It was the weekend before Easter, and we were in the car driving home from church. Palm Sunday. I had a palm bent into a clumsy cross in my back pocket. The palms they burn and turn to ashes in 33 days shy of a year. In a week Jesus would die. The mass was filled with sadness. For weeks we’ve not sung as much as we usually do throughout the year. We were being solemn, trying on solemnity. The service on Palm Sunday ended with bells sounding, sounding, sounding. It said in the program that the bells are a tone painting that signify the nailing into flesh, Jesus’ wounds. We stand and listen, and Henry doesn’t squirm. When we walk out of the church, the priest has tears under his eyes. In a week Jesus will be dead.

I always cry lately on Christmas Eve. There is so much joy, but every year it’s the same: we celebrate the birth of a child, but in a few months we will be mourning his death. So much foreshadowing. All the sacrifice from someone who is perpetually kinder and more wise than I know how to be.

I was trying to explain this in the car on the way home that Palm Sunday. I was trying to talk about my sadness because of the foreshadowing, because every year we celebrate and mourn, year after year, celebrating and mourning, then the tone painting with the bells and the tears in the priest’s eyes. We have to believe that we are worth the sacrifice, and that there is something after all this pain.

I don’t believe in Jesus, Rosie cut in. She was in a sour mood. I’ve heard this from her before, and I truly don’t care. All teenagers doubt and defy and feel sullen once in a while. But this time I just felt too sad. I got out of the car and hid with the dogs, Moby stretched like some solemn and understanding pieta across my lap. Rosie was instantly sorry that she had hurt me, but I couldn’t articulate why it made me so sad. I’m sorry I hurt your feelings, she said when we walked in the door, but I snapped that I didn’t care if she believed in Jesus. Then I disappeared.

Because I’m not always sure if I do, either. I believe that a man existed who had a presence. I believe he had the sort of power to change the world that some people have, like Obama maybe. Some beauty, a capability to help people rise to their highest selves. I don’t know if he was more than that, but I don’t care. I have no reason to care if the story is true or not: because the story is beautiful. That beauty matters more than any scrutiny of fact. Fiction, it has been said, is the lie that tells the truth. Myth isn’t exactly true for any time, it’s simply true all the time. I’m not sure why people are so concerned if any of this god stuff is really factual. It’s beautiful enough to not worry about that. There was a human who so loved the world that he died for us so that we can live. The tone painting.

Good Friday we were in an airplane, suspended. On Sunday the world was made of light. Jesus died on Friday, and on Sunday he became light. Tonight, driving along the ocean, struck by the sky and its constellations, I felt whole. There is so much sadness in death, but then we get to become light. I believe we are recycled, that in this world nothing is thrown away.

On Sunday our tiny cottage by the ocean fogged up with the heat from the oven, and our small world glowed abstractly. Easter was filled with light. I don’t know if I exist, but this life is beautiful enough that arguing about whether or not I am truth or fiction is just quibbling.

April 7th, 2010 | Category: inward | Comments (1)

In the near-empty church that echoed with baby cries, the priest put ashes on Henry’s forehead (from dust you came to dust you shall return). Sin, the priest said, is anything that brings you further from your highest self. Henry hasn’t sinned. I’m not even sure if he is, by technical or philosophical definition, human — having no language or self-consciousness. I hated seeing the ashes on him. It felt like a marker for something I can’t imagine will ever happen. He’s still perfect. He is the opposite of sin: he brings us closer to our best selves (and, in his worst moments, he at least teaches me patience).

We came home and, over take-out thai food, which is perhaps the opposite of what one is supposed to eat on ash wednesday, we talked about sin. I daren’t share others’ perspectives on their sins, but it was a deep and powerful conversation. And it helped me to understand what sin is more deeply, apart from what anyone else might think–the sin is so particular to the person who feels burdened by it. My sin, I said, is that I get afraid: I get afraid of people, I get skittish, I like to stay in my house where it is safe. I get afraid of making art: it takes so much bravery to face a blank page and to write or make out of thin air. It’s easier to say I don’t have enough time, or to make something small, like a teeny tiny blog entry — which, I know, is something small that also accumulates, and I know that sometimes it takes bravery to write and then to hit that blue Publish button, but it hurts more to free-write: to go deep down and out and all over without any idea where I’ll land. I need the blindness of free-writing to push me to new territory everywhere else, but it’s sometimes tiring and dizzying.

Fear of people and fear of the page: both these fears repel me from accessing a deeper and calmer self. So for lent, I’m going to a new-mothers group in town, and for lent I’m free-writing for half an hour each day while Steve tends to Henry. I’ve often joked that Ash Wednesday is my favorite holiday, but it is: I love to think of us as dust. I love to scrub away the parts of myself that don’t add beauty. Though I did wipe the ash off of Henry’s forehead as soon as we stepped out into the night.

February 18th, 2010 | Category: inward | Leave a comment

My brain goes in and out of working order. Swimming through warm and cool spots in an ocean, hormone spike here that makes me forget what I meant to say–

then exhaustion — the kind of exhaustion like in the beginning, that turns my brain to jello and makes every stair a chore. And crankiness, which makes me less lovable. This collage has circles in it. I’m getting close to the end, I can tell, because it feels like the beginning.

And fear. The what-if-I’m-not-good-enough / what-if-sleeping-on-my-back-has-damaged-the-baby / fear-fear. That’s returned. Waking last night at 3:30 in the morning, so wide awake it seems best to just get up and do some writing or clean the kitchen. Instead: ruminating (cyclical theme). About money, about all uncertain futures, about what on earth to name this baby and if I’ll know when I see him like I tell people I will, about IVF and how much I hated it and why (you mean she’s not over that already?), about the dogs and if they’re okay–

the dogs have been moved to Jack’s room for the night now. I realized in one other ruminating middle-of-the-night session that dogs in the bed with a newborn baby is a deal breaker (I’m beginning to love 30 Rock). It would be stupid, and my training sessions to try to keep the dogs on the floor would fail in the middle of the night because they’d crawl back up as I slept and I wouldn’t notice, and by morning all our training would be lost. I put the baby monitor in their room so I can hear if they’re choking or vomiting or all the dozens of fears I conjure in this transition. The first night one of them chewed up a pencil. No other incident since.

Are you going to snap right back to your old shape? That’s what happens to my Sims. (– Rosie)

You’re walking like the pregnant people do in my Sims game. (– Rosie)

Hormone spike: everything smells bad again. Even me. On our walk this morning we passed a man who smelled like airports and vodka. Coffee-breath smells like death-rot.

An hour walk still each morning. Even when it’s 11 degrees. My wool coat buttons except for around the waist. I can walk a dog on the way downtown but on the way back Steve kindly takes both leashes — tackling the meek Ann Arbor hills plus a dog plus a hot chocolate puts too much pressure on my back and shins.

I just woke from a midafternoon nap. In the studio. I turned off the lights and the room glowed dark winter gray. On the chaise lounge, barely the width of my body, especially now, both dogs crawled up there with me, the heater oscillating between all three of us.

I have no control over so many things. My parents and brother and sister have planned a trip the week before the due date, but they have to double-pack their bags in case they end up on the plane to Ann Arbor with one phone call about contractions. I am worried about ruining their plans and about the expense of sudden airline tickets during the holidays.

Just squeeze it in. ( — my sister)

Just squeeze it in. ( — Steve)

Just go over a bunch of pot holes if you want to have it early. ( — neighbor)

But I can’t even get the baby to turn or not turn. The baby’s kicking, Steve puts his hand on my stomach, and he abruptly stops kicking. I get apologetic, as if I could help it. The boy is not a performer.

I want to know what exactly the dogs know about the baby. Do babies only give off their baby smell once they’re born, or is he giving it off right now? Do the dogs smell, as the handicapped man at church in his wheelchair said to me on Sunday, that I’m walking for two? They don’t treat me any more gently. Can’t the dogs see that I swallowed a basketball or a watermelon seed or any other metaphor that I’ve heard recently?

What part of this baby is human and what part is still in a sort-of purgatory between human and upside-down blue bat? I asked Steve once on a walk if the soul/spirit/personality/essence/character of a person comes at the early embryo stage or when the baby breathes his first breath, and Steve thought that maybe it came in between, or maybe even later.

We are visual people. Or I am. Like doubting Thomas, I need to see the baby for myself before I believe that this is real. The turning in my stomach, I can only abstractly identify it with a baby. I don’t even know which part is his head. Once I thought I might have felt a foot. After nine months, the better part of a year, it gets hard to believe that this will end with a prize. Though I read this yesterday and I know it’s true: I love you more than sleep.

December 14th, 2009 | Category: inward, the baby thing | Leave a comment

December 7th, 2009 | Category: inward, the baby thing | Leave a comment

I’m trying to figure out what to do with this blog space.

Poor Steve, I’m always griping about / searching for what my next path should be. Post-school-school-school, not wanting to teach art, sort-of wanting to teach writing, pregnant, post(?)-first-manuscript, and finally feeling the space in my brain and heart to go forward.

My energy goes into lots of little things, but no big thing. I love keeping a blog. I had started it up again last January because I was talking to Jennifer, my always-inspirational writing companion, about what to do next and where I feel my energy, and she felt that, aside from a book or a gallery show or anything, she felt it was enough, it was plenty, to catalogue all these moments in my day. Because that’s what we do each Friday, we recount our lives and talk too long and write some and it’s always enlightening and funny. So my initial intention was to do that, to make my blog a sort of place for recounting small things — the penny I found, the flower I scavenged, the funny thing someone said, the process of making or burning dinner. I thought it would be more like notes–not thinking about audience or sentence-structure. And though each entry wouldn’t have plot, time passes and so plot occurs naturally.

But over time I think it has become too much of a written journal. And definitely it’s something I need, and it’s something that gives me energy. I love trying to write a piece that feels whole about something that happened — pumpkin carving or a funny interaction with Rosie — and trying to see the ’so what’ inside that moment and create a sort of mini-essay out of the moments of my life. And I think no writing is for naught–that energy of crafting sentences, of noticing something and transcribing it to the page is always valuable. And plus this is a place of problem-solving: I come here with an issue or question and I work it out on the page, which is how I like to deal with things.

But I think it has moved away from more of an artful catalogue of a life, and maybe has become too self-conscious. I think part of that was slightly inevitable because a good chunk of this blog has been grappling with infertility and IVF and IVF again. That’s a lot of plot, and a lot of exhaustion, and I wasn’t in a space to talk a lot about pennies I found and flowers I had scavenged. I was in crisis mode.

Being here at the Vermont Studio Center has lifted me out of crisis mode: it has allowed me to step back and see less near-sightedly, to see what I want to do next. My hope is to get a project underway — that sounds very hopeful, maybe too hopeful, but I want to explore the threads of projects that I’ve begun these past few years and to see if they have the strength to weave themselves into a larger project. Sometimes when I think about what I want to do next, I see a collection of poems. Sometimes I see an interaction of poetry and imagery. Sometimes I see something more like what Anne Carson does, where the genre isn’t singular in one book, so there are essays and poems and imagery. But I had so much satisfaction in creating the last manuscript, which, also inspired a lot by Anne Carson, tried to push the form of the essay–usually beginning with what was originally a poem and forgetting about line breaks. The act of writing it was so rigorous to me, but what created the drive inside of me was the essay form’s marriage with the fact that I had powerful material, a subject matter that I felt really needed to be recorded. I had an urgency in writing the last manuscript–this feeling that it needed to be written, I could not die without having written it. I actually felt at moments, absurdly, like I was invincible, like I was so meant to write it that I surely would not die until it was done, and that would keep me safe as I was driving or crossing a street.

I want to find that feeling again, and truthfully I feel the seeds of it most these days when I’m writing in the blog: infertility, pregnancy, the minutia of a marriage and a family, photographs and text, I feel an urgency in describing and recounting this. But also I don’t feel creative when I’m recounting it, or I don’t feel like I’m breaking new ground. Books about IVF have been written before; blogs about a family are all over the internet. I’m not a journalist, and I can’t write a self-help book, and my creative writing does not pointedtly deal with infertility.

Instead, here at the Vermont Studio Center, the material that is most inspiring is not what I’ve written for the blog. I’ve had more luck so far working with drafts of poems I’d begun with another site I created and manage, a password-protected site where my friends and I post two poem-drafts a month. I’ve also had more luck working with drafts of stuff I’d begun for twosuchmaps, another site I created and manage. The parts of this blog, courtneymandryk.com, that have been most inspiring for me this week so far have been the photographs. When I mark a photograph with the date as its title then it’s part of a photograph series: I photograph something that to me feels like a drawing. I don’t know how to describe that yet, but I know it when I see it. That transcendence of form is what I seem to like to think about, and the photograph-to-drawing transcription has been exciting for me so far.

Which leaves me unsure where to go on this blog or in my next project. If I’m going to put my time and energy into the blog, I want it to be great and I want it to feed me. I like the medium of the online world — it’s a fantastic place to explore the transcendence of materials. And I also love cataloguing the moments of my life. It makes my life feel real to me, it keeps me in the moment, and it helps me see the artfulness in each day. But it isn’t enough so far, I don’t think, and I don’t know how it’s contributing to my next project. I want to get more out of this online space, and I don’t yet know how.

November 12th, 2009 | Category: inward | Comments (1)

My brain has gone down the drain. I am not capable of holding a list in my head. Lists all over the house now.

I had to buy spinach at the store. My list said spinach not one not two not three but four times.

This morning I am trying to organize my day: I have a thought, I go to write it down, and by the time I get to the paper the thought is gone. Gone. I open a new window on my computer screen in order to write here, but I see my homepage and can’t remember what I was going to do.

This morning I boiled an empty pot for five minutes, waiting patiently for tea.

It has been a mellow couple of weeks after a storm of activity. I was in pain that the doctors determined was simply round ligament pain exacerbated by overworking and overlifting, but it kept me in bed for four days straight, on my left side, my computer tilted sideways, the charger popping out, popping out, popping out of its socket. It is not as revitalizing as it sounds to lie down for four days. It is stultifying. The fogginess in my body and brain feeds on itself and then nothing gets done.

And there is sickness everywhere. One minute it’s my throat, then it’s Steve’s head, then Rosie’s home with what her mother thinks is a fever. Then her mother has the flu. Jack coughs continuously. I was helping him put on his halloween costume makeup and he coughed absentmindedly directly in my face. So I lay low, and drink my nourishing tea and take my vitamins, all of my energy going into making a baby in the most abstract sense — I’ve never seen it, I might just have gas, all I know is I’m tired and bloated and I’m not supposed to get sick.

Yesterday we threw open all the windows and went on the first walk we’d been on since before the bedrest. The world is glowing right now. It is positively gorgeous. It’s a time where I feel that a photograph would cheapen it, would turn it into an image made for a thrift store puzzle. I just like to look, feel my eyes try to adjust and make sense of how yellow the trees are in our backyard. I feel them working, thinking. My brain in the background is the ocean, swooping in and taking thoughts away.

October 22nd, 2009 | Category: inward, the baby thing | Leave a comment

because I don’t know how to define soul, but spirit is defined: breath. Inspire.

When people sleep, they still have something about them that is them. Steve sleeps and he’s still my husband, still recognizable and beautiful and present.

People say that phrase, ‘and then she breathed her last breath’ but they don’t say ‘and then her heart beat its last beat’ or ‘her eyes blinked for the last time.’

When my grandmother died, she had been in a hospital for maybe a week, and her daughter, my aunt, had seen her in all states, in pain and asleep and composed and watching tv and eating hospital food. she said goodbye and left the room, my grandmother died, and she returned.

My aunt made a joke about it afterward, when we all arrived, about how funny my grandmother looked dead. It had only been a few minutes between seeing her living and dead, but her face wasn’t the same anymore.

So maybe that’s the moment. When the baby breathes for the first time. Maybe it’s not at conception or when the heart first beats or when the brain registers wake and sleep, but when it’s pushed or lifted out into the world, when the body literally joins spirit. Inside me is preparation. Some say half of early pregnancies dissolve, but out here we’d notice and hurt.

My friend says that you don’t breathe — rather, you’re being breathed. you don’t think about it like you think about lifting your arms or eating. Something fills you with air again and again, rhythmically, even when you sleep. I can’t even imagine that moment, I’ve never seen it, of being filled with breath for the first time.

September 23rd, 2009 | Category: inward, the baby thing | Leave a comment

I recently ran into a friend who has been saying since I met him six years ago that the whole world is redundant. All that can be written has been written, that can be said has been said. There are only so many words, which is true, and all the combinations of words have been played out. We are born into a world that doesn’t need our thoughts because they have already been thought.

I used to try to believe him, because he’s older and so what did I know. And a part of me still wants to try to believe him, because he’s my friend, and because I never said I know how to live this life. And because he’s read way, way, way more books than I have.

Maybe it’s because I, naive me, is bringing a whole new person into the world, but I couldn’t listen to it last time he told me. Now I have to believe that this world is new and that each person who enters it isn’t just the same as each person who has entered it already. My body is changing, my sense of height and depth and scale and smell and taste, everything is different.

Recently I was asked if I’ve ever walked into a room and felt like I’ve never seen it before — the person was a therapist and she was gauging how much I detach from my body and sense of self. She concluded that I detach no more than anyone else, but my passion for her question surprised me. Because I feel like I always walk into a room and feel like I’ve never seen it before. Was that couch always so low? Was that hallway so wide? Has it always been dark in that corner? Did the sun always make a quadrangle right on top of that painting? Steve and I go on walks each morning, and often we’re walking the same route. But each time I feel like I’ve never seen one or another house before ever. I’m sure it’s not new, I’m sure it didn’t grow over the grass overnight, but I’m seeing it for the first time. Maybe that’s because we’ve left five minutes early and the light is different enough that the paint color strikes me, or maybe it’s because the grass is longer and I suddenly notice scale, or because the flowers are falling and I see their new muted color in relation to brick and siding. Being in this particular self is unironic, it’s not cynical, and it doesn’t make for good jokes or cutting quips, and it probably doesn’t come across as very smart. But every walk is different. Every time I come home, I see my home for the first time.

September 15th, 2009 | Category: inward | Comments (2)

I had to do something this morning that’s good but which brings me fear because it involves teaching and facing the public and I am more at peace in my house. I was anxious about it over the weekend until I came to this terrible logic. I thought of Annie Dillard and how she says that in order to chop wood you have to aim through the chopping block. Mike Tyson said that about boxing: he punched past his opponent. And I’ve heard that about runners: run through the finish line. So why not use that logic here, because after that scary thing I won’t be scared anymore, and the fear doesn’t help me at all. So I pictured myself already finished with the morning, back in my studio, safe with my peanut butter and graham crackers. Oh maybe that’s avoidance, but it worked. I could picture myself already done with the fear, never having felt the fear to begin with, and it calmed me a great deal, and of course the morning was fine.

September 8th, 2009 | Category: inward | Leave a comment