Everything but the bathroom sink

Yesterday, while I was working on something on the computer, Bradley came in to the room and asked (quite unexpectedly) to look in my jewelry box. I suspect it was just a ploy to get me to do something with him, but nevertheless I let him open it up and look through.    

It lives in the bottom drawer in the bathroom, something I rarely open. It contains all sorts of things, a lot of it not even jewelry — a note from husband from a past Mother’s Day flower arrangement he sent, a bookmark, some screws (!). Most is junk leftover from high school — numerous peace sign earrings, giant planet Earth’s (Bradley wondered why I didn’t wear them for Earth Day; frankly I had forgotten they were there), several necklaces from a friend who used to identify ancient coins (the ones that weren’t salvageable he’d pierce and string a chain through for me), as well as jewelery that belonged to my mom’s mom, my namesake, that I was given upon her death. The box itself belonged to my stepmom’s mother, a treasure I brought home from one family vacation to Cleveland.

In a few days it will be Mother’s Day again. This time it comes just a couple of weeks before my book comes out, which I’ve dedicated, in part, to my mothers. Many of the poems are mamacentric — not just about my own experience as a mother (though that’s definitely part of it) but more than a handful deal with my relationships with the various mothers in my life.  Some of the poems feel rather raw, naked even, as though I’ve exposed myself. As a poet, I have often mined my own history – and the history of those closest to me – and recast the material as poems. Now that they will be available for public viewing I am a little nervous about the reaction I might get. But I’m not in the business of self-censorship, and even as I have drawn from fact, I must remember — and ask everyone else to remember – that what may come across as fact has been fictionalized.

I’m looking forward to seeing the finished books, to having that to show for years of hard work (for every poem that appears in the book, there are at least ten others that didn’t make it in — my hard drive is a mess). Beth Ann Fennelly wrote – in her book Great With Child, I think – that, until you’ve birthed the one book, you can’t get pregnant with the next. I’m ready to move on to new material. But I can’t seem to break free of it just yet. Maybe when the books are in my hands, or maybe when they’re in everybody else’s hands, I’ll be able tear into something new.

Opening my jewelry box with Bradley was a lot like opening a time capsule, revealing all the selves I have been or will become. 

Hopefully he won’t ask me to do it again anytime soon!