I'm tired of WoW again, don't even want to look at it. I go through these phases. Then, I get an itch, and I log back in, just to see sunset in Mulgore, and I remember why I liked it to begin with.
Instead, these days, I'm loving Daxter for the PSP and Animal Crossing for the DS. Handhelds are really all I have time for during the day, anyway, since I can do it while I nurse.
***
I'm so tired tonight, and it's Beltane. Tomorrow is May Day, and the Mexicans won't be going to work. It's all so screwed up and sad.
***
I look down at The Bug. I fan him with a Gymboree pamphlet. I stroke his head and face, study his fingers and toes, sneak my hand up his shirt to feel his smallness, and I know that my own mother did this to me. To my brother, now killing people for a living. I know all this, and life becomes so short in my head as to make me crazy, depressed, insane.
Right now, I might really be in a convalescent home, alone. All day, I talk to the air as if I were talking to my husband, my baby son, my mother on the phone. The nurses cluck and play along. Maybe some day it will be true. Will my mind take me here, to this time?
I don't have time to write well tonight, or lately. I'm starting to get the hang of this housewife thing, one tiny thing at a time. I remember reading an article in Oxygen about this chick who keeps all her meals prepped and ready to go all the time. She throws stuff in the grill or the slow cooker, then freezes, then defrosts, and food is always on rotation. You read it and two things go through your mind: 1) Man, I want to try that, and 2) Doesn't she ever want fresh food?
Went to our old market and bought a pound of their ready-made meatloaf for dinner, then the next day thought, why didn't I buy a few pounds? That shit freezes easy. Next time, I will. The last time I made chili, I froze a bunch of it, and it's ready for a quick lunch or breakfast whenever I want it.
Then, there's The Bug, who is growing and changing so quickly I can't begin to keep up. He pulls himself to standing in his crib, after much angry bitching, then shrieks with delight at himself. He creeps along the perimeter, and sometimes stumbles and falls, smashing his head. So far, he's been fine. I can't help but see all the ways he could really hurt himself play through my head. It's going to get harder and harder from here, at least through his toddler years. I was reading "To Hell With All That" by this rich bitch who thinks she can write about being a housewife even though she's always had a maid to change her sheets, and she writes about being at Gymboree with her kids, packing up to go, and sneezing, and a small voice came from the floor, "Bless you." And then, she realized she was in business. She could handle it from there.
It's been on my mind, lately, how important verbal communication is. Words are why "cleaning house" sounds boring, dreaded, and oppressive, but "blessing your home" sounds so nice. God, I love Flylady.net. Anyway, I can't wait until The Bug can talk. Something besides the annoyed "Mama, Mom, Mama, Mom" I get when he wants something.
I have stopped telling people what he is really like. Today at Gymboree, I had to say something he can recently do, and I just mentioned that he's pulling himself to standing, which is true, but I picked that because other moms in the group were using that one, too. I would have gotten sideways looks if I mentioned that he can touch my nose, eyes, cheeks, lips, and ears on command; that given a book of animal pictures and asked to find the kitty, he will point out the lion, tiger, or kitten (he also points at the kitten when asked which is his favorite - after much hilarious deliberation); that he has been startling me by repeating things I say ("Don't lick that," I said at the park, regarding a swingset pole. "Lick," he responded). I'm sure the teacher lady at Gymboree would have told me in kind, low tones that I'm just hearing things, because I've been told this before.
Other things are on my mind, too, like that Celeste is better now, but she's gone to Northern California until Monday, and I'm going through withdrawals, plus I'd like to tell you the stuff I've learned from her and Jason lately, which they would be surprised to hear. Also in the news: I drunk dialed for the first time the other night. I'd like to review Shopgirl, the movie, but I need to think it out first. I alternately agree with that rich bitch mentioned way up there, and then think she just needs to get with the times, and then I think she's just an out-of-touch ho, and then I think she's marvellously insightful, and then I think she should just get busy with Martha Stewart and get it over with. Also, there's this Day Without A Mexican or whatever, this Monday, which I fear is a bad idea, and tomorrow there's a baby shower I'm scared of, and The Bug looks really good in his new Angels hat (Michelle, I'm going to take pictures and send them to you; it's fantastic).
I know this has been a stupid post. I didn't have time to make it pretty. This is what my head is like, now. There's no way to unscramble it all. I'm lucky if I get a few words out on paper to my brother every other day.
Ech, fuck it. I'm going to bed.
The first thought in my head when I woke today was "Wrecked."
***
I can work the bag or mitts for a long time. I can run and I can lift weights and I can
Crossfit. Once, I walked all the way across San Francisco and it wasn't all that hard for me. My body holds me up pretty well.
But the last time I felt this wrecked was after I gave birth. And it's not just last night's sparring. It's the lack of sleep, which is less and less The Bug's fault lately, and it's my period (hey haters, see this blog's name if period talk makes you squirmy), and it's the bruises and the fucking shin pain, and it's this sore throat thing which is now livable but still lingering a month later.
***
Not hitting is harder than hitting, said Mister Aran this morning, and it's true. I can drill mitts and heavy bags all goddamn day, but my first round of sparring I couldn't even fucking jab. I barely defended myself. And I know this, I
know this shit. I've been hit, I promise. I was so nervous and uncomfortable with all those strangers, and they were none too happy to have to work with me and explain everything, and I just felt so fucking ugly and clueless. Yeah, ugly. I'm a girl, and it comes down to that. If you can't hang with the boys, you really should be attractive to them so at least they won't sigh when it's their turn to work with you.
God, it's just so hard on my brain. I hate being new at things, I hate failing, I hate looking like an idiot, but that's life. Risks suck, but there's a reason we take them.
I have no heart, but I want to learn. I'm going back because for nine months now, I've been scared every day, every night, of something happening, of getting hurt, or of The Bug getting hurt, and of death. It's become too all-encompassing. It's strangling me. I can't write for fear of it. I think of David Chapelle, when he said getting booed off the Apollo stage was the best thing for him, because it was the worst kind of failure, and he survived it. So I'm going to go in there and get hit in the face, and get bruises up and down my legs, and wake up feeling wrecked, and risk getting hurt, and risk looking stupid, and risk the boys not liking me. And I'm going to read this book
Stiff, which I just bought, and I'm going to go have lunch with Celeste, who worried me sick by getting into a horrible car accident over the weekend. I have to get out of this comfort zone, because it's uncomfortable. It's not even safe. It's just an illusion.
And this morning, I came home from breakfast, sat down, and started writing fiction again. I had to break out of something. And if burying a wiry boy's knee into my lower shin was what it took, then I'm glad it happened. But fucking
ow.
I don't know why, but I wasn't nervous until three minutes before class, in the locker room, washing my hands.
It started with PMS. And maybe PMS has a good side, because it shakes things up, exacts change, forces you to re-evaluate. I'm not used to PMS anymore. I haven't had it in 18 months. So when it got me, it got me hard. I was pissed off for two weeks.
I'm tired now, and I should be in bed. It's been like this lately. I stay up too late. I can't keep my thoughts together. But I was in the locker room, staring at my hands in the sink, and going into this class where there would be sparring right away, and no one I know, and suddenly I didn't want to do it. Or, I hadn't thought about whether it was what I wanted to do. I was in the PMS rage when I decided to sign up for the sparring. Now, no more PMS, just me in the mirror, looking unattractive, about to go into a hot room thick with sweat, populated by only boys, and fight.
I went anyway. So much of life is done without the enthusiasm required. I went up, I was late, I got into it, I was a noob retard. My first round, I couldn't even jab. I just circled around trying not to get hit, frozen in body and brain. I didn't get much better. I got hit a lot. My shin connected with a guy's knee, and now it really hurts.
I'm not like men. No testosterone to pump me up, get me excited for next time.
Do I want to fight? I don't know. But I'll be back on Wednesday. On Wednesday, I'll decide whether I'll be back the next Monday. It'll go like that.
Listening to Radiohead's "Kid A" reminds me of a time when I had to listen to this stuff to get into the correct, melancholy mood for a certain kind of writing. Now, I live right in the middle of it.
People say you're selfish if you don't have kids because it's true. You feel like you have a purpose (not a porpoise, though that would be cool). When you have a kid, you see your life not as a winding road or journey or puzzle but as a block of time, separated by decades during which you will do the predictable things necessary to the raising of a kid.
I don't think my life is over. The most meaningful part has just begun. Plus, my family would make it possible even now for me to go to school, or publish books, or fight. Whatever I wanted, and probably more. But the needs of a baby break life down into such simple bullet points - eat, sleep, shit, laugh - that it loses much of its mystery. Where I felt myself flailing for meaning much of the time before, now it's all very simple: be born, give birth, die.
No longer do I hope for a purpose in life. I don't understand people who have to believe they have a purpose. If people have purposes (now I'm picturing them as porpoises), then it stands to reason that most of the population's purpose is to serve coffee to the people with higher purposes. There must be little purposes and big ones, little baby porpoises and...
...oh god that reminds me, today while I was on my run that wasn't really a run, I saw the tiniest ducklings, swimming in a creek with their parents.
And at church, there were people with their kids, all of us with the same porpoise, and all the moms looked like moms. They had mom clothes and mom hair and mom mannerisms. You ever talk to someone who was friends with your mom back in the day, and the woman they talk about sounds like a stranger? There's no fighting the archetypes: once you're a mom, you're a mom, and anything else is pathetic.
No, I don't believe in porpoises anymore. I believe in choice.
CHOICE
You know, I really wanted Paris Hilton to be a good singer. I mean, I know there's no way, but some part of me, the part that loves irony and the underdog, harbored a fantasy that Paris had had some formal training in her ultra-rich youth, that her album would shatter the odds, that her pipe would be a formidable instrument, rich, deep, assured, to say nothing of the lyrics, which would make Fiona Apple miserable with jealousy.
Wouldn't that have been something?
All melodrama aside, I heard yesterday that I can take antibiotics and still nurse. So hey, maybe I'll actually go to the doctor today!
On the other hand, it's so nice outside. Maybe not.
I've spent eight days now with what I now think is strep throat, a sharp pain that feels like swallowing big, jagged rocks. This has been accompanied by occasional light fevers, one night of an earache so bad I was sure I'd broken something, and general cough and sniffles. The pain has made me unable to sleep, even when The Bug allows me to, so along with a marginal hearing loss, I walk in a cloud of exhaustion that I feel in the muscles of my face and skull.
I mentioned my hearing loss to The Bug's pediatrician; he looked in my ear and proclaimed I had a cold, but that things seemed to be progressing well. I was relieved to hear it, since I didn't want to take medication. Antibiotics will probably mean I have to wean The Bug.
***
It's been odd in my head, this last week. This is the third or fourth time I've been seriously sick since The Bug was born, and I used to be the kind of person who was always healthy.
As I type that sentence, I think maybe I'm exaggerating. I probably just don't remember all the flus and colds and headaches I suffered before I got pregnant. I remember Spain that way, too: all the funny little cars, the sweet-smelling cigarettes, the beautiful beach, the delicious jamon. But in reality, I was miserable much of the time in Spain. It took me most of my vacation to acclimate to the time difference, I spoke maybe four words of Spanish, and I found the locals to be unkind.
I remember my pre-parenthood life like that. I recall Friday nights out to sushi in new outfits, sleeping in until ten a.m., breezy brunches with no thought of high chairs, gaming until four in the afternoon and then going to the gym, only to go back to gaming until one in the morning. I remember picking up and going anywhere, anytime. But the truth is, I mostly hated my jobs, Mister Aran and I fought over petty things, and I did get sick.
The difference is, when I was sick, I called in. I went to bed and languished there until I was better. After a bad day at work, I went home and didn't have to deal with it again until the next morning. Come Friday, I had two days to do what I wanted. I could make an emergency appointment with my doctor without worrying about babysitters. I only really felt beholden to Mr. Aran, and he didn't expect much of me.
Although I have a lot of help, more than most mothers, I still don't get to come home and leave my work behind at the end of the day. If The Bug decides to be up every thirty minutes, all night long, then I'll be up, too, and it doesn't matter how my throat feels.
Pregnancy irked me because I loved controlling my body, and that was taken away immediately. Motherhood is a spiritual and emotional experience, but mostly it is physical. It may not be as physically taxing as construction work - though it feels like it, carrying my 22.5 pound son up and down my home's stairs - but it is hard, and there is absolutely no calling in sick. I was so excited for The Bug's birth, not because I'd get to meet my son and start our life together, but because I'd finally have my body back all to myself. Breastfeeding threw a wrench into that idea, but when breastfeeding was really hard, I was still recovering from birth and it all sort of lumped together. The Bug took to it like a champ and I discovered why Anne Lamott said it was the purest communication she had ever known. It is communion.
"This is my body," says the priest every mass while blessing the bread, "it will be given up for you."
That is what it means, not only to be pregnant and breastfeed, but to be a mother wholly. The priest, or mother, could just as easily say, "This is my life." Every mother, except maybe Madonna with her brood of nannies, knows this to be true. I felt it first when The Bug was a few weeks old. I had a fever, but still I had to get up to feed him, and it felt like his urgent sucking was tearing my sensitive skin apart.
I was in awe of it, that night, the life I'd agreed to, even through the pain. Now, after several such illnesses, I find it less enchanting. I go through toddler-like fits in my head when I've been up all night, or when I get sick, or when all I want in the world is a latte or a bellini with my brunch. I have little, TV-drama fantasies of gathering all the cash I can and running for it, getting a waitressing job thousands of miles away under an assumed name.
***
Other moms console me with time. "This time next year, he'll be your little buddy," said one to me today. Nothing makes you aware of life as a span of time more than parenthood. You understand why parents say that decades of their lives go poof.
Whenever I see parents of twins, triplets, or more on TV, someone invariably asks how they managed it, and the response is always the same: they look out at their gaggle with a tired face full of hard memories, and say something to the effect of: time passes. During The Bug's first months, I would watch the clock on TV all night, and it was hard to imagine that eventually it would be 6:00 a.m., that the sun would come up and Mr. Aran would wake. I would repeat to myself what my Lamaze instructor said about labor: "It is pain that is temporary, and it is pain with a purpose." The passing of time was my singular relief.
I've lived this past week like that. Each night I went to sleep knowing that the next day I would feel better, if just a little. And each day I woke with the same pain or worse. The pain is lessened only by searing hot water, and only for a few seconds after the swallow, then I need more. When I lay in bed, I try not to swallow, and the spit builds up in my mouth until I give up and gulp it, and then I lay awake feeling it build up again. The doctor, I know now, was wrong. This is no cold.
So, tomorrow, I will call the doctor. I will go in and take my prescription, and while it is being filled I will buy a head of cabbage. I am almost sure I can't nurse while taking the meds, and I refuse to pump, and it is probably time, anyway. These days, when The Bug pulls away from my breasts, he leaves a ring of teeth marks. I would like to have that occasional bellini or red wine when eating with Celeste and Jason sans regret, and I love my daily coffee. It will mean being stricter with my diet, but also less hunger, and prettier bras!
But still, I cried while nursing The Bug to sleep tonight. This may be our last night together, in that communion. I looked at him hard while he ate, watched his eyes get heavy and then close. I clipped his fingernails while he dozed, an acrobatic move I've mastered while he is still attached to me. I feathered his hair away from his forehead. He is always so hot, coming from his grandparents' room, where he plays hardest, before bed. His face was slightly damp.
This is my body, I whispered to him.
It has been given up for you.
