Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking

The week before Cedar was born I set a goal for my soon-to-be-baby and myself. I decided two things: in the first year of her life I would read all of Walt Whitman aloud to her and I would finally finish writing a book of poems.

I had a vision of us, lying on the bed, my broken-spined copy of “Leaves of Grass” tented between my hands above our rapt faces. I imagined I’d read “every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you” and she’d see the truth of it and crack her fist smile.

Instead she sounded her barbaric yawp to let me know it was time for a diaper change or a nurse. I realized that setting goals wasn’t my exclusive privilege anymore. I had gained a collaborator. After a brief sojourn in the co-sleeper pocket, Old Walt spent the rest of my daughter’s first two years on the bookshelf getting dusty.

The poems, they didn’t happen either. In the mix of cloth diapers, long afternoons spent in the rocking chair, and grinding up green beans into an edible paste, the time slipped away. I didn’t think to sing of myself when I was exhausted or unwashed or bouncing a crying baby.

And now her sister’s here, out of the cradle endlessly rocking, and I’m three times as busy. These days I struggle to fit in a good session of “Goodnight Moon” with baby number two. Looking back on two years of lost nap minutes, I shake my head. Those minutes are even more precious these days.

I know that my life is never going to get any less busy. It’s not the children or the job or the details of keeping a family together. It’s not being a mom. We like to blame our missed goals on all those things, but it’s just how life is. It just speeds up as it goes on. Mine is going on. Faster and faster.

Shaking the dust off Old Walt today, I see that the song should be the exhaustion and the diapers and the rocking chair. That’s why I’m writing this now instead of waiting until I think have the time. There is no time.

Whitman asks, “Will you speak before I am gone? will you prove already too late?”

My new goal is simpler. Maybe I won’t read “Leaves of Grass” to the girls, but I’ll read it to myself. I’m not going to let those nap minutes slip away any more. I’ll use them to speak before I am gone. It’s not already too late.

Wish me luck, I sent this to Scribbit’s Write-Away Contest:
scribbit: The Write-Away Contest | Motherhood in Alaska

tags technorati : motherhood poetry whitman writing