Waxing poetic

My daughter, who is 7 years old, has started writing poetry. This new interest seems to have grown from a poetry project in her first grade class, in honor of April being National Poetry Month and in preparation for the school’s upcoming Poetry Night.

There is a history of poetry here, of course. The White Mountains, and the forests and fields and villages around them, have inspired countless writers and poets, including Robert Frost, who lived for a time down the road from where I live now. My daughter’s recent poetry, not surprisingly, is inspired simply by the happy thoughts of a 7-year-old.

So far, she has waxed poetic about rabbits, dogs, cats, and the month of April. In one poem, she combined all of those things: April rabbits/April dogs/April cats/I love them all. Sometimes she writes her poems into big hearts she’s drawn on the page. She likes to use her new sparkly pen and write in her new sparkly notebook. She is a girl who loves to throw a little sparkle into everything she does.

Before my daughter wrote poems, she wrote books. These tended to center around seasonal themes – the bats and ghosts and witches of Halloween, the sand and seashells of a summer trip to the ocean. When she feels like writing, she sits down within the lively din that is nearly constant in our house, touches the end of her pencil (or pen) to the side of her mouth, opens to a new page, and just starts writing.

I love that my daughter writes. In this, she is like me. I have loved to put words on paper since I was old enough to climb the tall pine tree in the backyard of my childhood home and sit there with my notebook, surveying my world, thinking thoughts, writing some of them down.

In many other things, my daughter is quite different from me. She has, for instance, this confident sense of style that allows her to pair patterns and colors and textures that seem outlandish, but somehow work for her. While she struts like a fashion diva, I walk like a tomboy. Where she manages to always be fashionable – even on the soccer field or in the sand box – I can’t even manage to be fashionably late, preferring instead to be a few unfashionable minutes early to everything.

For the first two summers after my children were born, I worked as a docent at The Frost Place, that house just down the road where the great poet and his family lived nearly a century ago. It was there that I realized how powerful, and how meditative, poetry can be. I spent many a quiet afternoon reading Frost’s poems, his words strung together in timeless lines and stanzas. I already knew “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” by heart and “The Road Not Taken” nearly as well.

In those summers, I discovered other Frost poems – “Revelation” and “Reluctance” among them – and other poets. One night, there was a reading with three contemporary poetry greats: Maxine Kumin, Galway Kinnell, and Donald Hall. I don’t remember which poems they read that summer evening, but I left Robert Frost’s old barn feeling both contemplative and euphoric. That is the power of poetry.  It is in song lyrics and music, in really well-written prose, in nursery rhymes and children’s books. It can be soulful or silly, graceful or gritty, straightforward or nuanced with hidden meaning.

The first lines I ever memorized came not from a poem, but from a famous passage in Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” which I was required to learn for a high school English class. I remember the lines all these years later because they seem relevant now as they were when I was a teenager: “This above all: to thine own self be true,/And it must follow, as the night the day,/Thou canst not then be false to any man.” (There is a lot of other good stuff in that speech by Polonius, but I didn’t have to memorize all of it.)

Be who you are, and the rest falls into place. Those are good words to live by, I think, words I’d like my children to heed as they find their way in the world. I don’t know if my daughter will continue to write poetry, or if this is a fleeting interest. But I hope she’ll stay true to her sparkly, fashionable, confident self. And I hope she’ll always find a bit of poetry in her life.

Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul, posted to her Blog: Writings from a full life. This essay appears as Meghan's Close to Home column in the April 11, 2014 edition of the Littleton Record.

Being a mom

Catch a glimpse of a mother holding her newborn baby, and you’ll likely notice that universal new mom expression: part joy, part utter exhaustion, a big part wonder, an even bigger part love. It is a look of realized anticipation – and unanswerable questions. You’re here. I love you. Who are you? Who will you become? Who will I become?

We come to know our children, little by little, as well as we can. My three are still young– aged 6 and 4. I’ve known them all their lives, and I still have the same questions I did the first time I held each of them, felt their small newborn weight, gazed upon faces unknown and yet familiar.

In a way they are each the same to me as they were in their first moments: the determined and imaginative little girl, the thoughtful and sensitive boy, the younger sister always watching and ready to join the action. In many other ways, they change every day, adjusting to the world around them and to their own comprehension of that world and of themselves.

I have a clear recollection of rocking my oldest daughter back to sleep after a middle-of-the-night feeding when she was a few months old. Watching her in the dusky glow of the nightlight, I saw in her face the newborn Ella, the baby she had become in the months since her arrival, and the little girl she would soon be.

That phenomenon still hits me sometimes, always out of the blue. I’ll look at her to say something, and I’ll see the toddler she was not so long ago, the vibrant kindergartener she is now, and the teenager she’ll be well before I’m ready, all in that one small, wonderfully expressive face. In those moments, I still wonder who she’ll become. I wonder who my serious, sweet, silly son will be 20 years down the road. I try to envisage how the playfulness and caring and fiery temper of my 4-year-old will manifest in her grown self.

I imagine my own mother still occasionally glimpses the child I was, somewhere behind my graying hair and deepening crow’s feet. I imagine mothers everywhere have those glimpses of their children.

When I was a little girl, then a teenager, then a college student, I had a hard time answering the question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Being a mom is the one job I always knew I wanted. It’s everything and nothing like I expected, and it changes every day. Sometimes, often, it’s beautiful and fun and beyond sweet. Other times it’s downright ugly.

Mothering is hard work, but it’s good work, life’s work. If that sounds really cheesy to you, you’re probably not a mom. And if you think keeping kids safe and good and preparing them to be positive members of our world is a cake walk… well, all I can say to that is, “Ha!”

We complain sometimes, mostly amongst ourselves, about the constant responsibility of keeping the family running, maintaining professional lives, cleaning the children, feeding the children, teaching the children, entertaining the children, driving the children around, trying to keep the children from killing each other, and seeking amidst the chaos five consecutive minutes of peace. 

But most of us wouldn’t trade it for anything – not a million bucks, not a second home in the Bahamas, not even a full time nanny. Because it’s really a pretty great gig. And the payment comes in the form of kisses and snuggles, sweet voices calling, “Mama, I love you,” watching our children learn and grow, sharing with them the constant wonder of things little and large, and the hope that whatever they become it will be something good.

Do I want to escape sometimes, just walk out the door and keep going? Absolutely. Will I ever do it? No way. I want to stick around to see who my children become – tomorrow, next year, decades down the road. Wherever they go, whatever they do, whomever they become, I’ll love them forever. Along with all the other stuff, that’s just what moms do.

Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul and posted on her Blog: Writings from a full life. This essay also appears in the May 10, 2013 edition of the Record-Littleton.