I've never posted a poem here, try to keep that side of me separate, and in fact have trouble accessing that side of me post-motherhood, but I just came across something I must have written when my oldest was 2, which I will now share with you. Until I can manage the time to finish all the other half-done things I've been working on...

A Joke About Your Feet

Our daughter, age 2, moves

through our bedroom self-propelled,

her ideas moving her, ideas all her own,

a smooth motion like a crashing

ocean within her, soft and fierce and invisible

like all the parts I built for her

and when she makes a joke

—Out of nowhere!—

(the joke:

‘I didn’t steal your feet, I borrowed them,’

in response to my husband’s

‘You have my feet!’)

it’s nothing

we ever considered, nothing we created,

nothing of the parts of parenting we try

in futility to imagine before they happen,

it’s nothing but we look at each other

quickly and then our eyes quickly back

to her, to see what’s next.