Sure, I had the same jeans before pregnancy, but post-pregnancy, they somehow look like ‘mom jeans’. And I wore them to AWP in Seattle. Amidst the tattoos, long beards, and “ugly” sweaters (I’m pretty sure they were being worn with ironic quotations around them), I was wearing mom jeans and going to sleep at 8 pm. My body and lifestyle has changed and that’s ok.
While I’ve always been a fairly sober poet, I used to go to readings and events after 8 pm. When I lived in Italy, restaurants didn’t even start serving dinner until 8 pm. And now, with an infant at home, I follow his schedule, which doesn’t include late night readings and free-beer-with-the-purchase-of-a-ticket.
I removed the pacifiers and travel bottle rack from my luggage to pack for AWP. I packed copies of my book, postcards and business cards. I packed my writerly t-shirts, like my Dodge Poetry Festival and Powell’s bookstore t-shirts that had been hidden from my drooling son. (Happily, like the jeans, they fit 9 months after pregnancy.)
AWP is always a stressful event for me. It is hard to chat up writers I don’t know well. I’m intimated by asking questions in a large group. This time, I was representing Toadlily Press and needing to not only make eye contact, but attempt to draw passerbyers to our table. It was a challenge, but an important one I was committed to.
When Kim Brown from Minerva Rising asked me to take a picture by their table, I was terribly flattered. When the VIDA folks who sold me the “mini Vida” onesie for our son encouraged me to post a picture of him wearing it, I was tickled.
Talking with other mothers, I realized it isn’t that I’m outside of the writing world, but rather in another corner. There is a tribe of us who are, or have been, going to sleep early and finding a way to balance it all.
I’d rather be sleepy at AWP in mom jeans than not at AWP (or fill in other writing conference/festival/workshop) at all.
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Chloe Yelena Miller lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband and son. She is the author of Unrest (Finishing Line Press). She blogs about intersecting roles at Woman Mother Writer (http://womanmotherwriter.blogspot.com).
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Chloe’s three poems “Italian Vocabulary: Gravidanza,” “Conjunctions,” and “Ciao, Ciao!” can be found in Issue 4: Mothers.
