I found this the other day, and most of what is here still rings true for me. I am in a new relationship now. I have two more kids chasing me around, so I suppose that has impacted the way I feel about my womanhood. I think the biggest change has occurred in my mind. I am now giving myself more space and grace to be soft. All the help I refused to ask for previously, I am either asking for-or it is presenting itself to me-and I am accepting. My softness is allowed in the current space, and I am so grateful.

I hope this nourishes you.

October, 2017

The hardest thing I’ve ever done is be a woman.  The most offensive element of the whole ordeal is it wasn’t my choice, yet here I am, all breasts and bubbly disposition. My mother has four sons, and me. Each time I think of that fact, I feel cheated. Born into a world where women are often set up to lose, my lenses are cloudy with responsibility. Each day is a quest to take care of the people around me without much regard for how I feel, or what I want. Had I been born one of my mother’s boys, I would have much more freedom. The freedom to fail, make excuses, eat as many pastries as I want, and not worry about how many times my son has gone to the playground for the week. Fortunately, I do not have this luxury. My strength is an expectation, no matter what else is going on around me, or in the world. I am not allowed to take a time out and cry because it is the year 2017, and people are being sold as slaves, or because one of the babies my son shared a room with at the children’s hospital has passed. People in my house want dinner, and there is judgment when I don’t cook, just as there is judgment if I do cook, and don’t wash the dishes, or clean the stove. It is a taxing existence.

I showed this collection of poems to a friend of mine, a man- and he said, “Jesus Christ, just go ahead and name it I Hate Men. Other men haters like you will love it.” So sad that when a woman is truthful about her existence, some men will see it as a personal attack, and not a simple reflection. These poems were born from what I live, who I am and who I wish to become.

When I applied to the MFA program, I was living in the hospital with my son. He was born very early, and as a result, suffered some dangerous ailments he is now free from. I am grateful.

I had to grow into motherhood in front of strangers. Doctors of all shapes and sizes told me the correct way to breastfeed. Some of these people did not have breasts. They speculated about the causes of his prematurity, and gave me advice on when to go home and have “me time.” They even told me when to eat. I became a mother in front of a bristly audience, in a city I had lived in for about six months, away from my friends and family. My writing is about surviving as a woman in situations where I don’t always want to. Sometimes, I want to allow myself to be helpless, and not try. It certainly seems easier than continuous fighting-drowning and coughing up water, getting burned and applying thick coats of word salve on my wounds. Yet, here I am.

I want the reader to realize that I am just like her. If a man or two happens to read this, I am just like his wife, his mother, his sister. I paint my nails, I cry, I feel guilty many days, I want to be noticed, and though my exoskeleton is tough, I am fragile if you get to my softer, more vulnerable parts.

When I speak of falling out of love, it is from personal experience. The worst thing about falling out of love is admitting it to yourself. It is embarrassing. Disney has dealt us a bad hand in the love department, since the sequels to all the classics usually show the couples living happily ever after, not arguing about money, or who has gained more weight. Ariel and Eric are doing great!

The poems I wrote about motherhood and love after baby are the ones I wish I had in my hands when I was on bed rest, or when the monitors were beeping all around me, lulling my baby to sleep. I used to hold him while he received the blood of strangers and tell myself he was going to be someone else’s son pretty soon, since his blood was mixed with that of so many others. Is that not poetry in and of itself?

While reading some old journals a couple weeks ago, I came across a passage where I told myself I needed to go back to school. This was about four years ago, when I had just moved to Maryland, and I was working as a reading teacher at a middle school. I was miserable. The kids were delightful-it was the adults I couldn’t stand. They were always being intrusive, asking questions about my background I didn’t want to answer, and finding fault with me because I never wanted to show them pictures of my family. I was sad because I had no friends, yet didn’t want the friends The Universe was trying to offer me. I wrote about needing to go back to school since I had picked the wrong major in the first place. Who majors in Political Science? A woman trying to emulate her father, not even knowing his reason for following politics so closely. According to the pages of my notebook, I wasn’t sure I wanted to take the plunge and pay for a writing degree since many successful writers hadn’t bothered to earn an MFA, or if they had, they didn’t go around bragging about it. The greats made art by doing, not by taking instruction and trading feedback with others. I simply said, “Why spend the money when most writers just hunker down and write?”

Thankfully, I had time on my hands while morphing into a mother away from my home. Knowing that I would be staying home with my son while he grew healthy, I applied to the MFA program. I have pictures of his little toes sticking up next to my legal pad where I sketched out my statement of purpose. The nurses who took care of my son thought I was crazy. They asked how I was going to be able to take care of him and complete my coursework. Truthfully, I had no idea. I just knew that while I could write without studying writing, or using a program to help me grow as a professional, I didn’t want to. I considered the sense of community I would gain from writing alongside other people, thinkers just like me who were experiencing things that colored their writing and view of the world. I decided I would just make it work. After all, as a result of my existence as a woman, it is something I know how to do very well.