a poem for when you are growing

(but also, like, over birth metaphors)

When my last book, Lessons in Belonging, came out, I designed a birth announcement. That’s right. It featured a picture of my book, on a clothesline, next to a string of onesies. In a season where many of my friends were being celebrated for their hard and miraculous labor, I wanted to be equally celebrated for mine. Clearly.

I have compassion for this younger version of me, even if I have grown some since then. I no longer share her desire to match tit for tat (or womb for work, as the case may be.) I now see that comparing everything to a baby—book baby, fur baby, Hey Baby—sort of reinforces the idea that babies are what we really want, real or metaphorical.

Which doesn’t mean I’m above a good birth metaphor. There is much to be said for a subversive pun: how we can breed love in all kinds of ways, the mischief and magic of inconceivable kin, the way all of creation groans with pain and purpose. For a metaphor to shine, it has to be both true and surprising. And, sometimes, birth delivers. (See?!?)

But, in a development that will shock no one, the birth metaphor has lost some of its awe for me. Same goes for calling God Our Mother. What once started as a personal corrective to the hegemony of God the Father, now feels more chicken soup, less amuse bouche. Parental titles for the divine can still be true. But I’ve grown tired. And curious.

So when Someone Other Than a Mother came out this spring, I did not send a birth announcement. I did not refer to it as a book baby—even if I felt sufficiently celebrated when friends did. I appreciated when authors who are biological mothers insisted how much writing a book is not like a baby—for instance, it will not, sadly, appear after months of mostly gestation. You have to daily connect the ligaments.

Instead, I find myself gravitating to growth metaphors inspired by the natural world. These metaphors of seed and root and branches feel at once ancient and new. Not to mention, and this may be my real aim, inclusive. None of us knows what it’s like to be an actual shoot in soil. None of knows actual from metaphorical at all. There is a divine democracy to this unknowing.

Maybe you are growing, too—whether tired or curious. Maybe the growth is miniscule. Maybe the growth is painful. Maybe the growth makes you mad and you want to press moon shapes into your arm with a fingernail because you can’t sit idle with all this excruciatingly long learning and you don’t yet know what to do with your own power.

Or maybe today you are just, as the poet down below says, “excited to be on the path blooming.”

So—putting on my vocational facilitator hat here—what is the hard work you’ve been tending? What are you unearthing? What are you reseeding? Where are you beginning to see spouts? May you be surprised by growth however it comes, green and glowing and imperfectly ineffable.

XO,
Erin

---

Sprout

I am in search of my life.
Not the one I was dealt,
but the one I want to have.

Not the one
repeatedly stomped in the ground
popping up
where I least expect it,

But the one where
I wake up each morning excited to be on the path
blooming with
maybe nothing I expected
but everything I wished for.

I have been tending to the hard work.
I have unearthed and tilled
and reseeded the dead areas.

I am beginning to see sprouts.
Little glowing green life
pushing against gravity, weight of earth
to find light.

They are in search of their life.
They know more than I
how to shed the confines
of the seed,
thank it for its lesson,
and grow.

by Sue Ludwig

This is what growth looks like, according to my 14-yr-old at the “plant museum”

P.S. For more on the shine of surprising metaphors (particularly divine ones), I am forever recommending Lauren Winner’s Wearing God: Clothing, Laughter, Fire, and Other Overlooked Ways of Meeting God.

P.P.S. In another of my favorite brainy books, The Kindness of God: Metaphor, Gender, and Religious Language, Janet Martin Soskice reminds us that when Jesus called God the Father, it was startling and new and not at all a sloppy equation of men with gods.

P.P.P.S. Finally, if it is meaningful to you, Happy Father’s Day! And really, really, Happy Juneteenth! And also, always, even when it’s excruciating, Happy Sprouting!