The pain of requited love?

I am daily aware of, and hugely grateful for, the immense amount of privilege that I enjoy.

One of these huge joys is that I am loved by the people that I love most.  I endeavour not to take this for granted or to treat this gift too lightly.

Many of my early attempts at writing poetry, as a younger person, were based on experiences of unrequited love, or heartbreak, or mortifying misunderstandings. I have no doubt that the writing produced was not very accomplished. I have very little desire to trawl through old word documents to attempt to find any examples. Yet, at that time, I felt extremely motivated to express my feelings in poems.

In my current phase of life, I am searching for ways to write meaningfully about the relationships that I have with the people I love. One slightly paralysing consideration is that these people will probably read what I write – not usually a problem when writing about an ex, or about someone who doesn’t even know you exist. This was one factor that delayed my writing about my Grandad’s death. My Grandma might read it, my parents, my aunt: people who knew and loved him longer and better than me. I am still holding back on either writing or sharing elegies about other relatives and friends for the same reason. This is also why I struggle to write poems about, or for, my husband. This is why I worry about writing in too much detail about giving birth to my sons, or the subsequent experience of parenting them.

If I write too specifically about loved ones, especially in a ‘warts ‘n’ all’ fashion, am I betraying their trust? If I use my children’s names, is that a data protection issue? How do I avoid the ‘miserable mum’ genre without glossing over the fact that motherhood is the hardest thing I’ve experienced?

There are many people who have managed to do this very well. Carolyn Jess-Cooke’s poems about motherhood, for example. Ciaran Carson writing about his wife’s serious illness in his recent work. Writing about more mature relationships is the next step in my poetic development.