I wondered what kind of legacy he’d wanted to leave for me, or if he’d even thought about it at all.
While Tatay occasionally talked about being a teenager during the Japanese occupation, I didn’t actually learn that his family had spent that time in hiding, and why, until years after he’d died. It was his first wife who shared that story when I was visiting with my oldest brother and his family on a holiday break in college. When I asked her why he never told us, she shrugged and said that Tatay was just the kind of person who preferred to avoid talking about “unpleasant things” at all costs. I couldn’t argue with her assessment. She’d had to be the one to initiate the divorce after Tatay had started dating my mother (while he was also still seeing another woman with whom he’d had one of my older brothers).
Knowing that Tatay had actually spent his young adult years not just living through war, but actively hiding his identity from hostile occupiers, put a different lens on the ways he expected my younger brother and me to behave after our mother died. He would abruptly leave the dinner table and retreat to his study if we talked about her “too much.” I wasn’t allowed to look unhappy when I was around him and my stepmother because it was “rude and disrespectful.” Apparently after my mother had died, Tatay got into arguments with some of our closest family friends when they pushed for him to send my younger brother and myself to therapy. Therapy, in his view, was unnecessary, and his children “needed to learn how to weather the slings and arrows of life.” He might as well have said he wanted us to endure our own gom jabbar.
I’d like to think that this was my tatay’s way of protecting his kids, teaching them how to survive shock and loss. Maybe for him, trauma and pain were just something you learned to live with, processed or not. I wonder if he was afraid of the path we might find if we had guidance through our own fear and pain, rather than being left to fend for ourselves.
I eventually finished the series with Chapterhouse: Dune somewhere around sophomore year. I didn’t exactly end up loving it, and I couldn’t feel satisfied at having completed a series that was itself unfinished. All Herbert had left were notes and sketches, a vague outline of his intentions. Piecing it all together might complete the story, but it was still just an approximation.
I kept reading Tatay’s books, and when I finished them all, I bought more books by the same authors, and books I thought he would have liked, more than enough books to fill the space and time I was left to myself, but never enough to forget where I was, or that he was gone. I rewatched the same shows and movies we’d seen together, staying up late at night to use the one VCR in the house after my relatives had gone to sleep, volume low, seated close to the TV screen in the dark. Returning to familiar stories is its own kind of time travel, although that’s no guarantee you’ll find what it is you went back for.
© 2020 Michi Trota
Michi Trota is a five-time Hugo Award winner, British Fantasy Award winner, and the first Filipina to win a Hugo Award. Michi is Editor-in-Chief of Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) and Senior Editor of Prism. She is also co-editor of the WisCon Chronicles Vol. 12 with Isabel Schechter (Aqueduct Press), has written for Chicago Magazine, and was the exhibit text writer for Worlds Beyond Here: Expanding the Universe of APA Science Fiction at the Wing Luke Museum in Seattle, WA. She’s been featured in publications like the 2016 Chicago Reader People Issue, Chicago Tribune, and The Guardian, and has spoken at the Adler Planetarium, the Chicago Humanities Festival, and on NPR about topics spanning feminism, media representation, and pop culture. Michi is a firespinner with the Raks Geek Fire+Bellydance troupe, past president of the Chicago Nerd Social Club Board of Organizers, and lives with her spouse and their two cats in Chicago.
This Isn’t the End: On Becoming a Writing Parent
by K.A. Doore
We live in interesting times.
Some of us have always lived in interesting times. What’s different now is we can all agree that these times? They sure are interesting. There’s trauma and pain everywhere you look. Even a casual greeting at the grocery store includes an implicit shared understanding that this shit sucks.
Yet, we still wonder why we can’t create. Why we can’t read. Why we can’t relax.
I started this essay in February. I wanted to tell a story of hope, of rest, of kindness to others, but most of all to ourselves. I wanted to tell new parents: you’re not alone. Rest isn’t failure. Life is about ebb and flow, stop and go, rush and relax. This isn’t the end. This is just a pause.
Then the pandemic hit like a hurricane that we haven’t even reached the eye of yet. Some of us were able to pause our lives, some of us barely managed to hang on, and there was hope, yet, that we might return to normal, even if it was a new normal. We gritted our teeth and kept our kids home and stopped everything else because what else could we do? But the situation kept changing, keeps changing, the world shifting like sand beneath our feet, and there’s no end in sight to this perpetual state of holding our lives together through sheer will and spit.
It’s exhausting. Demoralizing. Impossible.
Like many parents, I found myself torn between identities that had been at odds even before the pandemic: stay-at-home parent and work-from-home employee and author with a book out soon. On top of that, I was also struggling with an anxiety disorder while cut off from all of my support systems. I dropped a lot of balls and we discovered which had been rubber and which glass. It wasn’t pretty, but we survived. Are surviving.
I almost didn’t write this essay. Retaining your creative self while parenting seemed so inconsequential while the world was on fire. But in our new reality, it’s more relevant than ever. What is parenting if not an abrupt upending of your old life, replaced by a furious scramble at understanding the new one, constantly getting it wrong even when you get it right, constantly exhausted even when you sleep, and always—always—five steps behind where you think you should be?
This essay was going to be a reassuring hug of words to new parents, but it applies to us all now more than ever. We are all in this new world together and despite the sometimes apocalyptic foreboding, this isn’t the end.
Many of the new parents I’ve talked to in recent years have echoed a similar feeling: that their lives have changed beyond all recognition and they will never be able to create like they once did. And they’re right: it has and they won’t. But “not like they once did” is not the same as “never.” In parenthood there are a dizzying multitude of ways to be and experience parenthood, but they all share one thing in common: change.
Change came for me with the popping sensation of water breaking. In the following months, I had to learn a new language, one with decidedly less words than English and quite a bit more screaming. I had to figure out how to do everything one-handed: fold laundry, scrub sinks, cut vegetables. I had to relearn how to sleep whenever and wherever I could. Sleep when baby sleeps quickly became the running joke of our household: might as well clean when baby cleans or write when baby writes.
Every habit I’d consciously constructed and every habit unconsciously maintained were dismantled. New parenthood stripped me down to the basics and forced me to create a new way of existing during a time when everything else was raw, emotionally and physically.
And in case that wasn’t hard enough, I was on deadline.
My first mistake was pretending nothing had changed. I tried to write as I had before and I failed in almost every way. I failed at NaNoWriMo for the first time in a decade and I failed at the daily goals I set for myself afterwards. Self-imposed deadlines slid from my grip like the sleep I craved. None of the processes I’d learned and committed to before worked anymore.
But slowly, tentatively, I found a process that worked. I discovered upsides to the new parent life—long stretches of time to think, to plan, to create, so that when I did have the energy and space to put fingers to keyboard, the words were there, waiting for me.
Miraculously, I turned in my book before d
eadline. I thought I knew what I was doing.
Then my child changed.
Where a newborn had meant using every minute my hands were not filled with child to instead fill them with words, an older baby and eventual toddler meant my hands were empty but my mind was full of her. At any moment, an alert toddler could pull on the cat’s tail, highlight the wall, or stumble down the basement stairs, while a sleeping toddler could wake at any moment, screaming because no one was there. Naps became more predictable, but at the same time, less: you knew they would fall asleep, but never for how long.
Toddlerhood ushered in a desperate fight to squeeze in writing during any moment she slept. As her schedule shifted, mine shifted with it. I grasped for any multiples of minutes when I could guarantee she wouldn’t be awake. My biggest struggle became pinning down a solid window of time where there were no interruptions, no breaks in flow. Even when I cornered and trapped that time, I was primed for the sound of a small child waking up, crying out—needing me. I had to learn how to write all over again, but this time with a lack of focus instead of a lack of sleep.
But even when I didn’t figure out how to make it work, it wasn’t long before everything changed again. A few weeks or a few months, all I needed was to be patient with myself, with her, and there would be a chance to try again.
My child changed and changed again, but it got easier each time. Stability lingered longer and longer, allowing us to not only create routines, but appreciate them. The toddler became a child and learned how to play on her own. I trusted that I would have ten uninterrupted minutes, then fifteen, then longer, until I found I was interrupting her.
Other parents I’ve talked to have echoed the shape of this path, that it gets better in fits and starts, but it’s always different. That, yes, sometimes we can’t create. We’re too tired, too distracted, too goshdarned sick. Or better—we’re too enamored with the way our kid is playing, their babbling incoherence a story if only to them, their fingers and arms turning just so, finding the ways that a human moves and plays.
But always, always, we will be able to write again. Everything changes, but we will write.
If I could go back in time and give my new parent-self advice, it would be:
Rest. You will have time again. You can ask for an extension. You are doing your best. Let others care for you.
Find what you need that is absolutely necessary to work, to create, to feel like yourself, and fight to make room for that. For me, it’s time enough to think of plot and energy enough to put fingers to keyboard. More than those two things was a luxury, but one I still ached for. But getting down words, even a handful at a time, gave me hope, and hope was enough to see me through.
Try again tomorrow. Try again next week. Just because today was a wash doesn’t mean you’re a failure. Just because this month was a struggle doesn’t mean you’re weak.
In all this you will learn a secret: that losing your ability to create or write or do what you love is temporary. Breaks are natural. Even though they can feel like a failure of will, they are part of the ebb and flow of creativity. We’re in a particularly large break right now and the world is even scarier than usual.
If you step away, you aren’t giving up; you’re making room. Room for yourself to exist. Room for yourself to grow. Room for yourself to still be here in a week, a month, a year.
Dare to show yourself the same kindness and patience you show your child, your spouse, your friends.
It feels like now will last forever, but this, too, will change. And as one parent to the world: this isn’t the end.
© 2020 K.A. Doore
K.A. Doore is an author and shouter of queer sci-fi and fantasy. The Chronicles of Ghadid is her debut fantasy trilogy, starting with The Perfect Assassin, and she’s also written about murder and parenting at Tor.com and Tor/Forge, as well as in the upcoming anthology about parenting in SF/F, Don’t Touch That! She haunts the Florida swamps with her cats, children, and wife.
Mourning Becomes Jocasta
by Jane Yolen
It’s complex,
this idea of sorrow,
this love of my son
who is my husband,
this one foot after another.
Tomorrow is now,
yesterday is when,
never today.
Moments wash away
in morning’s mourning.
Our children will know
the shame of it,
the blame of it,
but the noose will not.
It will work morning,
bring mourning,
and the shame
will be forgot.
Except by the gods,
who will make
this puppet dance
at rope’s end,
a fine finale
to a flawed romance.
(Editors’ Note: “Mourning Becomes Jocasta” is paired with the following poem, “An Elder Resigns from the Chorus of Oedipus at Colonnus,” by Peter Tacy. Both these poems are read by Erika Ensign on the Uncanny Magazine Podcast, Episode 37A.)
© 2020 Jane Yolen
Jane Yolen’s 389th book was published in 2020. Her eye is on #400 as she has already sold those books. She has won two Nebula Awards for short fiction, 3 Mythopoeic Awards for novels, the 2020 Asimov’s Reader’s Choice Award, for a poem in the magazine, the Boston Science Fiction Starlight Award (it set her good Scottish coat on fire!), two Christopher Medals, a Caldecott Award for her picture book Owl Moon, was president of SFWA for two years, as well as two World Fantasy book awards, named a Grand Master for SFWA, SFPA, and the World Fantasy Association. She has six honorary doctorates for her body of work, was the first woman to give the Andrew Lang lecture at St. Andrews University in Scotland since the inception of the series in 1927. (One of the speakers–in 1939–was J.R.R, Tolkein.) and was on the board of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators for 45 years.
An Elder Resigns from the Chorus of Oedipus at Colonnus
by Peter Tacy
Not ever to be born
surely was the better choice!
By cruel fate we’re torn.
We lack a voice
in our dreadful ends;
we forever know
and forever show
the gods aren’t friends
to any living thing…!
Yet, though washed by sea,
we also can’t be free
of the constant sting,
the deepest, hopeful stain,
of mortality!
So, then,
what, a mortal, can
I hope to gain
through more striving?
You sing on. I leave
your number; not to grieve,
nor as one surviving;
But just to leave—alone,
beaten—far from youth—
shriven of all but truth;
with one foot upon each stone.
(Editors’ Note: “An Elder Resigns from the Chorus of Oedipus at Colonnus”is paired with the preceding poem, “Mourning Becomes Jocasta,” by Jane Yolen. Both these poems are read by Erika Ensign on the Uncanny Magazine Podcast, Episode 37A.)
© 2020 Peter Tacy
Peter Tacy and Jane Yolen dated and were award-winning student poets when they were in college during the late 1950’s. Then happy marriages to others, and different career paths, separated them until, after both had been widowed, they reunited during a visit to Emily Dickinson’s house in early 2019. During their years apart, Peter was an English literature teacher, school Headmaster, and Executive Director of the Connecticut Association of Independent Schools. During that time he wrote and published two books and scores of essays and articles, all about education; such poems as he was inclined to write were never intended for publication and rarely preserved. That situation has changed since his re-connection with Jane.
Cento for Lagahoos
by Brandon O’Brien
Who do
we think we’re kidding?
As if the threshold was
the infinitesimal, too—
but spirit does linger.
Bring honey, a black lamb,
two firearms, and a woman’s dress,
with the turning of the moon.
Soon, I will turn thirty. Hope for the best.
Hunting is my living, see, and I take
away from this haunted space.
Loosen my language from my teeth.
Many things have tried to kill it.
It will hurt still, but not for long—
for a moment I’m scared that this will be worse.
Easier to gnash, better to howl with.
The root of the word monster
the sound of fuck you up
pressing deep into me, splitting me—
but they will see what I see.
Good lupo, optimum dog.
I guess there are worse names.1
1This poem entirely comprises lines borrowed from the works of the following poets (in order of initial appearance): Charles Wright, Adele Gardner, David C. Kopaska-Merkel and Kendall Evans, Shivanee Ramlochan, Rebecca Buchanan, Herb Kauderer, Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné, Nicholas Laughlin, Jeff Crandall, Cindy O’Quinn, Amal El-Mohtar, Roger Bonair-Agard, Toby MacNutt, Jeana Jorgensen, Nate Marshall, Deborah Davitt, Jessy Randall, Vahni Capildeo, and Roger Dutcher.
© 2020 Brandon O'Brien
Brandon O’Brien is a writer, performance poet, teaching artist and game designer from Trinidad and Tobago. His work has been shortlisted for the 2014 Alice Yard Prize for Art Writing and the 2014 and 2015 Small Axe Literary Competitions, and is published in Strange Horizons, Reckoning, and New Worlds, Old Ways: Speculative Tales from the Caribbean, among others. He is also a performing artist with The 2 Cents Movement. He is the former poetry editor of FIYAH: A Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction.
Uncanny Magazine Issue 37 Page 14