Lit baby

I brought my newborn to his first literary event a couple weeks ago. He missed Kai Cheng Thom‘s entire reading and woke up just after Trish Salah read her introductory piece to Lyric Sexology Vol. 1. I spent the remainder of the performance nursing and diaper changing in the next room with my partner and co-parent, Jackson, and then resurfaced for book sales and proud passing of the baby among friends in the audience.
 

It’s been over two months since I gave birth and about 11 weeks since I left the Metonymy Press office for a scheduled hospital check-up, only to be rushed up to triage and eventually admitted. Turns out the recent uptick in my blood pressure had become unsustainable and I needed to be induced. Thus began my hiatus from the company, many days and many to-do list items before I was ready.
 
At the Atwater Poetry Project event earlier this month, Kai Cheng made her always-appreciated shout out to independent presses and us in particular. “My publishers are so dedicated, they’re here tonight with baby in tow.”
 
I had to cringe, aware of how mistakingly misleading this acknowledgement was. The reality is, my co-publisher Oliver is carrying the project on their own right now, short of a few techie tasks I’ve helped with here and there. They lovingly swing by the house each week to hold the baby and catch me up on the goings on of the press. We check in about broad strokes decisions, but for the first time since we started three-and-a-half years ago, the day-to-day operations are a one-person show.
 
Lately, when I’m up in the middle of the night panicking about low milk supply, my infant’s unwillingness to sleep anywhere but on our chests, his silent acid reflux, or any number of other mysteries that consume me of late, I actually crave the familiarity of the challenges in running a small press. I have to remind myself that most of what we now know we also panicked about upon the first (and second, third, fourth) try. But I still long for the satisfaction of accomplishing a task from start to finish with a level of confidence that eludes me these days.
 
The reality, though, is that our already under-resourced press is operating at half capacity right now and will continue to function more slowly than usual up until I come back mid-2018. We’d hoped to hire to fill the gap, but a bunch of boring bureaucratic details meant we didn’t qualify for any funding this winter.
 
For the moment, I’ve traded one labour of love for another, but I look forward to recalibrating somehow, eventually carving out space for both. Until then, I am ever grateful for a co-publisher skilled enough to fly solo, for patient authors and readers, for an endlessly supportive co-parent, and for pretty much the best and only reason in the world I’d choose for temporarily stepping back from something that means so much.