A new poetry collection shares one mother’s experience of becoming a parent for the first time — to twins — as her mother was dying.
Poet and Heartland Community College professor Cathy Gilbert will release her debut collection this fall called My Limbs a Cradle, my Whisper a Song, written in the quiet moments between the chaos.
Unlike previous works, Gilbert didn’t know where these poems would wind up.
“The other manuscript I wrote was very purposeful; I wanted to write that,” she said. “This collection is poems that I needed to write.”
Gilbert describes that time in her life nearly a decade ago as “full of transitions and really hard things,” she said. “The poems became a way to express the myriad thoughts that were looping around in my brain.”
The term “squeeze generation” describes adults in their 30s, 40s and 50s feeling the pressure of raising children and simultaneously caring for ailing and aging parents.
“Writing has always been the way that I process my thoughts and emotions,” said Gilbert, an Illinois Wesleyan University graduate who returned to Central Illinois following graduate study at the University of Chicago. She teaches English and creative writing, with published works in Hobart, decomP and Peoria Magazine.
Not one to shy away from tough topics, Gilbert tackles the hard stuff in life head on — stuff that seems ordinary, but rarely is. She writes about her family history, motherhood, grief and intimacy.
My Limbs a Cradle, my Whisper a Song picks up with a visitation from her deceased father in a dream, moving mostly chronologically through her pregnancy and the birth of her twin son and daughter, now 8 years old.
“You spend so much time when they’re infants in solitude, with creatures that don’t speak to you yet in any kind of verbal language,” Gilbert said. “I spent a lot of time with words that I thought they were thinking. I was supplying all of the words and all of the thoughts and there was really no one around at the time to bounce them off with. It was that quiet, difficult, but really sacred and divine time that I wrote a lot of those poems about my children.”
Running parallel to this, Gilbert and her brothers managed their mother’s care as her dementia progressed.
“I spent many, many moments wishing that I could ask my mother questions,” she said. “That was really hard for me. I was well aware that I was going to lose her and I was not going to have that person to go to. I have a wonderful mother in-law, but it’s just not the same.”
Having grieved another parent already, Gilbert thought she knew what she was up against; her mother was diagnosed with dementia a couple years before she got pregnant.
“She was beginning to need so much help, I kind of wondered if it would be selfish of me to start my own family. I didn’t know if that was something I’d be able to take on.”
That uncertainty comes out in the collection’s early pieces, followed by that “squeeze” that took over as her infant twins became walking, talking toddlers — and those quiet moments in solitude became fewer and farther between.
Then, Gilbert’s mother died. And she wasn’t as prepared as she thought she would be.
“I feel like so many people go through these types of things, but very quietly,” she said. “I think I wanted to let these poems out there to help other people feel like there is a village. There are other people who are experiencing the same thing.”
Cathy Gilbert's My Limbs a Cradle, my Whisper a Song is on preorder now through June 14 at therealcathygilbert.com.
