internet christians-- important question- is there a secret code to figure out if a church is homophobic? i am trying to decipher the churches of two colleagues and by extension these colleagues (yes i know why this is flawed reasoning but in the absence of any other indicators i'm going off what i've got) and whether/how institutionally safe it is to be out
I have perhaps been in a strange purgatory for several months now. The inability to write isn’t equivalent to the inability to write. Does that make sense? Language yes, but more, the presence, the depth, the journey, the motivation, the physical gesture, the breathing, the sleep, the farewell.
I too have been in a strange purgatory, on the verge of many major changes. It’s as if my entire imagination is focused on thinking about the future, that I have very little left for making stuff up wholesale. None of this is woe-is-me in the slightest; the things I’m waiting on are amazing, including going back to school for my MSW to hopefully one day do writing/art therapy; more I just want to chart the ebbs and flows of being a writer.
My solution has been to make little books— instant books I hear them called sometimes— a single sheet of paper folded into 8 with a slit in the middle. Nothing that goes into the books is more interesting or more real than anything else I’ve written recently, but it’s nice to see something tangible when I feel that all I do is write down feelings in my notebook.
do you want me to send you some little books? So far I’ve made one about radiqueer abusers, and another about unusual things that have happened so far this month. send me your address (in a message here or an email: kristen.e.stone[at]gmail) and I’ll mail them to to you.
every time a punk/radiqueer gets outed as an abuser i feel more sick and regretful about the ways that a certain kind of politics/posturing made me doubt my own empathy, intuition, and critical thinking.
tweet the name of your favorite witch at me (@_kristenstone) and birds of lace (@birdsoflace) by midnight tonight for a chance to win a copy of my new BoL chapbook, The Story of Ruth and Eliza ++ self/help/work/book
jennifer gilmore, the mothers
jhumpa lahiri, the lowland
Julie Maroh, blue is the warmest color
cris beam, to the end of june
jessica hollander, in these times the home is a tired place
megan milks, kill marguerite
(i read the first three in seven weeks; i read the latter three in 5 days, over AWP and associated travel.)
the two books i’ve been working on for awhile and haven’t finished yet:
shelley m. parks, mothering queerly, queering motherhood
julia franck, back to back (i seriously have like 3 pages of this book left, but i keep saving it until bedtime and then it’s too dramatic to read half-asleep)
books i’ve read so far in 2014: UPDATE
valerie wetlaufer, mysterious acts by my people
kate christensen, blue plate special
jamaica kincaid, annie john
dorothy allison, two or three things i know for sure
it’s not been a great month (+) for reading, i’ve been teaching and spending more time with the girls and started a new job, so my head is in work a lot. it’s not been a great month for writing, either, if i’m going to be honest. i’ve produced a lot but it’s mostly about non-profit and helping professions/social work/counseling feelings— nothing, mostly, i would share for a variety of reasons including white confidentiality ones.
i just started reading white is for witching by helen oyeyemi, because there are 17 people ahead of me on the hold list for boy, snow, bird. but it’s a little too spooky, i can only read it during daylight. (for context, i can’t even listen to “welcome to nightvale” after dark— one time i did and became scared of the faceless old woman who lives in your house, i had to go out and take a walk until jasmine got home; and i slept on the floor in my mom’s room for the rest of the summer after i watched the exorcist in high school)
i did finish back to back and mothering queerly, queering motherhood.
(below is a lengthy discussion of this book which is about queer theory and motherhood)
the latter megan milks sent to me via a secret santa book exchange, and i thought about it a lot, especially in light of some things that are underway. i found it frustrating because 1. it wasn’t gay enough and 2. i feel like sometimes she let theory and jargon overshadow things that are known facts about child development. i especially got frustrated by this:
The fluidity and ambiguity of family boundaries prized by those who celebrate families of choice may appear risky to those (including children) who do not enjoy economic independence or physical or psychological autonomy. at the same time, such fluid and ambiguous families may be a necessary choose for those with meager resources” (194).
If “fluidity” means uncertainty and unpredictability, well yes. stability is a developmental need of children, and if a person’s interpretation of “chosen family” means that children don’t know where they’re going home to or who’s going to take care of them, of course that’s going to seem “risky.” because children literally need to know who’s going to take care of them and what’s going to happen for the sake of their brains and social development. i find this language annoying and privilege-blind, because i work with moms and families who work SO FUCKING HARD to maintain stability for their kids in the midst of crisis. for an educated woman with lots of choices and access to resources to be glib about the importance of stability seems like a slap in the face to moms who bust ass to work their networks, house their kids, and provide routine when everything is uncertain, and that last sentence feels a little lip-service-y.
overall i find that theorists want to theorize the lives of people with way less choices as being “related to their own” in a way that sort of ignores social forces, economics, and access to resources, which aggravates the social worker in me. (most notably she writes that “the ‘mad’ and ‘bad’ mothers who commit infanticide and filicide, the drug addicted black or bother mother and the unwed teen mother…can be seen as resisting social norms” (16)… which, like, what? to talk about mental illness, substance abuse, and poverty as, in and of themselves, acts of resistance? while those mothers may resist social norms in interesting and important ways, i don’t think the existence of those mothers should prove a queer theory point about “resistance.” probably a lot of those women would love access to the resources that would make them healthy, secure, and safety housed so they can be “normal” moms not just struggling to survive.
a couple times i wrote “rude!” in the text because of her obvious desire to distance herself from “normal” moms who don’t know about queer theory, or who use technology to keep track of their kids’ activities rather than being a super cool”cyborg mother,” or who “tolerate abuse by their chosen partners” (192). a lot of this felt like “i’m a queer feminist; those women are not” (even though she has a whole chapter about religious polygamy and how we shouldn’t create distinctions between “good” multi-mother families and “bad” ones). in her desire to “blur the lines between our (good) selves and the (bad) Other” i feel like she erases a lot of important information and distinctions about choices and access to resources. (i haven’t read a lot of theory in a good long while, but it seems like maybe this is A Thing that queer/critical theorists like to do, use the bodies/lives of the Other to make a point?)
[i want to be super clear in raising these critiques that i’m an educated white woman who’s not currently a parent, and whose perspective on this is as a helper/advocate for families in poverty/crisis, NOT as a person in poverty/crisis myself)
i’m making it sound like i hated this book, which i did not, not at all. there was a lot about it that i found really thought-provoking and useful, especially the parts where she talks about coalitional politics, solidarity, and difference:
coalitional families do not merely acknowledge difference, they also value engagement with difference….place value on the difference contributions made to a family by members with different talents, capacities, and dispositions as well as different needs and vulnerabilities…contributions may include demonstrations of human vulnerability and interdependency, as well as resistance to and critiques of forms of care taking that diminish, devalue, or misunderstand the needs of the one being cared for…the contributions of some members may include exposing and disrupting assumptions of white privilege…because the ubjectivites of family members emerge from different positionings within the family…each will contribute different perspectives in constructing or reconstructing family histories, stories, and memories, and thus to familial self-definitions…contributions to ones’ family will also include bringing home what one has learned during one’s travels to worlds outside the home. in a coalitional family, one engages these and other differences as a site of potential growth and transformation (221).
i want to keep writing/thinking about this book. it’s been really foundational in some thoughts about abjecting and othering children (that i’m not ready to share yet). it crosses my mind daily.
this has been an accidental book review. (thanks megan milks for sending it to me, it was the perfect choice!)
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i have been following the discussion about entropy’s trigger warning round table with interest and a little bit of hesitation to say anything, but i’ve been thinking about some things and they mostly related to space and translatability of the language.
