It’s a pretty safe bet that Jane Austen never, at any point, used the word “yummy”—but it’s in regular usage here. I don’t want to know what Jane would have to say about that.
Such words litter my days now—horsey, doggy, kitty, yummy—the adorable upturned Y at the end rendering them safe for childish consumption. Words with their own tails. The kinds of words my daughter Anjali loves to point out, gleeful, tracing the letters over and over with her small fingers. Following a path that I hope leads her to Shakespeare and, well, Jane Austen.
That’s all very well and good for her, poised as she is at the beginning of a life that will show her yummy in endless and varying combinations. But what of her mother, trying in vain to hold on to her words, to fashion a language for herself that incorporates yummy but is not consumed by it? Because that’s the aspect of being a mother-writer that I didn’t expect. I expected the sleep deprivation and the lack of that sweet elixir, time, but I still thought that my mind would remain basically what it had always been. Mine.
But that’s not necessarily the case. I seem to be missing that quality of the mind that holds the words to the light, frowns, and then puts them back and waits for better ones. Lately, my words never seem good enough, literary enough, to please my inner Virginia Woolf, my inner Jane Austen -- those haughty, brilliant wordsmiths who seemingly had the whole of language underneath their elegant fingers.
I always thought that, with a rigorous effort, I could make their language my own. That was literature, for me. Sure, that wasn’t the kind of language I heard around the kitchen table, or in the poetry of my parents’ favorite boleros. But that was just life…and I was pretty certain that ordinary life, my ordinary life, could never be the stuff of art.
When I was in college, I finally had the opportunity to put my theory to the test. I could drown out the everyday voices; submerge myself in the finest literature English had to offer. I read, and analyzed, and listened to professors who seemed to wander familiarly through the thickets of even the most allusive, complicated poem. I grew more confident in offering my own interpretations, my own readings. That was an intensely yummy experience, books offering their layers and layers of secrets to me. But I was way too cool to say so.
So, yes, I could interpret in “their” language now. What I couldn’t do was write. When I sat down, no matter how much I tried to train my ears to trace out those subtle, brilliant rhythms, my own music came out. The coarse beats of the streets where I grew up, the unconscious sing song of their stories. I couldn’t look out through the eyes of the language I wanted to ape -- it was forever outside of me, locked in typeset pages meant to be read, but not written. All I could do was write flaccid imitations, full of experiences I’d never really had, and feelings that didn’t really ring true. The spark that had always drawn me to books and literature was absent in my overly mannered, uninspired prose. The heart of my writing lay elsewhere.
It took me a long time to accept that. I think I am still fighting, on some level.
Slowly, slowly, I allowed myself to go back to that kitchen table, to the stories I had heard while tagging behind my mother in the bodega. Writers like Grace Paley and Julia Alvarez showed me that there was value in the language and rhythms of the everyday, in chronicling the heartbreaks and triumphs of regular life, if the writing was compassionate, and true. So I took them as my models, and worked on uncovering my own beat -- my happy hybrid of Bergenline Ave and Beowulf. (well, not really Beowulf, but who could resist that alliteration? Not me.)
I thought that, having found my work, the rest was just a measure of time and effort. I was done with the exploratory heavy lifting.
Enter my very yummy daughter.
For years, I never really wanted children, but expected in some vague way that I would eventually want one or two…eventually. And moreover, I would bring them up the way that I read about in books. I imagined, in that same hazy way, that they would have an instinctual love of the classics. I pictured them, when I thought about it at all, clamoring for Homer and another chapter of Proust at bedtime.
It hasn’t exactly worked out that way.
Oh, Madam loves her books -- commands me to read them again and again throughout the day. That thrills me completely -- and I actually enjoy reading Goodnight Moon and Pat the Bunny and Where is Baby’s Belly Button? again and again. But then blessed nap time comes and when I rush to the page, the first words that bob up to the consciousness are words like red car, green peas, baby’s bunny. And by the time I manage to dig a little deeper -- she’s up!
In one of life’s unfunny coincidences, Anjali doesn’t speak yet. Not a word. You can imagine how worried I am, and how guilty -- is my own obsession with words somehow freezing her own expression? But…Anjali is still drunk on language, pointing, screaming with joy when she recognizes something. It is plain to see that for her language is yummy—the stretchy vowels of her abuelo’s Spanish; the affectionate lilting staccato of her dadiji’s Hindi. Our songs and rhymes. It’s all fascinating. It’s all yummy.
Come to think of it, I feel the same way.
And maybe I am giving my heroes and heroines short shrift here. They spoke their own passions boldly in the language of their experience, and drew from the well of literature that surrounded them. They may have never used the word yummy, but it is obvious that they were in complete agreement with Madam about the experience of the words themselves.
I have to be honest. My life is full of yummy right now—that little trickster word that sneaks into my writing just when I am reaching for high sophistication and deflates my pretensions. Yummy reminds me to start where I am with my writing, in this moment. Yummy leads me back to my life as it is, not the intellectual ivory tower I sometimes wish it was.
So I try to take yummy in -- make literature yummy, write yummy stories.
Besides, I can always aim for classic sophistication in the second draft.
Monica Gomez-Hira writes and mothers in Minneapolis, where she lives with her husband and toddler daughter.
