Write Like a Mother
(The following is the personal essay portion of my application to a writer’s residency for parents that would happen in Portland, OR. I didn’t get the residency this year, but why should the piece go to waste? I decided to share my thoughts with you instead.)
I wrote the first draft of this essay in my living room, interrupted every few minutes by calls from my 7-year-old son to, “Watch this, Mom!” The object of his attention varies from the latest Parry Gripp song to a pattern he’s designed in Animal Crossing to new parkour moves he’s trying out with the cat. Each time, I respond with “I see!” or “Yes, I’m watching!” or “Great work!” with one eye on the monitor so I don’t forget the word I want to write. Then, it’s a mad dash on the keyboard until the next inevitable draw on my mental reserves.
I have been writing with my son since the actual day he was born quite unexpectedly during the first spring finals week of my doctoral program. I needed an emergency C-section after going into early labor, so I had to dictate emails to friends who could proofread and submit my final seminar papers while my arms were outstretched and bound by IV lines. I took a linguistics final from that same hospital bed the next day, writing short essays on first language acquisition processes high as a kite on narcotics.
We would go on like this, he and I. Me, writing research notes on an old church podium so I could sway him for an extra twenty minutes at naptime. He, sitting in a high chair with a babysitter at one end of the coffee shop while the click clack sound of my laptop bounced off the high tin ceilings where I sat on the other end. My right hand still involuntarily curls into a poor Yorick’s claw when I talk about writing my dissertation, so strong is the imprint memory of holding my son and a book at the same time.
Nevertheless, we persisted. The nap times of graduate school infancy gave way to after-bedtime work sessions while I wrote my first book, The Golden Girls. This labor of love took six years to go from pitch to publication, proving that I am nothing if not tenacious. When author copies finally arrived on our doorstep in early 2020, I signed two with the same inscription: “We did it.” I sent one to my mother and put the other on the bookshelf in Duncan’s room.
Now, it’s time for something different. No one tells you when you have a baby that there will come a time when this child will not need you all day, every day. It seems unfathomable. Similarly, no one tells you in graduate school that there will come a time when you want to indulge in letting new ideas emerge organically rather than approach writing as a frantic, adrenaline-fueled exercise toward establishing creative legitimacy. But here we are.
I know this is the right time in my career for a string of new experiences: first residency, first memoir, first trip to Portland. Of course, as a memoirist it’s never a simple distinction between my personal life and my writing life. The memoir manuscript I’m working on reflects a new phase of my writing and my mothering, so these experiences would influence my creative output in richly overlapping ways.
Fat Baby Dyke is the title-in-progress of a literary memoir-in-progress that explores complexly embodied identities related to body image, disability, motherhood, and gender. The words fat, baby, and dyke are all contested, often pejorative, adjectives in the grammar of my life, and each word also has an important role in personal and political identifying contexts. Moreover, the meaning of these words has shifted so dramatically over the last century that it drives my curiosity toward finding out what’s next in language-as-identity, tracing our current understanding from the structuralist perspective (signifiers and signs separate from reality), post-structuralism (language has no inherent meaning), and current intersectional language modes where identifiers are presumed to be a political project of authorial intent. The key question I seek to answer in this manuscript is: is meaning made by what I call myself or by what others call me?
As a husky child and a fat pregnant woman, I have lived through several of these intersections. Some of the autobiography in this manuscript will be based on my dissertation research that looks at the power of weight loss success stories as guides for life. I incorporate my academic research interests and relevant theories from literary criticism, linguistics, critical feminist theory, and queer theory in an attempt at collective meaning-making as these words circulate through cultures, often shapeshifting even more outside dominant discourses. But there is one section of the autobiography that remains to be as deeply investigated: how has gender has influenced my fatness? In what ways does my butchness complicate my experience with motherhood? And, why hasn’t anyone ever gazed lovingly into my eyes and called me baby? These new, more urgent questions emerged in the language of coming out as queer two years ago already a mother and already a wife. The subsequent transformations and dissolutions of coming out have often left me speechless and unsure how to talk (or write) about myself in the present tense.
I can imagine few places more perfect for a baby dyke from rural Illinois to develop a working theory of self-referential language than Portland, Oregon. In part, this is because I suspect that many people in its queer communities have already parsed out answers to the questions I want to answer, making an immersion more effective than speculative research from the outside looking in. More practically, one of my essays is about language in lesbian bars. I want to know why Portland, so identified by middle America as a queer capital of our country, does not have a representative on the rosters of the Lesbian Bar Project.
This work — the living and the writing and the idle thinking and the dreaming and the talking to strangers — cannot be done from my living room. More to the point, it is work I must do as a writer first and foremost. The mothering will be there when I get back. It may not seem like much, but five full days to focus on my writing would be such a gift, and I assure you it would not be taken for granted.
Kate Browne is a queer writer and storytelling researcher.