Editing Night Feeds and Morning Songs: Poetry of Motherhood
In 2020, while homeschooling my two young children solo and working as a publicist, I edited an anthology of poetry about motherhood. Not since the newborn days had I been quite so much in the trenches of parenting. Even with the many advantages we enjoyed – adequate technology and living space, good health, kids without additional needs who don’t mind learning too much, the relative flexibility of some of my work, enough sleep – combining my jobs with homeschooling was horribly challenging.
I felt I had completely lost my sense of myself, because I was never alone – though, not having seen an adult other than my husband socially in a quarter of a year – I was always lonely. Even while on the loo I was assailed by demands to referee sibling battles, unanswerable questions (“Why is it a called a house?”) and unceasing demands for snacks. It was impossible to finish an email, a sentence, a thought.
The poems in Night Feeds and Morning Songs helped me remember the tender madness of the newborn days, and the sticky, beaming toddlers my kids were relatively recently. They reminded me of the privilege and pleasure of parenting when it felt like I was a mass caterer, a hostage negotiator, a kitchen maid and a referee – as well as a terrible teacher and an exhausted employee – and not really a mother anymore. They reminded me that my children are funny and bonkers and magic and that I love spending time with them. (Though not – as homeschooling made abundantly clear – all my time.)
It goes without saying – though say it I will – that every pregnancy and every birth, every mother and every child is unique. And yet, despite the fact that my once wakeful newborns are now both fully fledged schoolgirls, and I have neither a hefty teenage son nor an empty nest, each and every one of the poems in this collection told me something profound, devastating or beautiful about motherhood.
In these verses I found a literary incarnation of the community that is so essential to this delicious, brutal, exasperating, exhilarating job of motherhood. This confederacy convenes in draughty church halls, in potty-mouthed WhatsApp groups and at the school gates. Its alliances are forged in waiting rooms and office kitchens, over the tambourines at toddler music classes and at the chipped tables of soft play centres. These tribes sustain us: they cheerlead, they advise, they sympathise.
They put the kettle on and pass the good biscuits. They make us feel that we are not alone – and not mad, although what is asked of us as mothers sometimes seems to be. In a world where events have frayed the threads binding us together, during a time in which many of us are distanced from our networks of love and support, the fellow feeling I experienced reading these urgent, ecstatic, sometimes heart-squeezing verses had a new poignancy.
These poets take us from the deeply peculiar state of pregnancy, when our children roll and swim within us, to the moments in which we watch them set sail, their eyes on the horizon as we shrink behind them on the shore. And everything in between is here, too, from the tempest of the labour room through the apparently endless hours of sleeplessness (shhhh, shhhh …) to the tying of tiny shoes.
Poetry was a luxurious comfort to me during the newborn days when my bone-deep exhaustion rendered reading a novel a wild and distant fantasy. It was something I could gulp down during a night feed, or while liquidising a blameless vegetable. These poems granted me windows into other dark bedrooms and, when I read about infant-speed toddles, as in Kate Clanchy’s beautiful ‘The View’, I could see something of our own haphazard progress reflected there.
As the years passed, I squirrelled away more of these verses. In the company of these poets, I could forgive myself the piled laundry, the toast-for-tea, the ‘not-now-I’m-busy’s and the school run screeching. They helped me to approach some of the tender feelings often buried under the avalanche of weaning or wiping, cheering or chivvying, and give them a moment – those quiet moments that are, for some years, so few and precious – to be felt. These women invite us into their homes and their hearts, and we understand ourselves – and this deep, wild, ever-evolving bond – better for hearing their voices.
Night Feeds and Morning Songs, edited by Ana Sampson is out now.
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Ana Sampson has edited eight poetry anthologies including I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud (a top three poetry bestseller in 2009), She is Fierce (an Amazon category bestseller in Young Adult Poetry) and Night Feeds and Morning Songs. She writes and speaks about poetry and women’s writing at bookshops, library events, schools and festivals.
Category: On Writing
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