My husband’s phone rang. It was his stepsister, calling from his mother’s hospital room. Yes, he said. A few moments later he said, Hi, Mom! I hadn’t heard him say it for days. My heart beat hard, as if it knew. ♦
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My husband photographs everything: bound hanks of insulated wire on the train platform, clouds at sunset out the jet window, the shape of my foot as I sleep.
When he was fired from his job, he cleared off his hard drives. Then he gave back the company’s computers. That night he discovered he’d forgotten to copy the last photographs he’d ever taken of his mother.
In one of the lost photographs, she holds her head in her hand. She turns toward the glass doors that open onto the porch over the canal. She is skeletal, her body no longer able to derive nutrition from food.
She looks uncharacteristically hopeless, as if the picture represented the moment that she, who had outlived her sudden-death prognosis by five years, would not go on. ♦
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She was given twenty-four hours to live on the day I was told my cervix was 50 percent effaced.
Three weeks before her only grandchild was born, she joined her old horse, who had fallen suddenly ill only months before and was awaiting her patiently in the earth. ♦
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Then I became a mother. I began to inhabit time differently. It had something to do with mortality. I kept writing the diary, but my worry about the lost memories began to subside. ♦
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Nursing an infant creates so much lost, empty time. Of the baby’s nighttime feeds I remember nothing. Of his daytime feeds I remember almost nothing.
It was a different nothing from the unrecorded nothing of the years before; this new nothing was absent of subjective experience. I was either asleep or almost asleep at all times.
Day and night consisted of the input and output of milk, often in an emergency, but the emergencies all resembled each other. At dawn I noticed a pile of tiny damp blankets and tiny damp clothes on the nursery floor, but I never remembered replacing the green shirt with the yellow one.
In my experience nursing is waiting. The mother becomes the background against which the baby lives, becomes time.
I used to exist against the continuity of time. Then I became the baby’s continuity, a background of ongoing time for him to live against. I was the warmth and milk that was always there for him, the agent of comfort that was always there for him.
My body, my life, became the landscape of my son’s life. I am no longer merely a thing living in the world; I am a world. ♦
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In my twenties I stopped to write every time I happened upon beauty. It was an old-fashioned project. Romances were examined in detail. Each one was new.
My thirties were filled not by romance but by other writing. In the diary I logged the words I wrote and the light or heavy passes I took through existing manuscripts. Virtuous activities such as exercise and housekeeping also were logged. The rhapsodies of the previous decade thinned out.
Toward the end of my thirties and into my forties, entries became further abbreviated. Most of the sentences started with verbs. I is omitted from as many sentences as possible, occurring only for emphasis. I logged work and health — symptoms, medications, side effects. Housekeeping was no longer noted. If I read or looked at or heard something extraordinary, I named it, but as one ages, fewer things fall into this category. Reflection disappeared almost completely.
Of a concert by a band I’ve liked for almost twenty years, listened to most recently about five years ago, but never seen live until this week, I wrote only Still know every word. Twenty years ago, the sentence would have been twenty sentences.
Though I try to log only the first time he does yet another extraordinary thing, the diary is now mostly about my son. ♦
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Sometimes the baby fed at seven thirty and cried until feeding again at eight thirty.
My life had been replaced with a mute ability to wait for the next minute, the next hour.
I had no thoughts, no self-awareness, just an ability to sit with a little creature who screamed and screamed.
Waiting for the baby to feed or stop feeding or burp or pass wind or yellow liquid shit I postponed showers, phone calls, bowel movements. I ignored correspondence because I had no energy even to say I am so tired, and no one cared that I was tired — who isn’t tired? Before I had the baby I remember feeling tired all the time. But after he joined me I could spend four days in two rooms, pajama-clad, so tired I was almost blind. ♦
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I used to be twenty. Then I was twenty-one, twenty-two, and so on. And then I became a mother and could no longer even distinguish the difference between twenty-one and twenty-two or the difference between thirty-eight and thirty-nine.
I was at once softer and harder. The hardness was a capacity for pain that would otherwise have interrupted the soft, almost bodiless calm in which I held the baby. ♦
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Soon after his mother died, my husband’s dead father’s best friend’s ex-wife died. The best friend is the only one left. My husband said the man’s name. That leaves him, my husband said. That leaves him, of the people who have known me since I was born. And then my childhood will be truly gone. ♦
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Another friend wrote to ask all the desperate questions I used to ask before I became a mother. How old were you? How long were you married? How long did it take?
I wrote back, One of the great solaces of my life is that I no longer need to wonder whether I’ll have children. ♦
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Time kept reminding me that I merely inhabit it, but it began reminding me more gently.
In a dream I found an old-fashioned windup metronome on my desk. A man’s voice behind me: Is that really a metronome on your desk?
In another dream an old woman told me that at my age, she wished she’d known that the soul never stops appearing. ♦
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Perhaps it was all the years studying the piano repertoire of the great prodigies, or perhaps it was studying alongside some actual prodigies — one of them was blind — but when I turned seventeen I became convinced I had fallen into a life of irreversible failure.
The stench of failure — I felt it coming to cover me.
Now I am old enough to know what I’ll never accomplish. I will never be a soldier, a physicist, a thousand other things. It feels like relief.
Sometimes I feel a twinge, a memory of youthful promise, and wonder how I got here, of all the places I could have got to.
I use my landlady’s piano as a writing desk. ♦
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