Writing in and through motherhood

By Kim Moore

For the last few years, Clare Shaw, Amanda Dalton and I have made a pact to ourselves to write a poem every day throughout April to mark National Poetry Writing Month, or NaPoWriMo for short. This sounds, on paper like a Really Bad Idea. Every year, in fact, my poet-friends on social media seem to split into three camps. In the first camp, are those that think it’s a terrible idea that will result in hundreds of awful poems that will take over the world and drag Poetry into a state of mediocrity. In the second camp are the people who are writing alongside us, sometimes posting poems, sometimes not, who are taking part for a whole host of reasons. I am being slightly facetious here of course, I am sure there are also people who don’t really care one way or the other, or in fact, didn’t even realise NaPoWriMo was a thing.

NaPoWriMo has really worked for me the last few years. It’s the closest as a writer that I can get to the camaraderie of a group run. For example, last Wednesday I went on a group run with a local running club, the Todmorden Harriers. They have a multitude of ‘packs’ who go out and run - a ‘slow’ group, a ‘medium slow’ group, a ‘medium steady’ group, a ‘medium fast’ group - these are all the descriptors I’ve heard the few times I’ve been. I’m somewhere between the ‘medium slow’ and the ‘medium steady’ group, which means when I went out on the pack run last Wednesday, I was hanging on for grim death at the back of the pack up the hill, and then running faster than I’ve ran at any time (other than in a race) down the hill and along the canal. It meant I ended up running 12 kilometres without noticing, and climbing from the bottom of the valley all the way back up to the top of the moor. On a pack run, or a group run, you run past the boundaries of yourself. At one point, I felt as if my body, and my legs were not my own, as if they were carrying me across the earth despite myself.

NaPoWriMo can be like that as well - except you are writing past yourself, exceeding yourself and what you might usually do, because there are friends and acquaintances writing alongside you, egging you on, and sometimes you follow them onto different routes, or you write faster and further than you’ve done before, and you grumble whilst doing it, and complain but you do it anyway, because everyone else is doing it.

When I’m taking part in NaPoWriMo, I’m always absolutely convinced that the drafts I’m writing are not good. I don’t do anything with them during April. I write a poem a day and then abandon it until the end of the month. When I come back, I’m often surprised to see what is written, that there is something in those rough drafts that I can work on.

I can feel myself gearing up for April now. I’ve not written any new poems for about six months or so now, although I’ve been steadily reading and filling myself up with poetry. I’m now at the state where I’d quite like to sit down and write. It’s like a full feeling, perhaps how a glass that is almost to the brim with water would feel, if a glass could have feelings. Or it’s like teetering on the edge of a very long drop that you know once you go, you will be falling for a long time and it will be fine, but you are putting off going.

I’m hovering on that edge now. Or I’m holding myself perfectly still, so I don’t spill over the edges of myself. It’s taken me a while to recognise this as my writing process at the moment. When I started writing, I was in my mid twenties and I wrote most days, although I still had to squeeze it in around a full time job music teaching. I wrote like that for over a decade, and then I had my daughter, and I had to find new ways of working, new rhythms to my writing.

It occurs to me, writing this, that my writing used to be something I did despite everything else that was happening. Before my daughter came, I wrote around the edges of everything else. I was lucky - I was relatively young, I was physically fit and I’ve never needed as much sleep as the person I live with. When my husband went to bed, I wrote into the night, sometimes falling asleep on the floor in front of the fire, and then waking and carrying on, and then getting up for work the next day as if it was nothing.

Since having my daughter, my writing has to be something that my family commits to, even the members of the family who can’t really consent to such things. That is to say, I need my husband on board to make it happen. I tell him that I’m committing to NaPoWriMo again, that I need to write a poem every day, and he agrees to help make this happen, which means giving me time when I need it.

I wanted to share with you a poem that I wrote during one NaPoWriMo a few years back. It’s just been published in Poetry London magazine and I’ve just received my copy. I have been loving reading through it so far. The exercise was to write an Abecedarian - a poem which uses the letters of the alphabet, in order, down the left side of the page to start each line. I remember feeling very cross about this prompt, and annoyed at having to write in a form I had no interest in.

I’ve learnt since then that those spikes of resentment and annoyance, those spikes of energy are always trying to tell me something, that any prompt or exercise I feel annoyed about means there is something to be mined there, something to dig into. That year during NaPoWriMo I was deep into the frustrations and joy and wild beauty of motherhood, deep in the dark time of sleep deprivation, caught in the time when you are so bone-tired, but you can’t stop staring at your child, in the time when you never want to do another bedtime again, but you also don’t want to miss a bedtime because it feels as if something is being torn from you. I love her and I’m terrified. I want her to experience the world, and I don’t want any of it to touch her. Bedtimes were long and tedious and mundane and moving and beautiful and tender. How to hold all of this, how to explain all of this?

Since then, I’ve found this beautiful Abecedarian by Keith Leonard Abecedarian on the Good Father by Keith Leonard - Poems | Academy of American Poets

Perhaps Abecedarians are the form to write about parenthood with. I read this poem to my husband because I knew he’d enjoy it - he has also been the recipient of many admiring comments about being a Good Father, just for parenting. I’ll never forget the first poetry event I was part of organising after giving birth - I sat at the back and breastfed my daughter non-stop, in between taking tickets and greeting people. At the end, my husband walked around carrying her so I could have five minutes to talk to people, but all anyone wanted to talk about was what a good father he was! I mean he is a good father, but he was walking around holding her. I’d been feeding her the whole time and not one person came up to tell me what a good mother I was! Humph.

Anyway, the poem in Poetry London, “Bedtime Abecedarian” came out of that time. In some ways, writing an Abecedarian felt a little bit like writing a sestina - the form means you are following the thread of language where ever it leads, writing to the end of the line and letting your mind leap to a word that starts with the right letter, letting yourself be surprised by what you didn’t know you knew, or didn’t know you felt.

Some of the lines that surprised me - ‘love, love, so love is the last thing that she hears’. That I could repeat this word, that is at the heart of all of this. Another line ‘Nothing has ever felt like this…’. I didn’t know this, or fully understand it until I wrote this poem, that nothing will ever feel like it again. The line about quiet settling inside her. That was a surprise - that I could put that moment into language, when a child who is never still, finally settles into sleep. The line about the lesson. That fairy tales exist to teach girls a lesson. That I don’t want her to learn those lessons. I don’t want her to hear them, or live them or see them.

Here is the poem below - there are some amazing poems and essays in the recent Poetry London - here is the link in case you would like to subscribe. There is a cracking new poem in there by Katharine Towers and I was pleased to see a Manchester Metropolitan University alumni, Audrey Malloy also has a new poem in there this time.

If you would like a writing challenge, perhaps as a warmup to NaPoWriMo, you might want to have a go at your own Abecedarian - and do feel free to post them in the comments, or part of them (if you don’t want them to count as published).

BEDTIME ABECEDARIAN

Ally said today her friend was sad 
because he wanted her to play 
cars with him, but she wanted to play 
dolls in the home corner, 
even if it did make him cry and moan. 
Friendships are tough, I observe, 
gravely, uselessly.  I snuggle up, 
hug her, bury my face in her hair. 
I read a book to her in a boring voice, 
judge the moment when I can roll away, 
kiss her goodnight, whisper that I love her, 
love, love, so love is the last thing that she hears. 
Mummy, she mumbles, you're my favourite. 
Nothing has ever felt like this, these long 
ordinary bedtimes full of tenderness, 
picking a 'surprise teddy' for her that makes 
quiet settle inside, like a bird coming to rest. 
Red is her favourite colour. 
She is sleeping like a fairy tale girl, before the story 
teaches girls like her a lesson. 
Underneath this love, I'm terrified. There's a song of 
violence running through my life. I don't 
want it inside her mind. Today she wrote 
x x x in her notebook twenty times. 
Yesterday I held her close, then let her go. 
Zipped her into her red coat, closed my eyes.