motherpoet: a working/parenting guest post from Molly Sutton Kiefer

A guest post by Molly Sutton Kiefer, part of the working/parenting series.

I was born into a family whose habit was to string letters after one’s name.  I grew up spending the school year in the low-slung mountains of Chattanooga, the summers in a small apartment in Columbus, Ohio, where my father plugged away at his slow-moving Ph.D in Composition.  In an orangey-red bucket, I would play with the perforated edges of computer paper threaded through a dot-matrix printer.  My childhood was spent with an ear to the den-door, listening to the click-pause of my father’s tape recorder and the corresponding typewriter racket as he transcribed interview after interview.  When I was in middle school, he was awarded that Ph.D, became “Dr. B.S.,” and my mother put the manuscript into a shirt-box, wrapped it up, and perhaps this is where it remains.

My mother finished her Master’s degree the year I graduated high school.  My father’s parents decorated their names; even my grandmother with a Ph.D of her own.  Imagine that, a woman with a Ph.D in her time.  She turned ninety this summer.  In January, I gave my daughter Marjorie as a middle name, after her.

Beyond this alphabetic standard, I also grew up with a mythology that would guide my future-making decisions:  that one must choose between writing and a family.  I knew my father wanted to write too, but didn’t, because he chose family.  That was what I was told, anyway, perhaps in one of those hush-hush, please move away from the den-door and let your father work sort of ways.

And as I moved from childhood to adolescence to striking out on my own, I kept strange brilliance as company:  Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson, Anne Sexton, Elizabeth Bishop, Sharon Olds, Kimiko Hahn, Claudia Emerson.  Early passings, long lives, still living, unmothers, and mothers all.

Undergraduate—English with a minor in Women’s Studies and American Indian Studies.  Now what?  I couldn’t find a job, fantasized about winning bread for my boyfriend as he made his way through grad school in computer nerdery and then he’d do the bread-making while I worked on poetry in graduate school.  But I couldn’t find a job, which paralyzed me, and in a stubborn fit, I decided to get my Master’s in Education and teach high school, which I did, for three years.

I left teaching high school to become a poet.  I didn’t think of it this way, though.  I thought of it as leaving teaching high school to attend university, to get an MFA in poetry.  There’s a difference:  poet versus writing poetry.  A label versus an action.  A profession versus a degree.  I left a job with security, health insurance, tenure, so that I could fulfill that want of mine that came when I was half my age now, the one that barreled up from deep within.  I was drained at the end of a school day; I knew no poems would come when battling classroom management and parent emails and administrative whims.  But when I left, against the advice of my financially-sage grandmother, I found myself stumbling on the answer to What do you do?  I couldn’t call myself a poet—that was too presumptuous.  I had only a few poems scattered in small publications, and I didn’t know at what point I would feel confident enough to confess to writing poems.  I stood struck dumb at social events, small talk petering toward what do you do—and me thinking, ask me instead—what is your passion?  I can tell you that.  How do I earn a living?  That isn’t me, who I am.  What is your work?  What do you do that gives you income?  This is what they wanted to know, and I couldn’t say.

In the midst of my own alphabetic accumulation, my third degree (BA to M.Ed to MFA) with the University of Minnesota, I became pregnant.  When I say “became,” I, of course, mean struggled and grappled and clamored, desperate and anxious, another in the legions of (in)fertility, bumbling through treatments for PCOS, some boisterously less pleasant than others.  I didn’t think beyond the getting-pregnant part, not much, as my only goal was to overcome the I don’t ovulate aspect of my system and find myself birthing on the good insurance I received through my teaching assistantship at the university.  Indeed, it was good, and Maya Marjorie arrived in this world just as the final semester loomed up its impudent head.

I found myself enraptured, batting away at the pesky emails in my in-box, hibernating deeper into my sofa, recovering from a 42-hour labor that culminated in a c-section, which lead to a smoldering infection, which forced my partner to hold me up in the shower as I teetered and soaped.  It was not a smooth recovery and my mind was far from poetics and academics, though I loved my manuscript—poems about the cruelty of failure, that word, failure to progress smeared across the blank on the form:  reason for cesarean.   Overachievers never fail to progress.  But I had. My body a medical object.  My daughter a light in my arms.

Immediately, I realized my manuscript would become neglected, and I deferred my defense for the following May.  I took the first six weeks of the spring semester off, then taught for the following nine, each Thursday evening a pang as I nursed my daughter in the quiet conference room at my husband’s workplace before climbing into the car and skidding off to campus to teach intermediate poetry, my mind fully fogged.  That first night, I could barely lift off; my arms ached for Maya.

Despite the deferral, I still had poems to write.  So I would wake, before my husband and my daughter, and would slide downstairs, shower, then putter little poems before crawling back into bed with the two of them.  In the summer, I tried another tack—I would observe, and then sketch out little poems in the margins of things, while she moved from furniture to floor to another room entirely, little ruminations with clichés peeking through:

She’ll watch me all morning, her hair silver-fine,
she’ll putter her starfish hands on boxes, reach up to the curtain,
the one I smeared poo on a month ago, changing her diaper,
unrestful exercise.  These days, it’s only diapers and socks, the tops of her feet
will blacken with carpet dust and she pees like a toad
whenever we lift her under the armpits.  She’s learned grasp
and pinch and sometimes, she surprises me with the clasp
of teeth on the inside of my thigh.  We yelp drumming songs
in the afternoons, we pound the sofa cushions,
and she synchs up with me, we beat together. 

And this is exactly what I wish my life could always be like.  They’re joyful poems.

On the weekends, I ask my husband for an hour or two, so that I can spend time submitting poems from the manuscript to contests and magazines in the hopes that one or two will land.  I call this my work.

People ask me what I do.  I tell them I am a mamapoet.  Or a poetmama, depending on my mood.  This press of the words together, it gives me a shiver of pride.  On Thursdays, I drive up to the Twin Cities, attend a class on book arts.  On Mondays, I plan to attend a yoga class which explores the connection of the body to language.  These departures are hard, initially, but soon, when I get into the rhythm of movement, of pulling paper, the only reminder of Maya is the imprint of her on my body, and she hugs close to it, my back bends, the weight of my breasts reminding me that I will have to come home soon.  My name is spangled, its own little collection of letters, not an afterthought, fully a part of each breathing day.

Molly Sutton Kiefer has two blogs for her dual identity: roots + wings gives her freedom to explore motherhood, and maps + poetry reminds her to keep that literary life vibrant.  Her chapbook The Recent History of Middle Sand Lake won the 2010 Astounding Beauty Ruffian Press Poetry Award.  Her work has appeared in Wicked Alice, Breakwater Review, Permafrost, and CutBank, among others.  She currently lives in Minnesota with her husband and daughter, where she is at work on a manuscript on (in)fertility.  More can be found at mollysuttonkiefer.com.