Please welcome: Guest Blogger and 2012 Pen Parentis Writing Fellow, Sarah Gerkensmeyer!
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“ScientistsDiscover Children's Cells Living in Mothers' Brains.” I wish this were the title of one of my short
stories.
As someone who juggles the roles of
mother and writer (among many others), I was most definitely intrigued by this
article in Scientific American last month. I think that many parents who are artists
spend a great deal of time thinking about the gulf that seems to exist between
their work and their family life. And
this gulf can be so discouraging. So
riddled with guilt and worry. Since
becoming a mother, I've wanted to insist that my writing has opened up, that
among the new joys and stresses of a family I can now conquer the world in my
work. And yes, there have been glorious,
fleeting moments when I've felt this kind of spark, pushed into an urgent and
intoxicating sense of discovery while writing during my sons' nap time or while
they are away for a couple hours at school and daycare. But often the negotiation of my family and my
writing life seems fraught with imbalance and uncertainty. I haven't read my four year old enough
stories today. I haven't worked on my
novel in weeks. If I let my writing
slide, I'll lose a piece of myself. If I
devote myself too much to my writing, I'll become that nutty woman who locked
herself in the attic with her notebooks and her Shirley Jackson and her Carson
McCullers. My two sons will never see me
again—a mother who got lost in the wilderness of her stories.
But then I read this article about
fetal microchimeric cells that have been discovered burrowed into mothers'
brains and bloodstreams and who knows where else. I gave birth to two sons, but it seems that
my babies never completely left me. And
what a comfort that is. I wrote some of
my strangest short stories right after my second son, Charlie, was born. I was too overwhelmed during the sudden quiet
of his nap times to try to dive back into the draft of my novel, and so I
allowed myself to write very short and peculiar tales, little stunted creatures
that I didn't recognize when they landed
there on the page right in front of me, the cursor blinking in confusion. But I didn't care. I was writing again. And my new baby was asleep, warm and
well.
Quite a few of those little stories
ended up cementing my story collection together in unexpected ways. Suddenly, I had a book. I had a new baby and I had a book. I like to think, now, that those newer
stories are Charlie's in so many ways.
When I was huddled at the dining room table during his naps, hunched and
desperate and spewing out odd tales, I wasn't fighting against the pull of my
tiny newborn baby. I was inspired by
him. When I was pregnant with him, those
weird stories were in me, washing around and fusing together right alongside my
developing son. It's a nice, strange thought,
isn't it? That he gave me those stories
to tell?
My husband and two sons dropped me
off at the airport a couple days ago so I could head out to the Green Mountains
for a two week stay at Vermont Studio Center.
I am lucky. I have a generous husband
who insists that I am a writer, not just a mother and all of those other
things. He insists that I deserve time
on a mountain, with just my stories. He
insists that I fight through the guilt of leaving home, that our sons need to
grow up seeing a mother do what she loves.
And I have two sons who are happy.
Who love me. Who will welcome me
home in two weeks. But my family is also
right here with me, my two sons especially—little bits of them burrowed into
unexpected parts of me and my work.
On the way to the airport, Charlie
(now twenty months old) chattered away in his carseat behind me. He listed things, a mash of words I could
recognize (horse, snow, mama, dog) and things I couldn't. He was absorbed completely in the urgency of
his language. Now that he has started to
talk, he often gets frustrated when we can't understand him. He'll jabber a string of sounds that we don't
recognize and he'll cry when we don't catch on—pointing at the television or
the refrigerator or a stack of his books, a concrete need bursting to get
out. But I like to think that sometimes
he's telling us something else entirely.
Sometimes he's lost in a long-winded diatribe that we will never be able
to piece together. Maybe it's the
stories. The ones that were swimming
around alongside him when I was pregnant.
The ones I wrote after he was born.
The ones I haven't written yet.
--Sarah Gerkensmeyer
2012 Pen Parentis Writing Fellow
