You’re WHAT?! (Poet + Homebirth = FREAK)

Some of you reading this blog must have had this experience: someone asks you what you do and you say “I’m a poet” and they laugh uncomfortably, or say, “what?!” or “I don’t like poetry,” or they step away from you, or say, “you’re kidding, right?” Of course there are times when a person says, “me too!” or, “I’m a painter!” or, “really!” but I’m always surprised at how many people seem not only confused by my answer—“I’m a poet”—but concerned or angry.
Well, these responses seem like warm embraces and a big thumbs up compared to how people respond when I tell them I’m planning to have my baby at home. Except for people who have had or witnessed a homebirth or are midwives or have had a close friend who had a baby at home, the response to my plan is overwhelmingly one of fear, disgust, and enormous anger. “You’re WHAT?!” “WHY?!”

Living in Iowa City made me feel, for the first time, the ways in which being Jewish meant being part of a minority group, and I often feel aware of the way my gender shapes my choices and others’ perceptions of me. I never went through a Goth, Punk or other outsider pose, but I often find myself in a room full of people and feel seriously estranged. Not until recently, however, have I become aware of the extent to which being a writer is a marginalized position in society, being a poet is downright weird, and planning a homebirth lands me in a feared and reviled subculture.
I’ve always had trouble proudly proclaiming, “I am a poet!” and I’ve always been shy about going for a wacky artist persona. My mother (ahhh, the subculture of storytelling!) has often accused me of being too conservative, and surely part of my high school/college mostly-Gap wardrobe was a response to my mother’s fashion flamboyance which ranged from Pippi Longstocking to Gypsie Queen. Starting in fifth grade I fell in love with poetry and knew I would write for the rest of my life, but I also knew I wanted to get married, have children, learn to cook really well, and oh dear how I idolized this one friend’s family—they lived in Riverdale! The mother didn’t work! They had a car and two kids and a dog and a country house and the mother wore elegant clothes you couldn’t remember the next day.
So, at the same time that I was becoming a poet I was also striving very hard to fashion myself as soccer-mom-in-the-making. In college I had a smart, law-school-bound boyfriend, and I taught myself to cook (very well) and clean (not very well) in my off campus apartment where I lived alone. I balanced my checkbook and did well in school and majored in Psychology because I hoped to learn practical things and graduate with a major that might lead to a career. I also took poetry classes with Wayne Koestenbaum and photography classes with Lois Conner and wrote lots of poems and made photographs and did some slams and was published in lit mags, but I never got too close to those arty types (well, I never got too close to anyone except a few compelling young men), and it seemed that in spite of my poetry proclivities I was on my way to the respectable world of grownupness.
Others didn’t always see the soccer-mom in me. My future husband (not the law-guy), for example, liked that I was “dark” and “unusual” and wore steel-tipped shoes and had a “mystique.” Didn’t he notice I was striving hard for Normal? The truth is I was both things—Normal and Not-Normal—and they never really meshed and still haven’t. I entered the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa upon graduating from Yale. Future husband moved to Iowa City with me, and I was conspicuously absent from the revelry of the workshop scene. Instead, I learned how to can jams and jellies and how to make Chinese appetizers in a bamboo steamer. I wrote lots of poems and generally played house with my future husband.
I got married at 25, had my first baby at 27, and I took (perhaps too much) pride in all the adult accoutrements of my life. I never wanted to be Mainstream or, HEAVEN FORBID!, conservative—but I really did want to be thought of by friends and family as responsible, dependable, and competent, and I worried that poets could not be these things. After all, isn’t a Poet someone who is: eccentric, narcissistic, odd, intensely sensitive, and unpredictable?
As a Poet-Wife-Mother-Woman-Liberal-Jew-New Yorker-American I am still striving to be dependable, responsible and competent. But I’m also thinking more and more about the ways in which I may have confused those goals with trying to seem more non-descript and mainstream than I am or would ever want to be. Perhaps being a poet is not simply my “job” and not just something I “do during the day.” Perhaps it’s time for me to grow up as a Poet and take a little more pride and responsibility in the ways in which my “lifestyle” or “occupational” choices are Political choices. It has always seemed embarrassingly grandiose to imagine that being a Poet makes me a public figure or bard or revolutionary—look at my privileged Nice Girl Domestic life in the country of plenty!—but to deny that I have certain responsibilities and opportunities as an Artist and as a member of several subcultures is to be naïve and untrue.
It’s interesting that it is the issue of homebirth that has stirred in me an activism and outrage that not even my feelings about this Crap Government and horrific war were able to ignite. Part of my dissociation from the war protests and the Anti-Bush movement is a feeling of hopelessness and helplessness, part of it is a fear that if I started watching the news (which I stopped doing after 9/11) that I would be so upset I would never get out of bed again (see, I’m “intensely sensitive” because I’m a Poet). And part of my hesitancy to embrace the strident anti-establishment voice is related to a liberal philosophy that often espouses an each-to-her-own stance (in contrast to the Evangelical Fundamentalists), which seems to be a basic component of compassion for others and respect for the autonomy of all individuals. But I think it’s time to stand up who I am and for what I believe.
I think the choices that most pregnant women are offered in the United States when it comes to having their babies “delivered” are shamefully substandard, anti-woman, and anti-family. The business of “delivering” babies in the US is based on money, fear of malpractice, BAD medicine, and BAD research. It is true that women should birth their babies in a place where they feel safe and comfortable, but the fact that most women choose hospitals rather than free-standing birth centers or home deliveries and obstetricians rather than midwives, is a result of how the culture has LIED to them about birth and about their bodies and about the safety of hospitals. My decision to have a homebirth is a personal one and a political one. I believe that if more babies were born without drugs and more women became mothers surrounded by love and support that there would be a visible, measurable change in our culture. This is my ardent belief.
I think our president in is a moron and the Republicans have an anti-human agenda and that as a country we are waging a foolish, selfish, amoral war. I think our Democrats are pansies and our country is complacent and self-righteous and absurdly ego-centric. I think our Capitalism is given way too much free reign and that when you look at the relationship between our government and Big Business you realize that we’re not in a “Free Market” system but in an insider oligarchy motivated by a level of greed the common man and woman can barely conceive of. This is my ardently held belief.
I think that being a mother is a role that is just beginning to be understood for some of its many creative and revolutionary qualities and that if we were able to really give up our Madonna/Slut ideas about women and finally chuck our simultaneous sentimentalizing/vilification of mothers and motherhood that we would begin, finally, to move toward a feminist society and that if we don’t move toward a feminist society the result will be no less than the extinction of the human race through climate change, nuclear disaster, war, or some other insanely misguided action of the patriarchy.
I think my kids know I’ll be there to make them dinner almost every night and, as I’ve mentioned on this blog before, I am, literally, a soccer mom. So, maybe I can relax about all of that. Maybe next time I find myself at a party with a bunch of tobacco lawyers and bond traders and someone asks me what I do, I need to resist the temptation to mumble, “poet” into my drink and speak up.
Obviously I’m no Anna Akhmatova; I’m not Octavio Paz. I’m profoundly grateful not to be a political dissident or a poet writing verse on prison toilet paper. But it’s time to stop pretending that the only reason I’m a poet is because I like the sound of words or because it’s so much fun to sit around and consider line breaks. It’s time to embrace the FREAKness of being a poet. Despite the fact that I am a certified U6 referee for West Side Soccer and have been late to pick up or drop off my kids at school less than 4 times in 5 years, I am also odd and unconventional. I am obsessed with the things I care about; I am an enthusiast. I undergo powerful emotional experiences, which cause me to become angry and freak out. If our country and government and social politics and culture and interpersonal relationships were different—if they were humane and feminist and child-friendly and intellectual and environmentally sound and based on compassion—would I then be just like everyone else? I’d love to find out. For now I’ll work to cultivate my inner FREAK.