Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Where is Mommyville anyway?

I have landed in an unknown place—Mommyville—and even though I have been here almost six years, I am only recently getting settled. Being a mom has been a life changing experience...I am surprised by this? Yes, still. Having gotten the hang of mothering, sort of—"Look ma, no hands!" (just before crashing that bike)—I am working on getting myself back out in the world as an artist and gasp...developing my career in this area.

I use the term artist in the old fashioned sense as "one who engages in artistic endeavor." My endeavor has evolved over the last thirty years from photographer, painter and sometimes poet into filmmaker, writer and educated poet—let's remember those lovely letters of MFA after my name (in Creative Writing: Poetry from Brooklyn College.) Yippy, that and a dollar might get me a cup of coffee...and yet even with that degree, I don't know why people, even me, separate poet from writer, but everyone does—consider the well respected Poets & Writers magazine—could be that we are afraid of poetry and hence it stands alone (just like the cheese.)

Beyond just artmaking in my existence, there is of course, the rest of life that is constantly keeping me awake at night, so finally I thought I would channel the insomnia and general feelings of uselessness into a blog. As a writer, I have wanted to blog...I admire bloggers, but I have been afraid. Afraid to put my thoughts out into the universe. Who will read my stuff, hard to say, but there it is: a fear of the power of words.

In the blogsphere there is a mommy blog for everything and I thought: yeah, we need one more. So along with the artist's angst, I am interested in the state of motherhood today and anything else my mind fixates on in the wee hours of the morning. As I like to chant to my daughter: hocus, pocus, let us focus on our task right now...I probably won't, but here we go anyway.