Thank you for reading Poetry Practice! I really love the Substack platform, not only because it is so easy to post and share my own work, but because there is so much good writing here! It’s like Twitter for people with a longer attention span. One of my favorites are the weekly comics by Liana Finck in Liana’s Newsletter. Last week’s cartoons were particularly on point. Nagging seems to be a theme for her, so if you need to laugh about wildly off-balanced household dynamics, check her out.
Our household is still working on finding our balance, but we have a few wins. We’ve reduced dinner yelling by giving in to a free-range/foraging style meal. Standing has reduced the violence of diaper changes. Our biggest win though, for the moment, is bedtime.
It wasn’t Maya who needed to get on board. Even as a tiny, roly-poly bug newborn, she smiled and giggled when I swaddled her, eager for the snack and snuggles to come. The bigger challenge was how to integrate her father into what was a very breast-centric activity.
We read a lot in this house, but I struggled to persuade J that we needed to read to this small creature who couldn’t even focus her eyes properly. The value, I explained, is that I needed a break, and he needed to be part of bedtime. He obliged, reading to the back of her head as she squirmed, and for a while I enjoyed a few minutes alone before returning to the fray. It worked, but it wasn’t that fun for any of us.
But babies change. Eventually, I didn’t need those few minutes so desperately, and she grew more interested in the hide-and-seek book/game her dad brought out every night.
Now, after changing into pajamas, we lower the lights and gather in Maya’s room. Sometimes I’m still moving about, putting toys away, getting her bed ready, maybe folding laundry. J gets into position on the floor mattress—which we’ve kept in this room almost solely for this purpose—and picks out a book. Maya wanders a bit longer, undoing the laundry I’ve sorted, or trying to climb on top of the nightstand, but eventually we all converge on the bed.
She still doesn’t have a long attention span, but she’ll perch on J’s chest for at least a few pages. Whenever the story ends, we talk softly to each other or lay in silence, watching her work/play until lights out. Maya goes down calmly and we have a few hours of free time before going to bed ourselves.
This ritual wasn’t planned. I don’t even remember when I began staying in the room for the story. But now it feels essential. No matter how tired we are, or how busy the day was, we’ve carved out ten or fifteen minutes of easy time together, hopefully sending us off into peaceful dreams (even if only to be woken up a few hours later).
Father-Poets
I am writing about bedtime because I am thinking about fathering. I’ve been reading poet Kevin Young’s Book of Hours, which opens with a collection of poems on the sudden death of his father. He walks us through the early days and months of his grief, creating poetry from conversations about organ donation and errant dry cleaning.
Two years after his father’s death he becomes a father himself, and the next section celebrates the birth of his son.
My favorite is “Greening”, written to his son:
the edges of this world that doesn’t want a thing but to keep turning with, or without you— with. With. Child, hold fast
Four poems in this section are titled “Teething”, a fact that feels like a poem in itself. The way we parents always want to know why the baby isn’t sleeping well again—they must be teething, right?
Young carries us through about a decade of his life, including more grief. His poetry is tender as he writes about the way love enters his life daily. I’m grateful for his writing, for the opportunity to experience birth from the experience of a father. The more common complaint is that literature lacks the experience of a mother, yet I struggle to think of authors who write so intimately about fatherhood.
One other who comes to mind is Craig Morgan Teicher, who describes his conflicted selves—father and poet and husband—with wry humor and cheerful resignation. In “Why Poetry: A Partial Autobiography”, he is outside, trying to write as a heavy storm approaches. He tells us how the rain will drive him inside again, another missed chance to think, to write, where he will hear the sounds of his children: the machine that keeps his son alive “rattles like an idling truck” and his daughter, Simone, who “is plotting something, standing and yelling / in her crib, jumping now, / her sleep a bad joke.”
I love hearing the father’s perspective, love knowing that there are men trying to write while their baby naps. I love that they’ve written poems called “Colostrum” (KY) and “Video Baby Monitor” (CMT), and that they paid attention during the breast crawl. I want more.
Who are your favorite poet-fathers? Or other writing by men on fatherhood? Let me know in a comment below!
Why it matters
I’ve made our bedtime saga sound mild, but it was a small part of the bigger storm raging in our household during the first months postpartum. One morning, sleep-deprived and concerned for the future, I jotted down a list of all the ways my daughter reminded me of her father, and how much I loved them both. I needed to know that I would be able to tell her stories about him, how he rescued her in the hospital, bringing her to me when my legs were still frozen, and how the first time I was able to write after her birth was while he held her for a three-hour nap.
When I ask my mother about myself as a baby, her affection spills out and she is full of sweet stories. She loved having babies and tending to us. But when I ask about my father, how he played with and cared for us, she blanks. Perhaps it’s simply time that’s erased those memories, or too much static in the intervening years, or unfair pressure on the mother to remember everything.
In a similar and less emotionally-charged fashion, my father-in-law smiles and shrugs when I ask about my partner as a small child. “I don’t know,” he says slowly, as if he too is surprised that he can’t remember what J’s naps were like or if he was a picky eater.
Already I’ve forgotten many of infinite moments of those first months spent staring at my child, details lost as more life gets piled on. Which is all the more reason why I’m glad these poet-fathers (and mothers) are writing, capturing the sweetness and the tears, doing the work of remembering for the rest of us.