I like the nightlife, but lately things have been getting out of hand. "Hey, did you hear that?" I mumble to my groggy bedmate in the predawn dark. The alarm is about to go off, but it's been preempted by the scratch and maw overhead. A muffled thump, small footsteps -- these early morning audio extras disrupt my sleep, and disrupt the cozy feeling I savor, all tucked in my warm bed, that my home is my dominion, my territory.
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Writing is all about response. Robert Frost once said that he lived life twice: once when he experienced it and a second time when he wrote about it. By writing down our experience, we give ourselves the opportunity to immediately reflect, to stare at the words on the page, to say: I am here.
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Where has technology intersected with your parenting? Has technology impacted your child's literary experience? Where does the value of books and electronic media rank in your household? Why?
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            Don't tell me I've never built anything. I assembled these cell walls from spit and pulp
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The baby is on board. He cannot disagree.
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where do you go, rising and dropping back like a pendulum?
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For an evening we loosen our grip
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He howls the length of the street
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I am doing all the right things: medicating her three times a day, reading the finest print on labels to be sure my milk supply stays free of all dairy. But this isn't getting any easier. I am exhausted, embarrassed, and always demoralized. Why can't I comfort you? Who are you? Why don't you love me?
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Facebook Status Update: Allison Trainor is wondering what she'll do with all this free time. Both kids are napping!

Internal Status Update: Allison Trainor is going to have an internet affair while her children nap. I click on Bo Larsen's profile page for a better look, another look. Anything new since last night? Yep. He's changed his profile picture. In this one, he is wearing sunglasses, a black jacket and a sated smile, like he's had a morning of great sex and rock n' roll. The shot is from the waist up, but his right hand is visible, clutching the neck of his guitar. It could be a picture for an album cover.
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Cristina Henriquez quickly rose from emerging writer declared one of "Fiction's New Luminaries" by the Virginia Quarterly Review, to author of the much-lauded short story collection Come Together, Fall Apart, to novelist of the debut The World in Half. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic as well as many other publications and anthologies. Literary Mama's former Multi-Culti Mami columnist Violeta Garcia-Mendoza chats with Henriquez about her cultural and literary origins, her craft, whether it is easier to name a child or a character, and how motherhood is shaping her writing life.
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Motherhood, for most of us, comes with its own language. We learn to divide our experience into trimesters; we become familiar with all things maternal, including "instinct," "bond" and "leave." Many of our new words slide into a kind of noun-heavy babyspeak: onesies, binkies, sippies, nummies. But there is a kind of motherhood that catches you by surprise, one that empties your heart and mind and leaves you struggling to find any words at all. Vicki Forman writes about such an experience in her memoir, This Lovely Life: A Memoir of Premature Motherhood, which was awarded the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference Bakeless Prize in Creative Nonfiction.
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