I have been thinking about mothers who are poets who live in poverty or close to the poverty line. Some of them are writing within academia, some of them not. Most of the mothers who I have been thinking of are adjuncts. They teach five or seven or sometimes more classes a semester. They do not have health insurance and I think about their struggles to write poetry. I want you to know that in many cities it costs 1,000 a month to put a child in daycare. I also want you to know that in many places, you only get a few thousand dollars to adjunct a class. There are so many mothers who get up at 5 am to write poetry and they are poor and they keep going on. They teach their classes and they come back home and they love their children and they are very tired and then they get online and they tutor for extra money. I want to tell you that no matter how much they work, they are still poor.
I want to tell you about these mothers because you might not know them or know anything about them or maybe you don’t want to think about them. It could be that you are a young man in your twenties and you spend a lot of time at the bars, drinking and hanging out with your friends and having sex with random girls or boys—and then you go home and you feel such inspiration to write your poetry about the moon and your half-cooked romances and how the streets look as you make your way home from these bars.
I want to tell you that there are mothers who get up at 5 am when you are walking home to write poetry and these mothers are very tired and these poets are your mothers also and their fatigue is real and not made up or imagined.
When I was unionizing the graduate employees at Florida State University, I was very pregnant with my son, Ezekiel. I walked from office to office across the campus of FSU and I had to convince the graduate employees that they needed a union. Most of the students agreed and our union was finally recognized. However, there were many students who looked at my very round and heavy body and they told me that if I struggled it was “my choice” because it was “my choice” to have become pregnant in graduate school. When I think of the way that they looked at me, I can still feel in my body their sense of disdain.
There are so many people who feel this way—why are mothers blamed for being mothers? Then, when the mothers move on from graduate school to being adjuncts people say that it’s “their choice” to have become mothers while working as adjuncts and then it is their fault that they became mothers while being professors. There is simply no room for mothers.
There is no room for the pregnant body.
There is no room for poor mothers.
Poor mothers exist but no one wants to see them.
Poor mothers are writing poetry right now.
I know a young mother who is a poet who is struggling as an adjunct and she is also an online tutor. She is a brilliant poet too. Once another (male) poet said that she “exaggerated her poverty” because she wanted people to feel sorry for her. It reminded me that once I read that Sylvia Plath “exaggerated her poverty” so that people would feel sorry for her.
Guess what? Poor mothers DO NOT exaggerate their poverty. They do not want you to feel sorry for them.
There is no such thing as “exaggerating” poverty.
Poverty cannot be “exaggerated.”
Guess what?
Poor mother poets do not want to poor and they don’t want you to feel sorry for them.
Sometimes poor mother poets want to go to the bar that you go to and have fun too but they don’t usually.
Guess what?
Poverty is poverty and it sucks and it sucks so much more when you have a child. There is no romance in getting up at 5 am to write your poems and coming home at night when the young boys are just going out to their bars.
Poor mother poets would much rather write their poems without worrying about how to pay for daycare or how to pay for their rent and I am not exaggerating.
Recently, I read on a poet’s blog that a professor had quit her job in academia because “real” artists cannot stand the confines of academia. This poet who quit her job, she is not a poor mother.
Poor mother poets do not quit their jobs because they have this romantic feeling that their poetry couldn’t be written in the academic environment because even if they did have this romantic feeling, they would never indulge it.
When poor mother poets get up at 5 am to write their poems, they worry that their babies will start crying and they won’t be able to think or that there won’t be enough time before they have to go and teach.
I wrote my second book with my infant son on my lap. I breastfed him and wrote and I was poor. I changed his diaper and I wrote my second book and I finished my dissertation and I taught 7 classes a semester and I paid thousands of dollars for health insurance and finally when I got daycare paid thousands of dollars for daycare.
Poor mother poets hate housework.
They don’t want to do housework.
They want to write their poems and maybe one day go to France.
They want sometimes to go to a bar and have fun.
They don’t want you to hate them.
They want to read Paul Celan and not double, triple check the balance on their bank account.
They really do.
They don’t want to be saints (living in poverty on purpose) and they don’t want to be heroes (doing all the things that they do despite their poverty)
They still love you no matter how you treat them though but they are getting sick of your thoughtless comments.
Funny I should come across this post at this very moment.
I’ve been composing a blog post about being poor and dithering about posting it or not because I know a good percentage – maybe all — of those who read it will hate me and blame and mock me for being poor.
Everybody hates the poor. Everybody. Liberals most of all. They think they’ve already solved all that.
like this a lot and this from a father thank for sharing, i try to get my message out through my peotry ramblings and its just so good to see another thank you
I am a stay-at-home mother poet, not living in poverty, and blessed beyond measure that I am not. Yours is a wonderful post about the very real disdain our ‘family values’ culture has for motherhood in general, and mothers who would be artists in particular. Thank you.
Great post! you are putting your finger on so many issues that are often unsaid — bravo for saying them. I think about the acknowledged (but what action?) point that once a woman becomes a mother her income is likely to drop significantly — something that is just “naturalized” within a patriarchal system that doesn’t account or allow for maternal needs/leave, and is predicated on the male body, which doesn’t give birth or need time off. So much within academe assumes this — the “wife” who will leave her job (or doesn’t have one in the first place) to relocate for her spouse’s tenure-track job and set the kids up in school, etc. It’s astounding how “choice” is used as a weapon by someone who doesn’t realize his (or her) “choices” have never been restricted. This is all part of a larger social construction — and again, congrats for pointing when the fabric frays or there’s a big hole some fall through.
One suggestion is that since adjuncting does pay so miserably, think of other fields or ways to use your skills that might pay better, hence leave more time open for writing. Killing oneself teaching so many classes just to make a liveable wage has always been nothing but demoralizing to me, nevermind barely worth it financially. But I know this all comes down to being able to open other doors, use other skills. Best wishes, and please keep writing.
Sandra,
I somehow found this through a Facebook link either from Sandra Beasley or Jeannine Hall Gailey. Anyway, just wanted to say thanks for this.
I’m still thinking about much of it (I’m a mother/poet/editor/freelance writer – which might be read as “currently unemployed” or the more upbeat “stay-at-home-mom”) .
But I so loved how you wrote this out and the thread that continued throughout it. I wish I had something more interesting to say or add besides Thank you. But I don’t. So, *thank you.*
All best,
Kelli
I was a middle-income academic mother who got tenure when my daughter was 2 so I was very lucky, but when abortion was legalised in 1974 when my daughter was 5, a female childless colleague said directly to me, ” We don’t need childcare no we have abortion.” Bye-bye to the human race!
Interesting post re work-adjuncting-poetry. Can you give the link where you saw the post about the poet mom in academia who quit her job? Thanks.
Thanks for this. It really resonated with me, and I’m sorry for whatever thoughtless comments you’ve had to endure.
This,
“Then, when the mothers move on from graduate school to being adjuncts people say that it’s “their choice” to have become mothers while working as adjuncts and then it is their fault that they became mothers while being professors. There is simply no room for mothers.
There is no room for the pregnant body.”
is so very, very familiar. And depressing. Etc. If you haven’t seen it already, I recommend the book Mama, Phd: Women Write about Motherhood and Academic Life Full disclaimer: I am a contributor, but my piece is a fluffy little cupcake of a thing compared to the other searingly intelligent, honest, important essays in the book.
Thanks for this. I couldn’t figure out how to put together adjunct work and motherhood, so I quit when I had a child. My husband worked, so we could almost (barely) afford it, and my job as an adjunct would certainly not have paid for childcare, etc, etc. However you cut it, this world is not accomodating to mothers (working or not) and their children.
Thanks so much for all of your comments. I am frankly surprised by the response which has been really overwhelming. I should say that I did get a full time teaching job which I love and started this year so my circumstances have changed a lot and I am very, very thankful for that. What is interesting is that I don’t believe that I could have written this blog post last year when I was having so many difficulties. Perhaps this fact speaks to the problem itself: that it can only be dealt with in retrospect. Maybe I didn’t want to admit to myself that things were pretty bad because I needed to keep moving on. I can say that having a full time job= a much easier life—no question about that and yet I still get this feeling that every time I write, I’m “stealing” time away from my 2 year old and that I’m being sort of selfish. Someone posted on my FB page that we need a summer camp for poetry moms. Honestly, I think that this is actually an excellent idea.
Thanks again for reading
Sandra, thanks again for your post. I am not a mom. I am the lowest of creatures, a spinster. I am treated as if I am stealing time away from a woman’s real tasks: motherhood. I can’t say how many times I’ve applied for this or that gov’t program and been denied, but been told, “If you had children you would qualify.” We have no use for barren wombs.
The “adjunct” positions in academia viciously exploits people. The way that universities hire on part-time, and then take care to make sure that they don’t give any of them enough hours to qualify for benefits, by hiring a dozen people to fill half a dozen positions, is exploitation, pure and simple.
Thank you for writing this.
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God, this is beautiful and heartbreaking and I cried.
I had my son the summer before I was a senior in college. My boyfriend was working full time, and we absolutely could not afford daycare. I had to take my son with me to school and rely on the kindness (extreme kindness) of my classmates, most of whom had little to no experience with babies, to look after him during many of my classes. I was told that, even though he was completely quiet and well-behaved, I was not permitted to bring him to class because one of my (female) classmates complained that my breastfeeding him was “disgusting”. This was at a women’s college. This classmate now has a child of her own and I sometimes wonder if her views have changed. I hope they have.
I adore my son. I hate that I feel like I have to make that clear, but I have to make that clear. I adore him. He has made me a better poet, a better person, a better wife, a better everything. I would not be half the person I am today without him.
But we are poor. My husband is an adjunct and I work a job that is so far from poetry that I literally cannot think of a job that would be less poetic. Sometimes hearing people say things like “I can’t believe you’ve never spent more than one day at a time working on your poetry” or “why don’t you go for your MFA?” is heartbreaking. It is both equally heartbreaking and healing to read that so many other women go through this, too and that you keep going.
This probably sounds sappy. I hope it doesn’t. Thank you for writing this. Thank you.
People are idiots. They are. That they don’t find room for pregnant bodies; that they condemn mothers, the very people who sacrificed to give them life; that they do this is insufferable and snobby and stupid.
This is wonderfully written and I thank Lou Freshwater for posting a link on her blog to show me the way here.
Keep on fighting. You’re talented. It’s so worth it.
Just wanted to say that I loved this post, having “been there” though luckily I’m not there now, even though I’m currently unemployed. I’m lucky that my partner still has his job, lucky that my older kid is in school, and lucky that the younger one still naps. That is when I squeeze writing in, during those blessed naps. And though I am no longer poor, I still hate housework. (But then, I hated it before I even had kids!)
Yes, there needs to be a summer poetry camp for moms. Why not?
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Thanks everyone. I can’t believe the response to this post. It has been so great reading your stories and being able to connect with you. I think that it’s so important for people to know the sorts of conditions in which we (working mothers) write our poetry and I also think that it’s important that we find each other and support one another. Also, I think that it’s important for full time tenure-track professors such as myself to have solidarity with adjuncts and not forget the working conditions of adjuncts (it’s only been a year for me) just because they are no longer adjuncts which happens over and over again. I *do* really like the idea of a poetry summer camp. I’m going to try to work on that idea so that maybe we can all meet
This is a beautiful essay. It’s nice to read about another poet/mother’s experience. I don’t work in academia, but I work in education and I support my husband (who’s an artist and stay-at-home dad) and my two daughters (one disabled). I have a master’s degree from a good university and a regular job that pays over 60,000 with okay insurance. How could I possibly complain? According to my annual salary, we’re not “poor” by a longshot. Though after paying medical bills (even with insurance) and costs to maintain my husband’s studio, we come in around the high 20s. In Chicago, that’s not that much money for a four-person family, so we qualify for moderate income housing–which definitely helps. As for child care, it’s out of the question. It’s prohibitively expensive for us, and even if it weren’t, most child providers don’t have the resources to take disabled children. I love my life, and I wouldn’t change it. But it definitely looks easier on paper than it is. And if my life looks easy but isn’t, how hard is somebody’s life that actually looks hard? Thanks for writing this.
Right on! I am not even a mother, just a poor struggling single poet who wishes I could go to swanky parties and eat sushi. Women ARE always blamed for the “choices” we make–the choice to have kids, the choice not to have kids. Either way, it’s justification for paying us less and undervaluing the work we do. Thanks for your incisive words.
My mother-in-law has a place in upstate NY that we share and that she rents out sometimes. I have thought at times of turning it into a poet-mom retreat for a week. If you get serious about this idea, let me know!
When I finished my M.F.A. I couldn’t even find work as an adjunct so instead I took a post as an AmeriCorps VISTA. It was a great choice for me at the time as I got health insurance and qualified for many benefits for the last two years. I am worried about next year when I once again start seeking adjunct work and keeping my fingers crossed I’ll find something that will let me put my son through college in two years.
Thank you for letting me know I am not alone in the fight.
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excellent post. mothers in the workplace are routinely disparaged when they’re not being completely ignored. i’m sorry this is something you’ve had to face, but i’m so glad you’ve written so eloquently about it.
Thank you. I haven’t been there, but I have friends who have, and I found myself nodding in recognition. I was struck especially by this:
However, there were many students who looked at my very round and heavy body and they told me that if I struggled it was “my choice” because it was “my choice” to have become pregnant in graduate school. When I think of the way that they looked at me, I can still feel in my body their sense of disdain.
I’m in grad school and remember a (disheartening) recent fight on my English department’s listserv about whether better child care and parental leave should be part of our bargaining demands. The person who started the fight used precisely that sort of disdainful language (with a side of “why should my aid go to someone else’s dependents?”).
I am not a parent, but two colleagues who started the program with me are. Both struggle to cover their child care costs. And both are men whose spouses work at least close to full time. There are no women, single or partnered, with children in my cohort. In fact, I can only think of four women in my large graduate program off the top of my head (and this is a state school where people stick around for years) who have had children while in grad school.
As I explained to the person who started the listserv fight, I know that there are people who haven’t joined this department, even though it’s a good intellectual fit for them, because we make it hard for women who have children to finish the program. (Every prospective student weekend, I’ve talked to at least one mom who has been admitted to our program but got a better deal on child care at another school.) And I suspect that there are people who would never consider this department because we don’t make it financially feasible for single parents to attend. When we make it impossible for mothers to work in academia, that’s wrong.
Thank you again for an insightful post.
Hi Rachel
Thanks for your response. Does your university have childcare for faculty/ TAs and students who have children? FSU does and it’s great but the problem is that there are not very many spaces and the waiting list is something like 2 years. (My son is enrolled in FSU daycare now because his father is a student), but I think I put him on the list when I found out I was pregnant and a spot opened when he was 10 months old. I definitely think that childcare should be a collective bargaining issue—I mean the union takes on many issues that don’t “cover” every member, but that doesn’t mean that they are not all important. Shouldn’t the “collective” be emphasized here? I had a similar exchange with someone over email who says that he has a problem with pregnant women being seen as a “special” case i.e. and therefore disagrees with granting her maternity leave (what about a worker who needs to take care of a sick parent or simply someone who needs to work another job to support herself because he has an illness). Instead, he says that all people should be given a certain amount of leave to cover a certain very say 3 or 4 years. I think that there’s also a good argument to be made here. What do you think?
i loved this.
this essay brought me to tears, to laughter, and then to tears again. what you wrote is just that real and prescient, precise and fine-tuned to the concerns of destitute verse-loving mothers. i have 2 kids and i work two jobs… one at the ymca and the other at a Taco Johns. there just isn’t any work around here but i pay the rent, write my poems (mostly devotional verses… maybe you could help me find a publisher) and provide for my two little boys, Walt and Ezra. anyway thank you again for writing such a moving polemic on one of the most major and yet unsung plights in this disgrace of a society.
yep, that’s me too at 5am. loved what you wrote.
YOU GO GIRL
Sandra, this essay was really powerful. I give so much credit to single parent poets. I’m not sure what qualifies as poor, but I have a non-tenure track faculty position and my wife is a public school teacher (btw, i got way better paternity leave than my wife’s maternity leave…sad). I do have benefits and only teach 3 sections, but the base salary sucks so I’ve had to supplement with several other projects within the department. And even still we’re not making a dent in our mountain of debt and pretty much have to use the credit card (more debt! with worse interest!) near the end of every month to make ends meet. Because we can’t afford daycare, I stay home during the day and watch our son until my wife gets home and I go teach from 3-9. Needless to say, the stress and fatigue make writing tough. And I have a great support system…a great wife, family nearby willing to help, etc. Single parents with no family nearby and more sections and no benefits are friggin heroes. This essay makes me want to stop whining and get to work.
On Sunday I gave a talk/sermon on “Stereotyping the Poor” at the St Augustine Unitarian Universalist congregation in Florida. The service leader of Lola read an excerpt of this work before I gave my presentation. Your work is very powerful, and I’m so glad you put these feelings into words. I can relate to your work on some levels. My talk was really inspired by the experience of having a family–my wife, a student, and I have 3 children–being an adjunct, and living off of less than 30,000 a year; having to have a tooth pulled rather than repaired because I lacked health care; having to battle to get an orthopedic doctor in our county to treat our eldest daughter’s broken arm and on and on. And of course I’m a white, male, heterosexual, educated, American citizen. So if life is challenging for me, then it’s only going to be worse for others who lack this privilege. Yet I think we need to spend more time talking about class because economic disadvantage, in some ways and at some times, mitigates other privileges. I guess this is why it’s so important to have an intersectional approach to understanding oppression