My Toddler Ate the Only Draft
Critics have savaged my work before, but never literally.
My daughter recognizes four food groups: milk, banana, items found on the floor, and literature. On the morning of March 9th, she chose literature.
I should explain the notebook. I am, by conviction and by stubbornness, a longhand poet. Phones die, laptops update themselves into comas, but a spiral notebook from the pharmacy has never once betrayed me. That was my whole speech, anyway, the one I gave at dinner parties back when I attended dinner parties, back before Mira arrived and converted our apartment into a small, loud research facility for gravity.
The poem in that notebook was the best thing I had ever written. I know every writer says that about the work that gets destroyed, the way every fish that got away was enormous. But this one was different. It had come out of me almost whole during the 3 a.m. feeding, which is the hour when the apartment is so quiet you can hear the refrigerator thinking, and Mira was heavy and warm against my shoulder, and the poem arrived the way real ones do, rudely, without an appointment. It started from a prompt I had saved months earlier, seven words about inheritance, and it turned into a poem about my grandmother's hands, which became my mother's hands, which are becoming mine, which were at that moment holding a bottle at an angle the internet had strong opinions about.
I wrote it one-handed, notebook balanced on my knee, and when I finished I did something I still cannot defend. I did not photograph the page. I did not type it up. I put the notebook and the pen down on the bed, patted it like a loyal dog, and went to deal with a diaper situation that had achieved, and I say this with respect, structural complexity.
The diaper situation took eleven minutes.
Mira, at nineteen months, could not yet say "spoon," but she could climb like the finale of a nature documentary. When I came back, she was sitting in the middle of the bed with the notebook open in her lap, looking for all the world like a tiny editor reviewing submissions.
She had opinions. Her opinions were dental.
The page was gone. Not torn out, not crumpled. Gone.
There were flecks of blue-lined confetti on the duvet and one soggy corner of paper in her fist, which she extended toward me generously, the way you offer someone the last bite of something delicious.
"Mama," she said, which was one of her five words, and in context felt like a review.
I called poison control, obviously. The woman on the line was so calm I wanted to marry her. Paper is nontoxic, she said. Ink in that quantity is nothing. Your daughter is fine. Then, after a pause... "Was it important, the paper?" And I heard myself say, "It was the only draft of the best poem I've ever written," and this professional, this saint of the switchboard, said, "Oh, honey," with such genuine grief that I sat down on the bathroom floor.
Critics have savaged my work before. A workshop in graduate school once described my imagery as "aggressively beige." A magazine rejected me in nine words.
But nobody had ever eaten a poem. Nobody had ever converted my art directly into a nap and, some hours later, into a diaper situation of her own, which, yes, I checked, and no, the poem was not legible on the other side. I want that fact on the record, because everyone asks, and everyone is disgusting.
For two days I mourned... I tried to reconstruct the poem and produced garbage. The lines came back to me like guests arriving at the wrong party, familiar but wrong, wearing coats I didn't recognize. I texted my sister that the poem was gone forever, and she texted back a photograph of Mira in a laundry basket wearing sunglasses, which did not help... and helped completely.
Then, on the third night, at the 3 a.m. feeding, in the exact chair where the poem had first arrived... something strange happened. I stopped trying to remember the words and just remembered the poem. What it was actually about. My grandmother's hands and the specific way she pinched dough, three fingers, a little twist, like she was turning a tiny key in a tiny lock. My mother doing it decades later in a different country without knowing where the gesture came from. Me, in the dark, holding the bottle, feeling the twist arrive in my own wrist like mail forwarded across three lifetimes.
I wrote it again, one-handed, on a fresh page.
And here is the part I still turn over at night: the second draft was better.
Not a little better. Unrecognizably better.
Because the lines I could not remember, it turned out, were the ones that had never been alive in the first place. The fancy ones. The ones auditioning for an award. The ones where I stopped being a granddaughter and started being A Poet. Digestion had taken those, and memory refused to reissue them, and what survived was only the part I actually meant.
Memory is the most brutal editor I have ever worked with. It keeps nothing you were showing off, and everything you meant.
I read an essay once about why safe poems lose, and I remember nodding along and changing nothing about how I wrote. Apparently the lesson had to come to me through a toddler's digestive tract. Fine. Poetry finds its couriers where it can.
I typed the new draft. I photographed it. I emailed it to myself, to my sister, and, in a moment of paranoia I refuse to apologize for, to my own work address with the subject line DO NOT EAT. Then I did the thing I had been too precious to do with the first version: I entered it in a monthly poetry contest, because a poem locked in a notebook is just a diary entry with ambition, and I was done keeping this one to myself.
It didn't win... It got a commendation and a kind note from a judge who said the poem about hands made her call her mother. I printed that note. It is the first review of my work that ever made me cry in a good way, and I owe it, technically, to an act of censorship by a person who was wearing a bib at the time.
People ask if I watch Mira more closely around my notebooks now. The honest answer is that I watch my notebooks more closely around Mira, the way you keep an eye on a rival. She is four now. She scribbles in the margins of my drafts with a crayon held in her fist like a dagger, and sometimes her marks land next to a stanza I have been doubting, and I take it under advisement. Last month she looked at a poem about family, her own great-grandmother folded inside it, and drew what she solemnly identified as "a dog eating the moon." It was the best feedback I received all year. I cut the last stanza. She was right. It was the moon, and it needed eating.
The soggy corner of the original draft, the one she handed back to me that morning, I kept. It is taped inside the front cover of the notebook, one bite-sized scrap of the best worst thing that ever happened to my writing, tooth marks in the margin like tiny applause.
She takes a bite of everything I love. So far, her taste is impeccable.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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