Mamas Write: 29 Tales of Truth, Wit, and Grit

Kate Hopper

A year and a half ago, I sat on one side of a large, cobbled-together square of tables in the sunlit loft of the O’Hanlon Center for the Arts in Mill Valley, California. Women lined the periphery of the square and spilled onto the uncomfortable-looking couches against the wall. I was there to lead an afternoon writing workshop for the Write On Mamas.

We talked about character development and concrete details, and I gave them a writing prompt. Soon the sound of fingers tapping on keyboards and pens scratching across paper filled the room. And I could feel the energy bubbling up around me, an energy born when people write together.

I knew that some of these women wrote in order to document their lives, to not forget. Others were using writing to make sense of the world in which they were living, to find joy in what is rather than dwell on what might have been. Others wrote because they simply couldn’t imagine not putting pen to paper.

When one by one they shared what had emerged from the writing exercise, I listened to their beautiful words spill out, words that described the textured, complex realities of their lives. And as always, I felt grateful, my understanding of humanity swelling, expanding.

I gave them another writing prompt, they once again bent their heads over their work, and I leaned back in my chair and smiled. My journey to that classroom began a decade ago with the premature birth of my daughter, who is now a healthy ten-year-old. My story was born out of fear and uncertainty, and writing it helped me plant my feet firmly on the ground once more. It led me to these women and to others like them.

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That day in Mill Valley I knew that the Write On Mamas would send their words out into the world and change the world, reader by reader, because that is what good writing does. And they have sent their words out into the world—you are holding them in your hands.

Mamas Write examines the things that drive us to the page both as readers and writers. Some of these women (and one man) write to remember and create permanence, others to heal and transform. Some write to encourage, to make other mamas feel less alone. Others write and read to gain perspective, to understand what they think and believe.

This book was born from the common denominator that is motherhood, and these pieces tap into the urge to create, an urge that leads many a woman both to the delivery room and the blank page. But these essays are about much more than why mamas write. These writers are grappling with universals: love, acceptance, disappointment, grief.

And this anthology not only celebrates why and how and what these mothers are getting down on the page; it celebrates community, the ways in which we support each other as writers and as parents. In The Next Prompt, the first piece in this book, Janine Kovac writes, I know that if I can’t share these feelings here—with these mothers who graciously share their stories with me—then [ . . . ] I will never write truthfully about anything.

These writers have taken a leap—to write their truth, and to share that truth with each other, to share it with you. This collection is ultimately about the power inherent not only in writing, but in sharing our stories. It’s about creating a space—virtual or in person—where we all feel safe enough to be vulnerable, to write what we’ve been too scared to write.

So dive in, join the community. And when you’re done reading the words in this book, pick up your pen and get your own truth down on the page. You won’t be sorry.

Kate Hopper is the author of Ready for Air: A Journey Through Premature Motherhood and Use Your Words: A Writing Guide for Mothers.

The Next Prompt

Janine Kovac

I always sit at the card table, my Tuesday makeshift writing desk. Rachel and Angelisa share the big couch while Mary and Jill squeeze together on the little grey foldout couch from IKEA. Aluminum laptops emerge from tote bags. Cords are plugged in. A pitcher of dusty-pink herbal tea sits on the coffee table surrounded by coffee cups. A prompt is given (Rachel prepares them ahead of time). The timer is set for twelve minutes. (That’s always my task.) Then we write. When the timer goes off we take turns reading aloud, always without comment. Then Rachel gives us another prompt and we start again. We write for two hours. Every Tuesday.

My friends write about their challenges: a blended family, a son with a genetic disorder, a baby who died when he was ten days old. They write about what it feels like to have a child in the hospital.

Sometimes I write about my challenges: a daughter who hates swimming lessons, twins who have suspected hearing problems or the husband who thinks he can live on raspberry iced tea and Pop-Tarts. But mostly I write to make my friends laugh. I write absurd stories in which Dick Cheney takes yoga classes in the Berkeley Hills but won’t remove his black knee-high socks. I write about a family of raccoons who conspire to play practical jokes on a poodle in the neighborhood.

Occasionally I drift into memoir and write about my twins, who were due in April but born months earlier in December. I write in a distant voice, the way an alien might record life on Earth. I describe the proactive scenes—me, kneeling in front of the mirror for each of the ninety-two mornings the twins spent in the newborn intensive care unit and carefully applying the makeup I normally saved for parties before donning the brightest colors I could find in my closet. But I never describe the scene before that—me, dragging myself out of bed, trying to slough off despair and uncertainty.

I never venture past the bare facts. I’ve never tried to speculate as to why my husband stopped shaving the day I went into the hospital the week before Christmas and didn’t shave again until his sons were discharged the week of Easter. When I write about my daughter, I record her precocious anecdotes rather than the months when she’d scream, Mommy, don’t leave me! when I’d try to take a shower. If I write about the early diagnostic appointment during which the doctor told me to expect to have a dead baby at every ultrasound, I transcribe her cold remarks but I don’t write how I felt when I heard them.

The surface-level snippets I write on Tuesday mornings become prepared statements such as, It really was a fifteen-minute surgery—stock answers to family and friends who ask about our time in the NICU.

How awful! people say. Or, You’re handling this so we-ell! And, You’re so strong not to cry!

It’s funny how emotional detachment gets mistaken for emotional strength. And even though I know the difference, I don’t know how to digest our traumatic time in the NICU. I don’t have the words to describe what those months felt like. So on Tuesday mornings when do I venture to write these detached scenes, I’m grateful that nobody asks me anything. My friends nod slowly or sigh deeply but they give me the space they intuitively sense that I need.

We write. I time. We read. I listen.

The other mothers write about their babies’ fingers and toes, the smell of soft, downy hair, the textures of rich, creamy milk, of blue lips and limp limbs. I listen to Angelisa write about singing to her baby as he passes from this world into the next and the friend who brings her soup when she is too depressed to get up from the couch. I listen to Mary, who writes directly to her son, as if she were writing him a letter.

I watch as they crack open their hearts and read, never apologizing for their vulnerability. Only apologizing because they haven’t written more. We cry as we listen. Eventually I put out a box of Kleenex next to the pitcher of tea.

Then one Tuesday, something changes. It starts out like any other busy morning. Nine-thirty a.m. and among the five of us we’ve already been to one physical therapy appointment, placated a feverish husband, arranged for two back-up sitters, dropped off a car for an oil change, and purchased a birthday cake. We’ve fielded calls from an insurance company, a special-education lawyer, a Realtor, and a seventh-grader who forgot her lunch. One by one we take our places in my living room.

Ready? Rachel looks around the room. I set the alarm on my phone for twelve minutes. She gives a benign-sounding prompt: It is time to . . .

It is time to write, I think. But I type: It is time to feel. The image that comes to mind is of me lying in my hospital bed a few hours after my emergency C-section. I’m holding photographs the nurses took of my baby boys. I wouldn’t see them for another fourteen hours, but I didn’t know that at the time, lying on the bed, woozy from medication and nauseous from the anesthesia.

I think past the thoughts that I had wanted to be true (this is what a healthy one-and-a-half-pound baby looks like) and the thoughts I had spoken aloud to my husband (this is a face only a mother could love) and let myself feel the fear of that moment—what I really saw in those pictures. Remembering feels like sticking needles under my fingernails. Pushing the memories aside makes the pinpricks go away. Nobody is making me write down my painful memories. Nobody expects me to pour my heart out. I could always just write about the raccoons. There are eleven more minutes to write before we get a new prompt.

I look at my flashing cursor. I know that if I can’t share these feelings here—with these mothers who graciously share their stories with me—then I will never write truthfully about our time in the NICU. I will never write truthfully about anything.

I type what I see: My baby’s skin looks slimy, like a raw chicken breast. I look at it there on my screen, standing alone. I don’t feel the pinpricks anymore; I just feel proud, as if something poisonous is now out of my system.

I record details about the boys’ faces, such as the tape that held their breathing tubes in place and the eerie blue light that made them look as if their bruises had healed. I remember the helplessness of seeing my children hooked up to strange, life-giving machines. Each time I see a new vivid image I feel the needles again, but I keep typing anyway.

Letting myself remember is like guiding myself down the cold tunnels in the New Mexico caverns I’d visited as a child. It’s icy and the air feels thin, ancient, devoid of life, like the air in outer space. There’s a path but it’s too dark to see it. It feels as if I am the only person who has ever traveled here. And then I turn the corner and see something beautiful—ancient stalactites and mounds of limestone stalagmites—and realize I can’t possibly be the only person to ever come here. There’s no way someone could see such exquisite sparkling in the middle of pitch-black darkness and not be moved to share what they’ve experienced. Beauty such as this is meant to be shared.

I type until the timer chimes.

When it’s my turn to read aloud, I pause in the middle of my sentences, as if they are confessions rather than memories. This is the easy part, I remind myself. The hard part was letting myself write it down in the first place. Or maybe the hard part was trying to keep it inside. My voice rises in pitch as I read. It’s like an air bubble rising to the surface of the office water cooler. It cracks; I sob. Jill hands me a tissue and takes one for herself.

I had always pictured sharing sad news like flying artillery. But my friends react to my story the same way I react to theirs: softening, as if they are absorbing the blow rather than defending against it.

When I’m done, the room exhales.

Rachel whispers, You’re going there, Janine! You’re finally writing about this! Good for you.

We wipe our faces. I blow my nose.

Then Rachel reads the next prompt.

Janine Kovac is an event coordinator with Litquake, San Francisco’s annual fall literary festival. She is also a founding member of the Write On Mamas. Her work has appeared in Salon.com, fiction365.com, and in the anthology Nothing But the Truth So Help Me God: 51 Women Reveal the Power of Positive Female Connection. She blogs about her experience as a NICU mom for the science-based parenting site Raising Happiness and is an alumna of the Squaw Valley Community of Writers and Lit Camp. When not writing about preemies, Janine reads about fairies, dinosaurs, and garbage trucks. She lives in Oakland, California, with her husband and their three small and surprisingly noisy children.

The Write Identity

Jennifer Van Santvoord

Last year at a cocktail party a handsome stranger asked me, So what do you do? He was standing a little too close, though before marriage and kids, he would have been standing exactly where I wanted him.

Um, what? What do I do?

I panicked.

I started to sweat. Oh no, can he see me sweating? No, of course not. That would be weird. He can totally tell that I’m a mom, can’t he? It’s like a giant poop stain all over the front of my dress. Wait, is there a poop stain on my dress? That wouldn’t be so unusual. Likely, actually. But he can’t seem to tell that I’m married. Personal space, buddy. Personal space.

I’d been a stay-at-home mom for five years. How do I make that sound sexy?

I waited too long to respond. The silence between us was becoming awkward. He cocked his head to the side, almost like he thought there was something wrong with me. There is nothing wrong with me, Mr. Handsome. I’m just not as quick to come up with a witty response to your sweat-inducing question since having children. Those little rug rats stole all my brain cells and never gave them back.

Oh no! Say something!

I took a deep breath. Well, I said slowly, I’m at home with my kids for right now . . . and . . . um . . . I write a blog.

What’s the blog about? he asked in a husky voice, as if hoping I would say something like, "Well, it’s like Fifty Shades of Grey meets Striptease. You wanna get out of here?"

It’s about funny parenting stories, you know, that sort of thing, I said, almost apologetically. Sorry to disappoint you, Mr. Handsome.

He stared back at me blankly, and then I saw the look. His eyes started to glaze over. He thinks I’m a joke. He definitely thinks I’m a joke. It was a look full of what I’m sure could only be judgment and condescension.

Sigh. I’m such a cliché.

I am a mom who blogs, a mommy blogger as they say. Mommy bloggers are everywhere these days, making me feel a bit like a dime a dozen. But the truth is, as clichéd as I may feel, and may in fact be, writing has made me a happier