I was trying to explain that transposition
between having thoughts and doing for others,
because in every household the metaphor is clear:
the caretaker is a woman, and so
when I began
writing, I listed out my morning, the preparations
and cleaning up of spills and toys, taking down
and fetching, the driving and carrying of people
that no one wants to know about
if we believe in the reality of book contracts
and job offers. I had
an accomplished list,
I believed, a specific and authentic record
of the drain cleared, of stirring a pot
and rubbing the back of a hysterical child,
and through it I thought I constructed
a breathing replica of my life, the aspic
in which I moved. But when I looked inside,
looked closer, I found only
the second-wave woman,
nearly the very same image I knew repeatedly
as a girl and as a woman trying to write,
you are not this,
you are this,
these binaries, again and again. Yes, my time
was missing, I did not sleep very much then,
I had ground myself down on the mill wheel
of uncompensated work, but my thoughts
beat batwings against my skull, some of them
more powerful than any idea
I’d had yet in my life. I even wrote down
all the things that flapped out of me at night
in hours I stole from sleep or was expected to use
on my child. I wrote the way writing feels urgent
when you learn energy has been expended
to silence you, or worse,
to get you to silence
yourself. These ideas that I wrote
and even tried to publish were utterly
new to me, I couldn’t have known them except
for motherhood, and I wrote like this for years
to an audience performing the great labor
of the world, not only women but so many of us,
we who are asked not to consider aloud
what we become inside
our prisons, schools, hospitals,
our profitable, dick-swinging offices,
we who are asked and then silenced by force,
reduced pay and firings, dwindled invitations
and the refusal of our words, belittled by stories
everyone else seems to sign on for
that tell us to disbelieve our lying eyes.
In the midst of my work, running another errand
or in the middle of the night, I wrote through it,
learning women don’t give up our creative
selves, no child demands it,
but we are made to concede
by real people who benefit from all we relinquish,
those we know personally and those agents
of power who do their best to be invisible,
and then we are told this uncreative life
was a choice. The list I made on the day
I found a dead mouse under the sink
and buried him, when I tore apart
my child’s jigsaw puzzle in a glorious flying out
of edges and fixed our washing machine
with my own weary hands, it told me how angry
I was at these tasks, a barrage I believed
had worn my mind smooth. It explained
why the writing came in pieces,
but the list was not what I wanted to say,
that I experience joy
because I have made room for it. I am writing
that while the metaphor, for women,
of birthing to creative activity
is in some ways correct, it is only the first move
to conjure a woman’s grievances,
and it is past time to make the second, and so
I ask her to speak,
I call her forth,
I open my throat.
