Over the course of a few years after my kids were born, though, it was sort of a quick decline. She eventually didn't know who I was, or she knew that she knew me, but she didn't know how she knew me. And then eventually she became kind of nonverbal. And so trying to not only keep a relationship with my mom and compartmentalize, like the grief of slowly losing her over time, with the joy of having kids, but also trying to figure out how can I give my kids a relationship with my mother too.
Losing a parent can be particularly hard, whether it's a sudden death or slow degradation that makes the goodbye extended. As many parents know, having kids can be hard as well. But when those two things are happening simultaneously, it brings joy and tragedy together. This is random acts of knowledge presented by Heartland Community College. I'm your host, Steve fast. Today's guest is a poet who had twin children around the same time that her mother was suffering from dementia. She talks to us today about how she processed a lot of the emotions of these life events through her art. Hi,
my name is Cathy Gilbert I'm a professor of English here at Heartland Community College in our LASS division.
And you recently had a book released or will be released shortly after we're recording this. Can you tell us a little bit about the book? What's its title?
Sure. It is a poetry collection. It's a small poetry collection, which is called a chat book. And it's called My limbs, a cradle my whisper a song. And it's sort of about that transition period where you're becoming a parent, but also your own parents are aging. And so over the course of the 30 or so poems in the collection, I give birth and have these infants, but my father has already passed on my mother has dementia. And by the end of it, she has passed.
First of all, what's it like to have your first book come out? What's that feel like?
It's weird. It's surreal. I've been submitting to literary magazines for ages. And this is not the first full collection I've produced. I have a long full manuscripts that's based on like Villa Brea Tar Pits and my family history. With that, that's still I'm still strapping publishers for that. So it was weird to me that this was the one that caught interest first. And I think it's weird because this one seems so much more personal and less gimmicky, I guess, than the other collection. But it's very strange. I'm suffering a little bit from imposter syndrome, right? Like, maybe I don't deserve to have this collection out or that people don't really care. But it is a very relatable topic. A lot of us have children, and a lot of us have aging parents. And so I guess it makes sense.
By the way, in an effort of cross promotion, if people would like to hear more about the poems that you wrote a fascinating story about the your family's connection with the Brea Tar Pits, very interesting. There's another episode of this podcast, so you can search for please like and subscribe. Anyway, this was thematic than what you decided to put together for this collection.
Yeah, I didn't start out writing the collection as a collection. Like when I did the carpet stuff that was a purposeful I know, I want to create this manuscript that tells the story. This was I just happened to write these poems, I needed to write these poems, poetry and writing in general is sort of my therapy or my way to kind of process big changes in our lives, right. So obviously, having children becoming a parent is a huge change. Having a parent kind of slowly lose her memory and her faculties is a huge change. And so I needed to write these poems for myself, the fact that they kind of coalesced into this collection was sort of an afterthought, to be completely frank. And it's cool that it happened. But I my, my goal was never when I started writing the poems about my kids. My goal was never to have a book about about this. You know,
I wonder if you would read one of the poems from the book. It's called our work is never done. Yeah. And it's something that I think maybe touches on a couple of different things you mentioned. Yeah.
It's also the poem that contains the title. Right, right. Good place to start. Yeah, totally. Okay. Our work is never done. It's a poet's job to notice. The slant of light or snowy woods are a lonely cloud. But some days there is nothing to report our heads and eyes too busy with the work of living to notice anything past the fingers of our hands. As now at close of day, I can't get past the dishes dormant in the sink, the laundry, worrying in the basement, the sleepy wait tugging at my lids, or the anticipation hanging like earrings at my lobes as I wait for the first cry of the night to pierce through the monitor my limbs or cradle my whisper a song.
So when I read this, the first thing I thought of was work life balance, and trying to balance the various things of your day and especially with young kids, but He said earlier when we were talking that you had to write these poems. So what is it like to balance your creative? Urge inspiration, your work with having twins, especially when they're cradle age, you know, cradling age, and everything else? Was it hard?
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. And actually, a lot of the poems were a lot of the poems that are about infants, right, were actually written in the dark on my phone, as I'm buried underneath nursing babies, like they're sleeping on me, and I have an idea. And so like, I had my phone on, you know, invert colors, or whatever. So it wasn't too bright. And I wrote a lot of poems in the dark like that, because you spend a lot of time in the dark with your thoughts. When you have young young children.
It is kind of funny how nimble your, your hands and fingers can become, when you don't want to wake a child. But he's still like, Alright, I've got to totally let me get them. I'm, I'm, you know, checking sports scores not doing anything important. If I was
obviously also doing Doom scrolling and like checking with my, if I'm doing something wrong, you know, is there a tear at like, 4am, like, this isn't working, they're not nursing enough, or they're not sleeping or whatever. But I also did this, you know, and I actually don't know if I would have been able to write this collection, if it weren't for the time that we're in with cell phones and the Notes app on your phone and all of that.
You mentioned also that you kind of went through a transitional period with your parents. And I think anytime anybody has kids for the first time, it brings up a lot of like, wow, well, hold on, what did what happened when I was a kid? What did my parents do? What did they do? They definitely don't want to do those sorts of things. But what was the timeline on you? Your father's passed on? And your mother had dementia? Yeah. How did that fit into this time that you were, you know, yeah, getting into settling into being a first time mother.
It was it made it really, it's already bittersweet, but it made it even more. So I was so much more aware of time and time cycles, and like the passing of generations and those sorts of things. Maybe it sounds cheesy, or hokey, or too spiritual, or whatever. But when I was pregnant, I really felt as if my father who he died in 2007, right. And so I was pregnant in 2015, had been like eight years has been quite a while. But I really felt his presence at the time I was pregnant, like as a protection, right? And having a twin pregnancy is really it's high risk. It's really scary. I'm a kind of person that researches to the nth degree. So I know if something terrible happens, here's what it was going to look like, right. And so I actually couldn't, I didn't do a lot of writing at that time, because I was just too busy being worried.
But I felt somehow, like I had this guardian angel right in my father's spirit kind of watching over me. So he he was part of that time for me in that way. My mother. My mother was she still knew me when I was pregnant. And she knew she was excited that I was going to have kids. Over the course of my pregnancy. She had declined a bit, right. But she still had most of the facilities. And she was still living at home. I have my brother and sister in law were living with her. So it wasn't, it wasn't quite so tragic. Yet, in the over the course of the few years after my kids were born, though, my mother died in 21. Right. So in that five years, it was sort of a quick decline. She eventually didn't know who I was, or she knew that she knew me, but she didn't know how she knew me. And then eventually she became kind of nonverbal. And so trying to not only keep a relationship with my mom, and compartmentalize, like the grief of slowly losing her over time, with the joy of having kids, but also like, there's a bit of grief and having kids too, right, you lose a part of yourself, you there's lots of sacrifices to be made. So I got really good at compartmentalizing for a while, but also trying to figure out how can I give my kids a relationship with my mother too.
And so even though she's slowly not knowing who we are, so to this day, my kids say, because they were they were four, or almost five when she passed. And so even to this day, my kids will talk about the Memory Care Unit that she lived in and how they want to go back and play with the really cool toys they had there. And why can't we go back to where grandma Barbara used to live. And so they do remember, they do remember a little bit of going to visit her and I tried to bring them as often as I could, but it was it was a huge balance. And it was just a really hard time and maybe a time where I was a little bit in denial about how hard and sad I was, you know, but just kind of pushing through to make sure that I didn't have any regrets after she passed.
It's really interesting because when you think about the memories that you have Have as especially a very young child, and some of them are very strong and impress upon you. But like when you're old, whether or not you have dementia, you just kind of get old, like me, you forget things. But when you're a kid, you forget a lot of that stuff. And so it's almost like this book ends of as your kids get older that they might remember very specific things. But they might have a more loose memory of those early years, because that's just how your brain develops. And so it is, it's almost like a race against the clock to find the just right temperature for making memories to a degree,
right. And then with both of my parents being gone now and trying to keep them not just in my mind, but like to give pieces of them to my kids, because I see them and my kids all the time to choosing which stories, right which anecdotes you tell about those who loved who passed on which ones become part of like the lexicon of what my kids know about their dead grandparents, right? So and trying to make them not always like, I don't want to put my parents on a pedestal and say, like, oh, they were so wonderful, you know, we can turn the dead into saints sometimes, right? But to be a little bit more realistic about it. So one thing my kids will always say, if they're crunching really loudly or eating loudly at the table, they'll stop and say, Wow, grandma, Barbara really, really would have hated that because she did not like mouth sounds. So you know, like I'm trying to keep parts of it in their, in their memories in the forefront of their mind. Well, I
wonder if you wouldn't mind reading another one of these poems. It's actually kind of it goes to the beginning of what we were just talking about. It's called visitation. Yeah. Which is a very appropriate title for the poem.
Yeah, for sure. visitation. After his death, my father came to me in dreams. The first time he was confused, he came home and couldn't understand why he didn't have the key. why we'd given away his clothes. He didn't know he was supposed to be dead. But he needed a belt. So he's strong on old rope through the loops of his pants, and rummage through the car trunk for shoes. It's been many years now since he's visited me. I thought perhaps he'd finally realized his state and moved on, made it across whatever bright bridge or tunnel, one traverses to the other side. It was bittersweet to think those visits were gone. And since having his grandchildren, this boy who bears his name, this girl who bears his face, I thought often of his absence, how wide and big it grew alongside my pregnant belly, until his lack became its own shadow, a grief hidden beneath the drowning joy of having two babies at once, who won't meet the man who helped make me.
And yet last night, on the eve of the day of his own birth, he rang the doorbell in my dreams. When I answered he stood before me looking well and wearing all black, a strange car in the driveway behind him. I had both BABES at my hips, and asked if he had time to stay. He looked unsure, confused again, but said, I think I have a couple hours. As if time was now a thing. He couldn't measure, seconds and eons all one. His voice was clear and familiar. And I smiled to here it opened the door wide to let him in. I think I have a meeting later. He muttered. As I nodded, reposition the children and said, a couple of hours is just fine.
So did you really did you dream about your dad? Oh, yeah. When you're pregnant?
Yeah. And well, this was after I had the kids that I had this dream but my I dreamt about my dad a lot sooner after he passed a lot. Yeah.
When we talked earlier, you'd mentioned your family history and some interesting things about looking at your family history. Were you close with your grandparents,
I was close with my mother's parents. My father's parents both died before I was born. His mother died when he was like 15. His dad remarried. And then his father actually died on the day on his own birthday. So we lived exactly at three years. And he died a month before I was born like to the day. Wow. Yeah, very strange. Well,
so there's sort of two things I think one thinks of if they have lost their parents or lose their parents when they have young children. Why don't we one of the first one is, you know, especially if you can't get a baby to stop crying or they have colic training or something like that is what do I do? I gotta ask somebody what to do. And quite often, it's your parents, quite often it's your mother. You know, you lose that resource for emotional support and for resource support, but you also lose the opportunity that we talked about a little bit earlier and you did your best to kind of maintain it with your kids, of your kids to have relationships with their grandparents. Right. And was that something that you You thought about a lot, I see a little bit of that in visitation. It is the Oh, you can have an opportunity to meet your grandkids, right?
Yeah, I thought about that a lot, especially since my mother was still alive, right when I had my kids and I had been without my dad for so many years, when, when my dad passed away, I remember thinking, like, if I have kids, he's never going to know my kid. So it's always sort of been on my mind. And so there are things about my dad that I have made sure my kids know or, and also on the flip, I've noticed things in my kids that seem weirdly genetic, right? Like my daughter is sort of obsessed with space and the stars.
And my dad was like a bit of an amateur astronomer just right. My dad was really, really good at it music. So as my husband's a musician, right, so my kids sort of naturally have like music ability, and just little things like that, that kind of keep coming back up. And so when you see it, you remark on it and say, oh, you know, your grandpa Stanley was like this. And so then they kind of put it in their brain that like they've kind of carried something on.
Do you see them have any interest in? I mean, that's kind of a mystery. Right? I remember, you mentioned that you had relatives that you learned more about later that you never really had the firsthand experience with. So do you see your kids go? Oh, that's interesting. You know, just maybe even the tone of the voice the way you might talk about your father?
Yeah, sometimes. Yeah. Sometimes they seem very interested in other times, it just kind of gets blown off to them, you know, they don't need to worry about thinking about it, because they know I'm just gonna say it again, someday. I'm gonna remind them a bit later. Well,
at least they're learning to eat more quietly. There we go. There's one more that I want you if you can't read, it deals with your mother dementia, and what it's like to kind of go through that. And I wonder if you could read I still haven't cried. Yeah.
I still haven't cried. It's been three days since I walked my mother around the halls of her care unit, held her hand, took a deep breath and answered her. Three days since she looked at me and had to ask who I was three days since the woman who birthed me and held me and gave me a name. couldn't recall our relation. Three days since her look of sheer surprise, at the idea of having a daughter at all, and I still haven't cried because I had to get home to make dinner because the laundry needed to be moved from washer to dryer to basket to washer again. Because I had to go to that meeting. And that one too, because the bills had to get paid groceries bought because the Christmas tree needed to be put away because the dishwasher and the loading and unloading because the crayon scribbles on the wall and the food glued to the kitchen floor. Because the twin toddlers I never sleep trained because their transformation into leeches at night, all mouths and limbs and wiggles and weights, all tossing and turning and cheeks laid upon my chest.
Because the post nasal drip, I can't kick because the drainage pools and my throat at night and I wake to cough and I wake to resettle wailing babes and I wake to remember her look of surprise at. I'm your daughter, Mom, your daughter. And I wake to lay here and think and wonder how those tears still haven't come choked back, hiding behind the preparations for her birthday party, which kinds of tea sandwiches to make and how many kinds of fruit to dip into chocolate and what kinds of tea and tea cups and plates. And I wake until sleep comes again and under the limbs of my children. And in the morning, when I cough to clear my throat and I shake off the blurry night. Perhaps I can shake those tears loose, or at least find the time to think about them slowly welling in my eyes. And the funny way one can drown in such a small amount of water.
So yeah, I think that encapsulates so well, a lot of what you were talking about with the inspiration. And I wonder, you said that we will go back to when the first things you said is that you had to write these things. How much of writing these poems especially that one helped you kind of realize a little bit of what you were doing processing things compartmentalizing, giving yourself time to think and process, big life changes.
I think it really did help. It gave me a place to put those emotions, those feelings, those thoughts that gave me an opportunity to let it out somewhere and have it exist in sort of sort of the validating process, right to have those words out there and know that they're real, they're real, and they're there and I had them and I still have them but now there's a safe place for them to be. The trick is with poems like this, and I'm going to be a creative writing teacher for a second because I teach that here at Heartland to is you have to be when you're writing from your very personal emotion In these big moments, I like to say there's the therapy version of the poem. And then there's the literary version of the poem, and the literary version was for the audience. And so there are many of these poems, especially the ones that are kind of about my mom and very intense like this, where the other draft looks quite different, or it reveals much more, or maybe it says too much. And then these other versions, kind of dial it back a little bit, so that the focus is where it needs to be. And it becomes a version for the audience to relate to. I wonder
how much of when you're engaging in a creative endeavor like that, and you're writing something that is personal, by the time you have the distance from it to evaluate it, technically. And to change this or that, does that help you then kind of get rid of that weight of the emotion? I'm taking this and thinking about it, then I've turned it into something else. And it might not be, you know, pure. It's not a diary by that time, right? It's a piece of work, right? And so does that help, like move forward on time,
time and distance definitely helps. Sometimes you need more time to step away from something. And sometimes you can have less. It also, for me, actually, the transition from if I've handwritten something, versus once I type it out, there's a distancing there, because now it's on the screen black and white, no longer in my handwriting, and it looks more like what the artistic version will eventually look like. So it's not so raw and like literally come from my hand, right. So there's a way to distance in that way too. But definitely, definitely time.
So when you're teaching students, and they are throwing their raw 19 year old emotions, in some case on the page, is that hard to get that to click with them. There
are some structural things that I have focused on a creative writing class to kind of help students move away from just putting their feelings on the page and their thoughts in the page, we talk a lot about focusing on creating images so that the images help your reader have the thought instead of just telling them what they're supposed to think. But in terms of revision, and providing that space for processing and the distance it takes to be able to put away the raw version and create the artistic version.
Sometimes, there's just not enough time to truly do that in a 16 week course. Because sometimes you need more space than that. And so I'm actually just really, really transparent, honest with my students, I bring in like the zero draft ugly, terrible versions of my poems and show them to them, and then show them what the final version look like and talk about how long that took me. Sometimes it's just a couple of weeks, I have one poem that took me literally eight years to get right. And then another, like five or six, it just got published, like last week, like in a literary magazine. Sometimes it takes a really, really long time, depending on how much you're struggling with it. So I expect my students to attempt these sorts of deeper revisions. But I totally understand that in a 16 week course, if you just wrote something in like week eight, you know, you might not have the the time or the space or the distance to really revise that in week 12.
But I would think that you start to talk about developing the tools. Yeah. And the process for sure. So that being said, now that this is a book, that's the final final version, right? You're not probably going to be George Lucas changing, you know, the color of an alien, in this book, you know, five years from now, when it's done, you've submitted it, somebody else has taken it, they've published it does that? How does that make you feel about the process of writing about these things? Yeah,
I think by the time you have submitted it so many times to different publishers, every time you put it out there and every time you get a rejection, there's a little bit of letting go of it of letting it be its its own thing, I would say that if you're going to be submitting stuff, you should try to have the piece be as finished as you are comfortable with, there's always going to be time for like a few edits. In fact, I think in one of these poems, there's like a small grammatical error I'm going to be asking my publisher to fix before. And it's not it's more of a dialectical error. But anyway. But I tell my students that the piece is done being revised when it stops yelling at you, like when you stop thinking about it over and over again, because it's just not settled. And so these feel settled to me.
And the more that I put them out there, the more that I let other people see them. Like before I sent it out to publishers, I would share some of these with people that I trusted, and get their thoughts on whether or not it was really done. In fact, there's one poem that I didn't give you as a sample, because it's got a couple of curse words in it, but it's the very last poem of the collection. And it was, I really had a hard time letting go of the therapy version of that one. Like a really hard time that when I wrote after my mother had passed, and I had to send it off to a friend who is she's the one I go to when I need ruthlessness, right. And so she helped me see like, Okay, this is this is you doing crying therapy stuff and this is you doing art stuff. And so let's, let's figure this out. So having all of that happen feeling that those are finished now because of that, and I keep I keep the therapy versions, those are my versions, right? So I'm okay with letting these go out in the world and serve their purpose to readers hope I'm hoping that they are relatable and help readers realize things or process some of their own issues with their parents or their children. Well,
Cathy, thanks so much for coming in talking about not only the book and your work with students, but about the inspiration and your family. It's been great to hear about that and to hear your work.
Well. Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.
Cathy Gilbert is a professor of English at Heartland Community College and the author of the new poetry collection, my limbs a cradle my whisper a song. To learn more about the collection or to preorder it visit finishing line press.com or visit Kathy on Instagram at the real Kathy. If you're interested in other interviews about poetry, art, literature, or other topics, subscribe to random acts of knowledge on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you found this one. Thanks for listening
