Children's Literature

I realized I never reposted my blog post for Bone Bouquet here. They asked contributors to write about what they were reading and why, and here was my answer. I love remembering how little he was and how adorable his porto-language was. He says “tiger” like a big kid now, but he still loves that book. Enjoy!

Being a parent has washed away the capitalist mindset I accidentally adopted towards reading when I decided to become a “serious writer”. You can’t apply extractive capitalism to literature and expect to keep really engaging with it. So I didn’t, for years.

But I can see the little happy upwellings in H. when he passes a book and decides to pick it up and bring it to me. At almost-two, H. reads for all the clichés.

He reads just because he wants to. Because there are treasures to uncover as his small hands turn big pages. Because it’s literal magic. He knows that when he opens a book he is co-creator of a small world, one that doesn’t just exist on the page but in some more accessible, nearly tangible ether.

Every time we read together, we weave the story invisible and real. We weave the words into image and emotion, catching light and bright between me, my hands, my voice, the book, his eyes, his tongue.

Llama Llama Red Pajama helps him hold his own routine separate from himself. To safely explore fear and its expression. To observe, codify, and reconcile the reality of nightly bedtime with his stormy internal world. “Pillow”, he points to the picture, and looks at me for affirmation. “Potty.” “Copit” (his reversed way of saying “blanket”). Mama. Kiss. Light.

And the music in it. He sings his rhyming books as he builds trains and strolls his doll around the loop of the kitchen and living room. “Yama, yama, [mumble] mama”. The alphabet song is “momo, momo, momo, mi, A, D, H, A, momo, mi”. He practices words he knows by inserting them into songs: “E-i-e-i-lawnmower, E-i-e-i-dirt, E-i-e-i-daddy”.

Language is music is reading is speaking is singing. Is living. Reading All the World, H. and I follow a thread of light and dark woven through the routine beauty of a family’s days; the book’s poetry like a graceful helix rotates between unified opposites. A noisy day of beaches and markets and gardens and rain, old and new and light and dark, (“Slip, trip, stumble, fall / Tip the bucket, spill it all”) glides into one beautiful, hopeful chant: “Everything you hear, smell, see // All the world is everything / Everything is you and me // Hope and peace and love and trust // All the world / is all of us.” The abstractions of this kind of poetry go over H.’s head, but the music, I’m sure, enters his blood as it does mine.

Yesterday we asked what pajamas he wanted to wear. “Tiger”, he said (well, it was “Kider”, another reversal). He’d never responded to the question before; I wasn’t sure he knew “pajama” even. But it turns out Llama gave “pajama” to him, in its music.

And his desire for the tiger pajamas specifically? Comes from Follow That Tiger, which his dad reads every bedtime. When I read it to him, I re-write the badly-metered lines as I go, but H. doesn’t care about that so much. He just wants the safe tension of the tiger stalking the forest, the suspense always resolved with the same friendly “ROAR.”

The best books, our favorites, like all good poetry leave small corners of strangeness and darkness lifted to trip us up, tags to pull and unravel the world. Like the moments of queer surprise or melancholy layered into Goodnight Moon. The quiet discrepancy between “a little toy house” and “goodnight, little house” changes what’s pictured just a little bit. The toy house becomes the house the bunny is in, that the reader is in, all the same. Similarly, the “picture of the cow jumping over the moon” becomes an actual cow in “Goodnight, cow jumping over the moon” (as the pictures echo). And of course we stop, I stop, when Brown gets to “goodnight, nobody.” A fearful, lifted moment of eulogy, of grace.

To H. that strange beauty, the kind that stops time, is routine, is how he sees every inch of his world. And may reading ever keep it so. Because my heart, smoothed and sanitized by a world that assiduously requires me to account for every moment—it needs to get reacquainted with it.

Books:

https://bookshop.org/books/llama-llama-red-pajama-9780451474575/9780451474575

https://bookshop.org/books/all-the-world/9781481431217

https://bookshop.org/books/follow-that-tiger-catch-him-if-you-can/9781785575266

https://bookshop.org/books/goodnight-moon-revised/9780060775858

Bodies: on dissociation and privilege

It’s hard for me to be in my body. I’m on the couch right now, forgetting to breathe as I listen to H cry. We are re-nap-training him, still, again, forever. Today he wanted to stay with me in the dim tent of blankets, smiling at me as he nursed; instead I set him down in his crib. 

The best I can think to do for him is let him find the ability to soothe himself. The best I can think to do for him is give myself an hour a day without touch, with my own body alone.

I’m trying to feel my breath, focus on where the different parts of his cries hit my eardrum. 

--

I tend to run away from sensation. Shallow or absent breaths, tense shoulders and hips, numbing the way my body feels emotions with food or drink or smoke, depending on the era. 

During labor I felt I was fleeing my body, or fleeing through my body to find a place where the pain wasn’t. The moment I succumbed to it fully, I screamed like a child, turned over in the hospital bed clutched the railing and screamed, high and breathy, not in pain but in fear. 

I can’t say I’m proud of how I responded to his birth, really. I was not calm, I did not breathe through it, and I was not centered. I screamed and screamed. I could and do remind myself that it did go fast, nearly precipitously so, and it was a surprise that it happened when it did, only a few hours after checking out of the hospital for blood pressure monitoring at 38.5 weeks.

But that attempt to comfort myself relies on implicit agreement with the premise that I did it wrong. 

And I was, have been, sometimes am ashamed; I blamed my pelvic floor issues (a rectocele if anyone’s counting) on the psychological block I felt against the pain and the pushing. And it was probably a primary driver behind a fleeting but very strong desire to get pregnant again, quickly — I wanted a delivery do-over. 

Instead, though, I try to sit with it and let it instruct me. Not on ways I need to improve myself or get stronger, calmer, less afraid. But on how to comfort myself, and the ways I feel fear.

It was only in the moment of re-entering my body and accepting what was happening that the required pushing, and the safe birth, happened at all. In the moment that I turned inward and could actually feel his head in the birth canal, and told him we were going to get it done. 

--

This week I am feeling something familiar in my body, but I’m having a hard time directing my attention to it; my mind glances away from it in fear every time I decide I need to know what’s going on. But listening to H right now (fully embodied in anger himself), I feel fully the heavy emptiness in my diaphragm, the catch in my throat. It’s dread, and anger. 

I’m having nightmares too. Of gruesome murders at close hand, petty and rageful fights, any kind of apocalypse. I wake myself up shouting in the early hours. Waking is like tearing the air from around the dream, like fighting through water, my chest tight and silenced, mouth jawing, and then I’m awake and afraid, flight mode at 5am. 

My body stays in the 5am ditch, but as the day proceeds away my mind goes. It’s the heritage of CPTSD, anxiety, bipolar II, depression. Sensing threats everywhere and tuning them out. The fear lives in me, replays itself daily in my body, and so I have learned to separate myself from it until my most common feeling is a fuzzy kind of bifurcation.

--

It’s impossible to write poetry without being embodied. Metaphor requires body, requires thrust and committed impulse that cannot be executed by brainpower alone. Everyone knows Emily Dickinson’s “if I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry”. A ridiculous poet used it as a pickup line on my best friend at Cambridge’s Cafe Pamplona in 1999 so the line is fairly ruined for me, but it’s really the truest — to read poetry is physical, and to write it is, too. 

And this is why I’m so afraid of it. Why I avoid it for months, years at a time. I’m always fleeing my body. 

I used to describe, back when I treated every symptom of my anxiety and depression like the symptom of a drug trip, feeling like I was about half an inch and to the left of my own body, all the time. Once you describe such dissociation there’s really nothing else to say; you can’t observe anything but the unhappy friction it creates; eventually, you just end up repeating yourself.

--

I wonder too if this has to do with the fact that I really don’t know what I look like, but I’m not sure. Do others know how they look? Is their proprioception more fine-tuned, have they not been triggered out of their bodies? Does the one of a kind pink manta ray feel his pinkness, do the gray feel their own mottles, as beautiful because as sure? 

--

This morning, online, so many ways to feel fear, disgust, anger, hopelessness. Amy Cooper’s panicked racist lying, her everyday grotesque manipulation. The calm cop with a knee on a dying human’s neck like it was any ground you might kneel on to garden, change a tire, pick up something lost. The economist calling people “capital stock”. The Chicagoan angry he’ll have to wear a mask in restaurants. “If people are afraid they can stay home.” The bodies of the servers literally not present. 

So many ways the full coursing life of our bodies is denied. Why not run, why not numb. So easy. So many of us fleeing. When we should look back even though we become pillars of salt. 

And how can I desire to sit, anchored, in a body that sits in a world burning, melting, lobed with polar wind and disaster? 

Why bother sitting in a body that sits in a world touching bodies that use other bodies as pawns, coal mine canaries, “human capital stock”, targets, punching bags, fleshlights, trash. Bending bodies like bridges the wrong way and never allowing them exhaustion. Heavy limbs of the dead. Of Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor, of George Floyd. 

How can I sit in a body that might, if I knew her, allow Amy Cooper space to “be afraid”, or could even be her? Out of disinterest or forgetfulness or laziness or exhaustion or fear of conflict, or fear of losing hard-scrabbled status. How can I confront the body that doesn’t just witness but takes part. 

-- 

Harder to escape a body under immediate threat. I know it too, in my own ways. Impossible to not be there when you’re murdered by police, or by white fragility, or by being an essential worker in a pandemic. Auhmad Arbery could not have forgotten what he looked like, not ever.

--

So today because I am not under threat, I sit and feel under threat. I feel the echoes of threat threaded through my body and know they are only echoes. Because it costs me nothing to confront my own inchoate dread, because my own old traumas are not standing bodied before me, I feel every inch of my living body.

Because I birthed a white son whom the sun shines on today, because I am able to safely run from my own fears, today I will stay. Feel the dread and anger, know two things: we are safe, many others are not. Know the feeling is right. 

On extended breastfeeding, Larkin, and epigenetics

“Hummingbird at a flower”. That is…one metaphor. I typed it weeks ago at the top of this very document, hoping to come back to it. The metaphor that comes to mind this morning instead is “lamprey suck-flaying a fish”. 

H is still nursing at 22 months; I didn’t think this would happen, but then again I didn’t think it wouldn’t. My approach to breastfeeding has been inertial. He found his latch within the first few days of his life, I happened to have an adequate supply, I didn’t leave home for work so I didn’t have to pump, and so here we are, H nursing on and off all day, and nursing to sleep every day during our epic co-sleeping naptimes. 

These naptimes another example of my “take the path of least resistance” mothering style. This is how we ended up co-napping and not even close to weaning during the pandemic. It was just easier.

But it doesn’t feel easy when he uses me as a drinking fountain at play, or a pacifier in sleep, or when he takes hours to wind down enough to nap while I’m trapped in a dark bedroom fending off minor disasters of toppling lamps and spilled water. Not after weeks and weeks of it with no more than his night’s sleep off. 

Sometimes not even that. We had a power outage last night, and the cessation of his noise machine woke him. Who knew how long it would be, so in he came. Clambering and sliding under the blankets, pulling and contorting new stretch marks into my breasts (which I thank for their flexibility). Pushing up my shirt and instructing me to hold it up, no on both sides please, so he could find the other breast and investigate it as he drank. Scratching me as he went, so I took his little thumb and bit off the too-long nail, missed last time I clipped. 

I dozed. Woke in the dark to H still busily nursing and his fingernail, little scrap of him, still in my mouth. So tired that ugliness coated the world around me, anything my mind touched ugly, broken. I wondered what the laws were for unemployed mothers giving up custody. They couldn’t force me to take care of him, could they?

But then again, there we were eating each other. There we were literally ingesting parts of each other. My leaving. What a joke. What a fiasco. I keep trying to write about the fact that mothers become literal chimeras after birth. Scraps of fetal DNA floating around in us for years. Lodging in our brains. Some researchers think it causes cancer. Some think it saves us from Alzheimer’s. Regardless, I contain him. 

He contains me too. I’m reading about generational trauma, cycles of abuse, all the ways in which we ruin each other. One psychologist says “good” parenting works as the placenta worked, to take in and filter toxins from the womb.

If good parents—mothers, inescapably—are a life-giving, filtering organ of support, “bad” mothers make their children their “poison containers”, discarding their negativity into them instead. Such an incisive image. Such a searing one. If it weren’t for the undercurrent of misogyny I’d be seduced. If it weren’t for the fact that being a good mother in this case means being a self-negating mother.

But the metaphor sticks with me anyway, beyond the mother-child dyad. Because I believe it. That in my worst imaginings a family is just a group of scapegoated poison containers. That we inject our self-loathing into each other, that sometimes all we can see in another’s face is our own void staring back. 

This feels especially true right now, when our worlds have shrunk. How easy it’s been, lately, to revert. The now-closed home become the reflection of my own dirty, dingy, exhausted mind. How easy to inject poison into those who are now always there, instead of defusing or diffusing the emotion. I’m being purposefully vague here. Because this isn’t about my particular wounds. It’s about the pain of carrying them around, and the pain of re-inflicting them.

“Man hands on misery to man”. The only poem I can recall in its entirety anymore. Partly because I used to teach it for meter and prosody, but mostly because I adore an incredibly dark poem. 

I envy joyous poems & their poets—you know the ones, because they’re rightly popular, all these geniuses able to find the uplift, to sing it strong. But I’m at home in the dark stuff. Which is how I prefer to read Larkin, even with the sing-song insouciance and humor of it, I zero in on the trauma, of course. For the uninitiated, here:

This Be The Verse

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.   

    They may not mean to, but they do.   

They fill you with the faults they had

    And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn

    By fools in old-style hats and coats,   

Who half the time were soppy-stern

    And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.

    It deepens like a coastal shelf.

Get out as early as you can,

    And don’t have any kids yourself.

Larkin was likely thinking of nurture, not nature, when he said “they fill you with the faults they had.” But even when we don’t directly re-enact our own wounds onto our children, the traces are still there, trauma inherited; he may as well have been talking about the reverberations of trauma in our epigenetics. The vision of our unhappy lineages “deepen[ing] like a coastal shelf” comes to me in the still-dark. Murky water sparking with corrosive little add-ons to our slowly spinning helixes.

And of course, then, the nature becomes the nurture, and on and on. How far back must I peer to find the root of my unhappiness, my addictions, the root of my short temper and rage, the root of my quick-to-overwhelm personality. 

Or, more fearfully, how far will these press forward from me. Especially if I take the path of least resistance. How easy it’s been, lately, to growl, exhausted animal, and shamble down the well-trod paths. Paths trod by repetition, by chemical markers, by memory. 

H is this open faucet streaming life, and I’m terrified that we will wrench him closed. I’m even more terrified that what’s streaming out will start carrying heavier and heavier toxins. That it’s all already lurking in the depths.

And so. What a horror. To pre-ruin your child not only with your bad genes, not only your bad actions, but the bad actions done to you even before their birth. My favorite novel, The Shining (yes, for all its overwritten faults) finds its worst terror in that dark reverberation. Those dark birthrights. Jack shuffling down the halls, turned into his father, turned into the hotel, turned into his addictions.

I am thinking of you, reader, in hoping to think my way towards something beautiful to end with. But no image of H smiling in the sun today, no snow shining like fire in the votive of a lilac bud, no light-hungry tulip unfurling air towards me on the deck can wipe that away, not truthfully. Not without it staining through, ugly palimpsest. Like how, at night, I imagine H’s cry and it joins with the rush of blood in my ears, is as constant, embedded.

At best it’s a can’t//must scenario. We can’t go on we must go on. He’s my last hope and he’s the container I pour my (our, our, our) toxicity into. Bad mother, source of sustenance. Little lamprey, erstwhile hummingbird. Scrap of me, best of me.