Motherhood & the Modern Poet
The balancing act that leads to glittering shards of life all over the floor. The first essay on a series about women.
In looking at my drafts folder I realized that there are essays I have left incomplete that all share the same theme: Women. I’ve wondered why I haven’t published them, and I’ve realized that the answer is simple: Fear. I’ve decided that it’s time to polish them up.
Some of these posts are dedicated to the women who inspired them.
Essay 1:
For Melanie Bettinelli
Motherhood and the Modern Poet
Here’s an old picture of me holding my infant daughter in the condo that we rented in Cambridge, Massachusetts for seven years. Notice the moving box in the background. On the day we came home from the hospital with the baby we received a letter from our landlord saying that we had two months to move out. What followed was one of the most stressful times in my life, and it led to a series of mental and emotional breakdowns to which I was already prone. It would take three more years to achieve a more stable life in a new city, but this event in 2013 would be the catalyst for a change I don’t think my husband and I would have otherwise made.
When I went to my summer residency at the University of St. Thomas in Houston Dana Gioia said to all of us in the lecture hall, “It is good to suffer.” He’s often talked how he and his wife Mary lost their infant son to crib death, and a number of his most memorable poems have been about this painful time in their lives.
Suffering transforms us. It creates a tension that when resolved can lead to a sense of joyful relief or a greater knowledge of what you love through grief.
I see Motherhood itself as a metaphor for human life. Once a woman gives birth for the first time she is transformed through horrible pain into being a Mother. No matter who we are, we are reshaped by the lives around us, but as mothers we are remade by the lives that were once inside us.
It is often said that having children is like living with your heart outside of your body. There is so much joy in having children, but there is so much terror, especially when you have a child with disabilities. Or multiple children with disabilities. Many of my close friends know that I live in a state of low-grade emergency — except when it has been punctuated with actual high-level emergency, usually involving a child. I want to make clear that I don’t wish that the people in my life were different. I love them completely and as they are. I think I am a better, more compassionate person through what I have learned by being involved in special education advocacy, the deaf Catholic community, parent advisory councils, and programs that serve vulnerable children and their families. I would never have known these fierce and resilient people if I had not had experiences with my own children.
So why should I add three-hour-long classes on Thomas Aquinas and other philosophers on top of this?1 Why submit myself to poetry workshops? Why do so much work that won’t pay for the bills? Why add to an already over-scheduled life?
I write because I need Art. Art mediates my experience of this temporal existence and my hope for the eternal. Art exists in the space between my gravity-bound fears and my unfathomable joys. Art is what I make as a form of madness and compulsion. There is no not-making for me, and because I care about the art I want it to be the best it can possibly be.
A mother wants her children to achieve their full potential.
A poet wants her poems to achieve their full potential.
My best mother friend is Melanie Bettinelli, and I would never have become a poet if it were not for her. Like me, she has five children, and she got me to read poetry after hating it for most of my life.2 She invited me into a Facebook homeschooling group where Sally Thomas was the moderator. I didn’t know that Sally, in addition to being a mother of four, was also an extraordinary writer. These two women helped to shape me into the poet I am today, and I am happier for having Sally and Melanie as friends.
The thing about my poetry friendships is that they would not have been possible if it had not been for the technologies that exist today. I met Melanie because her husband listened to a podcast that my husband and I produced.3 I met Sally through social media. I’ve made more friends in my online MFA program. However, it is real, in-person connection that is necessary to move a friendship to another level, and this is why I am so grateful that Melanie doesn’t live too far away.
We get together once in a while, and Melanie continues to introduce me to other writers I don’t know. Last Wednesday we went to Boston College to see the Irish poet Doireann Ní Ghríofa speak about her own life of motherhood and poetry.
Doireann described being obsessed with finding every translation of Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill’s work she could get her hands on. She told the story of being in a library with a baby in a sling and a restless toddler to whom she would surreptitiously feed pieces of banana to, against the wishes of the librarians, all while balancing books that contained Eibhlín’s poems.
Seeing two gifted writers and mothers meet each other for the first time was one of the greatest joys of recent days. Words flowed between Doireann and Melanie as would have between old friends.
Motherhood isn’t just about being a mother to one’s children. It’s about being open to life — receiving all of its challenges and blessings just as Mary received word from the Angel Gabriel that she would give birth to Jesus. That is the Annunciation, the first joyful mystery of the rosary. But the second joyful mystery is the Visitation, when Mary goes to her cousin Elizabeth who is also pregnant. We aren’t meant to experience motherhood alone, and I don’t think we are meant to experience poetry alone either. To the mother-poets who have not found your Melanies, Sallys or Elizabeths, I hope you find them. In the meantime, I offer you my Substack and, if you want it, my friendship as well.
Thank you for reading. As always, I am grateful for your time. Your attention is a blessing.
Pax et Bonum,
Zina
Have you felt that the obligations of parenthood
kept you from pursuing artistic work?
If you are an artist and a mother, what has your experience been?
Have you felt like you had enough support?
What do you feel you need that you are not getting?
Hopefully UST isn’t the only program that requires a class on the Philosophy of Art and Beauty.
I mention Melanie in this post from April, 2025.
Writing moms make the best friends.
I love all of this Zina: suffering transforms us, motherhood transforms us, the joy and sorrow mingled together, the need to create art. Art mediates our experience of temporal experience and our hope for the eternal! Yes! This. I smiled at the picture of you and Melanie and Sally and felt included somehow in your homeschooling, writing, mothering life as I teach our five boys and write in the margins. I have so enjoyed the words all three of you bring to Substack, and what a joy that you share a real life friendship. Funnily enough, I have a prose poem/micro essay sitting in my drafts folder about what it means to be a mother-poet, but I haven't known what to do with it. Maybe I need to be brave too.