Yeah, alright, I had a baby.
And for whatever reason, it makes me itch to write -in a nervous, not-sure-I-can-reach-between-my-shoulderblades-to-scratch kind of way. Having extruded a tiny human, am I capable of generating anything else? Or am I, like an old seam of coal, mined out?
I feel picked over, broken up. The baby-having is not for sissies. Women may have done it for millenia, but you know what? A lot of them died. And if they didn't, they didn't get any sleep and were subsequently tired and vulnerable and got eaten by sabertooth tigers, leaving their tiny, mewling daughters to grow up and perpetrate the next generation.
Surely, if every woman knew exactly what she was getting into, we would have figured out how to pawn this off onto men. We've at least figured out how to have fewer babies, so that each one we do have becomes the tiny, terrified sac into which we cram the totality of our hopes and anxieties. Fun times for mom, fun times for babe!
But I'm told you forget. Biology pulls its rabbit out of a hat- or, rather, stuffs the rabbit back in. Your memories hop away into darkness and you're left holding the bag. Or rather, the baby.
Good thing it's cute.
Friday, November 29, 2013
Friday, November 1, 2013
Waiting
Birth and death: the last holdouts against the hegemony of the day planner. Everything else you've got pinned down. You set appointments; you cancel them and keep them; you schedule them and reschedule them; you generally operate under the assumption that you are the boss of yourself.
And then you give birth.
Or you don't.
I'm five days past my due date, no contractions, no anything doing. So I'm waiting. And waiting -real waiting, no deadline, no line in the sand- is uniquely humbling.
We used, of course, to wait all the time. We waited for the rabbit to spring the trap, for the first green shoots of spring, for the rekindling of light above the horizon. But we're consummate editors, we humans, and in the last few hundred years we've struck through wait after wait. We want a rabbit, we head to the grocery store. We crave greenery, we ship it in from Mexico. At night, we flip on the lights and fire up the TV. Waiting, nowadays, lurks only in our darkest spaces: a great, moist stillness silting the roots of our lives.
We are born; we die. And, for once -or twice- we wait.
And then you give birth.
Or you don't.
I'm five days past my due date, no contractions, no anything doing. So I'm waiting. And waiting -real waiting, no deadline, no line in the sand- is uniquely humbling.
We used, of course, to wait all the time. We waited for the rabbit to spring the trap, for the first green shoots of spring, for the rekindling of light above the horizon. But we're consummate editors, we humans, and in the last few hundred years we've struck through wait after wait. We want a rabbit, we head to the grocery store. We crave greenery, we ship it in from Mexico. At night, we flip on the lights and fire up the TV. Waiting, nowadays, lurks only in our darkest spaces: a great, moist stillness silting the roots of our lives.
We are born; we die. And, for once -or twice- we wait.
Saturday, October 19, 2013
Shut up about pregnancy, already.
Pregnancy seems, at least to me, to be a singularly wordless activity. You can describe it, sure; you can opine; you can absorb, and give, bad advice about labor and edema and soft cheeses and wine; you can try to make something literary of it.
But it comes down to this: you shut your mouth and push out a kid.
It's the oldest- and possibly the most boring- story in the book, which does not seem to prevent mother after mother from reading it backwards and forwards, not to mention talking about it to anyone who will listen. I get it: Never have I given so much thought to my innards or what goes in them or what might, conceivably at the end of the day, come out.
(Conceivably is the wrong word, as it's pretty much inconceivable, at this stage, that a baby WON'T appear. I'm 39 weeks knocked up, and conception is long, long in the past.)
But I haven't written about pregnancy. Nor have I written about much of anything else beyond the writing I've been doing for my two paid gigs.
(Sidelight: In this age of new media, the two outlets for which I've managed to be hired to write regularly are newspaper and radio. This appeals to my sense of the morbid.)
I think the banality of the experience that's muzzled me. Pregnancy, childbirth, raising kids- these are near universal experiences that -in a cruel twist of fate- every women woman experiences afresh. And consequently, the experiences are, to everyone but their experiencers, dull. Pregnancy eats your words. Gain a baby, lose your voice.
It's not as bad as it sounds. But it is -quiet.
But it comes down to this: you shut your mouth and push out a kid.
It's the oldest- and possibly the most boring- story in the book, which does not seem to prevent mother after mother from reading it backwards and forwards, not to mention talking about it to anyone who will listen. I get it: Never have I given so much thought to my innards or what goes in them or what might, conceivably at the end of the day, come out.
(Conceivably is the wrong word, as it's pretty much inconceivable, at this stage, that a baby WON'T appear. I'm 39 weeks knocked up, and conception is long, long in the past.)
But I haven't written about pregnancy. Nor have I written about much of anything else beyond the writing I've been doing for my two paid gigs.
(Sidelight: In this age of new media, the two outlets for which I've managed to be hired to write regularly are newspaper and radio. This appeals to my sense of the morbid.)
I think the banality of the experience that's muzzled me. Pregnancy, childbirth, raising kids- these are near universal experiences that -in a cruel twist of fate- every women woman experiences afresh. And consequently, the experiences are, to everyone but their experiencers, dull. Pregnancy eats your words. Gain a baby, lose your voice.
It's not as bad as it sounds. But it is -quiet.
Saturday, September 14, 2013
I Am Here
Thursday, September 5, 2013
Tuesday, July 16, 2013
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
