“I Stop Writing the Poem” - Tess Gallagher

“I’ll get back to the poem” - Tess Gallagher

…but before I do: I’ve newly discovered I’m pregnant. It’s far too early (by certain *ahem* standards) to tell anyone. But from my perspective, this chapter of human experience – when you’re viscerally gripped by hormones but far from guaranteed a child - is terribly obscured.

The early stages of creating life are a lot like perpetual jetlag on an indefinite flight to an ambiguous destination… with the worst hangover of your life.

At least, that’s how I experience it. 

 Against the general backdrop of delight, it can be terrifying. 

I’ve never been good at feeling the difference between “resting” and “quitting,” between “surrender” and “giving up.” So pregnancy and its unequivocal demand that I slow down fuels my anxiety that if I stop “the poem” I won’t pick it back up.

Tess Gallagher helps me reframe the different callings of womanhood as mutually nourishing - feeding off each other, not eating into each other.

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At a first read, I only heard a scathing indictment of the fact she DOES stop the poem for the laundry, and that there IS a young girl somewhere learning to do the same no matter what.

Yet there is tremendous, anchoring confidence here: “I’ll get back to the poem” she unambiguously asserts right at the heart of the poem. “I’ll get back to being a woman” she declares immediately after, aligning “womanhood” as much with poetry as with laundry.

And laundry and poetry, upon closer examination, are not the radical opposites of “creativity” and “drudgery.” Gallagher doesn’t simply fold, she “bring[s] the arms of his shirt together,” conjuring an embrace through the power of artistic perception. “Nothing can stop our tenderness” she continues, dignifying laundry as a tender act. And that “our” is fabulously ambiguous, referring both to the couple’s tenderness and the speaker’s tenderness towards poetry.

The poem’s very existence is proof that “poetry” and “folding” aren’t mutually exclusive: the latter, by becoming the subject of the former, enables its existence.

While celebrating the possibility that I might bring another soul into the world… and navigating the anxiety of that act’s impact on my life … I “watch” this poem like the “small girl standing next to her mother.” I’m reminded not to abandon my beloved crafts (poetry, motherhood), but to have faith that I can alternate between the demands of each – “nothing can stop our tenderness.”