Wild surmise

Sophie and I went to the library.

Seven words.

Sophie and I went to the library.

Seven ordinary words, marking the passing of a benign, seemingly mundane event. Almost no reason to mention it. A child. A mother. A library. So what?

After all, there are bigger events. There is a world at large, and my, it’s large. Tanking economy. Greedy banks. Bloody wars. Power struggles. Politics and pundits, media glee.

We are aware of the blazing ring of fire circling us. In the middle of it, we change diapers. We wipe little bottoms. We shop in bulk. We return overdue books at the library. We go to work. We try to find work. We love and we lose our spouses, our children, our way. We cry in the shower. None of this gets much press.

And yet.

*****

I think most of you who come here, come here because you have a hunch there is meaning in the small events. Not all of you are sure of this, but most of you—like me—hope it’s true. That the library trips and grocery errands and baths and Vicks Vapo-Rub all matter, somehow. That they matter more than the fire raging all around us, burning nothing but itself.

Some of you write me, apologetically, about your own blogs: I have a blog too about my kids but I can’t write like you. No one reads my blog except family. My blog is boring.

I visit your blogs, slipping in and out of your lives unseen, grateful for the welcome mat and the unlocked door. I visit you, I look at your photographs. I can feel your love and your devotion to your families. I can feel your frustration. I can feel your boredom. I can feel your wondering: Is this it? Is this all? What else should I be saying? What else should I be doing with this life?

When I read your words, I hate the term blog more than ever, because there is something ugly about it. One syllable, rhymes with frog, log, depending on where you hail from. Blog. All wrong.

Because what you say is beautiful. Why? Because your words prove that you are paying attention. You have been paying attention to humanity, intimately, drop by drop.

I read the words you’ve written, the words you are so quick to dismiss. I shake my head. I want you to take pride in what you write. I don’t know what our collective children will think, but my guess is that the generations we are raising now will sit together someday and define themselves less as children of broken homes or intact homes, but more as children of bloggers or non-bloggers. I look forward to hearing what these little ones will say when they are no longer little, no longer in need of a flushable wipe, wielded by a loving, if exasperated, parent.

Let me undefine you. You are not ‘mommy bloggers’ or ‘daddy bloggers’ or ‘single bloggers’ or ‘infertile bloggers’ or ‘adopting bloggers’ or ‘miscarriage bloggers’ or ‘dead child bloggers’ or ‘depression bloggers’. I read these terms and I am horrified and outraged on our behalf.

We are not front-page news. But we are our own front-page news. The fact that you take even a minute out of a month to say something—say anything—about your life and the lives of those you share your life with? To me, that says they matter. You matter. We matter.

I don’t always want to be here, living the back-page new stories that deserve more grand-scale attention than they will ever receive. But when I read your words, you remind me of the beauty and power in the simple act of recording a life. In writing about today, you are building a bridge to a place you will never see. That is magic deserving of reverence, of celebration. Bake yourself a cake. Kiss your reflection in the mirror. Cut yourself more slack. After all, you are a benevolent wizard. Follow my math: Bloggers are writers. And we writers—I define ‘writer’ as ‘those who dare to write’, whether it’s three words a week or 30,000 a month—are wizards. You will never know where your bridge will go. But trust me, someone will eagerly cross it, someday. You are magic.

Sophie and I went to the library. Henry and I walked the dog. I was up all night with Finn—those ears. My mother is having surgery and I’m scared. Daniel is away for a month and I don’t know how I will make it through. The adoption fell through. I don’t know how to say this, so I’ll just say it: she was stillborn.

I read you. I feel who you are. I see you. Thank you.

*****

At the library, Sophie curled up in the children’s section with several books. I curled up in a pile of pillows across from her, with a book I absentmindedly plucked off a shelf: “Mother Reader: Essential Writings on Motherhood.”

It includes an essay written in 1983 by Alicia Ostriker: “A Wild Surmise: Motherhood and Poetry.”

Ostriker could have been talking about mothers who blog—or about any of us who dare to write, catching our perplexing, heartwrenching, occasionally joyous lives in our drop-by-drop fashion:

“The writer who is a mother should, I think, record everything she can: make notes, keep journals, take photographs, use a tape recorder, and remind herself that there is a subject of incalculably vast significance to humanity, about which virtually nothing is known because [traditionally] writers have not been mothers. ‘We think back through our mothers, if we are women,’ declares Woolf, but through whom can those who are themselves mothers, when they want to know what this endeavor in their lives means, do their thinking?

We should all be looking at each other with a wild surmise…because we all need data, we need information, not only of the sort provided by doctors, psychologists, sociologists examining a phenomenon from the outside, but the sort provided by poets, novelists, artists, from within…[We] can imagine what it would signify to all women, and men, to live in a culture where childbirth and mothering occupied the kind of position that sex and romantic love have occupied in literature in art for the last five hundred years, or the kind of position that warfare has occupied since literature began.”

I want you to know that I regard you with this ‘wild surmise.’

We are in the trenches, as some smart soul coined it. All around us, the flames go up and go down like a hellish merry-go-round. We watch as the world and those who run it continue to set it on fire, again and again. We are not immune to global suffering. We do what we can, we vote, we write letters to the editor, we march, we make calls.

But we know our limits. At least, we perceive our limits.

So we lie low in our trenches. We attend to the lives we live. We write about our babies’ tummyaches, our children’s earaches, our own pain. We are grateful for all we have, even as we hurt, and kick sand over our hurts to hide them. We sense on some deep level that the pain we attend to daily is connected to the pain of the world—the pain of all those around the world who don’t write, who can’t write, who have lost it all. We do the best we can for whom we can. We do it for the ones we can’t do anything for.

That’s what’s in our words. Our “blogs,” our journals, our scribbled notes on the back of a grocery list—when we write even a word, we write out of gratitude, or protest. We write to witness. And that’s a beautiful, powerful thing.

Ostriker wrote: “For women as artists, the most obvious truth is that the decision to have children is irrevocable. Having made it, you are stuck with it forever; existence is never the same afterward…[y]ou no longer belong to yourself. Your time, energy, body, spirit, and freedom are drained. You do not, however, lack what W. B. Yeats prayed for: an interesting life. In practical terms, you may ask yourself, ‘How can I ever write when I am involved with this child?‘ This is a real and desperate question. But can you imagine…Dante, Keats, bemoaning their lot—’God, I’m so involved with this woman, how can I write?’”

We can write. To bear witness to our own lives makes us human. To bear witness where we are makes us all the more able to bear witness to the lives of others, even others we have not met, will never meet. The more we write, the more we refuse to be back-page news, to be “filler.”

We are not filler. Our children are not filler. No one’s child is filler. We know this in our guts.

But the world refuses to extinguish its constant ring of fire. We wring our hands.

Of course we do.

We may write helplessly.

Seven words:

But let us write with no apologies.

Now, seven more:

Let us keep writing, with wild surmise.