In Their Own Words
Margot Kahn on “Mixed Feelings About My Contribution to Humanity”
Mixed Feelings About My Contribution to Humanity
There are days in the fall when
on the paths through the park
slugs everywhere are crossing.
I come upon them stretched out
to their longest lengths,
trailing their cursive tracks,
and I stop, stoop, and I pick them up,
their soft, wet bodies contracting.
I set them down gently on the other side,
in the new grass
or the soft, dead leaves.
And then there are other days—
days we’ve been late to school
because none of the clean pants
are comfortable, because
a fraction of toast
has been left on the plate
but cannot be cleared.
Days when doors have been slammed
or books held open, and I am tired
of asking for socks and shoes,
tired of wondering over the whereabouts
of rain boots.
On these days, I get to the park
and see the biker
skimming down the path,
the dog’s damp nose, his slip
of indiscriminate tongue,
and I don’t stop. I look at the slugs
and say to each one of them,
Good luck, buddy.
Good fucking luck.
Reprinted from The Unreliable Tree. Copyright © 2025 by Margot Kahn. Published by Curbstone Books/Northwestern University Press. All rights reserved.
On “Mixed Feelings About My Contribution to Humanity” from The Unreliable Tree
I know it’s a complicated thing to say, and it may be hurtful or worse to some, but I approached motherhood with a lot of ambivalence. I was in my thirties, married for five years. When we got to that tipping point of “geriatric pregnancy,” my partner and I were similarly deer-in-headlights about the decision.
There was no way to know how having a baby would impact our lives—how much happiness or despair (or both) it would bring, or how the quantities of happiness and despair would compare to a life without our own children. We knew it seemed utterly foolish to make such a life-altering—indeed, life-creating—decision with so little precision. In the years since, I’ve heard so many other women confess the same sentiment that I know it’s not unusual.
Still, for those of us who had a hard time wrapping our heads around a definitive desire for being mothers but ultimately became them, and then perhaps felt embarrassed or guilty or shameful about that indecision, it’s hard to know how to talk about this. And then there’s the part where you’re in it. The ups and the downs, the befores and afters go from vivid and raw to blurry and unfinished. Also, our children are going to read this.
So, like I said, we stumbled into it. The pregnancy took some time and then it appeared, a line on a stick, a shape on a screen. Though I don’t recall the first time someone said it, it was probably around about the first instant I let the words pregnant escape my lips: Enjoy every minute.
Pregnancy, for me, involved bleeding and a miscarriage scare; the edict from my doctor to eschew sex and exercise and not gain too much weight. It involved taking iron pills to counter anemia that then caused constipation so fierce I’d writhe on the floor for an hour each morning with abdominal pain. It involved a birthing scene where I went numb up the left side of my body, lost too much blood, and was told I might need a transfusion, that the baby’s heart rate was dropping. Finally, our son was vacuumed out of me, and I was stitched up in such a way that it hurt to stand up for two years.
Then, the hormones, sleep deprivation, ocular migraines. The bleeding nipples. The crying. Enjoy every minute, people kept saying. My mother. Strangers. Generally, these people were at least twenty years on the other side of early motherhood, and they made me want to scream.
At the same time, I knew there was something I needed to capture. Not that I wrote any of the poems in this collection, The Unreliable Tree, during the first five years of motherhood—these images, these moments started spilling out when I had the benefit of more than six consecutive hours of sleep and a few minutes to myself here and there in a carpool line.
Frighteningly, thirteen years into the adventure, I’m finding the same words I so despised hearing are wet on my own lips. Holding a friend’s new baby, her thick, little body so much heavier than it seems it should be, her thighs soft and spongy—I’m about to say It goes so fast. I bite down on the skin of my cheek before I say Enjoy it.
In a craft talk she gave for Tin House that was uploaded to the excellent podcast Between the Covers, Torrey Peters talks about the editorial pushback she received for a particular character’s lack of clear motivation to become a mother in her novel Detransition, Baby. “Everything that is transcendent and miraculous and sublime about motherhood goes away when you try to express it,” Peters says. “This is something bigger than can be answered. If someone asks you, leave it opaque. Fill in the images, build in everything to hold that emptiness, but leave it empty.” Yes! I wanted to cheer. I love my son unequivocally, but all I can do is give you the image.
The Unreliable Tree is a collection about care—the care of a child, a spouse, a friend, a house, a heritage, a piece of land, a body, a self. It’s about devotion, sure. But the foremost concern for me is risk—the frightening leap of caring for anything that may or may not turn out the way you hope. The labors of love that may or may not bear fruit. I’m still new to these crafts—to mothering and to poetry—but if I could somehow change the cliché, I’d ask that instead of saying enjoy we say, simply: notice.
