The Voyage of Parenthood: A Review of LITTLE ASTRONAUT by J. Hope Stein
Little Astronaut by poet J. Hope Stein captures the wonder, joy, and isolation of new motherhood. The title compares the psychological experience of parenting an infant to traveling with a small crew aboard a spaceship, and several pieces convey and build on this metaphor, including "Lullaby for Voyager," "A Toast to the Dark Side of Earth," and, of course, the short titular poem.
The poems in Little Astronaut reflect a variety of emotions, from the humor of a child's public announcement in a natural history museum that "monkey-people have boobs!" to the sweet reflection that a mother holding her infant daughter can look like just one being in the bathroom mirror.
Stein doesn't shy away from the earthy: we see how pregnancy affects her sex life, the cabbage leaves she uses as a remedy for excessive milk production while weaning her daughter, the songs they sing to poop while toilet training, and the occasional cuss word. The "gross" is occasionally intertwined with the hilarious: "Daddy, don't drop your penis in the toilet!" and the tender, in a poem where Stein races to remove cat poop from the baby's mouth, and at the close of the piece, scars on different parts of Stein's body "speak" to each other as she sleeps holding her daughter, who will not sleep in her crib. This reflects the experience of parenting in its physicality and sweetness.
Yet, her work reflects sophisticated knowledge of and fascination about many aspects of the world: space exploration, fetal development, evolutionary history. And, a deep tenderness towards her little family, including her husband (who does the dishes!) and especially her tiny daughter, Oona.
Motifs of fanciful childhood imagination are scattered through these pages. A rock becomes a symbol of power. Stein wakes to tea parties, fairies, confetti, and glitter. She also engages in her own adult fantasies of being cast in a movie by a famous director (as well as fears, as she recollects the "universal cinematic language " of miscarriage). Yet, sometimes, in the same pieces, ordinary rocks, seashells, and dirt get mentioned right alongside the fairy dreams. Our actual world can be just as amazing as fantasy, especially when seen through the eyes of a child.
Poems here are of varying lengths: some extend over multiple pages, and others consist of two lines. This reflects Stein's versatility as a writer and also the way thoughts and emotions occur to us while we have an intense experience. Sometimes, there's a lot to say, but other times, one sentence is more than enough.
The quick vs lengthy bursts of thought also recall and evoke Stein's space travel metaphor. Time is measured differently in space due to the varying orbits of planets. Days and years as we understand them can be minute or nearly eternal elsewhere in space with Earth's migration as a reference. So, as we "spacewalk" through Oona's early childhood, there are naturally a balance of short interjections of feelings and observations and longer periods of reflection. And sometimes, during the toddler years, "every number on the clock is replaced by the word now/and the hands of now always pointed at two nows."
As explorers might spend extensive time solely with each other for company, the little family develops their own language of love. From the earliest newborn days, Oona's little mouth resembles a parenthesis, a device to hold and contain the sounds and words she will eventually say.
Some words in the pieces are modified to reflect the toddler's way of speaking. The three create their own music when Oona's tiny hands slap her father's belly like a drum. In one rich piece, at three years old, she writes "Oonadad" in bright pink on the driveway with her own self styled punctuation, exclaiming that the word means that Oona and Dad love each other very much.
This collection follows the Steins through Oona's learning to crawl (An Infant Reaches) through the baby's first steps and eventually to her walking and dancing. Stein references dancing in several poems, from the relief she finds from her doctor's announcement that the baby is healthy and "dancing" in her womb to a piece where her husband plays guitar and sings lullabies to Oona and the three dance together. Dancing is something people do for fun when we're happy, which this family is, but also a metaphor for navigating a complex situation, losing and regaining balance, which is part of the physical and psychological journey of parenthood.
Themes of food and nourishment also run through this collection as symbols of love and connection as well as sustenance. Stein relates her own hesitation at weaning Oona from the breast "a little less and a little less, and then no more/but tonight, a little more." She becomes wistful at the close interaction her daughter has with a cup that covers her face as she sips.
In a later poem, she reveals her poignant reason for her reluctance to wean: psychologically, she does not want to give up her ability to nourish her daughter from her own body without depending on the unpredictable outside world. Even grounded on Earth, life can be unpredictable: she’s vulnerable to her own memory and planning lapses as well as to economic and political threats.
Of course, human growth, as well as space exploration, requires separation from the known and the familiar. Oona must eventually step out of the "mothership" for a spacewalk of her own. A section, "tethering," references the parents' process of letting Oona grow while still nurturing her under their care.
The final poem, "The foot" highlights the motif of watching a child grow. Stein reflects that Oona used to be a "ceramicist/molding the elasticity of her skin." Now, at three, her daughter is more than half the length of her body as the two curl up together in bed. Yet, her foot still massages her mother’s stomach as they sleep, although now from the outside.
Like the recordings and images on Voyager 1 and 2, which make appearances in several pieces, children are "probes" we send to the greater world out beyond our own existence. In this way, the baby becomes a "little astronaut" traveling through time.
J. Hope Stein's Little Astronaut is a complex yet relatable ode to parenthood. It highlights the joy and wonder of bringing small children into the world, an experience both personal and cosmic.
