Mashed potatoes and milk are both white, so they rhyme-- or, the Languages of Motherhood
by Jane Malcolm
You begin to learn the shape of things underneath things Knit winter hat and the curves of pot handles or spout pushing like a twisting baby's arm or leg
in a seven month sack
My pregnant pause had been exactly that, my attempt to “learn the shape of things underneath things,” to allow myself to be read and to acknowledge and embrace that reading. The tea cozy, its surface and depth—a new topography required new maps.
And then, during labor, I had a textual revelation. As I felt my way through things—feeling trapped, feeling raw, feeling like I had “exceeded my boundaries”—I actually thought about Mina Loy’s “Parturition,” and I understood labor’s clichés. In the midst of an otherwise very primal, intensely unthinking experience, I knew what it meant to be “the centre of a circle of pain.” There was only now, and in that now, “I am knowing / All about / Unfolding.”
I have told this story several times (with varying degrees of embarrassment!), and I think it epitomizes the conflict that motherhood presents: out of a profound acquaintance with the self (labor, the epitome of self-knowledge) comes a relationship that asks us to set aside ego, to reinvent subjectivity. Loy wrote poems in between the mending, the laundry, and the cuddles. I am writing this in the dark, as my son sleeps on the bed next to me. Motherhood has become my subtext, the material condition that shapes what and how I write.
He just turned three, and I am still trying to invent a language to describe motherhood. It is somewhere between the pregnant pause and the “knowing,” this attempt to render what is both exceptionally normal and exquisitely unique. Sometimes, I like to think about my son as an unfiltered version of myself, whose relationship to language is raw and utterly present. He apprehends the world in manageable meters and ideational rhymes, and in this sea of words, I see a kind of poetry (of my own creation?) that gives me pause.
Jane Malcolm is an Assistant Professor of English at the Université de Montréal. She has written previously on the poetry and criticism of Laura Riding and the poetics of Occupy Wall Street, and is currently working on a book about ambivalent gender and modernist innovation in the poetry of H.D., Mina Loy, Laura Riding, and Gertrude Stein. Her co-edited edition of Laura Riding's Contemporaries and Snobs is forthcoming from the Modern and Contemporary Poetics series at the University of Alabama Press.
