Other women don't tell you

by Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach

some days, cleaning the bathroom will feel

like enough. Some days, washing out every bottle

and scrubbing the milk residue rings until their white

is in your skin and under your nails, some days, letting

the plastic dry until it shines like expensive China, some days,

that too will feel like enough. And when you’re squatting

on the bathroom floor across from your son, making noises

that are animal and beast and mother in one, watching him

scrunch his face into a prune to make those same sounds

back at you without result, some days, when he picks up

a magazine about wood building and stays seated and looks

so much like his father and grandfather and likely theirs

and you are there to see this, those days feel like so much more

than enough. But others, most days even, after you’ve hidden 

every roll of toilet paper and every spillable and breakable

and chokeable, after you’ve folded and tucked and verbed

through those things other women told you

make you woman or warm or worn out man or maybe

just womb, after you’ve done more with your body

than your body has ever done, nothing feels like enough

or like anything at all. 

* * * * *

This installment of "Other women don't tell you" was also previously published in DIALOGIST. It is part of Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach's book, The Many Names for Mother, which was recently selected by Ellen Bass as the winner of the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize, and will be published by Kent State University Press in the Fall of 2019.

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach emigrated from Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine as a Jewish refugee when she was six years old. She holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Oregon and is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, where her research focuses on contemporary American poetry about the Holocaust. Julia is the author of The Bear Who Ate the Stars (Split Lip Press, 2014) and her recent poems appear in Best New Poets, American Poetry Review, and Nashville Review, among others. She is also Editor-in-Chief of Construction Magazine (www.constructionlitmag.com) and when not busy chasing her toddler around the playgrounds of Philadelphia, she writes a blog about motherhood (https://otherwomendonttellyou.wordpress.com/).