Dear Readers,
Each month, you will receive an email from me containing one boredom, one horror, and one glory. This is the 33rd one.
Boredom. The night before last I dreamed that I was still in MFA school at George Mason University with all these 23-year-olds, who had a lot of intense drama going on among them—love affairs and who got published where and stuff. I was one of them and also not: it was unclear whether I was supposed to read some of my poems during a five-minute slot at that evening’s event, like they were each going to do, or if I was one of the featured readers, a celebrated alum returning to do a half-hour reading with these young people as my opening act. I kept sneaking out to look at my computer to figure out what I was going to read. I could only find bad drafts of bad poems. I didn’t have enough to read for a five-minute slot, so if I was doing the half hour, it would be a total disaster. All this was complicated by the fact that I had Bea with me. I was pushing her stroller up and down ramps at the Metro station, sifting around in my bag for my mask while we waited in long lines for the elevator to the tracks, desperately trying to get her home for lunch before she fell asleep.
Glory. When I was 27 or so, I drove from D.C. to Baltimore to take part in a reading for a literary journal. My poems had gotten an honorable mention in its annual contest. It was a cool, thrilling night, all these writers and I was one of them. There was even a band. I had recently hit upon two tricks, which I still use: practice so much beforehand that you memorize what you’re reading, and read much more slowly than seems appropriate. After the reading, an old (?), glamorous man and woman came up to me. He had a book and had lived and taught all over the country. I loved flipping to the back of literary journals to the Contributors’ Bios section and seeing all the different places people had lived and gone to school and taught; each one was a little dream you could have. And a book, that was the bright line, the stark, objective division between real writers and me.
They said I was good, special, different and better than the other poets who had read.
“Thank you!” I said.
The man told me I could definitely succeed, but there was a secret I should know.
“What is it?!” I said.
He said there were a lot of people who had promise when they were my age, maybe a little older, five years or so. They might have a bunch of impressive literary journal publications, even a book—but then nothing. You never heard from them again. Did I want to know what happened to them?
“Yes! What happened?!”
“They had kids.”
Horror. What a bad thing to say to a young woman writer! I thought that even at the time, basking in the glow of his attention. But I still sort of like that he said it. I passionately promised him I wouldn’t have kids.
*
I take my recent dream to be an extension of a thought I had as I was mopping our entryway the other day: I timed out. For most of my life I desperately wanted to be a poet-academic of some degree of renown, and most of the choices I made were with that goal in mind. “I don’t care how long it takes, I will have a book,” I told my professors at George Mason. But it wasn’t a book I wanted, I found after I “got a book” (in the MFA parlance). It was to keep becoming more and more of a writer, however I kept redefining that for myself.
But for me, at the rate I was going, it wasn’t going to work. If I was ever going to fail out of Michigan and have to get my MFA all over again. If I was ever going to spend years working full-time between grad schools. If I was ever going to have a kid. And I always was going to do those things, because I did.
It likely does not need to be said that the guy at the reading was wrong. Tons of people with kids become poets, academics, or poet-academics of some degree of renown. I can cast my gaze across the hall from our apartment to find two examples. And there are certainly people without kids who are “never heard from again” after a brief burst of publications in their 20s.
But me, I timed out of the thing I was trying to do: I didn’t achieve some ineffable but (to me) recognizable level of being-a-poet-academic before I had Bea. Maybe having Bea wasn’t the deadline. Maybe it was turning 40, or just not being this exciting young girl anymore, or the pandemic, or exhaustion from always being on the academic job market. I certainly didn’t think of having Bea as a deadline, but the month or so before she was born, I was writing like crazy in a way I haven’t written since.
It isn’t that I went back on my weird promise to the guy at the reading; it’s that I lost the thread of the passion that led me to make that weird promise. Maybe if I had already achieved the, I guess, ontological condition of poet-academic, ineffable but to me recognizable, then loosening or even losing that thread wouldn’t have been such a big deal. Maybe I would have been able rummage around and find it, like my mask in my bag in the dream. Maybe some colleague or editor would have found it dropped and handed it to me. But those things were never going to happen, because they didn’t.
I don’t mean this is the way always it’s going to be.
Dammit this was supposed to be about Jonathan Franzen’s new book. And it actually is, but I’ve already written so much. I’ll tell you more next month.
Sincerely,
Lucy
Lots of my favorite writers had kids. And many of their kids wrote memoirs detailing what shitty parents they had. How can one simultaneously do two things that require infinite commitment?
It does get easier as kids age. They go to school while you're at work. They suddenly don't need your help with, well, everything. And that's because YOU'VE done your job, which is a very cool feeling. I also hear you on the grad school nightmares. Mine have morphed to include my son as well. Basically "No, I can't do one last semester! I have to pick up my kid!" Haha, brains.