Hiding

For most of my twenties, I believed I didn’t want children. I spent most of high school and college writing angst-ridden poems addressing themes like suffocation, identity loss, and entrapment, and believing that the worst possible fate was to wind up married and mothering in suburbia. The idea of having a family and living outside a city seemed, for some reason, incompatible with absolutely everything else life should, and could possibly, be.

I am now married and mothering in suburbia, and it’s actually pretty fantastic. Of course, we’d prefer to live elsewhere; but we’ve had adventures—many years in New York, our lucky time in Barcelona—and will surely have more. It’s not surprising to have had a seismic shift on the idea of marriage and motherhood in ten-plus years, but it’s funny to look back on that doubtful girl; I wish she could have had an idea of the kind of happiness that was possible in everything she feared.

Eleven years ago, when I was twenty-two years old, I wrote the poem below. I quite like the poem, but the sentiment is, obviously, part of my ancient history. I found it today on my computer—it somehow made it here, after being written four or five computers ago—so I thought I’d share it. Enjoy.



Hiding

I am crumpled in the closet:
ears and lungs pulsing,
knees digging red into my chin,
tarsals warped and crunching.

I want to sleep here, or die here,
but I am not a sardine.
I am a grown woman,
and the table calls to be set.

Children flock to me like squawking birds;
cries of “Mommy we’re hungry, sleepy, scared!”
make me want to tip this nest,
to watch it scatter, twig by twig.

I am hungry too:
for the slow sedation of sound
as I burrow deeper beneath a bed
or the throttling isolation of a paper bag disguise.