small visual moments to bring me back to me. quiet, don’t scare it.

May 7th, 2009 | Category: drawing | Leave a comment

studio! I snuck in yesterday, away from my stereotypical nesting obsessions for once. Sorry sad studio. All the drawings look lonely and have turned into lions, baring their teeth and showing me all my weaknesses. They look dull and lacking, and then I started to see things I liked and ways I could improve others. I drew — I made myself draw. I took an older drawing that I only pinned up because it took me so long even though I didn’t like it and I drew over it.

I’ve been afraid to go in mostly because I’ve been writing more, and when I write in my studio I feel like I want to draw instead — have I said this before? I could draw onions all day and it could mean nothing but they could be beautiful and I can pin them up and feel that at least that, at least there is beauty. Beauty is part of why this species evolves. It sometimes truly is enough. But I can write all day and feel like I’ve been digging and feel glad and also like I’ve done nothing. What I’ve done is at best sort-of pretty, black words on a white page, but usually pretty ugly, text on a computer screen. And so I leave my studio after having written there feeling like I have done nothing, that I have done less than nothing, negative nothing, my drawings looking sadder than before I even walked through the door.

So I set to work yesterday making my studio more writer-friendly. I found some curtains to section off an area (that sounds scary but with the format of the room, hopefully it will be feng shui enough), I put my desk facing the window instead of the studio walls, I made lists like “potted plants” and “paint wall by desk.”

And I set to work also making my drawing area more livable: the studio began as a white space, no fault no harm, but drawings are everywhere now and my desk smells like moldy oranges. There are ribbons tangled up next to onions and stacks of garlic and lobster netting on the windowsill. I bought a new shelf for the objects and for drawings I don’t want to hang. I made space for a gorgeous chaise that will allow a spot for more than just me to sit down. I bought a blanket that hasn’t been chewed by dogs, one to put around me when I read. And a water heater for tea, made of glass instead of the plastic hot pot that almost instantly stopped working. It’s a new phase of my studio life, but it’s coming together. Abandoning a place for a time, even just two weeks, it makes me scared of it, it makes the energy in the room feel colder and more detached. Yesterday I found a way back in. (Though you’ll notice that I did not go back today — I would rather squat in a bookstore than go back today.)

May 6th, 2009 | Category: drawing | Leave a comment

I listened to Ayelet Waldman on NPR’s “Fresh Air” yesterday and had to find creative ways home so that I could stay in the car.

A lot of what I do is over-sharing, that’s what Ayelet calls it, and she does it, too. Saying the awkward uncomfortable thing that is somewhat painful and too honest, mostly just too honest. I don’t tend to do this in person, I don’t think, but I do it a lot when I write. My audience is often no one, an internal self, and sometimes this gets me into trouble.

There was a moment when Ayelet talked about the love for her husband vs. the love for her children — she had written an essay that was published in the New York Times that explained why other mothers don’t have sex anymore: they have transferred the love of their husbands onto their children. If one or all of her children were to die, she would be devastated, but not destroyed. If her husband were to die, she can’t picture what living another day could possibly look like. She feels that children who think they are the center of their parents’ world have trouble just being kids and being responsible for themselves. This logic is so beautiful and romantic and dangerous, I love its bravery. (I do think that when a baby is born, it’s most likely and should be the complete center of everyone’s world, and maybe that point is made in the original essay, but I agree with her that, while I know I am loved, I feel more sane because I know that my mother doesn’t live and die by my every choice.)

Ayelet also recounted a time when she chose to have an abortion because there was a risk that her child would be born with a disease similar to downs syndrome. She was telling about this event and tears were all over my face as I drove. It was so detailed, so emotional. In the end, they chose to abort the baby because her husband (Michael Chabon, who very much wanted to keep the baby) said that if they aborted the baby and she were wrong and the baby would have been fine, he would always love her — but if she were right and the baby was born with a genetic abnormality, he didn’t know if she could forgive him for the way this would impact their family for the rest of their life. This logic is so raw and beautiful and paints her in so many ways as just a human. I feel, and not dramatically, that I live for that honesty.

I spent today reading the book she wrote, Bad Mother, the whole thing. I didn’t feel as immersed in the book as I wanted to, and I felt too much that the book was mostly railing in soap box fashion at other mothers who think they can judge what a bad mother is, but I disappeared magically when she let me into her house, tiny details, moments of complete intimacy. I can feel her baby’s softest skin, see her first daughter’s reddest lips. She recounted a week when her infant was starving to death and she didn’t know it, and I cried in the bookstore, I was right there inside her grief. I love being that close, seeing ugliness and beauty from centimeters away.

May 6th, 2009 | Category: overheard | Leave a comment

They’re wild in our woods behind our house. In the evening they glow an ultraviolet blue that I’m not sure if a photograph could capture but I’ll try another time. Steve picked some for me and I quickly put them in this water glass. The way the light hits the glass and reflects the woods in the background, it feels like another world in there, like a scary marine diorama.

May 4th, 2009 | Category: photograph | Leave a comment

I went to acupuncture on Saturday — I went back mostly to share the good news with this woman who has become my friend by way of piercing my skin with needles about twice a week since late December. She’s been feeling my pulses all this time, and helping my constitution — helping me clear heat from kidney yin and restore balance. She felt my pulses on Saturday and said that I had a pregnant pulse. She says that in the instant of conception, the pulse changes. I was wondering yesterday as I learned a new statistic if this is why: just after conception, the mother’s body increases its blood volume by 50%. The acupuncturist showed me how I could feel it for myself, which is much cheaper than pregnancy tests: usually the strongest part of the pulse hits right about at the crease of the wrist, but a pregnant pulse travels up part-way into the thumb. I love this idea of a pregnant pulse: a new way to read the body.

May 4th, 2009 | Category: happening, the baby thing | Leave a comment

When we told Rosie for as-sure-as-we-can-be-right-now that there was going to be a new baby come December, she behaved the way anyone would wish a stepgirl to behave: she was just so happy, and proud of us, and couldn’t stop talking about it. I was driving her to the mall later that night to buy her a dress for a school function, and she asked me if I could even possibly think of anything else besides baby. I told her that honestly it didn’t feel real yet, so I didn’t really know what to think about. It just feels like a whole new time, she said to me. Like how you can think back to third grade, and second grade, and when you go back to that time in your head it just feels completely different, like you were a whole different person then. It smelled different, you saw the world differently. Right now feels like that, like we’ve entered a new time.

May 4th, 2009 | Category: happening, the baby thing | Leave a comment

I’ve been trying to understand why we have children. I know why very simply without thought, I just feel it in my chest: hope. Hope for the future of this species we’ve kept alive so far.

But also there is something about dreams and success, I think. But I think of my mother and how she took herself out of the center of her life to raise us — made our needs first. And of my mother’s mother, and how she made her children’s needs first so that they could be the best they could be. And of my mother’s mother’s mother and how she did the same. All to get to me, who in a fractured way will do the same. And I sort of wonder if, when I was born, my mother hoped for me that I would grow up to be a good mother, if that was her greatest hope for me. We all work so hard to provide for our children and then die while our children grow up to work so hard to provide for their children and then die while their children work so hard to provide for their children and then die. That is simplistic, but the patterns is sort of realistic.

And I remember when I graduated from my first graduate program and I came home for a weekend and my dad said that he was so proud of me, that it was clear I could do anything I wanted to do, that I was capable and smart enough. That was his pride. But I felt all that and I also felt that I wanted to be a mother. And being a mother means surrendering your body and self and time to raising new people who must be the center of the universe at the expense of all else. At least for a time. You’ll be well suited to motherhood, my father said recently, and I was honored and I know that it’s true — but I also wonder if that makes him proud of me. If he worked so hard to provide for us so that I could be a mother, be a body and raise another who for years will speak in sparse sentences and turn my brain a little mushy, at least for a while. and I also couldn’t help but wonder why no one realizes that I’m already in motherhood — that I’ve been raising a girl and her brother and two dogs and two cats for almost six years. And I’ve been doing all this while also writing books and going to graduate school and becoming the person who my father thinks can do anything — anything except gracefully accept the fate of an infertile spouse, which left me primally aware of my purpose in life and that writing books and living in the studio and mothering someone I didn’t get to know from birth didn’t make me feel fully complete.

This is all convoluted, I’m aware. But I asked a friend recently why we mother — she doesn’t have children or inherited children — and she said that we are evolving. Each generation is better than the last. When my mother’s mother was parenting, there were no books to help her. Freud cracked open the psychology of the mind and the effects of childhood, and that has led us to realize the power of early influence which has spawned a library of parenting books that help us to raise a better generation. I was talking this weekend to someone who is writing a book on the 18th century, and he said that in the 18th century, most people walked around half-drunk because the water they drank was in beer — fermentation was the best sanitation process they had. All those drunk people couldn’t work as effectively and couldn’t parent or birth such healthy children. And many people died, either in childbirth or from a then-prevelant disease that we don’t even think about anymore. From there look where we’ve come.

But also look where we’ve come that our planet is wobbly and we’ve managed to create greenhouse gases and nuclear bombs and pesticides. In this way we are worse than before. I remember reading in Annie Dillard’s For the Time Being that every generation — every generation, quoted back until before Christ — all felt that the generation following theirs was worse. I look at my childhood and then I look at Jack and how, for all his beauty, he gets too sucked up in video games and television, which we didn’t have. He doesn’t have as much homework as we did, and, because parents of our generation tend to hulk over their children and not let them have the space of childhood, children don’t know how to handle responsibility and freedom as well and end up hyperparented and doing worse in school. Children these days, it seems to me, have it too easy. They get carted everywhere. We’re too afraid of kidnappers and so don’t let our children fly down the street on their bikes unattended, learning from their own scrapes, finding their own creative ways to bike back up a hill. Children these days are more prone to diabetes, filled with more junk food than before, stuck in their houses, raised by babysitters because their parents are both at work.

I am being dire and simplistic, I know. And I don’t have an answer. I don’t know if each generation is better than the one before. But I believe in my future children. I feel the hope of the next generation with everything I eat, everything that’s being turned into a new human being, all the organic bananas and asparagus and arugula that remind me to hope again, sometimes it seems in spite of everything. That hope is my biggest job, and it makes me feel like I can do anything.

May 3rd, 2009 | Category: inward, the baby thing | Comments (3)

Many months ago I was with Rosie and her dad called me; on the phone it showed this word: ICE. She asked why his name was ice. Was he a rapper suddenly? Was I mad at him and was he cold? I told her I’d read it somewhere, that sometimes in car accidents there is someone who is too incoherent to speak for themselves yet she has a cell phone packed with numbers of people who care about her. EMT’s began asking people to insert an ICE into their phone — In Case of Emergency. Steve’s my ICE.

The other day she was showing me her new phone and there it was: ICE MAMA — that’s me; ICE DAD; that’s Steve. There are many people who care about her and many who would drop everything if something were wrong with her, but this showed me that we’re the ones she knows are responsible enough to pick up our phone, find the keys, and handle a problem rationally. I’ve been thinking about this all weekend, and everytime I feel sort of weepy, just glad that I actually have done something right, that I actually am someone she can count on more than any other.

May 3rd, 2009 | Category: happening, house | Leave a comment