So I had a kid

Miles Foster 

Born 8/30/2015

I have written (elsewhere) word upon word about approaching the great gulf between childfree and MOTHER. It felt so huge and monumental but now I am MOTHER and it feels pretty great. We've crossed the gap and gotten over the hump and a stride has been found. I wake up happy and my baby smiles at me.

This is a good chapter of life.


Currently:

Reading: Mom forums like Reddit's Beyond the Bump. Tim Gilmore's The Mad Atlas of Virginia King. 

Watching: In the wee hours of the morning where no human should soberly exist, I marathon old HBO shows like The Sopranos and Entourage.

Eating: fucking EVERYTHING

Wondering: I am in a constant state of wonder at this moment in time. I wonder if the baby likes the music we play and if my ceaseless drumming on his belly will teach him rhythm, I wonder how to maximize my time without losing type of unscheduled spans where magic creeps in, I wonder how to be a better friend without sacrifice to my homefront.

Shocked by: I am in a constant state of shock at this moment in time...ha. I am shocked by electric hues of poop and tiny tracks of tears, I am shocked by the caverns that existed in my heart that are now open to the light and the biological microcosms of new life, I am shocked by how quickly my energy returned and the waddling days of too-pregnant have receded into memory.

Planning: Weekly yoga. An oil change. A Halloween costume - Piglet maybe??

Learning: in leaps and bounds, in giant amounts, in quick bursts. The learning curve is huge here.

Laughing at: Synchronized family farts.

Om mani padme hum // Riverside, FL 

Truer truths

4/6/2015

I wonder at what point I will grow tired of people rubbing my belly and saying hi to you. It’s a pretty standard cliche, the overwhelmed and over pregnant mom-to-be besieged by the hands of strangers… but at this point, I adore it. Every time someone wants to say hi to you I beam, accepting their well wishes for your existence in this world. I am ok with our community wanting to know you.

In other news, I feel you getting stronger. The tiny twinges I understood to be you are morphing into tiny thuds and pops of “oh!” and I’m slightly afraid of how strong the movements will be when you are 8lbs instead of barely a pound, like you are now. I relax and prod the tightness of my abdomen, speculating where your head is, beginning the lifetime of irritation I will be to you. I am amused by this concept, that already you are turning away from my insistence, pulling the blankets over your head. Secretly I am soaking this feeling in as deep as I can, for now there is no sting of rejection from you. Only speculation, only idle ponderings. I know we will break each other’s hearts in spades but that’s for later days.

  

Truth be told, my days are filled with these idle ponderings of how our collective life will form, and to what degree truth will play a part. Obviously you will be too little for much truths other than the 100% obvious ones (burners are hot! food is necessary! on and on ad infinitem) but it’s the slippery truths I spend my time with. How old will you be when questions of sex and drugs and “mom, have you ever been arrested?” slip into our daily conversations? Will you even want to discuss any of those issues with me? Will you care to hear of my firsts and lasts?

Here are we

So suddenly living // The view from my office window

3/29/2015

Sunlight on fuchsia leaves
me in a parked KIA channeling Confucius,
hands symmetrically balanced
on each side of all things,

grasping a universe of silence
and spinning geometry
slamming atoms together
so microscopically cosmic.

There you are. Here are we,
speechless and slow
with all weights placed
in suspension.

Here is me and a face
of smiling wrinkles dancing down the path,
a chorus of unbridled laughter trailing after,
an acoustic guitar playing Pomp and Circumstance
in a newer style with all the proper resolutions.

Sunlight on fuchsia and flesh
and a narrow silver band of symbolism
leaves me contemplating catechisms
open-ended as cells knit and mend
without my needing to be a part in it.

Passively integral, this role,
as very directly we roll
towards a fate as yet opaque.

Here are we and there somewhere is you
underneath the warmth of sunlight
on the fuchsia of my light spring clothes
with hands wrapped around the belly you inhabit

as the willow tree next to me
buds and greens,
so suddenly living.

I think that's a bump

I always bookmarked those beautiful sets of baby bump progression photos,
imagining what my own might look like someday. 

As it turns out, there are no pictures of my bump that have not been taken, by myself, in a bathroom.
I'll fix that at some point... 

...maybe.

A Felt Flex

Wrong concert, correct sentiment // Atmosphere show #4

I think I felt you, in a crowded coliseum downtown, under a canopy of swinging can lights and glittering camera flashes. A twinge of a brush of limb on ligament, a pressure, a set of serial movements setting a mind at ease.

I felt you and uncertainty settled, I felt you and said nothing, I felt you and the lights circled wildly, an interactive performance, a flexing of fingers on ivory and an old man at a piano and I felt you in the most perfect way I could have felt that newness, before an oldness, an archive of pop culture wrapping around a womb and producing our dive into this thing together.

I felt you and grinned within and out and beamed. I felt you and was so moved by the dance of life at its beginning as you danced with middle-aged beauties falling in step with time and rhythm and I felt you where the music is made and I know that you will join me here on these steps, in these seats, in these amphitheaters full of sweaty joviality, that our molecules circle together now and will in perpetuity. Esto perpetua, whoever you are and will be. 

Notes to an existence

When you existed and I didn't know it yet:

Great Falls, VA // December 2014

- your father and I danced in the kitchen to “Came out of a Lady” by Rubblebucket, a song I’m sure I will sing for you, a video I’m sure I will play for you. You came out of a lady and I want you to save me, that’s amazing…

- I watched a swarm of Puerto Rican puppeteers descend on Hemming Plaza and chase a horde of laughing children around an easy evening and I imagined what life would be like when I was on the other side of this seemingly impossibly tall fence dividing BEFORE and AFTER not knowing I was already climbing...

- I stood with others and protested the injustices of this country, because it matters, because black lives matter, because the people in our communities alongside you matter. Because there are mothers with skins of different pigments who feel their children in their bellies as I feel you and that cycle of wonder is no less important than yours and mine. I hope this is a conversation and set of concepts that we will hash out many times in the future until you see as clearly as I that when our friends speak, we listen.

- I tried yoga for the first time and discovered I really really like it. I like to test my body and feel it conquer new worlds and positions, I like having a group of my favorite women over weekly, I like that our house is a welcoming and inviting space for meditative moments.

- I spoke my poetry aloud before an audience, multiple times over, when I was oblivious to your existence and then knowledged. It is a goal of mine for you to see me participate creatively, not just in our home but also sharing with others. It is important that you know what community looks like, true community, not the social imitations from the television. I want you to know and to participate, too.

- I climbed sheer rock faces high above a roaring river. I trampled dewy fields of clover down somewhere in West Virginia, hands and feet covered in layers against pervasive cold. I called after your father nervously when he traveled too far, to where I couldn't go, and I watched him deftly make his way back through glossy leaves.

Reboot

It's been quiet in here. For those of you who don't know, I have recently found out that I am pregnant. Perhaps unrelatedly and for some odd reason my writing has dried up. I'm sure it will bloom again, unexpectedly, and I am in no hurry... But I do find myself in a state of introspection and hermitage from my usually bustling social existence. I am contemplating what is in store for my futures, both immediate and long term. I am waiting to see if writing is a permanent state of existence for me or if I have reached the end of this particular creative reservoir.

I say all of this because I stumbled on a quote this morning by Mik Everett that, through this bit of silence, I want to share:

What happens if you fall in love with a writer?
Lots of things might happen. That’s the thing about writers. They’re unpredictable. They might bring you eggs in bed for breakfast, or they might all but ignore you for days. They might bring you eggs in bed at three in the morning. Or they might wake you up for sex at three in the morning. Or make love at four in the afternoon. They might not sleep at all. Or they might sleep right through the alarm and forget to get you up for work. Or call you home from work to kill a spider. Or refuse to speak to you after finding out you’ve never seen To Kill A Mockingbird. Or spend the last of the rent money on five kinds of soap. Or sell your textbooks for cash halfway through the semester. Or leave you love notes in your pockets. Or wash you pants with Post-It notes in the pockets so your laundry comes out covered in bits of wet paper. They might cry if the Post-It notes are unread all over your pants. It’s an unpredictable life.
But what happens if a writer falls in love with you?
This is a little more predictable. You will find your hemp necklace with the glass mushroom pendant around the neck of someone at a bus stop in a short story. Your favorite shoes will mysteriously disappear, and show up in a poem. The watch you always wear, the watch you own but never wear, the fact that you’ve never worn a watch: they suddenly belong to characters you’ve never known. And yet they’re you. They’re not you; they’re someone else entirely, but they toss their hair like you. They use the same colloquialisms as you. They scratch their nose when they lie like you. Sometimes they will be narrators; sometimes protagonists, sometimes villains. Sometimes they will be nobodies, an unimportant, static prop. This might amuse you at first. Or confuse you. You might be bewildered when books turn into mirrors. You might try to see yourself how your beloved writer sees you when you read a poem about someone who has your middle name or prose about someone who has never seen To Kill A Mockingbird. These poems and novels and short stories, they will scatter into the wind. You will wonder if you’re wandering through the pages of some story you’ve never even read. There’s no way to know. And no way to erase it. Even if you leave, a part of you will always be left behind.

If a writer falls in love with you, you can never die.

Cummer

Cummer in the earliest Fall

The singer seamlessly stops mid-lyric and slings a breathy “hey” my way

as I wait for the waitress, shoulder to the wall.

Hey.

Plate glass reflecting shifting shades of surrealism (and painted sunglasses?)

refract a popular culture that aged out of power decades ago. 

I’m fidgety at a table by myself, trying to channel this energy properly but

my pen taps mad against the paper.

Brain, be still.

It’s actually still warm outside but

inside the Atrium the best kind of chill has descended,

driving my fists inside pockets.

“Stand by me,” on repeat, three words exhaled through gap teeth.

Listen: to electric guitar somehow quietly shredding,

to the soft back and forth pad of of the singer’s feet.

Listen to the shotgun scooch of cafe chair against carrara marble.

This music is more suited for fields

trodden down by gathered bohemians

than this current configuration of whispering art patrons

And when the singer drifts off key

doubtless no one notices ‘cept me and that’s fine-

I can keep my mouth shut.

Now Showing:

I don’t know you, but you said I do

and suddenly now I want to 

 

(there’s no harm in curiosity)

Stitches

1904 // Before Wackness Descended

In Jacksonville the riots are on TV

as a gaggle of child rappers take the stage.

The shrieking faces shrink down to LCD flatscreen height and width,

contained in the space of a pixel and as easily overlooked.

I can no more blame than explain my interest

in a 19 year old plastic pitbull of a human being,

a walking gimmick, a schtick-up if you will.

Stitches and the other youngbloods are glitches

in the pop culture matrix which makes this student

of the universe perversely curious.

Thankfully the pain of aging is quiet, mostly, though

sitting on the floor of 1904 with my head relaxed

against the rattling speaker cabinet I feel the clamor crescendo.

It’s midnight on Thursday and I have work in the morning.

Through a haze of – body heat? Fake cocaine? Wannabe endo?

Who knows what this thickness is that hangs over our heads

but the strobe lights pierce it effortlessly and through it I see

a groping and desperate thirst somehow crammed

and coerced into young white bodies.

I feel like a bully. Like I oughta get this superiority complex examined

because I can’t understand it, the clear rift dividing sincere from riff raff,

the blaring transparency of marketing turning its keen eyes on us.

You didn’t come to this stage by your talent, motherfucker. Who’s paying for these beats?

You disgust me, turning me even against weed, on stage looking like an eggplant

with a skullcap barely on your head, flashing a set of shiny golden teeth.

I feel like overturning every table in this tainted temple,

taunted by televisions mounted on historic brick.

Mmm I’m too old for this shit