Parenthood is hard on poetry. Well. Mundanity is hard on writing poetry. Getting mired in the swamp of day-to-day normalcy is often a gradual mucking over of your lens on the incredible, the magical, the beautiful of the world. But actually, children and mundanity are hard on poetry for opposite reasons.

Kids are incredible and magical and beautiful. When you have children, you are given the gift of seeing the world again through fresh, wondering eyes. You get to rediscover everything that became banal as the wonder it really is, and you get to do this with every single child, because each one encounters the world in their own unique way. In that way, kids are excellent for poetry. The problem arises when, while the words of awe swirl in your brain, arranging themselves into rhymes or half-lines, stanzas and couplets, the words of those same children swirl in the air, saying such poetic and timeless things as, "Mom, I'm hungry, when are we going to eat? Mom, did you bring my sweater? Mom there's sand in my shoe and it's windy. Mom, they touched me!" And pretty soon any words left in your head are chased away by these louder, more persistent words.

It doesn't help that I am purely an undisciplined poet. Occasionally I will sit down with one of my beautiful notebooks* and a freshly filled fountain pen, and eke out a few sad and stilted lines of alliteration. Generally, though, poetry comes to me. But usually the times when my brain is still enough to settle the words down are times that are not convenient for writing. I cannot drop everything and sit on the sand of the beach to write the poems that come unbidden to my brain while the 3-year-old is throwing sand into the eyes of the 8-year-old, and the 12-year-old is, fully clothed, up to his neck in the ocean. At the top of the very small mountain I dragged my kids up, sublime views may inspire something poetic, but alas, these are lost in the clamor for fruit snacks and water bottles and requests to be carried back down.

The times I get poems out of my brain and onto the (usually digital) page now are odd times when a peculiar combination of mind and peace in the house coincide. Recently I was folding a basket of laundry when suddenly some thoughts I had been pondering merely as thoughts for months (maybe years) suddenly coalesced into a villanelle. Everything about the shape of the poem, including the two key lines that repeat, fell fully-formed into my mind. I was able to get to my computer and type them out quickly, because the children always run for the hills when they see the laundry basket come up. Other times include, inconveniently, just as I am falling asleep, or while I am in the shower, or up to my elbows in dirty dishwater.

But poetry became difficult before I had children, because before I had children I had the mundane. And the mundane eats your soul in its own way. The mundane is not an external factor. It is not the grind of life in a capitalist society, in our cookie-cutter houses with our soul-destroying commutes by car. It is not the constant parade of dishes, laundry, dusting, vacuuming. All of these things exist in the same world as mountains, oceans, sunsets, sunrises, seashells, snails, rain on stone, moss on the trees, and every other beautiful thing. Think of the times people joke about the best sunsets not being on a beach vacation but rather in the grocery store parking lot. Mundanity is a beast that lives inside you, feeding on your inattentiveness. As your eyes turn inward to your own smallness, and the small, gossipy minds of the generality of social media or workplace chatter, the mundane begins to cloud your vision, giving you only a small tunnel view into the world, obscuring the color and light and majesty that are all around. In many ways children gave me back my poetry. They took away the boundless time and energy I had to write it down, but they gave me back the joy and vibrancy it requires. Even if less gets written than I would like, at least it lives in me instead of suffocating slowly in the background of my soul, unnoticed and unmourned.

* Re: the beautiful notebooks. I have, like most people who write, an insane collection of beautiful notebooks. I have done the classic thing of Not Writing In The Good Notebook Till I Have Something Worthy To Put In It. The end result is lots of empty notebooks, or notebooks with pages torn out of the front. But there are endless beautiful notebooks. Write in them. Write nonsense in them. Draw bad sketches in them. And for heaven's sake, just leave them in; don't tear them out. Let yourself be mildly embarrassed by the folly of past-you, and turn the page. When I am dead, my grandchildren will burn them (and unlike with authors like Emily Dickinson, it will be no loss to the world), and the smoke will ascend to the skies, and that will be as good an end of the beautiful notebooks as one could possibly hope. That which is holy and spent should be burned.