On Having a Person

There was really not too much about pregnancy that made me panic the first time around.  I knew that birth would be intense and messy, that sleep-deprivation would be unimaginably hard, and that a baby would change pretty much everything.  But I’ve always been a “cross that bridge when I come to it” kind of person, and I was so ready for this that things just mostly felt right.

But one morning as I waddled down the stairs, I caught a glimpse of my empty kitchen table, and at that moment I was knocked in the chest with a giant, terrifying reality.  In one of those empty kitchen chairs, I could almost make out the shadowy shape of a grumpy teenager with messy hair slumped over a bowl of cereal.  A teenager, who, had he been real and not a figment of my overly hormonal imagination, would have smelled like dirty socks and morning breath.  I suddenly panicked.  Grabbing the banister rail to balance myself, I said to my husband, “Oh my God.  There’s going to be a person living here.  Like a roommate, only forever.”   And while he reminded me that one’s own child is different from the messy, eccentric person you randomly meet on Craig’s List, the panic would continue to rise in my chest like a frantic flutter of crows trying to get out.  This was not just a baby we were having, but whole human being. 

I am someone who likes my space, and in order to recharge from the noisy goings on of life, I require a lot of it.  I like to drink my morning coffee without talking, I screen phone calls because I often can’t muster the energy to say “hello,” and while I don’t mind being hugged, I’m not one to lean into an embrace unprompted.   

At 30, I had finally gotten out of the trafficky, congested space of Southern California, had undoubtedly married the right person, and was living in a cabin tucked among the redwoods where we read and took naps and played jazzy music on the radio.  And I was desperately ready for this next chapter, but I was also increasingly nervous about our having to share our space with this unknown person, who I was now convinced was a sullen teenage boy with poor hygiene.

But then our little girl arrived, and I was one of those annoying people who experienced nothing but euphoria, and who felt that being a mother was what I was born to do.  And as it turned out, we had birthed a very quiet, calm baby who fit quite nicely into the cozy cabin.  The noise she made was fantastic, the spaces she filled were ones that we couldn’t have even known needed to be filled.  We did not feel crowded or overwhelmed; we felt (gag) complete. 

A friend once told me that babies are born empty, and that we slowly watch them fill with all the things that make them whoever they are going to be.   I always remembered that as we watched that bald, wobbly little lump start to smile and roll, sit up, stand and join the world.

And now she’s six, and her fuzzy, rust-colored bird fluff has grown into a long tangle of beautiful orange strands that would be totally gasp-worthy if she would ever wash or brush it.  Her feet are dirty, her lean legs are spattered with scabs and bug bites, and she suddenly demands privacy with all things bathroom-related.  She is a person.  A complicated person with opinions and moods who, I realized the other morning, often sits slumped over her cereal bowl refusing to answer our “good mornings” or other attempted civil pleasantries.  Other times, she wakes up as if on some kind of amphetamine, chattering loudly, doing theatrical things with her arms as we slump over our coffee, wincing at the way her energy is rattling our brains against the insides of our skulls.  

She leaves her shoes in a pile by every entryway in our house.  She interrupts our conversations.  She gets into my sewing kit and leaves needles on the floor.  The other night, she slid off her chair and writhed around under the dining room table because she felt that we were ignoring her during dinner.  She uses way too much toilet paper, despite the many tutorials I’ve given, and she never flushes.  She leaves blobs of toothpaste in the sink.  Aside from the one college roommate who, it turned out, was sleeping with my boyfriend, my daughter is the worst roommate I’ve ever had.

I mourn those early days when all she wanted was to be pressed up against me.  She wanted to wear my shoes and carry my purse, and when she wanted to know what I was doing she’d ask thoughtfully, “Where do, Mama?”  In her eyes, I knew everything she needed to know about the world, and we spent much of our days walking quietly, pointing to birds or puddles and naming these things.  Even her moods were simple; there was no guessing when she was unhappy and why.  We were so physically and spiritually connected that we breathed the same space in the house, and I felt empty when she wasn’t in it.

So I’ve been walking around with this little sadness because she has just begun first grade and has lost a bunch of teeth, and my voice is often hard and tired when I speak to her.  We have incentive charts and exhausting discussions about consequences and we still have those goddamn shoes at the bottom of the stairs.  

 But you know what?  Sometimes we also have conversations about whether we believe in God and how people should treat each other and how sad dying is.  We listen to audio books in the car and we read Laura Ingalls Wilder before bed and imagine what our lives would be like if we had to make our own cheese.  The other day she was telling me a story and she used the phrase, “…when much to my surprise…” and I wanted to hold her against me because it was so sweet (she didn’t let me).  She still needs me to lie in the dark with her before she can go to sleep, and she still clings to the nightshirt I wore for the two years I nursed her quietly in the dark.  I am secretly hoping she takes it to college with her. 

I know that one day I will feel even more confused by her than I do now, and I will mourn these days, the ones we are having now.  I know that one day her spastic kid energy will quiet, dipping into teenage melancholy, and I will miss the way she used to use my furniture as a jungle gym (no matter how many times I’ve asked her not to) and how she’d enthusiastically asked me a million questions before 8am and how there were always costume accessories strewn about the house.  And this work I do now, of trying to match her erratic, unpredictable behavior with some sort of cause, trying to decode the complicated outbursts and manic emotional swings, will seem simple when compared with what’s to come.

One day I will have my space back, and I will be free to silently drink my coffee and read an entire newspaper.  And I know that space will feel much too large and cavernous and dolefully uncomplicated.   But right now, there is a person at my kitchen table.  She is inexplicably sullen, wildly animated, eerily articulate, maniacally joyful, exasperatingly rigid and breath-takingly beautiful.  She is a terrible roommate, (aren’t we all, really?), but as people go, she’s absolutely one of the best I’ve ever met.

The Missing

It’s been eight long months

and I’ve done all kinds of missing

From the deep achy wells

to the small needling  pinches

I’ve been pressed up to the window of what I've not got

I’ve done big swells of ocean missing

dried sage and lavender missing

gnarled old oaks

grapes on the vine

and blackberries like wildfire tangled here and there missing

It’s been rich coffee talking missing

weavers in the windmills missing

goat cheese shudders

herb scented fingers

and everything that gypsy touches turning to beauty missing

I’ve had kids in mud boots

gnawing unripe apples from the top of the tree missing

little bitty horses with big, brown teeth missing

no need to lock the door

old dump truck beeping

its backing up song

and the roots being severed from the bottom of my feet missing

There’s been two a.m. heaving from my guts missing

little whispery twangs of hurt missing

tryin’ to rub it off of my little girl’s back missing

and the missing that submits cuz what else can it do...

And just when I think there ‘aint no more missing that can be done,

I hear a call from over the mountains and across the flat expanse

of a mountain poem

and a naked poet

and despite the way it pulls real heavy in my throat

I find myself humming

because no matter how you cut it, that’s just grand

We

We

My daughter snatched the ziploc bag
bulging with cookies of generous size,
silver dollar chocolate chips,
and she brought it to her room
where she ate them,
I imagine,
one right after the other
and didn't bother to hide the bag.

That's what she's doing with it.

My spouse wakes up hourly
just to check on it
feed it
let it roll around in his head
like so many loose marbles.
Then wears it around his eyes
as heavy red goggles the rest of the time.

The little one doesn't know
that his milk is laced with it.

And I

I wear it like a backpack
or one of those lead x-ray aprons
that let them see inside you,
shifting the dull pull of it from one arm to the other
bearing it sometimes between the ribs
or behind my lids
or in that hard to swallow knot in the gullet
and I watch it curiously, cautiously, as it goes about its work
careful to hit only one of us at a time,
before landing softly in the quiet spaces between us.

Home Waters

You can paint your bricks

charming shades of pastel
lined up like Easter candy

red doors and black hinges

charismatic balconies

twisted with iron

but you will not have me.

Though you keep your spaces

tree-lined

white blossomed puffs in April,

ostentatious amber just before they trickle down in the cold

and you spatter it all with wildlife

who live on your stale white bread

and who have long lost their primal pull

and refuse to leave

I cannot be enticed to sink into your small loveliness.

Your water is glass

that does not roar and cleanse

just hovers noiselessly and hardly dares to ripple.

And while your river splashes impressively,

will jostle you from one end to the other

fanning out its arm to sell you all that slips by,

I will see only chip bags

mosquitoes

dead factories sprayed with delinquent color

and no salty mist will call me home.

How We Got Gus

How We Got Gus

It’s 3:32 AM, and I’m being pulled from whatever level of REM it is that feels the thickest when you’re being roused from it.  I had finally been sucked into this glorious tomb of sleep at 2:28, less than an hour ago.  I groan, roll over to the cold side of the bed, pull the stirring body of my 6 month-old son close to my own and push an exposed boob toward him.  “What side was I on?  Didn’t I just feed him an hour ago?” Everything is a disconnected haze except the numbers on the clock, which are anchors in the otherwise drifty sea of night.  Hungry or not, he swiftly latches on (he knows the drill), and I wait, watching his little fingers close and open absent-mindedly, groping around my chest until his sucking slows and he is milk-drugged and still again.  I roll back to my side of the bed and try to sink back into sleep before the next round.

You cannot complain.    

You went into battle for this.

You cannot complain.

Six years ago, we conceived my daughter the way people who get to take things for granted do.  We had a bunch of sex, got pregnant, delighted in every normal ultrasound, and we were so confident in the process that at 30 weeks, we ditched the hospital birth plan for a homebirth we very much believed in.  We spent the last month readying our little cabin for her arrival.  My daughter, however, in her first act as a militant introvert, decided that she would never be coming out.  And by week 43, I made the defeated pilgrimage to the hospital where I was monitored, timed, poked, drugged, and eventually cut open, and my little redhead was pulled out, literally kicking and screaming. 

But then there she was.  And I wondered what the hell I had been doing for the past 32 years that had seemed so important. 

He kicks my arm, and I pull out an earplug.  I listen to a single, flaccid cry that gives out at the end. He’s back down.  It’s 4:05 AM.  I was almost dreaming, and now I am not.

We had really only talked about having one.  Hazel filled us with so much of everything that there didn’t seem to be room left to be filled with anything more.  We dismissed myths about only children being spoiled or weird, and we enjoyed the relative calm of our life with one little person who more than flooded our hearts on a daily basis. 

A friend had told me that I would know if it was time for another baby when I had the nagging feeling that someone was missing.  Neither of us had anything close to that feeling.

But suddenly she was two, and then almost three, and we could see the simplicity of “baby” morphing into the crazy hilarity of “toddler” and then the complexity of “little person,” complete with opinions and ideas and fat rolls that were quickly smoothing out into muscled limbs.  We watched as our early 30s started to drift into our “late 30s.” Our lives since her birth were the most fulfilled and purposeful they had ever been, and we started to feel that having another might let us wring out the sponge of joy a little longer.

So we pushed aside all of our hesitations and decided to just give it a whirl and see what would happen. And as often happens (if one is so fortunate), within a few months I found out I was pregnant again.  My husband was out of town when I took the test.  I sat on the toilet, waiting for the rush of joy, but instead was met with a quite unexpected and overwhelming wave of grief and panic.  I watched my daughter putter around the house with her funny projects, and I cried.  I didn’t want to have to share.  I didn’t want to have to make room.  I didn’t want to be pregnant.  I felt we had made a terrible mistake.

And just over a week later, I wasn’t pregnant anymore.  Scar tissue from my C-section had blocked my left fallopian tube, and the pregnancy got stuck.  And then it ruptured.  And while my husband was returning home from his trip overseas, I was in the hospital having the broken tube, and the pregnancy I didn’t think I wanted, removed.

He breathes heavily and I stare at the ceiling now, unable to fall back to sleep.  It’s 4:12.  I’m thinking about what to pack in my daughter’s lunch.  I don’t have much room on my side of the mattress because he’s right in the middle of the bed.  I curl into fetal position with my back to him.  I try yoga breathing exercises.  I know my window to sleep is shrinking with each breath he takes.  One of my legs is tingling and I try to shake it without waking him up.  At 4:40 I manage to sink back into sleep.

I healed and dusted myself off, and we decided that we really did think we wanted to try again, despite the now higher chance of a repeat ectopic pregnancy.  After a few cycles, I held another positive test in my hand.  This time the idea of a baby took a back seat to the medical drama of blood tests and ultrasounds.  As early as is possible, we went in and saw a little shadow of a thing that we were relieved to learn was a pregnancy in the uterus.  We watched the teeniest little flicker of a heartbeat, that magical pulse. 

After we had gotten through the proverbial woods, however, the reality of the situation dropped in my lap.  Another baby.  This time it was happening.  And even though I was grateful, I was battling the reservation that settled in again when I thought of making room for another person.

I was still letting the idea steep when we went in for my 9 week appointment.  We were chatting with the ultrasound tech about kids and the mystery of our daughter’s red hair when her wand froze, her face fell and the room got silent.  The screen was still.  I heard, “Honey, I’m so sorry,” as if it were spoken from the end of a long tunnel.  I stared at the unmoving outline of a head and the beautifully stacked curve of a spine, and I knew that it had been an alive thing, and that now it wasn’t.  And I suddenly had never wanted a thing more than I wanted something on that screen to stir.

30 minutes into a dream about sailing on a cruise ship that I forgot to pack for, he starts thrashing around again.  My face contorts, and I am crying, too tired to produce tears.  “I can’t do this.  I can’t DO this anymore.”  This is torture.  I want to get up and pass him to my husband, but I’m too tired to move.  My face hurts from being so tired.  My skin hurts.  I open my shirt to him, and he nestles in.  It is 5:36.

It was just before Christmas when, having turned down a glass of wine, I announced to my family that I was pregnant with our “third time’s the charm” baby.  I had a healthy right tube, and we now knew that it worked. 

The next day, despite insisting that I was just a little “backed up” from my prenatal vitamin, I started feeling bad, and by the following day I was having a hell of a time convincing myself that things were okay.  Still, I was scared and in a million shades of denial, so I waited too long.  By the time we drove to the ER, my entire abdomen was filled with blood.  Another rupture.  

In an inexplicable turn of events, the “third time’s a charm” pregnancy had somehow floated to my tubeless side and had managed to get itself lodged in the nub of the tube that had been removed a year prior.  This was partly why we missed the signs; the pain I was feeling wasn’t coming from the right place.  As I blinked through the anesthesia fog, the surgeon softly explained that she had to reopen my c-section cut to get to the source of the bleeding.  She had to cut out the rest of the tube and a wedge of my uterus.  She put her hand on my leg (which doctors are not prone to do often) and said,  “Ali, you almost didn’t make it.”  And I knew that “making it” meant living, and that living was all about my girl, the kid who still slept with my old nightshirt and took big inhales off it, even if I was lying right there next to her.

He finishes nursing and his eyes look like little black marbles in the dark.  The gray of morning is beginning to yawn behind the slats of the blinds.  His mouth spreads into a gummy, charming smile and I know he’s not going back down. “Noooo…!” I plead to him and toss a toy in his direction, praying that he will somehow entertain himself for ten more minutes.  Just ten more minutes.

For six months we didn’t discuss babies.  I looked at my daughter’s freckled nose, her eyes wide-set like mine, and knew that nothing was more important than me being here to draw pictures of cows and boats on her back before bed.  Gratitude for my breath, my life, for my little family, propelled me through those six months. 

Gratitude though, like all other emotions, is not a thick, evenly felt gift that you hold with you every waking moment; it’s too weighty. Instead, it drifts out of the immediate now and becomes something more like memory.  It takes the form of a stated fact (I am grateful), but fails to continue to be a feeling in your bones, no matter how you try to cling onto it.

Luckily, like gratitude, the baggage emotions like fear and grief can also only keep you in their grips for so long before they, too, begin to soften and keep their distance.

The following summer, as I drifted back and forth in the hammock, I watched my daughter filling up her little green watering can and making her way to the strawberry bed, and I was suddenly hit with the feeling my friend had warned me about.  “Oh my God.  Someone is missing!”  I could almost see the outline of a pudgy person, a boy, toddling around on uneasy legs where my now tall and gangly almost-five year old busied herself in play.  It was like realizing halfway to work that you forgot your belt.  Or your pants.  Someone was missing! 

The feeling was not a fleeting one.  I pictured this sort of cosmic window above my head behind which a little person could be seen peering down, his face pressed to the glass.  I am not religious, and I generally do not believe in things like cosmic windows, but this image was so vivid that I couldn’t dismiss it.  It lived alongside the sadness of knowing that my brush with “not making it” had likely shaken us up too much to broach the subject ever again.  Then one day my husband quietly said, “I want to try to have another baby.”

So we called our doctors and we got second and third opinions.  We made emergency plans and decided that if we could just have one more chance, just one more, we would be able to live with whatever the outcome was. 

I was thirty-seven, and while having a bunch of sex had worked for us in the past, this time it seemed not to be happening.  One cycle rotated into the next, and every negative test dropped me into a dark place.  I tried to dig up that feeling of contented gratitude for having one healthy, fantastic kid, but then hope would flare up in its place, and I’d become adamant.  It took six more months, and over the course of the six months, I had given up six painful times.  I apologized over and over to the little boy looking through the window, and I scolded myself over and over for not being able to let it go, for knocking gratitude and contentedness out of the way like a bully, for feeling that my daughter wasn’t enough when I knew she most certainly should be.

And then there was a positive.  And there was blood work and ultrasounds.  There was a pregnancy in the uterus.  There was a normal 9 week ultrasound with a wiggling, squirming little being.  I dreaded every appointment and braced myself for loss, for stillness, for dramatic gushes of blood.  Instead, 37 weeks later, I was handed a small, warm package that I was told contained a boy, and I began to believe in things like cosmic windows and messages from the sky.

Gus and I are awake now, but the rest of the family still sleeps.  He squeals and makes himself laugh by sucking in air, a new sound he’s trying out.  He grabs is toes and rocks back and forth.  He clutches a fistful of my hair and shows me his gums.  I have 14 minutes before I need to get up, make his sister’s lunch, coerce her into wearing her puffy jacket.  I wonder how I’m going to drive her safely to school when my eyes are seeing double and the weight of exhaustion forces my eyelids down with every blink.  I cannot do this day.

Most days I am a zombie, and my mind is plagued by the negative thoughts of what I’m doing wrong.  “I’m not loving enough,”  “The house should be cleaner.” “I’m enabling his shitty sleeping,” “I keep forgetting to hug my husband,” and the big one, “I should be more grateful for Gus.”  Every second I should be grateful for Gus.  But when I’m trying to make dinner, and he won’t let me put him down, so I’m holding him with one arm while trying to kick open the oven to toss in some semblance of dinner, I forget to feel gratitude.  When he blasts through a diaper while I’m in the middle of grocery shopping, and I discover that I have forgotten to stock the diaper bag, I forget to feel gratitude.  When I’m in the shower, my hair full of shampoo, and I hear him wail, already awake from a mere 12 minute nap, I do not feel gratitude.

And I go to bed many nights feeling guilty and ashamed for all of the negative thoughts I battled throughout the day.  For not staring at my children in wonder all the time, for snapping at my daughter when she kicks her shoes off at the bottom of the stairs, and for not clutching them closely enough and acknowledging the little miracles they are every second of the day.

But that is not how gratitude works.  Like fear and grief and desire and even love, it is too big and profound and cumbersome to carry around in our hearts every minute; we wouldn’t get anything else done.  Instead, it lives like ocean waves, sometimes nudging us a little with chilly, delightful splashes, and sometimes knocking us completely off our feet. 

Yet somehow, running on the fumes of only tiny sips of sleep and looking ahead at a day full of mundane domestic errands, milk spilled all over the counter, and shoes to pick up from the foot of the stairs, I can still take a moment in the early morning to stare at this simple creature with his enchanting eyes  and ridiculous dimple, and I am reminded of his journey and of his patience at the window and of the weight of what I have been handed.

Goose

I go for a run that morning

to shake off the dust of worry

that has settled in a fine layer

overnight

flipping through mental files of bills and checks,

the weight of legal documents,

how I would remodel a bathroom

with a claw foot tub

in a house I don’t yet own.

I run easily without the weight of the stroller

some flakes chipping off and flying behind me,

others sticking obstinately

as I move through a crowd of prattling geese.

One catches my attention

with what looks like a limp worm dangling from its face

that I soon realize is its tongue

shards of shattered beak left gaping around it.

I listen first to the revolted shudder that tells me to flee,

until that deeper spot tells me to go back

and be human.

That goose can’t do its work like that

and the grace of the rest of the geese,

who are busily gossiping in what I imagine to be

the comical accents of British butlers

while they mindlessly go about their work,

and the silly ease with which they rip up and nibble grass and seed

in their sleek, black beaks

only exaggerates the seemingly terminal condition of their luckless mate.

yet,

I watch as he waddles on able feet

with a heart that still needs beating

and dips his head unnaturally,

scooping what he can catch in the cracked remains of his face

and tips his head back to urge the pieces down his throat

past the flaccid tongue that only complicates the job,

and I am ashamed.

For to have worries is the work of the living

for those of us so fortuitously intact.

The Baby is Eating All the Poetry

The baby is eating all the poetry

Sucking out milk and marrow,

blood and ambition

with each gluttonous pull.

He is peach, dimpled tentacles that

draw out the clutter of words,

the juicy rhythms born of memory and electricity,

even the dark ones.

When inspiration dares to replenish at night,

he kicks it away with dough roll thighs

screams at it until it dissipates,

batting blameless eyelashes at it in the dark.

The baby is eating all the poetry,

leaving only wordless, foggy space,

the hypnotic dance between innate need and limitless offering,

and a colorless, wistful hum

that offers nothing in the way of anything

that could be put to paper.

A Starting Place

“And why don't you write? Write! Writing is for you, you are for you; your body is yours, take it. I know why you haven't written. (And why I didn't write before the age of twenty-seven.) Because writing is at once too high, too great for you, it's reserved for the great-that is for "great men"; and it's "silly." 

Besides, you've written a little, but in secret. And it wasn't good, because it was in secret, and because you punished yourself for writing, because you didn't go all the way, or because you wrote, irresistibly, as when we would masturbate in secret, not to go further, but to attenuate the tension a bit, just enough to take the edge off. And then as soon as we come, we go and make ourselves feel guilty-so as to be forgiven; or to forget, to bury it until the next time.”
― Hélène Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa

I have always been a zealous and even gluttonous reader who unfortunately retains only about 10% of what she reads.  I am always left with just some aura of the text, though the specifics float away like dandelion spores not long after I've closed the last page.  This is why I'm insanely impressed with myself for not only remembering having read Cixous' essay (Okay fine, the title initially escaped me, as did most of the content), but for recalling enough of the phrasing to quickly locate the passage that has been rattling around in my head since I first encountered it.

I read this essay in graduate school and while my highlighter had been easily swiping here and there over the punchy prose, I stopped in my tracks when I reached these two paragraphs.  I instantly felt the you, become me.  Not because I had ever considered serious writing to be reserved for men (I think I had learned everything I felt about wanting to write from women like Atwood, Morrison, Woolf, Shelley, and even earlier, from Judy Blume and Beverly Cleary and the very scandalous V.C. Andrews), but because Cixous had just completely accused me of the very thing I'd been guilty of since I had had my first little diary as a kid.  I mean, my first diary had a combination lock on it.  My impression from age 7 was that writing was private and secret and its purpose merely catharsis. And somehow I had never evolved past that, despite having recorded the daily darknesses of of my teenage years, the wild drama of my twenties and the new relative calm of my early thirties.

Writing for me had always been as necessary as it was mortifying.  It was something I did alone and for myself, filling the pages of  little journals and notebooks and then stockpiling them in my closet.  I would have frequent shudders of panic imagining that I would one day be killed in an unexpected accident, and the people I love would sit around drinking coffee and pouring over my clumsy, imperfect scrawl of ideas, reading lines out loud to one another in a, "Hey guys, get this!" kind of way.  My words were always ones that "didn't go all the way,"  and it was because I never let them. In order for them to go anywhere really, you need to actually revisit them, wrestle with them, interrogate them, say them aloud, and I considered most of what I wrote to be too unbearably bad to ever look at again.


I find there to be nothing more embarrassing than bad writing.  When people approach me with their screenplays or short stories or (even worse) their poems, I squirm with discomfort.  Because it takes a lot for writing to be really good, and while I'm always beyond impressed by other people's confidence in letting it out of their pants (to keep Cixous' metaphor rolling), I am absolutely the worst critic of the craft.  One cliche, and I'm out.  And what can be harder than stringing words together that have never before been strung?

So I read Cixous' 2 paragraphs and saw myself so clearly that it seemed stupid that this epiphany took so long to clobber me over the head.  That the thing I like to do the most can be so accurately likened to the primal, awkward, act of masturbating.

So I have spent the past few years pushing myself to find the one thing a writer needs to really be able to call herself a writer : an audience.  I've braved a few open mic nights with poems I forced myself to revise and even submitted a few to poetry contests and literary magazines just to force the words out of my hands.  And while my emotional armor is fragile when it comes to criticism or rejection, I have already felt the prideful rush of accomplishment that comes from crafting, rather than just spewing out, a piece of writing.

I do not dismiss the need to write privately and without purpose; this kind of writing is good for the psyche and is often the most honest sort.  But without a purpose beyond the needful release of words, I will continue to bury them before they've had a chance to become anything more than just ejaculate.  So I have borrowed (and completely taken out of context) a title from Whitman (a poet who knew a thing or two about sexual inuendo) that I think sums up my need for creating an actual space for my writing, outside of the pent-up, aching pages of the journals shoved under my mattress.


So yes, Ms. Cixous. Why don't I write?