Quiet Mountain Essays
Copyright©, 2005
Speaking of Stones
by
JodiAnn Stevenson
“But which is the stone that supports the bridge?” Kublai Khan asks.
“The bridge is not supported by one stone or another,” Marco answers, “but by the line of the arch they form.”
“Why do you speak to me of stones? It is only the arch that matters to me.”
Polo answers: “Without stones there is no arch.”
-Italo Calvino (Invisible Cities, 82)
Shortly after entering graduate study for creative writing, a person began growing inside of me.
Oblivious to this person’s dividing cells, I went about my business being the independent, self-
centered writer/woman I had consciously and carefully become. The foreign body grew. When I
finally learned of the invasion, I began a slow and sorrowful surrender. It was sorrowful because an
entirely new negotiation of identity was about to ensue for me; one that would give me no choice but
to accept the death of my own singular self. Though I was abstractly excited at the thought of having
a baby, emotionally I resisted the thought of sharing my world so thoroughly with another person; a
person I didn’t even know.
Yet, this body continued erupting inside of me; a body I did not know. Though it filled me until I was
swollen with it. Though it fed off of my generous blood and tissue. Though it twisted and kicked
around inside of me as if I were the cave carved into the side of the mountain, this body was its own.
It did not belong to me. It had its own needs. It had its own expectations; yet it was of me. It was
from me. It was with me. It and I were mutual bodies; a communion of We.
And so, my graduate study experience was not what I expected it to be. Though I did spend a great
deal of time luxuriating over the practical applications of literary theories and philosophies that have
come to be the life-blood of my own writing, my child became my practical priority. My own body
split itself so that I was obligated to pay it some attention. So there was less time for fiddling around
with my writing and there was less room in my brain for poetry. Or, was there?
One of the midwives that helped me deliver my baby once told me that there is an old native
Guatemalan tradition which calls for pregnant women to leave their looms and stop weaving for not
only the duration of their pregnancy but until their children are old enough to care for themselves.
These women are considered amateur weavers before they become pregnant but when they return to
their looms, after not having woven anything at all for some time, they are considered among their
communities to be master weavers.
But what does one do when one is not a weaver but a writer? Should a pregnant writer put away pen
and paper, or computer, as the case may be, until her child is grown? Perhaps, but that would be
missing the point of this tradition. In one way, it is easy to interpret this tradition as a means of
forcing women out of their vocations – and forcing them into the home. On the other hand, it seems
to me that this is first and foremost a tradition that respects the meditative quality of motherhood;
that quality which allows maturation and rumination over all other life practices; that quality
through which we are reborn into a plural and, I must finally admit, a more enlightened being.
This plurality presents itself practically every day. Before I became pregnant I paid no attention to
time, sleep, or for the most part, other people’s needs. Suddenly I was going to bed every night by
9pm. I woke up every morning at 5am. Most nights, I woke on and off to breast feed the baby. I
was never away from him for more than five hours at a time and when I was away, I came home to
pump milk from my breasts so that the flow didn’t choke him when he tried to eat. Even now that he’
s a bit older, my entire day revolves around an 8am breakfast, a 10am nap, a noon lunch, a 2pm nap,
a 5:30pm dinner, a 7pm bath and an 8:30pm bedtime. This is not my schedule, this is his. My
schedule is secondary, almost inconsequential – I do what I absolutely have to, when I have the time.
Every place I go and everything I do begins with the question, is that practical for the baby? I avoid
public venues that are too loud or too quiet or too smoky or too, simply, not kid friendly. I listen to
“Classics for Kids,” very quietly, in the car. I spend a lot of time worrying about how to sneak
vegetables into the endless loads of complex carbohydrates this kid can eat. I don’t wear my hair
down when he is awake because he likes to pull it out one strand at a time. I have had to temporarily
remove my coffee table, my rubber plant, my fireplace tools, my coat tree, the metal ammunition box
I keep all of my writing in, and several other objects I hadn’t even realized were dangerous until my
little explorer managed to knock his surprisingly resilient noggin against them. And these practical
manifestations of my plurality as a mother are just, as they say, the tip of the iceberg.
But it is through this daily practice of being that one achieves what I now understand to be a more
enlightened existence than the one I was living before. Indeed, there is a meditative element to raising
a child which imposes a deep metamorphosis on a body. A Buddhist friend of mine describes raising
children as “sitting” in constant meditation. She told me that a man at one of her Buddhist retreats
once bragged (which doesn’t seem very Buddhist in the first place) about having sat in meditation for
11 days straight. It made her laugh. She said, “Attempting to raise three men, I guess I’ve been
meditating for close to nineteen years.” But, it’s true. Just as weavers who put down their looms do
not forget the intricate pattern their fingers draw through the yarn, a woman does not cease being
anything but a mother once she has a child. Her daily practice of motherhood only strengthens her
understanding of the myriad tasks and responsibilities her life offers. Women who become mothers
don’t suddenly stop living they just suddenly are living bigger, more complicated, and more
potentially fulfilling lives.
And so, a woman/writer doesn’t stop writing. In fact, through the quiet and constant process of
caring for a child, the fingers realize wilder, more elaborate patterns and more and more efficient
ways of fashioning these constellations into fabrics. Through day to day mothering I realized that
each time I came to my writing, I felt full and ever-ready to write. It was as if I had been scribbling
non-stop during what would seem to be “down” time. It was as if, rather than distracting me, my
second self was creating focus in me; clearing the clutter inside me until my being was fully attentive
to only that which was truly essential.
There is simply no way to articulate this deepeningly pervasive sensitivity to the world. Even all that I
write here about the process of becoming a mother and motherhood as a meditative process – even all
of this comes to me only in a kind of on-going retrospect. Just after my son was born, I didn’t
understand how all of this was going to come together. How could I be a student, a writer, a teacher,
and most importantly, a mother all at the same time? How would there be time for all of this? There
were countless times that I resolved to quit my graduate studies and there were countless times that I
thought sure I’d never be a decent mother. I fell into a daily routine of going over the first hill of a
roller-coaster – covering my eyes, screaming my head off, and hoping for the best. Every task I
accomplished could no longer be clearly subscribed to a particular role. While I wrote, I was a
mother. While I was a mother, I was writing. While I taught, I was writing and I was a mother.
While I studied, I wrote, I was a mother, and I taught.
Meanwhile, not only was my identity spreading and melding, this new person was inherently part of
this new identity so that whatever was with me was with him and whatever was with him was with
me. Goals, ideas, preoccupations, concerns, desires all blurred against one another and I forged
through not always trusting that this blur was for the best. It seemed impossible to trust anything
because everything was not like anything I had ever known before. I was no longer the one person I
thought I had become. I was something else. I was a plural body. I was a different me and I was
someone else now, too. And it’s hard to know which end is up when everything changes so
drastically, so completely.
I believe this drastic and complete change is the major reason that I suffered from postpartum
depression after the baby was born. It was not severe, in that my child was not in any danger around
me. But, it wasn’t mild either. There were constant tears. Constant. There were panic attacks,
mostly growing out of the gnawing dread that I would die and leave my child motherless or my child
would die and leave an impossible wound inside of me. There was outrageous anger, not just toward
my partner who I had seen as having gotten me into this mess but toward every mother in the world
for having lied to me about how difficult this was. Not that women don’t try to warn other women or
explain what it’s really like but our society does not support this openness. God forbid a woman
sound as if she is complaining about her role as mother!
Also, it is a sticky situation because a pregnant woman is so fragile that the last thing any decent
woman wants to say to her is “you know, there is an aspect of it that is really unbelievably difficult”
and send her into tears and nightmares for the remainder of her pregnancy. Also, if there is any
absolute truth of pregnancy, birth, and motherhood it’s that every woman’s experience is quite
different so one never knows if there is anything to warn another woman of in the first place. Sadly,
the most common form of advice from other mothers that I encountered was, “huh, you think it’s
bad now, just wait, it only gets worse.” Left without the openness necessary to discuss the truth
about becoming a mother, most mothers that I encountered simply seemed bitter. This was an
important aspect of my postpartum depression, in that I didn’t have an appropriate voice for what I
was feeling.
And I must quickly mention here that the diagnosis of “postpartum depression” has been so overly
used by the media in coverage of cases of maternal infanticide that I find most women are loathe to
admit they feel any confusion/ sadness over their new status of “mother.” Popular media makes it
sound as if postpartum depression is synonymous with baby killing. This makes things difficult for
those of us who experience much milder forms of postpartum depression – and there are many of us
– because if we mention what we are going through to other mothers we are treated as if we are
abnormal, even dangerous.
And yes, all of this left me feeling angry, most of all toward a world that would 'allow' someone like
me, so obviously not interested in sharing my life with someone else so thoroughly, to have a baby in
the first place. But, I was assured time and again that everything I was feeling was perfectly normal.
“Think of the changes your body has been through and is going through. Think of the changes to
your daily routine. Think of the fact that you are becoming a mother.” My midwife was especially
helpful in recognizing that this “depression” was an adjustment period; the struggle of the sticky,
inchoate wings to press open the chrysalis. This struggle lasted no less than six months and there are
times I still sense the dark corners of that cocoon creeping up around my head. Still, this happens
only when I allow myself to forget that I am no longer a solitary, novice weaver but a master weaver
connected to the ultimate plurality of being; the plurality of motherhood.
I suffered postpartum depression because I was mourning the death of that old, singular self that
could be selfish, self-centered, and, ultimately, self-defeating if it wanted to be. But my catharsis is
clear each time I embrace the power in the necessary expansion of my soul through parenting.
Becoming a mother has put me in a state of mind within which doing what I have to do every day is
writing; is poetry. Rather than dying with my singular self, I, and my writing, held on and became
reborn into this new plural self. There is no boundary anymore between my words and my being.
There is no time or reason for separating my self and my writing. Just as I am intrinsically bound to
the budding animal life of my child, I am bound to a new awareness of experience as expression and
expression as experience.
This awareness keeps me present and awake in every moment so that I am not only a constant
observer of the world but also of language – so that writing is happening in me regardless of what is
actually physically taking place. Most writers instinctively work towards this ability and this
presence of mind. It is not at all necessary, of course, to have a child in order to learn this. It just
happens that having a child is what finally brought me to this point. Having a child is what brought
me to an awareness of my writing as inseparable from my, which is really our, everyday existence.
When I think of the process of pregnancy, birth, and motherhood that the last two years have
brought me through it is impossible to deny that important work has been taking place. Every
moment of every day with my child is a raw, new event, explosive and relentless. It is one of those
fast-forward films of flowers blooming, playing over and over. Holding this kind of bustling life in
one’s hands requires an inexhaustible focus. The inherent meditative quality of motherhood has
created a vast wild space in my consciousness within which I am constantly aware of not only my
connection to my child but my connection to everything.
Of course, it is no small side note that even as I write this, my current understanding of consciousness
is being challenged by the fact that my now 15 month old son suddenly realizes that he’s a separate
person with desires and needs that don’t always coincide with mine. He thinks it’s a good idea to eat
windpipe sized magnets for example and I take them away from him while he screams, etc…. While
my thorough acceptance of this plural self helped see me through the first year, I realize it is only the
groundwork that will help support a steady stream of change for a lifetime to come. I feel my
singular self resurfacing, remarkably renewed and more self-assured, in order to allow my son’s
singular self to fully emerge. After all, the bridge cannot exist without the individual stones that
crowd to form it. Yet, without the bridge of which they are a part, the stones are only stones . And
ultimately, respecting the singular selves that shape the support we are to one another individually is
just as important as recognizing “the line of the arch” our plural self forms. In the meantime, I’m
busy at my loom.
Contributor's Notes...
JodiAnn Stevenson's work has previously appeared in several print journals including Phantasmagoria,
Mangrove, and InkPot, and in many on-line journals including Sunspinner, Bathhouse, and Big Bridge. Some
of her hypermedia work lives at www.bowlofmilk.com. She is also the founder and president of Binge press and
productions, a nonprofit company dedicated to producing and promoting the work of experimental women artists.
