New Words For It

You dear people. Toni Morrison says motherhood frees a person from baggage and vanity. And you? Let me read your words back to you:

If anything, it felt like having kids stripped me of everything about myself that I liked. I truly felt like my life as I knew it was over.

Personally, having my first baby broke my life into a bunch of little pieces, and it took me about a year to get it put back together again in a way that made me feel happy and whole.

…liberating? Um, no. Hahaha!

Is this why I love you? Or is this why you’re here? Or both?

The funny thing is, I also love (real life love) some people whose hearts bustle with throngs of sugar coated angels when they hear Toni Morrison say motherhood is “the most liberating thing that happened to me.”

The difference between us taunts me.

For a long time I embraced the role of relentless parenting curmudgeon, sneering at all rosy statements and issuing ominous warnings to prospective parents. Which was rotten of me, in a way, and obviously sometimes rude.

I felt (and still feel) a responsibility to counter the ever-present oversweet image of this whole enterprise. Even in a time when bad mother is the new good mother and complaining is supposedly hip among moms … it still seems impossible to utter the word baby without filling the air with flowers and tinkling chimes. Even the hip complaining has a hyperbolic, humorous slant, so that, like Ann Lamott’s Operating Instructions, I can hear it more easily as an account of one quirky person’s madness than as the harder, truer thing I wish we could all speak and hear about more freely.

I’ve been trying for the past year to write more poems that touch the hardest parts of my years of parenting babies. Poems are the best way to do this, because  this is an area where ordinary language fails us. I don’t think someone contemplating parenthood can hear stripped me of everything about myself that I liked, not really. I think that the moment you set down the word baby or mother or milk, you have poured honey and glitter over every single other word on that page, and on adjoining pages.

But.

After all of my months as curmudgeon and writer trying to speak through the glitter and honey and flowers and chimes and be able to tell what it really was like for me. (And you! Some of you. And many others.) After holding that at the center for so long … and after soothing myself over the loss of what I’d hoped would be a purely happy and gorgeous time by basically declaring my crushing experience to be universal … I am watching two new families—people I trust and love—care for their first babies, and you know what it looks like?

It looks like sugar and windchimes and singing angels.

And I don’t think this is just because of the weird looking glass that life throws up between parents of infants and everybody else. I know people keep their pain private (I did), and I know other lives look better without being so.* But I don’t think that is what’s happening here. The curmudgeon would say These friends are just in denial! When they tell you everything’s great it’s just because they haven’t yet lost the battle with the inevitable creeping despair at how their whole beautiful old life is ruined!

But I’m no longer the curmudgeon. I believe them. The curmudgeon truth in my heart is still there, but it is shifting to one side to make room for a twin truth (still a puny, malnourished twin, but growing). The beautiful new parents I know are soaking up every glorious minute. Their babies are wonderful. They cannot imagine it any other way. They are so glad they chose this path. It takes all of the generosity and largeness of spirit I can summon to say those things with sincerity, without sarcasm or bitterness, but now I say them, even as those twins keep thrashing at each other inside my heart.

The difference between us haunts me. But at least now I’m ready to see that it is a difference, not a lie. Loving them and believing them, I keep wondering why, and I start to imagine a language where the word why doesn’t exist.

 

 

* That Miranda July movie, The Future, where in a moment of self-pity she looks through the apartment window at her neighbor, a stranger, brushing her hair and sighs, That woman really has it together? That’s me, all the time.

Impercipient

Last week, via Facebook and a stunning 1981 Lego ad, I had the pleasure of introducing a friend to Blue Milk. The friend, a mom of two young daughters, thanked me for the link, said there are a lot of things on that site that I’ve been wanting to read. Then she posted to her own Facebook page this passage from Toni Morrison, which is item #6 on from Blue Milk’s About Feminist Mothers page:

There was something so valuable about what happened when one became a mother. For me it was the most liberating thing that ever happened to me….Liberating because the demands that children make are not the demands of a normal ‘other.’ The children’s demands on me were things that nobody ever asked me to do. To be a good manager. To have a sense of humor. To deliver something that somebody could use. And they were not interested in all the things that other people were interested in, like what I was wearing or if I were sensual…. Somehow all of the baggage that I had accumulated as a person about what was valuable just fell away. I could not only be me -– whatever that was -– but somebody actually needed me to be that. . . . If you listen to [your children], somehow you are able to free yourself from baggage and vanity and all sorts of things, and deliver a better self, one that you like. The person that was in me that I liked best was the one my children seemed to want.

And then half a dozen female friends posted swoony comments full of gratitude and affirmation of the truth of these words.

And I …

don’t get it. Do you? I suspect that you do, since my friend V and a flock of her mom friends seem to see in it the crystal-clear reflection of their own experience. But I don’t get it. Transformed by the demands of my children into a person I like better? Freed from baggage and vanity? Maybe I am lucky and was free from these things already. Maybe I’m so far from conventionally pretty or visibly sensual that I have skipped the part of life’s muddle that that entails. Maybe I am so weak that even the magic of motherhood couldn’t free me from the thrall of vanity and poor priorities. Maybe my early experience of motherhood was so marred by the complicated mix of depression and loneliness and failure that this transformation was impossible. Whatever the reason, I know that this change did not happen to me.

And. And. The change that Toni Morrison is talking about seems suspiciously like the promises about motherhood that are hanging in the air everywhere anyway, the promises that I think of as false. That motherhood is our nature. That we will find our real selves here. That being mothers makes us better people.

I do appreciate the both/and of Blue Milk’s list. The Toni Morrison passage conveys a sense of magic that tangles with the harder truths in a way that seems both complicated and right.

But it is a magic that I do not feel.

I chew on all this, and I sit in the circle with other moms who are weepy and lovey just at the prospect of a newborn, and who say to each other “soak up as much of this wonderful time as you can,” and it brings to mind my teenaged affair with the clunkiest poem I’ve ever loved.

I wish you could meet my children: they are brilliant, beautiful, hilarious characters, and wonderful people to be in a family with. There is no question about my love for them. I will write this every time now, especially now that May can read. I love them. Each of them is incomparable. There is no question about that.

But why should I feel so different from the rest of you about what it is to be their mother? At one time, I would have asked this out of self-pity, a kind of what the fuck is wrong with me cry. Now I ask it with deep, detached curiosity. Why does it seem like Toni Morrison, my friend V, and a half dozen of her closest friends, and probably all of you, too, are talking, when you talk about being a mother, about a whole different thing than I have ever felt? Or am I reading her wrong? Or … what?

I sense that understanding this would unknot something important.

Instead of Heaven

When my girls ask about dying, we come quickly to the topic of compost. They know well that things change once they stop living—even right inside in our kitchen.

The bird we found drowned one morning in the backyard wading pool? We buried it, and my girls know its body has become dirt, and part of the dirt has become clover, become oxygen exhaled by the round leaves, been inhaled by a mouse that was eaten by an owl that will die and become dirt, bark, leaves, the air we’ll breathe and the dust on the windowsill and the tomatoes in the garden.

I tell them these things, and they accept them as true, enthralling, and (I don’t think I’m mistaken) reassuring. They want to know what happens. I tell them. Parts of us keep going. 

This weekend I flew across the country to my old friend’s funeral. I knew when I booked the ticket that this was both ridiculous and necessary. This family, I had not seen in a good 13 years. The son, closer to 20. Haven’t been in touch beyond Christmas cards and Facebook. And yet I couldn’t make the thought of not coming here sit right. Maybe I needed to check that he really wasn’t here anymore.

Back home, big flakes of snow fell today. And here, there are bougainvillea blooming, and clusters of trumpet-shaped flowers as long as my hand, half-open and pointing toward the ground, and ginkgo trees with fan leaves turned half-yellow. In yards beside little houses are trees thick with oranges, and I am unabashedly foreign to this place in my awe: Oranges growing right there! I slow down to gawk and cause traffic problems.

How strange to be in the place where these friends have lived for 20 years (which don’t feel as long as 20 years). To hear stories of a year of sickness, half-hope, and pain. To hear new friends talk about the Paul they’ve known, and recognize the person I used to know.

To kill time by driving among donut shops and taquerias and well preserved 1950s neon signs and OH MY GOD CITRUS TREES to the stern voice of my borrowed GPS: Recalculating.

Part of me believes maybe some of him is still hanging out here.

At the funeral we sang:

I danced on a Friday and the sky turned black;
it’s hard to dance with the devil on your back;
they buried my body and they thought I’d gone,
but I am the dance and I still go on.

Well, yes and no, right? Yes, the owl, the orange tree, the air in this town. But it doesn’t go on the way we with our little minds wish it would. The way his wife of 25 years wishes it would. His sons, grown and brave but still needing him. Wanting him. And god damn, it is hard to dance with the devil on your back. Poor Paul.

Even Longer Ago

Someone I once knew and loved well died today—a loss far enough away that I can’t accept condolences, but close enough that I feel the fracture lines in each of my bones. My mom forwarded me a one-line email with the subject line Fwd:FWD:Very Sad News.

That is very sad, I emailed back. I didn’t know this was coming.

How frustratingly ignorantly human I am. Didn’t know this was coming.

He had leukemia. He was in his sixties. He was the dad of the first boy whose sweaty hand I held in a movie theater, the dad of the boy whose embrace in my dreams even today represents complete belonging. He was the husband of the woman who nursed me through my first spiritual crisis at fifteen with stacks of Buechner and Forrester Church and Spong, and who married A and me nine years ago.

He—his name was Paul—he was part of this family close enough to be my own, the friends you have as a teenager if you’re lucky: people who were as good for me as my own relatives were, but from whom I was far enough to love without reserve, without regard for cool.

He was funny. He made puns. He loved baseball, not that I know much about that. We ran together in the woods, me as a near-anorexic teenager and him, I guess, in his forties. I remember never feeling anything but strong and funny with him, and that was rare for me.

Later in high school, I dated a rather boring kid, someone whose utter lack of  adventure or creativity I must have found soothing at the time. This boring guy’s mother frequently made hopeful comments about our eventual happy marriage and the inevitable grandchildren—which I always found disturbing, even when I was really into the guy (I was 17!). Paul took the role of bizarrely chivalrous tribal father. “If you married him, I’d kill you. No, I’d kill him.”

Obviously, those words make him sound like a little bit of an ass, and, indeed, assdom was the sin he was most often accused of. But there’s a reason for that. Fierce, moment by moment affection will sometimes make you look like an ass. He turned his fierce affection on me during the years I most needed to feel love other than the required love of family. He was the same way in his marriage, and with his sons—one my age, one older, and one so young I still think of him as a round cheeked baby with dear, curly eyelashes, though he’s now a young man himself. Fierce affection. I picture Paul with his arm around the son my age, the kind of sloppy, athletic squeeze they’d give one another. How they’d hang on each other—a teenaged boy and his dad!—and how they folded me in.

I hadn’t seen him since 1998. I wrote to him a year ago, a couple of months after he got sick, and his wife wrote back to tell me my note made them laugh. That was the last I heard.

Ways

For twenty one years I have run in Sauconys—thick and cushiony and with hard white orthotics to prevent the overpronation that was diagnosed way back when as the cause of a bad case of shinsplints.

The new shoes are the new Sauconys, pink nylon with white foam soles, lighter than a pair of wool socks. I wear the shoes sockless. Through them, I can feel the texture of the ground. The book—the breathless Outdoor magazine-style page turner of a sham of a pseudo-anthropological book—says your feet get stronger the longer you run without shoes, that you ultimately avoid injury. The videos online of runners who have run barefoot all their lives show the ball of the foot kissing down to the ground in slow motion, then the cushioning grip-down of the toe and heel.

I can’t tell if I’m doing it right. Are those my heels I’m landing on? Toes? Land on the ball of my foot? Like this? This? After a block, I’m aerobically wiped out and can hear my heels clicking down first (hear, not feel, yet) just as they’re not supposed to. This new way takes new muscles, and to do it right I have to be at a real run, not the heel-dragging shuffle I’d become used to, scuffing along through the brown leaves with my ipod on.

I find myself in the most false conversations. Even with A. He calls to ask how my run was. “Pretty good,” I answer, automatically. I am halfway into the unthinking next sentence (“I, uhh, it was…”) before I realize I am carrying out an empty routine. “Actually it wasn’t pretty good. My lungs felt like ass and I had no idea if I was doing it right, and I only went three blocks.” Much better.

But then there are the moms at the park and the moms at Spanish class pickup and the friends at the Halloween parade, and whoever’s in the kitchen at work when I wander in to microwave my leftover pizza. How are you? Pretty good. Good. What’s new? Not much. I rocket back out of the conversation’s orbit before (if) I ever realize I haven’t really been saying anything. What’s to say at day care pickup, in the checkout line, even over coffee with a friend?

If words are metal, this chatter hammers them into foil. Talk too much and you never know when you might accidentally throw an anvil at someone. And then keep on talking.

Coeur

And then last night I read Rollo May, in The Courage to Create:

The word courage comes from the same stem as the French word coeur, meaning “heart.” Thus just as one’s heart, by pumping blood to one’s arms, legs, and brain enables all the other physical organs to function, so courage makes possible all the psychological virtues. Without courage other values wither away into mere facsimiles of virtue.

And:

I propose a new form of courage of the body: the use of the body not for the development of musclemen, but for the cultivation of sensitivity. This will mean the development of the capacity to listen with the body. It will be, as Nietszche remarked, a learning to think with the body. It will be a valuing of the body as the means of empathy with others, as expression of the self as a thing of beauty and as a rich source of pleasure.

Well, then, Rollo May. I will not leave my pewter box outside the green metal door of my office as planned. I will hold it in my lap under the conference table. It will warm my hands.

My eldest has a rubber bracelet of the Lance Armstrong type. She chose it out of the toy basket at the dentist, woozy with nitrous after undergoing the filling of a cavity in her molar. COURAGE, it says. Last week she asks me from the backseat, “What is courage?”

“Being brave,” I tell her.

“What’s being brave?”

“It’s doing something even though you’re scared to do it.”

Minutes later, from the backseat, “What’s being brave, again?”

I give examples. The first day of kindergarten. The first time you tried the monkey bars. Going to the dentist. To each of these, she replies, “But I wasn’t afraid then.”

Maybe we invent brave. Maybe there is only ever afraid or not afraid.

And who is Rollo May, anyway? Only a man like all the rest. Where do we get off writing slim books about how to live? And by we I mean they, those who have? He. At least he was in his sixties by the time he wrote this. A man in his thirties or forties acting so wise, I don’t think I’d countenance anymore. Still, he loses points with me by not placing a footnote in that “listen with the body” paragraph. Footnote: Women have been doing this for ages and ages. It was their idea; I’m just writing it down with the voice of masculine authority.

I am 37 and realizing that asking wondering questions has become a habit, now no less inauthentic than reflexive credulity. I am 37 and experiencing the first glimmer of irrelevance, in the form of wise friends nearby having babies and living in all their complexity the weeks and months that still seem so close to me but are so many years past now that I am letting go the hope of deciphering them. I am 37 (oh dear, I think I am 37, maybe it’s 38), and people my age are giving advice. I am a year older than Natalie Goldberg was when she wrote Writing Down the Bones. It’s time to start the habit of stating. It’s time to let the habit of questions wane.

Meditation Before Confronting the Difficult Coworker

I have a new box I keep my heart in. It’s a cube made of pewter, with rounded corners and a lid that fits on with a barely visible seam. It’s lined with fabrics, a different one on each side: corduroy, satin, linen, velvet, denim. All red, all soft and safe for an organ that is part fish, part dinner roll, part flower, part drum. My heart and all its names are safe in the box, black-red and breathing.

And my body—the rest of my body, minus heart—is made only of all the things we know bodies are made of. My hollow skin is only made of cells. I can see each cell’s solid nucleus, and emotion does not blow between these hard centers like air between trees. Between them is only the bland solidity of cytoplasm and the tough give of cell walls. Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen. My body is made only of these. My brain contains only these things, these parts lined up to make the glass spindles of logical thoughts. Hear them chime against each other. Hear my voice, every bit as clear.

I’m still here.

Are you?

Pondering

Two days ago, a friend (who is reading a book by Irvin D. Yalom, which I’ve never read but am now on the list for at the library & am hoping is as intriguing as this tidbit suggests) proposed using this thought experiment to approach decisions both large and small:

Imagine that after this life is over, you will live the same life again a hundred times, a million times, an infinite number of times. And every moment of those repeated lives will be exactly the same as the moments of this first one. You have to do all the same things, make all the same choices. You can’t change a thing, you just have to keep living exactly the same life over and over and over.

Now, how do you feel about the decision in front of you?

I am not completely clear about why this blows my mind, but it does. It makes everything seem clearer–past bad choices much more awful, current joys much more palpable, all decisions much more free and less guilt-ridden. I don’t really get why it has that effect on me, but I’m sure going to be thinking about it for a while.

Does it do anything for you?

Written Yesterday

I’m writing this on the last evening of my two-week writing residency. Residency sounds so official; you might also say vision quest, retreat, sabbatical, or, even vacation. Working vacation (sort of).

I’ve been staying in a “cabin” (cabin in aesthetic only, not in degree of comfort) in the woods, with a perhaps 160 degree view of Lake Superior. By myself. Under the hospitality of a small, family-run non-profit that has made it their business to open this place and space and time for writers and other artists.

Two weeks of waking up to a big window full of tangerine sunrise, lying still and quiet for a few minutes, fixing mochi and coffee for breakfast, and then getting to work. Writing. Reading Jane Kenyon (an a lot of other things) out loud. Sitting in a big, soft recliner watching the horizon. Wading around in a big book about the evolutionary history of motherhood. Walking in the woods and on a long cobble beach. Calling home every evening and hearing the whole other kind of joy that is a house full of brilliant little girls. Reading more or less a whole shelf of things I’d been wanting to read for ages.

And writing more than I believed I’d be able to. I didn’t know that my creative energy would expand so miraculously to fill this time. And to fill this space! At home, my poetry books and drafts and so on live compactly in my little corner writing space. Here, it’s been a thrill to see three tables—and often the floor—spread with them.

There is the niggling question of quantity vs. quality. But I’m suspending judgment about that. There’s lots more learning to do, and more and more writing, and more to say—which I’ll save for another post or more—about what I thought I’d write, and what I’ve been working on instead, and what I’m learning.

For now, I am soaking up these last hours here in the quiet. I miss A and May and August. I can’t actually say I am eager to throw everything in the car and see this stunning place and time in my rear view mirror. At the same time, I can’t wait to hold them all, and be back in our home, back in our life.