Literary Reflections

Throughout the sleep-deprived haze of my early child-rearing years, I wrote very little, if at all—but somewhere deep inside, the longing for poetry remained, dormant but very much alive.

Absorbing these images, it became clear: motherhood, at least in its initial stages, is simpler than I’d originally thought.

It’s like the act of writing, where I have kept my sourdough starter alive by continuing to feed it, and I have practiced the art of baking over and over again, knowing that not every loaf will leave my home, that some of them may even go in the garbage or become croutons. It is only because I continue that I succeed.

What I wanted, of course, was some kind of Plumfield. A space that didn’t force me to choose, but accepted both parts of my life.

The books, as my daughter said, were her childhood. How could I possibly give them away, deny her that safe corner of imagination?

I understood her loyalty to the one true story, the first version in her experience. That comforting feeling of stability and rightness is not easily outgrown.

I jog and write. Feet find road, fingers ping keys. I don’t lose weight. Essays are left in pieces. Chapters are only ideas. I had hoped that by now my resolutions would be paying off.

I was perhaps the exact readership that Judy Blume had in mind when she wrote Are You There, God? I was a girl with very little information about sexuality.

I still don’t remember what it is. I know the feeling though. I feel its emptiness like black tar.

Seeing my dead daughter become a publicly recognized name was unexpected in my self-focused grief and my naïve eagerness to share what a writer and human being Victoria was, and I have mixed feelings about it.

I have learned to value those things—the jugs and the kettles, the infant sunscreen.