Wanting a baby so much. Of course it would have been the wrong time. It did not happen then. Though it seemed the only thing that might mend me.
Someone to be there once the absences began to accumulate.
How to redeem the saddest of childhoods? How to become a mother when she had none?
She became a super mom. She gave us everything. Smothered with attention and love. Too much? Who can say? As a result of being over-loved I have become the person I am today. With little concern for other’s approval or acceptance. Little desire to fit in — an extraordinary gift, that freedom.
My father once said that my mother was never more happy than when she was pregnant — or more beautiful.
I feel claustrophobic. That the two of us can’t do this together anymore. Share the same body. I want to throw myself from my tiny attic garret onto Waterman Street and have it be over. I can’t breathe.
We are two hearts, four arms, four legs, two brains, four eyes, in one body. It’s the oddest thing. I don’t know how I’m supposed to walk around and go to school and act like an ordinary person.
As if I were not strange enough already — now, this eight-chambered heart.
The abundance of love I have always felt. Surfeit of emotion — now focused. An unborn music.
Such expectation.
The demands of love. Having poured it into my books without hesitation, only to find on completion that I had been refilled again.
Duras, Le Camion: “She might have said straight off there is no story outside love.”
Pregnancy. The attempt in part to keep the deaths of those one loves at bay. And in the case of the dead, to bring back — somehow.
Sat on a panel in Boston about the usual thing — writing on the fringe, breaking the rules. A little tedious in the end… My mind’s a blur these days. Increasingly I can’t remember things. A strange sensation — as if I were sloughing off all but the essential. And yet would I retain even the essential, I wonder? When members of the audience asked questions of us, their panel, I found it necessary to write the question down, because if another panelist answered first, I didn’t have a clue what it was I was supposed to talk about. Shouldn’t one learn to write traditionally first? — that sort of thing. I dislike making public pronouncements (though I’ve made plenty), but with my weird amnesia and laissez-faire attitude I felt little pain — well, less pain than usual. I am feeling increasingly free of everything that has constricted. That has conspired to keep me caged. Including myself. Amazing.
Dixie was there taking photos of my ever-evolving shape. Dixie, that sweet documenter. We drove back to Providence afterwards. I stretched out in the back seat happy as a cat.
I am at that stage where people politely notice that I have gained a lot of weight, but they are not quite sure I am pregnant. I blurt it out now at every turn: I am having a baby in June!
A panel at Columbia a few weeks earlier after which I swore I would never do one of these things again. So why do I? I imagine with a child all that is extraneous or false or simply silly will fall away. One can only hope.
I am struck at how engrossed I am in every detail of the pregnancy itself and yet have thought very little about the end result. Sometimes I think that after the nine months I will be finished, I will have accomplished a very great thing — and then it will be done. But of course, as everyone is all too happy to remind me, it will only be the beginning. The child at this point is still very, very abstract. I don’t know a thing about having a baby around. Not really. Not where I am the one in charge. But the pregnancy is so mesmerizing and I fall into simply taking it day by day. I will deal with the child once there is one. For now though I find that it is passing suddenly all too quickly and I want to slow it down, to stay in this, to prolong these feelings. Harbor, vessel, rose.
What moves inside my motion?
What beats so fiercely, insistently, saying here, here, I am here.
Love does, love does, love does.
Thinking of Judith and Zenka again. All our feelings so much on the surface — we cannot help it. Flirting together. They seventy and seventy-five at the time. How they protected me when they could — that terrible and wonderful summer. Rolling in sweet herbs with the next beautiful boy — feeling the end of all things. Waiting to get well. Having ended our life together, this time for good. Oh, Helen. Or so I thought. That autumn of the pot-au-feu. They held my hands. We gossiped about everyone and everything. We dreamt each day of how I might stay forever. I could take care of their dog, Rimbaud, while they were away. Swerving through the streets protected by that soulful golden retriever. Always another tearful good-bye at the airport in Nice. Always another joyful reunion at that same airport. Later the sadnesses would be in London — one of those British taxis — a cab ride in the rain. I remember thinking I had never seen such roses. This through terrible sorrow. Somehow London seemed an apt place to be sad.
The last time I had been there. Walking into that flat in Roe-hampton. We brought Zenka a birthday present from Paris. Two French engravings: Spring, Winter. Helen and I had come for the day, taking the Chunnel. We ate Indian food. At every table talk of the mad cow.
I direct the creative writing program as if I were Francis Coppola directing a film from his isolation chamber. It’s kind of wonderful to be so strangely free of the politics, the thousand discontents, the problems at every turn. This will be my last year as director. I must say I have not been exactly suited for the task — and now — I move through the days as if in a dream. Turning inward, sending forth instructions through a tiny microphone in my throat. Even a weirder director than before. If that’s possible.
Harboring a miracle, who can speak of mundane things? Though I know this is the most everyday and ordinary of miracles — or so they say. I can’t believe so many women have had children and so many seem rather blasé about the whole thing. Most people’s only contact with the sublime. Or perhaps they simply do not speak of such things in their conscious waking life, in which a hundred other obligations obscure the fact. Or they have put it aside. Or, as so many have put it: childbirth — a misery to be endured.
Someone tells me an outlandish story about a friend who schedules C-sections for herself in order to be spared the whole ordeal of birth. What is the word for the deliberate cutting off in oneself of those experiences that are potentially most profound in order to be spared pain? There must be a word in English, as it seems a particularly American trait.
And while we’re at it, what is the word in American for the similar phenomenon of deliberately cutting off a dream or potential for the simple reason that it is not profitable?
I am astounded to imagine what magic a woman’s body is capable of. Though I always suspected… Of course somewhere I always knew.
Always in the back of my mind the notion that I could still miscarry even if a charmed star hung over me on the night of her conception. Most unlikely and precious night.
A flood of blood — the only way to prepare — as I do in dreams — should something go wrong.