I found this the other day on an old thumb drive. It was an essay I wrote for a Grad School when I was considering an MFA in Creative Writing. I never did send it. Something stopped me, and I can't explain what. I was definitely trying to run from the midwifery calling back then--running into what I thought was a more secure and predictable career path. It amazed me though, when I re-read this, how much of my love of midwifery comes through...thought it deserved a nice, new home on the interwebz...

I imagine it’s how musicians feel. I know it is how actors feel: This glistening of the spirit, a haze of adrenaline, a waking of something nearly palpable. There is purging of the soul to be done. If it weren’t for writing, there would be madness. I am sure of it.

I remember Reagan, the Cold War, cocaine, stirrup pants, volumes of angst-ridden poetry—Lisa Lisa and the Cult Jam—The Berlin Wall, The Challenger, AIDS, Tiananmen Square—The Overweight lover Heavy D-- Urban Sprawl, White Flight, Rodney King, Welfare Reform. The time was perfect for finding Rimbaud, Wilde, Faulkner, Ginsberg, Bukowski—the proverbial Kerouac—Joyce, Whitman, Jello Biafra, The Grateful Dead, Poor, poor, sad Morrissey and Robert Smith. I was always so amazed that after Reganomics and Clinton’s welfare reform, more people didn’t need these folks as much as I did. It was heartbreaking, breathtaking, morose—this revelation. This truth of the universe. This coming of age realization that the entire world does not need the creative purging. Need it. Neeeeeeeed it.

The story of my late teens is this, the stuff that Lifetime movies are made from: A young girl living in Appalachia, secretly dreaming to get out. I met a man, a boy really, at a party. He had fire engine red liberty spikes. He talked of revolution and radicals. We struggled through school while I was a young mom. A radical. A welfare mom. A terribly young wife. I was needy and clingy and wanton. I was young enough to dream that I could move my tiny family into a straw bale yurt in the dessert and live in a self-sufficient community of other radicals. I was gonna sell back my power, man, live off the grid, stick it to the patriarchal western paradigm. My husband had other plans. We split. I tried to reconcile this longing for words and performance with a steady job, sensible shoes, and feeding the sweetest baby in the Universe. I found another someone, had a few more kids, and started living happily ever after.

It isn’t really the stuff of extreme duress. I wasn’t picking coffee beans for two dollars a day with my 12 kids. I wasn’t escaping from a war torn village with my baby hidden under my dress. Suffering is relative. Still, a life with parents who favored Hee Haw over Hemingway, Football over Feminism, Nascar to Nietzsche, we were the stuff of simple hard living Appalachia. I learned very early on that it is hard to appreciate the beauty of a well placed comma when you are sitting in the dark because you couldn’t pay the electric bill. Commas are overrated in those conditions. So is the semi colon when you are bathing in a bowl of water heated on a hot plate. Life in Appalachia living under the poverty line can be downright undignified, but it can be so full of inspiration and motivation and loveliness too: beauty that comes out in giant run on sentences in your stolen dollar store notebook.

I suppose when any person sits down and lists the major events of her life, it all looks unbearable. Everyone must think how did I get through that? I guess the difference in people is this: Some of them look at that list and shut it off. They crash down. They buy Abercrombie and Fitch, 200 dollar jeans. They get manicures. They get new tits. They leaf through home and garden magazine—and NOT in an ironic way. They think Real Simple magazine is full of Real Simple ideas. Some of them watch Nascar; some of them buy memberships at exclusive clubs filled with other rich white people. They know that God created the Universe in 6 days and he rested on the 7th. They KNOW this. They don’t need to examine the equation. They don’t need the madness, the majesty, the elation of creating and exploring. People like me need the exploration. Sometimes we tend not to have too much sympathy for one another…we two kinds of folks.

When I found all of those great writers and musicians I knew I was the kind of person who had to manipulate the universe as they did. I found writing and performing and activism. I was led to Ani Difranco, Sinead O’Connor, Tom Robbins. When I became a mother it was Ariel Gore, Barbara Erinreich, Ina May Gaskin. I devoured Beckett and Brecht. I even sat a while with those radical realists Ibsen and Chekov. I quickly distinguished myself from the other mama’s in the playgroup set. Once you have one homebirth, you automatically put yourself on the fringe. I found Chuck Palahinuk, Holly Hughes, and Karen Finnley while nursing my second baby, re-visited Bukowski and Burroughs with the third, the bhagadvaghita with the fourth.

I have spent the last 12 years entrenched in the Universe of babies and birth activism, lactivism, renter’s rights, teen mama’s rights, gentrification, renovation, revitalization, student loans, home ownership. Slave wage Adjunct hell. A mini van. It is easy to let the writing hibernate. I want to wake it up. I need to have it come awake and take me like some wanton drugstore harlot.

I have had three homebirths, helped deliver many other babies. I have studied the politics of childbirth and breastfeeding. I have rallied with a million women in Washington for the rights to our bodies and I have rallied for peace with only a handful of compassionate folks in my own town. I have spent my time as a gypsy, a teen mama, a radical, a subversive, a soccer mom, a PTA queen, and I have taken inspiration from it all. In this world of folly and psychosis and discord, there is also great tenderness, majesty, sweetness, and synchronicity. The clichéd yin/yang.

I remember my first time with Whitman. Man, was he goooooood. He took me right in my bedroom. He took me in the backyard, the hallway at school, the backseat of my parent’s car on the way to Norfolk VA. He knew how to play me. He wrangled me like a poet never had.

Of course, after Whitman it is a slippery slope. It wasn’t long until I was baring it with Burroughs and Kerouac, Ginsberg, Wilde, Baudelaire, Beckett, Brecht…The others came too, dressed up in late 20th century metaphor. Those damn writers of the West Village of the 70’s and 80’s. All those crazy punk activist performers scrawling their verbiage with stolen presses. Distributing their zines in hushed banquet halls and romping queer bars. Spreading their grammar to street kids and homeless folks and young aspiring writers like me.

There are others too, with much less fame and far fewer dollars in the bank. Those folks who will sit and listen to me rant and add their own ramblings to mine on the backs of napkins after the boxed wine is gone and the kids are sleeping. These folks are no less important. In fact, they may be even more important. They are a tangible human experience.

From the moment I found great writings I knew I was a writer. I wanted it. I could taste it. When I had my first baby, I knew I had to do it. Samuel Beckett once said, “To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.” I need a form. I need to explore outside of the boundaries. I need to shape the mess and give it up to the universe.

Great writings aside, the single most inspirational thing I have ever done was to have a baby at home. My friend, who we invited to our birth, said of her experience “I was watching you handle the pain. You were all glowing and bright and you were not in this world. I watched you go through a door without any of us. You left the room and I could see you go. I wanted to go through the door to help you, but I couldn’t.” And that is exactly what I did. I went on a journey of a magnitude I could not even have imagined, and I DID it. I did it. I felt Ginsberg’s mystical visions and cosmic vibrations. No amount of peyote buttons in the desert could touch that. I came out of it exhilarated. If I could do that, I could do anything. That is why I have to write. I have to. If nothing else, I am a terrible waitress and I couldn’t sell a working eyeball to a blind man. I can’t cook. I can’t clean. I can’t build things or do math. I can spill words onto paper and I can climb up on stage and offer them up to the universe. I can nudge women through their own doors. I can catch babies. That is what I have.