Tomorrow marks Silas’s six month birthday and I’m more excited about it than I thought I would be. We’ve even bought him gifts. I’m serving a half-a-cake. We’re inviting a few friends over and opening a bottle of champagne. I’m even planning to incorporate 1/2 birthdays into our regular celebratory traditions.
Ma, ma, ma, ma, maaaa, maaaaaa, ma, ma, ma-ma-ma-ma, maa, maaaa, ma, ma, ma. Raspberry. Ma, ma, ma, ma-ma, maaaaaaaaaa….
Then he grabs your shirt and tries to pull it down so he can eat.
As a mother, everything cuts so much closer to the bone.
I believe that I am a person who has always felt emotions with great passion. My highs, Mt. Everest; my lows, the Great Abyss. I am often covered in goosebumps. Photographs, songs, poems, novels, billboards. You name it, I’m inspired. I didn’t think my well of emotion could be dug much deeper.
Until I had Silas.
Today I decided to pick up For Colored Girls who have Considered Suicide when the Rainbow is Enuf by Ntozake Shange.
I finished Dreams from my Father by Barack Obama a few days ago and was excited to have recognized a reference to this choreopoem in the middle of his memoir. Hence, I decided to pick it back up.
Man, is it filled with pain. I was getting goosebumps every few lines. I was filled with that lightening buzz of excitement you get when you are reading something so powerful that you want to pick up the phone and share it that minute. Or, maybe you want to scream. Want to run uphill so when you buckle over gasping for breath you know you are alive.And, then there were the scenes about salsa.
Last night I reintroduced myself to the seductive rhythm of the Salsa beat after a long 10-month separation.
I was once an avid Salsa dancer– perfecting my turns and shines once or twice a week. And, that’s not all. I can not only salsa, but I can dance the cha-cha-cha, the merengue, the bachata, and the cumbia too. (Yeah, they’re all about the same…) I also like to brag that I won a Salsa competition once. (I really did. I won’t, however, comment on the number of contestants or the bias of the judges.) More than that, I played a salsa-dancing bird in a local production of Suessical, the Musical. (For children…) So, I like to pretend that I could easily take the gold on Dancing with the Stars. (Right, if I was a star…) But, yesterday, when I pulled my jazz shoes out of the closet, they were covered in what could have been a decade’s worth of dust.
Before I became pregnant with Silas, Paul and I suffered a miscarriage. In an attempt to make sense of this loss, I wrote the following poem. I recently submitted this poem to Mothering magazine, but it was rejected. This was my first official submission and therefore my first official rejection. Of course, I wish they had accepted the poem, but I feel good about the entire process. It helped that the rejection was very personal and very kind.
