My students still don’t know what they will never be. Their hope is so bright I can almost see it.
I used to value the truth of whether this student or that one would achieve the desired thing. I don’t value that truth anymore as much as I value their untested hope. I don’t care that one in two hundred of them will ever become what they feel they must become. I care only that I am able to witness their faith in what’s coming next.
I no longer believe in anything other than the middle, but my students still believe in beginnings. Ask them, and they will tell you that everything is about to start in just a moment, just one more moment.
That beginner’s hope, the hope that ends with the first failure — when I was with the baby I felt that hope all the time. ♦
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Trapped in a party conversation with two young people, I wanted to wait with them in the smoky hallway for fifteen years so I could hear what they’d say when they were forty. ♦
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In another dream my tiny toothless son had all his teeth. I’d looked away long enough for all the teeth to emerge, even the back molars, the teeth beating time in months, in years, his full jaws a pink-and-white timepiece.
In the next dream his downy hair had grown very long and I needed to cut it off with dull scissors. Again his body had recorded time passing, time that had escaped my notice. ♦
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For months the baby woke at seven, fed, fell asleep at eight thirty, woke at ten, fed, fell asleep at eleven thirty, and so on for the rest of the day. I’d made him into a milk clock.
Every hour was part of a ritualized ceremony of adding or subtracting milk. A river of milk flowed in and out and around him. He floated down the milk river toward the rest of his life. ♦
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One explanation for the loss of preverbal memories maintains that after acquiring language, one forgets how to access those preverbal memories.
As I watched the baby play with his toys I remembered an orange plastic panel fixed to the rails of my own crib. A round red rubber air bladder the size of my fingertip. A bell. A black-and-white crank that clicked. A blue-and-red sphere that spun fast in its housing and looked purple.
My brain had stored this memory — all the textures and colors and shapes and sounds. If you had asked me six months earlier if it were possible to retain infant memories into adulthood I would have said no, but I carried this memory without looking at it for thirty-eight years. ♦
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As I fed the baby with a little spoon I remembered a spoon scraping dribbled food from my chin and tipping it back into my mouth. That dribbled food, already tasted and diluted with saliva, never tasted good.
What else was on the orange panel? The bell and the crank and the spinning ball rang and cranked and spun. The air bladder forced the clapper up. I could see it moving up and striking the silver bell anchored by its silver bolt.
I remembered wanting to press the little red bladder again, again, again. Spinning the ball again, again, again. Wanting to see the purple. Wanting to hear the bell. I liked that it kept ringing.
Then I remembered a mirror.
I believed I was trying to remind myself of how it had felt to be wordless, completely of the physical world — that even before my body was an instrument for language it had been an instrument for memory. ♦
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It used to be that things always reminded me of a lot of other things.
Then, for eighteen months or so, they didn’t. In the diary I recorded only facts. Minutes of nursing, ounces of milk, hours of sleep.
Things were just themselves. I was too exhausted or hormone-drunk or depressed to think of anything that resembled anything else.
That’s how things appear to an infant. ♦
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One postpartum day it took me forever to remember the word obsolete. Another day, suggestible. Another, fennel. Does the mother of an infant need a smaller lexicon? Does she need a specifically limited lexicon? Did I not need to think about fennel then? About abstractions? ♦
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I remember from childhood that, from the point of view of a child, a mother is a fixed entity, a monolith, not a changing, evolving human organism who is qualitatively similar, in many ways, to a young person.
Recently I became not quantifiably old but qualitatively old. Old as a state of being. As an acceptance that I’ve more or less become the person I had a chance to become.
I’ve been basically the same person since I had my son. I know this isn’t true for all new mothers, especially those who are younger than I am (and most of them are). But I feel like a monolith now. I’ve emerged from a gauntlet, and it has something to do with having become a mother, and it has something to do with having become qualitatively old, and it has something to do with having run out of time and life to perceive and ruminate and record my minutes and days in the diary.
What I’m saying is that I have become, in a way, inured to the passage of time. I’m not really paying attention to what’s happening to me anymore — no longer observing steadfastly the things that have changed since yesterday. ♦
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I’m watching my little son change, though, from day to day and minute to minute. Watching him learn things is like watching a machine become intelligent, or an animal become a different animal. It’s terrifying and beautiful, and this has all been said before.
On the island where my husband grew up and where his mother lived and died, we see a rainbow every day. Not just a segment of a rainbow fading in and out but the whole bright bow of it, sometimes in double and triple arcs. Rainbows are so common there, they print them on the drivers’ licenses. They are no less amazing for their prevalence. Ditto birds, trees, stars, clouds, children, and so on. To the laws of supply and demand the real world is immune. ♦
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When the baby was eight months old, I realized I’d stopped identifying with the man saying Hi, Mom! and felt myself becoming the mother who hears him say it, the mother who will someday leave her boy alone. ♦
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The essential problem of ongoingness is that one must contemplate time as that very time, that very subject of one’s contemplation, disappears.
My prose began to judge or summarize its subject before it took any time to observe that subject. I couldn’t help attaching that tendency to the subject itself: the wild velocity of motherhood, an enforced momentum forbidding contemplation.
The tendency to summarize rather than to observe and describe — would taking that time to observe and describe be selfish, wasteful, nonmaternal time?
Is it possible to truly observe one’s own child, as a writer must, while also simultaneously loving him? Does a mother have something like writer’s block—perceiver’s block? ♦
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