Two Months Since Lina Day
I have been Lina’s mother for two months, although I am still figuring out what that means. One interesting change I have noticed is this: I experience some of my favorite poetry differently now. Pretty trippy. I’m a poetry junkie, and appreciate that a good poet can express worlds in very few words. There are some writers of prose who can do this (Sam Shepard comes to mind), but poets usually manage the most efficient and effective emotive expression, according to me. Anyway… I was reading some Sandra Cisneros (from Loose Woman, if you must know), and realized that both my self-concept and my emotional reality have transformed enough in this short time such that some poems sit differently with me now. I found this irritating at first, and re-read the poems, trying to force them (or myself) to behave. It didn’t work. Then I had a moment of panic: have I lost something? Am I spiraling away from myself? How come this little 10-month-old interloper is influencing how I feel about my very-grown-up poems?
Then I realized that I was experiencing something amazingly beautiful. The poems that were so whole and all-encompassing to me before are now missing something… so much so that I could feel it right away. The poems are still important and transformative for me, it’s just that now they represent a smaller domain of Stephanie. That is cool and weird and scary. I will never again define myself in the same way. I can be tough and competent and wholly myself… I can run the whole damn show… but now I do it holding my daughter on my hip, and that changes everything.
It’s good to be Mama.