My mother is a poet who has been in the groove lately. For the last couple of weeks, there hasn’t been a day that has passed without a new email from her bearing the contents of a fresh poem. They’ve been insightful, creative, light-filled and beautiful. As she’s been turning out pieces of art, I’ve felt stymied, my fingers unable to carry a coherent thought from my brain to the keys of my little white computer.

On the phone with her this evening, I joked that we only have one muse between the two of us, and right now, the muse is booked solid with the poetic demands of her mind. When she countered with, “what, you think each family only gets a single muse?” I replied that I felt like our family had two. My father and sister had one to share, and my mom and I had the other. That’s the way things have typically broken down in our lives (with the exception of shared bathrooms. I always shared with my dad and Raina always shared with our mom. I don’t know why it happened this way, but it did).

She firmly rejected my theory and stated in her “I’m-your-mother-don’t-mess-with-me-voice” that there was a enough muse to go around. Enough muse to send us all down the creative paths for which we are destined. Enough muse to help us tap into the words we were meant to string together. Enough muse to bring light to the phrases and notes and fragments of sentences our souls crafted before our entry into this life and stored away for future rediscovery.

So muse, as I head to bed, because I love and trust and believe my mother, I invite you into my soon-to-be unconscious brain, and ask you to uncover all those words I’ve written that I just haven’t remembered yet. And help me to remember them well into the morning.