My Son Thinks I'm Famous Because of One Poem
It was printed once, in a tiny journal, and he tells everyone.
My son has told the dentist, both his class teachers, a bus conductor, and one extremely patient waiter that his mother is a famous poet. I am not a famous poet. I work in accounts, and nine years ago exactly one poem of mine was printed in a journal with a circulation of four hundred, most of whom, I suspect, were other poets flipping straight to their own pages.
The poem was called Instructions for Leaving a Small Town. I wrote it the year Arav was born, in the fifteen-minute pockets between feeds, and I entered it into a monthly poetry contest mostly because sleep deprivation makes you brave. It did not win. But the editor wrote to say he wanted it for the journal anyway, and for one whole week I walked around like a woman with a secret engine.
Then life resumed. The journal arrived, I put it on the shelf between the warranty folder and a diet book, and I did not write another poem for nine years.
This is not a tragedy. It is just the most common story in the world.
Arav found the journal in March, during a school project about family treasures. He was supposed to bring a coin or a photograph. He came out of the study holding the journal open to page thirty-one, my name under the title, and looked at me the way I imagine people look at minor royalty. 'This is YOU,' he said. 'You're in a BOOK.'
I explained... Small journal. Long ago. Not a book exactly, more of a stapled magazine. Four hundred copies. He absorbed none of it. A thing had been printed, his mother's name was on the thing, therefore: famous. Seven-year-olds run on a logic that has no reverse gear.
He took the journal to school without asking. The teacher sent home a note saying he had given a very moving presentation, which is teacher language for: he stood on a chair. At his cousin's birthday he introduced me to another parent as 'my mother, the poet', and the parent, God bless her, asked what I was working on, and I said 'dinner, mostly', and she laughed, and Arav frowned at us both like we had ruined something sacred.
He told the dentist mid-filling. He told the bus conductor, who charged us full fare anyway.
He informed my mother, who did not need informing, since she personally owns three of the four hundred copies; the two of them now hold a small mutual admiration society on the phone every Sunday, and from the next room I can hear my name being discussed the way other households discuss cricketers.
He also started a folder. An actual folder, red, labelled FAMUS in his own hand, into which he placed the journal, a printout of the poem, and a drawing of me holding what is either a trophy or a large golden fish.
It became unbearable in the way only pure love can be unbearable.
So one Sunday I sat him down to lower his expectations, which, they should warn you, is most of what parenting is. I said, 'Beta, listen. Famous means lots and lots of people know you. Thousands. Lakhs. Nobody knows my poem. Four hundred copies, nine years ago. I am not famous.'
He thought about it with his whole face... the way he does over chess moves and dessert menus. Then he said, 'The library keeps books so they don't get lost. You kept your poem for nine years.' A pause, while he lined up the checkmate.
'Famous means somebody keeps you.'
Famous means somebody keeps you. My seven-year-old said that, and I have been unable to improve on it since.
I did the mature thing. I told him to go wash up for lunch, walked to the kitchen, and cried into a tea towel with the tap running so he would not hear.
Because here is what I had never told anyone, not even his father, not properly. I had not stopped writing because of nappies and deadlines, whatever I said at parties. I had stopped because one poem in a tiny journal had felt like a verdict: this far and no further. I once read an essay on why safe poems lose, and I remember thinking that safe lives have the same defect. Somewhere along the way I had decided that if the world was not going to keep me, I would save it the trouble and quietly stop showing up.
My son had no access to any of that arithmetic. In his ledger, one poem plus one boy who keeps it equals famous, carry the joy.
That week I started writing again.
Badly at first, in the same fifteen-minute pockets, which it turns out life still contains if you go looking. I started with a page of prompts, because a blank page after nine years has a glare to it, and the first thing that came out was about childhood: his, mine, the red folder, the golden fish. It was not good. The second one was less bad. By the fifth I recognized my own voice the way you recognize a friend across a crowded station, older, but unmistakably still there.
In June I sent three poems out into the world. I let Arav press send, because ceremony matters to him and, I am learning, to me. Two came back with a no... One came back with a no that had a full sentence of praise attached, which poets treat approximately like a medal.
Arav asked to see the rejections. I braced for the fall of an empire and showed him. He read the kind one slowly... lips moving, finger under the words. Then he carried it off to his room, and when I checked later, it was in the red folder, filed under the fish drawing.
'It's a rejection,' I said. 'They said no.' He looked up at me with the mild pity he reserves for my chess. 'They wrote back,' he said, smoothing the page flat. 'That means they know you.'
I have decided to stop correcting him. Not because he is right about the fame, but because he is right about everything underneath it. Somebody keeps you. Somebody writes back. Somebody stands on a chair in front of a whole classroom and says your name like it is worth standing on furniture for. If there is a better working definition of hope, I have not found it yet.
Yesterday he asked me what I want to be when I grow up. I told him I am grown up. He said, 'When you grow up MORE.'
And I heard myself say, 'A poet,' out loud, in my own kitchen, at forty-one... and the ceiling did not fall, and my son nodded like a man whose accounts had finally balanced and went back to his drawing: me, the trophy, the fish, and now, in the corner, a small red folder, spelled correctly this time.
He is learning his letters. I am learning what he already knows.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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