Sometimes You Gotta Buy a Vowel

How I remained a writer while raising small humans

Hello, readers! I’m dropping into your mailbox today with an essay about the juggling act of writing + mothering. (I also reveal just how freaking long my poetry collection, Psalms of Unknowing, took.) A version of this piece originally appeared in Zibby Mag. I hope you enjoy!

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My husband and I called it “buying a vowel.” That was the term we used when, as a nursing mom, I needed space from the tiny, beautiful, tyrannical, tongue-tied new human who lived on my body. 

The reference is from “Wheel of Fortune,” when the contestants are so baffled by a puzzle that they hand over hundreds in the hopes that Vanna will flip over a few E’s. Only I wasn’t paying in dollars. I was paying in breast milk. And the puzzle I was trying to solve wasn’t a pithy phrase, but one countless women have tried to crack: How to be both a mother and a writer.

The vowels were expensive, paid for by hard-earned ounces. These ounces took thirty minutes to coax from my body via a motorized milker, the syncopated suctioning so mechanical that my body was in no way fooled. Just a few ounces dripped into plastic bags. Even the plastic bags were expensive. 

But a few ounces were all I needed to buy myself two hours. Two fat, impossible hours into which I could stuff some semblance of my life before motherhood.

“I’d like to buy a vowel, Pat,” I’d declare to my husband (whose name is not Pat) and he would make his way to the kitchen, baby in hand. I’d head for my scrappy office, where drapes bunched at the floor like unbrushed postpartum hair.

When I closed the door behind me, I spun to my desk. Then to the bookshelves. Then to the window, glimpsing the dead-end street. Where to go first? What to do? I felt dizzy with indecision. Sometimes I pulled books off the shelf, searching for mentors: Hello, Virginia Woolf (zero kids). Hello, Lucille Clifton (six kids).

Weeks before the baby arrived, I’d written my beloved mentor-poet, Jeanne Murray Walker, who’d raised two kids: “Will I still be a writer once I’m a mom?”

Her response: “Of course! How else will you know what you think?”

When I paced the office, I was trying to find the part of myself that did the thinking. I was sparring not only with sleep-deprivation and brain-fog, but with a hurricane-sized new opponent in my psyche: Mother Guilt. How could I have my own needs when my baby needed so much?

At some point, I stumbled across an interview with the writer, Julianna Baggott. In her first year of motherhood, she didn’t write. Eventually, she realized that if she let being a mother keep her from writing, she’d resent her kids. But if she let her writing keep her from having the kids she wanted, she’d resent her writing. She needed both. 

Baggott planned fictional plots as she cut bits of apple into toddler-sized bites. She scribbled on the sidelines of her life. She had four kids and to date has written over twenty books.

This interview was a revelation to me. I bought more vowels. I opened messy word documents. I took notes in a journal while the baby slept on my chest. I once wrote a lyric essay about the twelve reasons babies cry while my baby was soothed from crying via my boobs.

This is me *not* writing with a newborn on my chest.

That moment—a baby attached to my chest while my arms reached over her to type—became my icon of Mother-Writer. With the minor casualty of an aching back, I could meet both our needs.

Scheduling got easier. And harder. After ten weeks of unpaid maternity leave, I returned to work part-time, adjuncting at a university. I squeezed my teaching obligations into two days; I needed thirty minutes of those days to pump.

One afternoon, office blinds closed, my body stripped naked from the waist up, I laughed at the absurdity. I flipped over my lesson plan and scrawled half a poem on the back: “Topless at the office / like a scandal, I stand / otherwise constructed….” I kept writing. I shoved the half-poem into a notebook.

Over a decade later, that poem, “Pumping Milk,” begins my debut full-length poetry collection, Psalms of Unknowing. Written over the course of more than ten years, the poems explore the intersections of feminism, motherhood, and spirituality. 

I wrote other things in those ten years of motherhood: blog posts, essays, a TED talk, and eventually an acclaimed memoir. I had another baby. I kept on teaching. If you had asked me if I was also writing a poetry collection, I would have said no. I was just writing in tiny increments each day. 

But those increments add up: those vowels bought, those scraps saved. I’ve learned: it is possible to keep both a writing life and small humans alive. 

I’m wary of round-ups, those articles that try to solve every complex problem with a 5- or 7-item list of pointers. Everyone has to figure out their own way. But if you ever find yourself pacing with indecision about how to balance the demands of your life with your need to make art, here are my thoughts. Take what’s useful.

Enlist support. Here’s where my privilege comes in: I had a spouse—a willing co-parent. We didn’t live on much, but his job came with health insurance, and he never once questioned my writing. Regardless of family structure, I recommend enlisting people who will help you buy—and use—those vowels.

Don’t be precious about conditions. I believe in scribbling where and when we can. I love a solid two hours, but who always has that? I probably spent ten minutes on the first lines of “Pumping Milk.” Jotting down ideas when they come keeps the door to creativity cracked open, which is often enough to eventually get the whole heavy door ajar.

Let your first draft be (very) imperfect—and stick with it. When I wrote that little half-poem, I had no idea where it would go. It was far from complete. But it captured something—the weird task of getting half-primal in a work setting. As I revised, this led to deeper revelations about the many selves a mother contains. A smarter, less sleep-deprived writer would have typed up those lines and saved them on a fancy device. Whatever your method, keep your scraps, your drafts, your partially formed ideas.

Write more days than not. This advice is not for everyone. But I try to write regularly, even if “writing” is rereading a paragraph and tweaking a sentence. Or journaling a half-page of rage. This practice doesn’t just add increments; it keeps my ideas active in my subconscious—which makes tomorrow’s writing easier.

Have patience. Writing takes time. So much time. I didn’t officially finish “Pumping Milk” until I was preparing my manuscript for publication. Technically, that poem took ten years! The collection itself came line by line, across more than a decade of writing. Progress might be imperceptible, but it’s happening.

Creativity and motherhood are not incompatible. In fact, I believe they’re mutually enriching. No doubt, it can be super hard. Our country’s reliance on the nuclear family puts tremendous pressure on mothers—and that’s probably the understatement of the year. But once I became responsible for small humans, a part of me broke open, and I was raw and tender and alive in a new way. And I had so much, suddenly, to write about—even as I had far less time.

Here’s to finding your time, friends…. and buying your vowels.

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Tidbits & Things:

• If this subject of mothering and art-making interests you, I highly recommend Catherine Ricketts’ forthcoming book, The Mother Artist: Portraits of Ambition, Limitation, and Creativity. It is amazing! Preorder today!

• Are you headed to AWP this year? If so, I’d love for you to say hi! Here’s where you can find me: