When I opened my Instagram account I named it to go with a book of essays I was starting to write. Several years later, as I’m finishing that collection, the name has come to mean more than I could have guessed at the time. My life has changed enormously; in real ways I am not the same person. I remain a writer. I am still committed to life over death. And I am a celebrant of the Good. Everything else is up for grabs, in flux as I change in order to live into the amazing events that came into my prior orbit, dislodging me into a new galaxy.
A place apart used to mean those locales set away from the ordinary where discovery and expansion could happen in unbound ways. Places where, once removed from the normal, you could foray into frontier terrain.
The phrase still means this, but for me it has become superseded by another, or even a few other, senses. A place apart has come to mean the position I bear as a mother with respect to wider society. Yes, motherhood is celebrated—and expected—in mainstream culture. But it is not really supported. By virtue of this absence of support and integration, a mother, from birth, exists in a place apart from the visible public world. (And of course the character and extent of this apartness depends on many factors of each mother’s particular social and economic context.)
A place apart also has come to mean the place I must hatchet and smooth out for myself and my child away from the chaos, overwhelm, and normative chatter of the discourse and internet cultures about parenthood that stalk newbies at every turn and with every click. I must make and protect the place apart from others in which I will be able to witness and nurture our child on the terms that she shows us, in the ways most befitting the relationship we have as it evolves every day.
Most stunningly—and daunting, and thrilling—a place apart also means the position I now occupy with regard to my prior life, and whatever self-understanding I thought I had before becoming a mother. With birth I simultaneously became displaced from myself and intimately thrust into myself, with no contradiction in those seemingly opposed movements. I now live in a place apart from myself, a place that is yet more centrally located to everything I believe to be possible on this earth.
Last, a place apart is more literally the physical space I occupy much of the day, but most especially in the night when my daughter sleeps alongside me, and in the days when she naps on me in a dimmed room. After experimenting with dozens of ways to squeeze writing into my life with a baby, none of which were working, I realized that I had to make my place apart the threshold of my writing life. The room of my own is never coming back. Our solitude of two, set apart from the light and nestled in the shadows of slumber, is where I will begin anew.
Welcome to my new writing venture, a series of occasional short essays from my place apart within the ordinary, my attempt to forge a world of words within the conditions and possibilities of naptime, one iPhone note at a time, with two thumbs, and a baby in the reverie of dreams.