On the spot

Panic. I'm reading one of my poems to a class of Chinese students in an hour's time, as a favour to their tutor. I hadn't thought much of it, just that I would read the poem and they'd maybe ask what bits meant and whether there was more story behind the poem etc. But I've just been given a sheet of questions they've prepared (two sides' worth!) and the first one is 'In your view, does your poem resemble the poetry of the contemporary Chinese Misty poets?' Er, well it may do but I couldn't possibly say as - to my shame - I have no idea who the Chinese Misty poets are. Can't you just ask me why my poems don't rhyme or something instead? Why did I agree to this?

[OK, a quick bit of research (thank heavens for the internet) tells me that the Misty poets rebelled against the officially sanctioned poetic ideology, so given that there IS no officially sanctioned poetic ideology to rebel against in this country, or at least not one that a 12-line poem about insomnia presents a challenge to, I will have to answer no to that particular question.]

Dedicated to the one I workshop with

"Woe to him inside a nonconformist clique who does not conform with nonconformity." - Eric Hoffer

Bloody hell. Just when I was feeling sort of ok about myself and my poetry career or temporary lack of it, an seemingly innocent brown envelope gets me all antsy again.

I was using the tail end of my bank holiday weekend to attend to my editorial duties for the Frogmore Papers, aka going through submissions with my most ruthless hat on. One of the submissions was a small selection from a forthcoming collection by a local poet, of poems dedicated to other local poets. Most of the dedicatees were people I knew slightly from workshops or, occasionally, readings where we'd shared a bill, and all of them are now doing much better than me, bringing out their own collections and running their own workshops instead of attending them. It made me realise how invisible I've been on the Brighton 'scene' for the past year or so, how my own social laziness has apparently damaged my chances of getting anywhere with my poetry just as much as any drop in the quantity or quality of my actual writing.

And yet I still want to believe that you can be a poet without having to hang out with other poets all the time. If I sometimes choose sitting at home with my husband watching West Wing DVDs over attending a reading on the other side of town, am I less of a writer? I fear the answer may be yes. While I am still friendly with a few local poets, the comparatively moribund condition of my 'career' reflects the fact that for some time I haven't bothered to show my face at the sort of events where poets circulate and network and, presumably, agree to publish each other and dedicate poems to each other. Partly I'm envious of this Brighton clique - who *doesn't* want to be in the gang, after all? - but partly I find it unappealing and fake. My friends are my friends for all sorts of reasons, but the reasons never include their poetic activities. I ended my involvement with Lewes Live Literature mostly because of the unbearable schmoozing that was so necessary and at which I was so inept. But will I ever get anywhere if I don't accept that a bit of 'who you know', a bit of networking even if it's disguised as getting pissed at a poetry event, is part of the deal?

Mothers, fathers, poets

I think I may have been a trifle optimistic in my diagnosis of the poetry situation. My brain IS still going like the clappers, but this week it seems to be entirely employed in making lists of what to take into hospital with me, what we still need to buy/acquire and how we are going to create the space for it all in a one bedroom flat, and what I want to write in my birth plan. There is very little scope for poetics in a birth plan, it turns out. Nothing that includes the words 'episiotomy', 'squatting' and 'artifically ruptured' can really aspire to be lyrical.

Interesting thoughts from Adrienne Rich in Of Woman Born:

Once in a while someone used to ask me, "Don't you ever write poems about your children?" The male poets of my generation did write poems about their children - especially their daughters. For me, poetry was where I lived as no-one's mother, where I existed as myself.

Although it was Rich's choice not to write about her children, this passage did remind me that, while no subject is verboten to the male poet, women who write about certain things (pregnancy, motherhood, domestic life, the female body) are condemned as being too limited, or too predictable, or just too damn GIRLY. If men get sappy about their children it is vaguely novel at worst, wondrous and transcendent at best, but if women do it it's redundant and boring - well of COURSE women love their children, duh. Or maybe you just have to be an exceptional poet to get away with it, whatever your gender.

Dear Babe, that sleepest cradled by my side,
Whose gentle breathings, heard in this deep calm,
Fill up the interspersed vacancies
And momentary pauses of the thought!
My babe so beautiful! it thrills my heart
With tender gladness, thus to look at thee

I love Frost at Midnight, but wouldn't we read these words slightly differently, more critically even, if Coleridge were a woman?

Or these from Waking with Russell by Don Paterson?

Whatever the difference is, it all began
the day we woke up face-to-face like lovers
and his four-day-old smile dawned on him again,
possessed him, till it would not fall or waver;
and I pitched back not my old hard-pressed grin
but his own smile, or one I'd rediscovered.

I think I'd love these poems just as much if they were written by women, but then I don't think they could have been. There is, I believe, a reticence among women poets to engage with their children too directly or emotionally in their work, because they fear not being taken seriously. Was that at the back of Adrienne Rich's mind? Did she really want to be 'no-one's mother' in her poetry, or did she just perceive that in the eyes of the poetry establishment, being someone's mother lessened her?

Weeks: 22+1

Imperfect perfection

At our 20 week scan on Monday the sonographer detected a probable cleft lip, and on Thursday we were rescanned by a consultant, who confirmed that there was a cleft and that it looked to be unilateral (ie only on one side of the lip), although bubs was being very uncooperative and wriggling around too much to get a very clear view. Whether the palate is cleft as well probably won't be detected until after birth. Although the consultant had never seen a cleft inherited from a parent before, our own research had told us that the chances of having one go up from 1 in 700 for the general population to 7 in 100 if a parent also has a cleft. I don't think I'd thought about my lip in years, it's been such a non-issue for me, but suddenly I'm aware of it again.

Despite the fact that I don't particularly wish away my own cleft, the emotions I've felt about my baby's are a lot more conflicted. I feel guilty for passing on my faulty genes, and for not even considering that I might be doing so (although it could still be total coincidence as well.) I feel anxiety about the number of unknowns attendant on pregnancy, birth and child-rearing suddenly increasing in number. I feel irrational hope that the baby will have exactly the same sort of cleft experience as me rather than anything more traumatic. I feel a bit of anger that things will be difficult, and that I won't be able to have the home birth I was planning. And I feel sadness for the lost 'perfect' baby that never in truth existed, but in our imaginations was the only outcome we'd entertained. Websites about birth defects tell you that it's normal to go through a grieving process, however brief, for this imaginary perfection you've lost. But for me the grief is tempered by increased excitement, because where before there was only potential, now there is reality, a real human being. Because nothing makes us more human than our imperfections, after all. And the baby is otherwise healthy in every way as far as the scans can tell.

Many of our worries now are practical ones, about the surgery involved, the timescale and the recovery process, and the possible problems with feeding, breathing or speech. My parents must have experienced the same worries but they wisely and kindly never shared them with me. A child with a cleft doesn't need to know that it's a troublesome child.

We also found out that the baby is probably a girl, and again this knowledge closes off one avenue of imagination but makes the developing person more real and exciting at the same time. And cleft or no cleft, our baby WILL be perfect to us :)

Weeks: 21+3

Sad news

The baby which one of my colleagues was expecting (due last week) didn't make it through the birth alive. It seems deeply unlikely and unfair that a tiny foetus can - against the odds - make it all the way through the pitfalls and miracles of pregnancy, that it can be protected and thriving for nine months, and then not be out of the woods. It made me realise all over again that in fact there IS no 'out of the woods', that every life is stupidly fragile from the moment of conception until the moment we die, whether that death comes tragically soon or after many flukey, healthy years.

You always know that losing a baby must be the worse thing ever, but I know it more sharply now I'm pregnant myself (even though I still can't imagine what they're going through). It's such a horrific reversal of the preceding nine months of expectation, planning, congratulation, excitement, happiness. When you're pregnant everyone celebrates with you; if you lose your child when it's barely arrived you must feel totally alone. I now feel terrified for my own little bump, of course, but mainly horrified that my colleague will eventually return to work and have to experience my pregnancy and happiness (assuming nothing DOES go wrong, universe forbid.)

Poetry in waiting

Someone at work asked me if I was writing poetry at the moment, and I almost said yes. The truth is that although I haven't written a word, I can feel poetry bubbling and fermenting inside me, getting ready to be written. On the other hand, I have nothing to show for any of my ideas (odd how this parallels my pregnancy - the baby is kicking but the movements can't be seen or felt from the outside yet) and I've always taken note of Miroslav Holub's 'Interview With A Poet':

You are a poet? Yes, I am.
How do you know? I have written a poem.
When you wrote the poem, it means you were a poet. But now?
I shall write another poem some day.
Then you will again be a poet.

So no bandying the word 'poet' about again just yet...

The signs are encouraging though. So far I haven't suffered much with the famous 'mushy pregnancy brain'; if anything my brain feels more active. I used to be most inspired - although often in a hectic, undirected way - just before and during my period, and pregnancy seems to be providing an extended version of this. And I'm trying to *read* as much as I can now, because I suspect that once the baby's born I'll be entirely occupied with being and doing, rather than judging and reflecting. And everything I'm reading is coloured slightly, excitingly, by the perspective of pregnancy. As Rachel Cusk says in her book 'A Life's Work':

"my experience of reading, indeed of culture, was profoundly changed by having a child, in the sense that I found the concept of art and expression far more involving and necessary, far more human in its drive to bring forth and create, than I once did."

Weeks: 20+3

Gina Ford vs Mumsnet

I had previously thought that the tyranny of the Experts was experienced chiefly inside the anxious parent's head. But it turns out that Gina Ford's influence might extend further. Not content with defamatory comments about her being removed from Mumsnet.com, she wants the entire site to be shut down. Now obviously defamation isn't the same as healthy debate about a writer's work, and if Ford and her lawyers are vigilant (some might say petty) enough to spot nasty message board postings then they should by all means do their thing to have them removed. But demanding that a whole community - one which benefits thousands of mothers - be taken down is outrageous behaviour from somebody who claims to be in the business of helping parents.

Birth or chocolate?

It seems that even my subconscious can't yet process the idea of labour without cloaking it in metaphor: I'm sure that my dream last night was to do with my anxiety about the birth, but if it were a film I don't think many audiences would appreciate the symbolism.

In the dream I found myself in front of a vending machine, faced with the decision of what snack to purchase. I stood there for what felt like hours, unable to choose, mainly because everything on offer was in some way verboten to pregnanters because it contained peanuts or whatever. Finally I selected a bag of M&Ms which were really a mixture of acid drops and chocolate raisins. Then I found that I couldn't read the price properly, and when I deciphered it had to scrabble around for enough change as it was much more expensive than I'd thought; next I couldn't see the code I had to enter because it was hidden at the bottom of the cabinet, and each time I bent down to memorise it I'd forgotten it again by the time I straightened up to the keypad. (By this time an angry queue was forming behind me.) When the packet finally emerged it was disappointingly small and unappetising, and I was mortified by the whole experience.

OK, so maybe the symbolism isn't that opaque after all...

Weeks: 20+1

Body image

There's nothing like pregnancy to highlight the extent to which you feel your physical appearance defines your identity. Throughout my entire adult life to date I have had an image of myself as a person with small breasts, slim hips and a stomach that although not flat can be relatively easily kept in check by reducing the number of cakes I eat. I don't think about my body type very much but I do, I suppose, try to choose clothes to suit it. My weight fluctuates, but only between a size 10 and a size 12.

I knew that my body could theoretically change, but I always thought in terms of changes that I could control through diet and exercise. And yet here I am facing the most dramatic change of all and I have no control whatsoever. Pregnancy is turning me into my own opposite: big boobs, big hips, big stomach. Despite being stupidly unprepared for this, I haven't minded it much. I am changing on the inside and it's only right that I change on the outside too. If nothing else it's been a glimpse into the sartorial options of the big and busty, and it's probably the only time I'll be regarding a growing stomach with pride and excitement instead of depression and anxiety.

My friend A, on the other hand, is at three months pregnant saying a heartwrenching goodbye to her skinny Miss Sixty jeans and her size 10 Benetton suits. But which body is really her? The willowy pre-pregnancy version or the swelling pregnant one? Both? For me, it's case of still feeling like myself, but a self that isn't the same any more.

Weeks: 20

Couvade

I am fascinated that sympathetic pregnancy exists, and that it has such a poetic sounding name. I will not be very impressed if my husband does take to his bed during or after the birth though.

From Wikipedia:

The term Couvade is derived from the early French word (Couver "to hatch") and custom where the father, during or immediately after the birth of a child, takes to bed, complains of having labour pains, and is accorded the treatment usually shown women during pregnancy or after childbirth.

It is thought that couvade is a way to minimize sexual differences in the pregnancy and birthing experience. The couvade may also be a way to establish the father's role in the child's life and to give balance to the gender roles. An earlier theory suggests that the couvade was evidence of male envy. Couvade is more common where sex roles are flexible and female power and status high.

Western medicine has tended to see the couvade as a medical syndrome or pathology. Defined medically, couvade is another term for Sympathetic pregnancy.



Weeks: 19+2