Writing Desire in Middle Age

Diana Whitney’s second poetry collection, Dark Beds, is a rich text built of the many narratives that comprise middle age for caregivers: the demands of young children growing into themselves, parents aging away from themselves, a marriage suffering from the stress of relentless obligations.

Through these poems, Whitney explores the ache of desire that is often the backdrop of these caregiving years—the desire to be on the receiving end of tenderness and to be witnessed as a whole being rather than attendant. In the poem “The Long Goodbye” the speaker asks, “How can you savor what you have when it demands so much of your attention?” 

Within these poems, Whitney builds a landscape that is at once realistic and dreamlike, filled with coyotes, frozen rivers, orchards. These poems attend to the natural world with the same care and grace that they bear witness to the unfolding of desire, as in this stanza from “The Same Earth”:  

All I want is April on her back—

ecstatic creatures hatching in the ice pond,

green frog moon waxing like a come-on,

the bulbs busting up through dusty grass.  

Whitney and I spoke over the phone—from opposite sides of the country— just before the official launch of her book, during a quiet moment away from the demands of work and family. 

Jennifer Berney: I wanted to start by acknowledging that you just lost your mom, and so it must be odd to be launching a book. 

Diana Whitney: Yeah, I’m really tired. It was about three weeks that she was dying, so I took a lot of time off to go be there. My mom is a big part of the book, so to have just lost her and to be bringing the book into the world is really weird. 

JB: Are you up for saying a little more about that? 

DW: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I’ll say that I’m a late bloomer with book publishing and I consider myself a slow writer, but I’ve come to embrace that and not compare myself to authors who whip out a book every two years. But this book was a long time coming. I’ve been writing these poems over a long period of time, like over the past 10 years. So they range from when my daughters were young to the later stages of their adolescence. And the poems range through the stages of my mom’s Alzheimer’s. So when I think about the title Dark Beds, there are layers of meanings there. The beds are definitely the garden beds because I’m a gardener.  And then also the marital bed and the darkness that can happen there when distance and conflict and estrangement develop within a relationship. And then there’s the darkest bed, which is mortality and death. And the poems witness my daughters as they move into adolescence while my mom was declining with Alzheimer’s. That’s one of the big arcs of the book. 

So now having it come out in the world at this moment—yes—it’s particularly poignant and strange and vulnerable. The poem that I wrote, The Long Goodbye: the long goodbye is another name for Alzheimer’s. I remember reading that somewhere and thinking, I need to fit that into something I write. I didn’t know that when the book came out, that the long goodbye would be over. It was a 10-year goodbye. But I have this feeling that she lives through me and my daughters and my writing even though the mother that I’m remembering now, the one before Alzheimer’s, isn’t quite in these poems. But it’s a weird juxtaposition, the book launch and the grieving happening at the same time, because you have to be external when your book is launching. And you have to be internal to properly grieve.

JB: You described yourself as a late bloomer just now, and I wanted to ask you about writing from the perspective of middle age. And, just to toss this out there, my personal experience of middle age is that it doesn’t feel late to me.

DW: I do use “late bloomer” in quotes because it’s not my word, it’s the culture’s word. Maybe because we live in this youth worshiping culture. My journey with writing has taken the time it needed to take. And the wisdom I’m stepping into is around trusting that my own journey was the right path for me. I’m actually finishing my MFA, and I’ll graduate in January. I had started in my twenties and I had to take medical leave because of a chronic pain condition that was really debilitating. And then I didn’t go back for a variety of reasons, including my father’s death and then having two babies. But it became important to me that I finish what I’d started and I had this deep intuitive knowing that it was something that I needed to do without apology and without a good practical reason. 

I went to my residency as probably the oldest writer there, and actually loved that role. I felt like a wise maternal figure there, like I had a lot of insights and knowledge and depth to offer to younger writers. And I don’t say that in a condescending way, just more like: I just turned 50 and I’m at home with myself right now. The older I get, the more loss I see. Life is short. In terms of writing, we have to celebrate even the smallest accomplishments. We really do! Like, there’s no more waiting around for the poem in the New Yorker or the Pulitzer Prize or the NEA grant—it has to be now! 

JB: I’m curious too about the thread of desire in Dark Beds. Did it come easily, or was it scary to write about desire in middle age? 

DW: The first thing I’ll say is that I had writing friends who thought I should write a novel, that I should fictionalize my story. I’m not a novelist. I had to write it the way it came out of me, which was in poems and a lot of the poems were written a long time ago. So a lot of the hotter, desire-themed poems in the book were written in 2013, which is 10 years of a 20-year marriage. The experiences that I had that shaped the book, they might have ended in a different way. The last couple of poems really wrestle with the questions of: what is fidelity? What is longevity? What are the boundaries that we need within a marriage? What does it mean to fall in love with somebody else? For me that was inextricable from the experience of mothering young children and the kind of abnegation of self that can happen. 

I did the full-time motherhood thing very intensively. I called it the Baby Cave. And a lot of these poems were written right as I was stepping out of the baby cave and this experience of limerence happened to me—which is a word I had to learn, but it definitely applies. And the poems came out of this thrilling intoxication,  an awakening of both creative and sensual energy. It was incredible to both get poems from that and to be able to work things out with my partner. I’m intensely grateful for both things. I said, I’m not going to apologize for the poems. The experience of longing and desire, that was temporary. It was a catalyst for the poems, but the poems exist and I did not ask permission either to write them or to publish them. That’s maybe scary, and maybe people who aren’t writers wouldn’t understand that, but that was really important to me. Actually, one of the ways that I could stay in my marriage was not to apologize and not to ask for permission. 

JB: I feel like the standard cultural narrative is that motherhood depletes our desire, but a thread through the book is that motherhood actually drives this longing. 

DW: It did, it did. And some of the trap I felt was the domesticity of being a wife and being a queer woman in a hetero-seeming marriage. And that’s actually something now, in middle age, I’m needing to work on: finding space to express my bisexuality and what does that look like within a committed partnership.  I’m writing poems about that. But at that point, I felt stifled by the institution of marriage, by this notion of wife and the expectations of being a good mother. But desire was this exhilarating freedom—and the place to come back to myself. 

Before getting married, when I was single and dating a lot of people—I used to call it the vixen days. I don’t necessarily write about those in a nostalgic way in this book, but I think that the emotional affair that I write about in Dark Beds was a way of reliving the energy of those younger days. It was actually very adolescent. 

JB: With limerence and desire though, there is something about those emotions that seems adolescent, but I want to second guess that association. Is that just our cultural narrative again? 

DW: It might be. I mean, I know for me, I started listening to the same music I had in high school. Actually there’s a playlist for my book that my wonderful editor and publisher asked for. And it’s: The Cure, The Smiths, Suzanne Vega— these songs that I associate nostalgically as songs of longing and that was the music I wanted to listen to. 

I think maybe we denigrate that period of time, but it’s also a really fertile and generative period of time. I mean, it’s full of tumultuousness and pain and all of that, but it really can be very charged and beautiful and, and creative.

JB: Well, it’s the time before we’re locked in, right? I wish I could take a vacation in my twenties but as my 47-year-old self, I would love to be simultaneously in my twenties and my forties. 

DW: I feel the same way. And sometimes I say, oh, am I just being nostalgic? But I think it’s much more nuanced than that, going back to the experience of adolescence. I remember being 16 or 17 and a friend’s mom saying “Oh, you’re in discovery mode.” She was probably in her forties.  She said “You know, discovery mode doesn’t end when you get older.” And I remember thinking that was so weird, and like, why was this old mom saying that to me? And I think that’s probably what I was longing for in the poems, to be in that state of discovery and possibility. 

JB: I’m curious to what extent desire is about wanting to be seen. So much of raising kids is about who you are to the person who needs you, which is different than being wanted for who you are. 

DW: Absolutely. Being seen was a huge, huge part of it. To be seen, to be recognized, to be desired as a goddess, as a force of nature, as someone who runs wild in the woods or  under the full moon—something totally separate from mundane daily life and the tasks of, say, feeding children. 

JB: It’s an incredible aphrodisiac to be seen. 

DW: That was a big, big part of it. Esther Perel has that book Mating in Captivity, which was so, so formative to me. She says that sex isn’t something you do, it’s someplace you go. And she talks about the unknown that’s in eroticism. It’s difficult to have that thrilling experience of the unknown with someone who’s been your partner for 10 or 20 years. That is what she helps couples figure out both in the books that she writes and in her couples therapy practice. 

JB: It sounds like some of the power in her work is in not shaming the need behind it. 

DW: Yeah, and normalizing it—talking about desires that are often unspeakable outside of a marriage or partnership. There are so many things that she wrote that opened my eyes and helped me also to be forgiving towards myself. 

JB: I want to make sure I ask you about all the wildness and nature and animals that appear in your poems.

DW: I spend a lot of time in the woods and I’m lucky to live in just a beautiful place in the hills of southern Vermont. So inspiration comes from being out in a remote place where no other humans are, and like hiking up a mountain and encountering wild animals or being under the moon or stars. I’ve come to understand that an essential part of my writing process is being out in nature; it’s not some “self-care” thing I have to make time for. I mean, maybe it’s also that. Mary Oliver said that she would get up every morning and walk and she would bring her little journal with her, and most of her poems arose that way. It’s not as direct for me, but my experience of being out in the wild—on the river, in the woods— is part of my writing practice. I’ll come back and jot images in a notebook, and they inevitably find them find their way into poems. 

I actually think that the page is a place that we can be wild and free in a way that we can’t necessarily be in the kitchen with our children or, you know, driving the carpool. 

JB: Yeah, that’s interesting to think of the page as its own wilderness, 

DW: Right? And a place of discovery or possibility. I ended up feeling like the experience of writing for me was more thrilling in the long term than like the experiences of a sexual encounter or the possibility of a sexual encounter. I don’t know if that sounds disingenuous, but the thrill of composition, especially of writing something new and almost channeling it—sometimes you can feel some wild, otherworldly energy moving through you. It’s powerful. So I really am grateful that I have both: I have my long partnership with the father of my children, and I have these poems that came out of that experience that I chronicle in dark beds.