Carrying

What does it mean to carry?

In her collection The Carrying, the great American poet Ada Limón explores what it means to carry. In the titular poem ‘Carrying’, Limón, childless herself, watches a pregnant foal and reflects, ‘… How my own body, empty, / clean of secrets, knows how to carry her, / knows we were all meant for something.’ Contrary to Limón, I am a mother and a wanna-be-writer, obsessed with my own version of carrying. I write and write, send out submissions, trying to find a vehicle to carry my creative spark out into the world.

What does it mean to carry?

Carry a child in our womb for nine months, carry an idea, a plan ... As Limón points out, we can carry many things beyond a pregnancy – ‘her belly-round with foal, or idea / of foal.’

Many of us carry burdens, not just (potential) joys. Even after we no longer physically carry our baby, as a parent, we carry the worry for this sentient being we have created, as they grow, moving out into the world, beyond our protection. We carry the strains of caretaking in varied forms – tending to ageing parents, other loved ones.

And of course, if you have birthed or raised a child, you are attuned to how they themselves carry the weight of existence. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger writes about ‘thrownness’, a recognition that to exist in the world is something we have no control over; we didn’t choose to be born.

Photo by Morgan Sessions on Unsplash

At the moment, I am observing my twenty-one-year-old son carry a new awareness, differentiating himself from his father. He is seeing his father in a stark light that perhaps delineates the end of his childhood. On a recent visit down south, over the phone, my son tells me, with obvious dismay, how ‘dysfunctional’ his father is. The pain in his voice of the recognition – I do not want to be like that; I will carve my own path – prompts a complex mix of emotions in me as his mother. I am proud of his self-awareness, while also sad for this lineage of paternal disappointment my son is compelled to carry – ‘thrown’ into. I recognise his anger and sorrow in my own fraught filial relationship.

And what of this urge to carry forth my creativity?

‘We enjoyed spending time with your work, though we won’t be moving forward with publication for this round’ – my latest rejection from The Berlin Literary Review.

Why do I keep writing when it’s just so hard to carry it out into the world, beyond this little study here, tapping away?

A poet friend, who is relatively successful – a handful of published collections behind her – recently said she considered giving it away. She is in her seventies, with grown grandchildren, and now, time to … what? What would she do instead? ‘I can’t not but write,’ she said shaking her head.

I can’t not but write.

So many of us word-obsessives, know this feeling. This ‘thrownness’ of being, carrying the heft and breadth of the creative yen. But this latest rejection, arriving at the (arbitrary) close of another year, makes me contemplate what it means to carry.

I raise this provocation: Can I carry this compulsion to create in such a way that it is not a burden? That I find daily joy in its expression, regardless of whether my work is picked up for publication? In the honing, the delighting in the craft of it …

Yes, of course, there has always been felicity in the act of creative expression, I reply to myself. But to carry a spark also means you wish to ignite it, for others to be warmed by.

Recently, I subjected myself to the cringe-inducing practice of re-reading an old journal from when I was eighteen, just out of school, first year at university, striking into the world as a young woman. Many of my diary ramblings were focused on the desperate urge to mate, to snag myself a boyfriend, but there was also that creative spark. All those decades ago, the artistic impulse stirred in me; I wrote plays, performed in a youth theatre, and yearned to be that thing called a ‘writer’.

Then, in the intervening years, life got in the way. Carrying a career, multiple careers, in fact, carrying defacto relationships, and then, carrying my son, mostly on my own, over these last twenty-one years.

And now, now, now …

I have the time and space, the room of one’s own, to carry forth that nascent spark.

I suppose, though, I need to find a way that the rejections don’t discourage me from the sheer voluptuousness that can be carrying.