On Balance

Published on April 28th, 2023 | by Eloisa Pérez-Lozano

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This is My Life

I.

The poet father pauses when cries resound off screen. I take a sip of my water and reposition myself on my couch while he turns toward his daughter, giving her a quick pout before turning on a toy for her to play with so he can continue reciting. The other writers on the call seem all smiles and patience within their respective Zoom windows.

As a parent and a poet myself, the mother in me finds herself wanting to see the baby’s toothy grin. I wish for him to break his spell and lift her up into the frame. Precious proof that I am not alone. That there are other poet parents out there, splitting their attention between the passion they live and the children they love.

But he maintains his professionalism: “This is my life,” he says. After he is sure she is entertained, he finishes delivering a piece that makes me gasp. The other writers wait a few beats before congratulating him. I want to tell him he’s not alone, but I can’t, because this is a recording of a poetry panel that happened earlier in the week. One that I can finally watch because both my children are fast asleep.

II.

After having my son, I was terrified I would lose myself in him. I held out hope that the writer in me would not languish as the mother in me took over. Fortunately, I found when he broke me open physically, he also left me emotionally open to a groundswell of inspiration to document my journey into new motherhood. I kept my phone close by, ready to whisper-dictate ideas for poems about my Mexican-American identity and motherly transformation as I nursed him to sleep, saving them as audio files to transcribe later. Because my mom stayed with us to help for the first three weeks, I began transcribing those audio files little by little. For the remainder of my maternity leave, I flushed out the ideas into first drafts of poems between feedings, diaper changes, and naps.

Back at my job, I was lucky enough to have a supervisor who was supportive of my choice to breastfeed. The room I pumped in was normally used by research assistants to scan and review old newspaper clippings and journals, which meant there was a desktop computer inside. Every day for months, I would shut the door behind me and attach the flanges and plastic tubing to my chest three times a day for 25 minutes. Against the soundtrack of the rhythmic whirring of the breast pump, I could work on poems if I saved them as drafts in my email account. Once I started, I couldn’t stop.

III.

I hear the faint ding of my cell phone buried in my diaper bag as I’m getting my kids in the van after a day at the museum. I swipe right to open the text and the writer in me gulps a breath of fresh air when I realize it’s one of my writer friends, asking if I’m really coming to the open mic night in town. Because I’ve dropped off the face of the earth since my daughter was born almost five months ago, I had no idea it was even happening. I say it must be someone else, the itch to perform starting inside me. I impulsively ask if I can sign up at the last minute, when and where it will be and if it’s okay if I go first so bedtime won’t be too late for the kids. I hop into the driver’s seat to search for poems with a soundtrack of chip crunching and baby gurgles in the back (of course, they are coming along).

The Houston sky is dark when we arrive. I’m immensely grateful the reading is outside the organization’s headquarters so my son can’t break anything. The practical voice inside my head insists I shouldn’t be here right now. That these kids need to sleep, and I need to be there to put them to sleep. Everyone else in the audience is grown. But the writer voice overrides, reminding me that after months of a pandemic, isolation from staying at home with my daughter, and drowning in spit up and diapers, I have earned the right to come back alive.

I’m a mess at the microphone, trying to balance my fifteen-pound daughter in one arm and hold my phone steady enough to read off it with the other hand. My son sits in the grass off stage, but starts tapping the platform, which is caught by the mic, breaking up my delivery. Before my second poem, my friend’s husband offers to hold my daughter and I hand her off, and luckily, she goes without a fuss. Sick of sitting still, my son tries to join me onstage, but trips and tumbles back into the grass.

“This is my life,” I say into the mic before reading my final piece to cheers and laughter.

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About the Author

Eloísa Pérez-Lozano writes poems and essays about Mexican-American identity, women’s issues and motherhood. She graduated from Iowa State University with a B.S. in psychology and an M.S. in journalism and mass communications. A Best of the Net-nominated writer, her work has been featured in The Texas ObserverHouston Chronicle, Houston Public Media, and Poets Reading the News, among others. She lives with her family in Houston, Texas.



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