Give it a go!
Here at The Mum Poem Press we are passionate about encouraging more mums to give poetry writing a go.
There are so many reasons to write, particularly as a mother and maybe particularly in easy motherhood.
For me, when my son was born, I just couldn’t help myself – little bits of poems just kept pouring out of me (it was weird!)
I think there are a couple of reasons why motherhood had that effect of me.
Initially, I just had this overwhelming feeling that I needed to suspend time somehow and capture my son, bottle him, and remember what those early days are like because they are such a blur but so unlike anything else in the world. I wanted to remember how it feels to have a new baby sleeping with their face smushed against your chest – and photos just don’t capture the WARMTH of it.
Once I started writing I stopped caring if the poetry was any good. And oh my god that was liberating! And it still is. I wasn’t writing it to win a prize named after some crusty old white man. I was writing it for me, as a memory book, and for my son and daughter, as I thought it would be nice for them to look back on.
And because I stopped trying to be the next T.S. Eliot, I started enjoying writing poems so much. Once I started, they just popped into my head at random times. Like once when I took my daughter for a wee in a service station on a motorway and wrote a poem about it.
Most of the time I would tap poems in the notes on my phone while my baby napped on me. When he got a bit older and napped in his cot (I know how lucky I am he did this as my daughter never did!) I had the luxury of sometimes sitting down for 15 minutes with a cup of tea and a pen and paper.
And it made me feel happy. It didn’t matter if it was good, just doing it gave me such a sense of achievement. Sure I’d had 2 hours sleep and had spent most of my day wiping bums and getting sicked on BUT, I’d also written a fucking poem!! So I was basically also Shakespeare. Yes, I was a mum, but now I was a poet too. And that thought helped me so much when I felt like motherhood was cannibalising my sense of existing as myself.
So, basically what I’m staying is; if you’re not writing poetry because you’re worried it won’t be any good, don’t worry! Come and be as bad a poet as me because it’s really fun!
#giveitago #getinvolved #writeforyou #newpoet #firsttimepoet #justdoit #whynot #timeforyou #motherhood #mumswhowrite #mumpoet
Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash