Not so secret mother’s business

“I had no idea I was writing a book. It was the furthest thing from my mind. I started writing to understand my experience,” says Jessica Chapnik Kahn, author of MADRE, a poetry collection about motherhood.

“I was quite shocked by how your life moves from witnessing your own life to suddenly witnessing someone else's. The poems were my way of witnessing myself through the biggest thing I'd ever been through.”

In 2016, after the birth of her first child Lev, Chapnik Kahn began jotting down lines of poetry on napkins, receipts, and discarded wrapping paper, often in the middle of the night whilst nursing, or during everyday activities like walking to the park.

“Another thing I didn't expect was how much silence there is with a newborn,” says Chapnik Kahn. “I'd never felt so close to someone in such deep silence all the time. I had to express what was happening in that silence.”

Chapnik Kahn also began drawing images of her son, (these feature in the book) with her non-dominant hand, a technique that was new to her, a revelation. “I had never drawn before because I had never needed to draw. I felt my left hand had no judgement. I was trying to understand his face, which was just an absolute mystery to me, a jigsaw puzzle I could never seem to put together.”

During this time, a friend of Chapnik Kahn’s who was also a new mother, read many of the hundreds of poems and decided to publish them. “I had not thought of these little works outside of my own private bubble of transformation. Motherhood felt like disappearing. I was shocked that pure devotion could disintegrate a person.

“So the fact that they resonated for her was really unexpected,” says Chapnik Kahn. “I realised, this is not just me. This is universal. I hadn’t yet come to that understanding because motherhood felt like such secret business.”