Sylvia Plath: Madre from Beyond

BY ADRIAN ERNESTO CEPEDA

“I need a mother. I need some older, wiser being to cry to. I talk to God, but the sky is empty.”

― Sylvia Plath

I know many are going to ask how did I get here? Emotionally, physically sick with mental health issues. Some may ask how can you have depression when you have published three acclaimed poetry collections? My life changed on November 11, 2017. Mi Mami died, four months before my first poetry collection Flashes and Verses…Becoming Attractions was published in March 2018 by Unsolicited Press. My mother was my number one supporter of mi poesia, and my drive to be published. When no one else did, she believed and saw the potential of my life’s calling, mi Mami was the one who gave me the gift of la poesía. She has always been my number one champion. When I was working as a retail servant, at every bookstore and record shop, you could imagine, she believed that I was more than a bookseller and I had poetry that needed to expressed, written and shared with the world. I would send her poemas for her cumpleaños and navidad. She called them gifts from my Corazon. Mami was more than my motivational compass, it was her belief in my calling to become a published poeta that focused every volume of my creative light. `

After she passed away, I realize now that I was in denial, for three years. Her death overshadowed all my publication successes. Since 2017, I spent this time promoting my three poetry books, especially my latest La Belle Ajar, a collection of cento poems inspired by Sylvia Plath’s 1963 novel and focusing on my career as a published poet. Instead of facing all the complex emotions of mourning the death of mi Mami, I compartmentalized these feelings, I was not ready to face, and worked on trying to make a name for myself in the publishing world. Foolishly I actually believed that publishing these books would somehow lessen the pain and make me happy. The opposite happened. With every book, positive review and acclaim from my community of poets and writers, something was missing. There was this huge gap of grief in my life that I was trying to fill with my success as a published poet.

So, I went looking for mother figures to try to replace the hole that was left after mi Mami died. But that just caused even more pain and confusion. While I was trying to help mi familia settle mi Mami’s estate, I became sick from not facing any of the issues of my mother’s death. This is when I rediscovered Sylvia Plath. For over a year she became my surrogate Mother. I turned to her words, her poems, her stories, her diaries, her quotes for guidance and for a while, her supernatural support helped me. Then one day, whilst I was reading one of the many biographies, from the plethora of books I bought to learn from mi Madre from beyond, towards the end of this bio I came to the part where Plath dies. And even though in my conscious mind I knew that Plath had taken her life on February 11, 1963, the part of me that was needing a mother figure was devastated. It felt like I had lost another madre and this was the beginning of where my story starts to turn towards my health crisis.

I should’ve known when I was reading Sylvia’s poem, “The Morning Song” when she wrote:

I’m no more your mother
Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind’s hand.

It was obvious. It felt like Plath was speaking to me, especially at the end of the poem:

Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try
Your handful of notes;
The clear vowels rise like balloons.

Towards the end of the summer of the pandemic, the balloon that held the grief for the death of mi Mami popped. Just like Sylvia Plath once wrote: “See, the darkness is leaking from the cracks. I cannot contain it. I cannot contain my life.” Since 2017, I had avoided facing any of the sorrow of her passing and it manifested in ailments, illnesses and sickness that would take over my body. Horrible acid reflux, hay fever, whopping cough, recurring influenzas, crippling back, leg and muscle spasms along with outbreaks of shingles was my body telling me I was hurting emotionally from the inside. It was the loss of mi Mami that I did not want to face. All of this pain was manifesting in all of these symptoms. I was missing her and was afraid to admit it. For years I would call mi Mami on the telephone and if I were stressed out, worried or sick, her words, advice or just hearing my mother’s voice would make me feel better. Since she died, I had no one to connect with, I missed mi Mami and I was desperately trying to find someone or some mother figure to take her place. This is why I turned to Sylvia Plath. But after I finished my book La Belle Ajar, I realize now I was missing mi Mami more. My condition worsened during the shutdown. I was suffering from daily debilitating anxiety attacks and I know I was not the only one. Plath said it best when she wrote in her journal: “I have much to live for, yet unaccountably I am sick and sad.” I talked to and know of so many poets and writers who were dealing with recurring traumas, depression and grief during the pandemic and I was no different. It wasn’t just the emotions of her grief, there were so many reasons for my sicknesses. Sylvia Plath perfectly described my physical symptoms that I was battling on a daily basis when she described:

The sickness rolled through me in great waves. After each wave it would fade away and leave me limp as a wet leaf and shivering all over and then I would feel it rising up in me again, and the glittering white torture chamber tiles under my feet and over my head and all four sides closed in and squeezed me to pieces.

More than rock bottom, physically and emotionally every day worsened, I felt like I was in pieces. My panic attacks worsened my daily medications that I was taking for my health issues stopped working, my anxiety went out of control, I couldn’t swallow food nor eat. And worse, I had insomnia, the worst of my life. I was emotionally and physically sick. But I was in denial believing that my suffering was physical and not mental like Plath once wrote:

I wanted to tell her that if only something were wrong with my body it would be fine, I would rather have anything wrong with my body than something wrong with my head, but the idea seemed so involved and wearisome that I didn’t say anything. I only burrowed down further in the bed.

I felt the same way as Plath. It had to be a physical ailment that could be cured by a visit to my primary care physician but as the days rolled on, my condition became critical. Towards the third week of another month fighting this illness when, literally on my hands and knees weeping, I realized that I needed to ask for help for my mental illness.

It’s not an accident that I chose Plath as my surrogate madre. She was a reflection of the issues that I had kept simmering inside for years. When I finally found help, the right medication, and started talking to a therapist, the darkness was slowly starting to subside. The insomnia felt like a curse that was haunting me. The lack of sleep was affecting my creativity, my appetite and I felt lost alone in my exhausted and paranoid thoughts. It wasn’t till I rediscovered my creative light again when I reconnected with mi Mami, writing her letters, that it all started to make sense to me. The therapy, the medication and my daily correspondence with my Mami is what brought me back from the dark and insomnia that had been haunting me during the pandemic. Plath explained it best when she wrote: “I am terrified by this dark thing that sleeps in me.” That sleeps in me; All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.” I was afraid to face any of the emotions of mi Mami’s death. Looking back if I had written these letters during the period when I was struggling with promoting my poetry books, I may have faced some of these issues in a healthier way instead of burying them inside my subconscious.

Alas like my Lazarus lady from beyond, I felt my own rebirth as Plath wrote:

Comeback in broad day
To the same place, the same face, the same brute
Amused shout:

‘A miracle!’
That knocks me out.   
There is a charge

This is how it is slowly starting to feel like. Like I am being recharged and resurrected into a new way of seeing life. And although I realize that Sylvia’s charge was electroshock therapy, my charge was more symbolic, of realizing my own inner chemical imbalance was affecting the rest of my living body.

It was no accident that I connected with Plath mi Madre from beyond. Lady Lazarus became a mirror of the pain that I was beginning to feel that I finally unleashed after three years of not being ready to experience the pain of mi Mami’s death.

For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge   
For the hearing of my heart——
It really goes.

There were scars, dark bags under my eyes and I didn’t want to look in the mirror. My heart would beat so fast because of my anxiety and it would go and thunder on causing my insomnia to keep me awake.

Finally, there was a charge. My charge was my medication, the right one that reconnected me to mi Mami and this led to a resurgence in my craft, my writing, my calling that I was put here to share my life through my canvas on the page.

And there is a charge, a very large charge   
For a word or a touch […]

I am your opus,
I am your valuable, 

 I wish I could thank Sylvia. Although she had a very complicated relationship with the legacy of her dead father which she explored in some of her most famous poems like “Daddy,” sadly, Plath never found any closure over the death of her father and I did not want to follow in the painful legacy that she poured into her poetry. Although, we both eventually had different paths to our dead parents, I want to thank her surrogate guidance eventually led me back to mi Mami. Because of this, I would say muchas gracias for her words, poems and guidance helped me reunite with la memoria of my own Mami. For making me see that I am valuable and for helping me to reconnect with mi Mami three years after her death. My opus is the collection of poems, Speaking con su Sombra, that were written for and inspired by Mami. For years, I couldn’t face looking at this manuscript because I was afraid of dealing with the issues of grief and pain from mi Mami’s death. But Sylvia, was the surrogate Madre from beyond that I needed at the time. Plath led me to where I needed to be. Like Sylvia, I crawled back home, “beaten, defeated. But not as long as I can make [poems and prose] beauty out of sorrow,” it will be worth this long full circle journey to reconnect with my own blood and flesh, from the other side. This inner voyage with Sylvia Plath brought me home with Mi Mami. Sylvia guided me by showing me how to treasure the imperfect inspiration masterpiece that is my writing vida like the lines I wrote in the seventh poem of La Belle Ajar:

I lay in bed
My ache
would rouse me, peaceful
fingers, cheerful I came
fumbling the blur of tenderness
breathing exhausted, I stared….

My goal is to go further than the explorations I created with Plath on La Belle Ajar write on. Because I am reconnecting with mi Mami, it feels like she will be by my side as I go through the final stages of revising and editing the collection of poems, Speaking con su Sombra, that she inspired. Thanks to mi Mami’s guidance, I am rediscovering emotions in poems that I will explore on the canvas in each volume of my living breathing page.

Adrian Ernesto Cepeda is the author of the full-length poetry collection Flashes & Verses… Becoming Attractions from Unsolicited Press, and the poetry chapbook So Many Flowers, So Little Time from Red Mare Press. Between the Spine is a collection of erotic love poems published with Picture Show Press and La Belle Ajar, a collection of cento poems inspired by Sylvia Plath’s 1963 novel, to be published in 2020 by CLASH Books.

His poetry has been featured in Cultural Weekly, Frontier Poetry, Yes, Poetry, 24Hr Neon Magazine, Red Wolf Editions, poeticdiversity, The Wild Word, The Fem, Pussy Magic Press, Tiferet Journal, Rigorous, Palette Poetry, Rogue Agent Journal, Tin Lunchbox Review, Rhythm & Bones Lit, Anti-Heroin Chic, Neon Mariposa Magazine, The Yellow Chair Review and Lunch Ticket’s Special Issue: Celebrating 20 Years of Antioch University Los Angeles MFA in Creative Writing.

Adrian is an LA Poet who has a BA from the University of Texas at San Antonio and he is also a graduate of the MFA program at Antioch University in Los Angeles where he lives with his wife and their cat Woody Gold