Another mother poem: childproofing
October 27, 2010
CHILDPROOFING
Wooden slats. U-bolts. Swinging hinges.
Sheets of transparent plastic. Plastic plugs
pushing their way inside every socket.
Fiddly gadgets to catch doors and drawers
before they reveal their vulnerable insides. And you
trundling across the floor, chasing
the ball that plays the same three measures
of classical music again and again,
sleuthing out hidden electrical cords. We can't
pad every surface: you whack your head
on the undersides of bookshelves, on
the coffee table, on the legs of a chair
you didn't realize you'd crawled beneath.
Sometimes if you catch us watching you wail.
Sometimes you barrel on, intent
on whatever's rolled just beyond your grasp.
When you fall we offer the comfort
of familiar arms -- or distraction: look, the cat!
Too soon you push away. The world calls.
You turn the corner and recede from view.
This week's prompt at Big Tent Poetry begins by inviting us to draw the interior of our home, and then to write about the drawing, and then to mine that written work to spark this week's poem. I didn't wind up drawing a floor plan, exactly, but we have been thinking about the inside of our house and how the rooms flow one into the next a lot lately, which inspired this week's mother poem probably obvious ways.
Drew's increased (and increasing) desire for independence is the subtext of this poem. He loves to crawl at a rapid pace down the hallway, from one room to the next, though often he stops to look back and make sure we're still there. He's becoming increasingly adept at flipping over, kneeling up to reach for things, and other physical tricks which would have been inconceivable even just few weeks ago -- though he also ends almost every day with at least one good bonk, usually to the head as he gets tired and loses his balance or misjudges the distance between himself and some obstacle he intends to pass.
Anyway, it's fun to watch him explore his world.
I'll revise this post on Friday to include a link to this week's Come One, Come All post so you can see how others responded to this prompt.