Always knew I wanted to have the experience of pregnancy. I am too much body to have missed out on such an event. Maso is flesh in Slovak, a lover once told me.
That extreme winter of vodka and snow and oblivion. His cigarettes and cynicism. He was a kind man. And I was wild back then.
He hurt me terribly and possibly inadvertently a few years back and we parted ways. I miss him.
When I write every day I never remember my dreams. But now that the writing has become sporadic, my dreams come streaming back. They are not altogether welcome, I might add.
She turns from amphibian to fish to bird to person.
I grow happily, happily rotund. I negotiate the curves gracefully.
This for me feels like a natural state. The easy happiness that has always, always eluded me. My intensities smoothed over a little. The sorrow modulated.
This peace. My friends, who have watched me struggle for years trying to think of ways to make money while I wrote, say, had you known, you could have been a surrogate mother every year, and written to your heart’s content. And have been well.
In another life I might have had five children, like my mother. But I do not have another life. And I miss writing. Nothing, not even this, can take its place. That dark radiance. It is as beautiful as anything I have ever known. It brings me to a place of unearthly happiness. I have not forgotten…
Who could she have spoken to about that flood of feelings? Or about her growing body? Or her fears? Having already had two miscarriages. How could she not have believed it was just a part of the sorrow that seemed to follow her. The saddest of all childhoods. Mother. She rarely spoke of it. But the illness and death of one’s mother at a young and crucial age must mark forever the way the world is experienced. A sorrowful place. Where was the solace? My father — yes, in part. Her religion. But who could she really speak to about these matters? Her sister? We were company, she said that more than once. Her brood of children. But how were we company? I think of her otherworldly isolation. And yet it is true she was always utterly present with us. So much so that each of us felt like an only child. How is it possible?
To write without embellishment. Without concern for the larger shapes. To simply record. And to have that be enough. That I was here. And that this, this most extraordinary and ordinary thing, happened to me once. It seems in this state more possible to do this than ever before. To just be. And write from there. Without grander schemes or plans for the text. Another freedom. To enjoy it as long as it lasts. It won’t last forever of course. Relish it.
Meanwhile Frida languorously waits. So unlike me to have lost the compulsion to compose at that level. It’s part of the letting go. Even the things that are most pressing or most dear become a little lost — not in a bad way.
This is the story of two souls in transit: the music of the spheres —
Provincetown, the dunes: I am walking through drifts and drifts of sand toward the ocean, aware of its presence, surrounded by it, caressed by it, the feel of it, the smell — and yet it is some distance away, still out of reach.
I offend some of those friends who have neglected to have children, in ways I naively could not have predicted. Who do you think you are? I serve as a painful reminder. Time passes. And all opportunity. Everything is ephemeral, fleeting — over before we know it.
The ocean in winter. How Ilene and I let it ravage us. Years ago already. Will we have children? we wondered over the riot of surf. Yes. Maybe. We were like schoolgirls together. A little shy. Whispering in the dark, every hope, every fear. Almost every fear.
I tell her about the baby. She is more thrilled than anyone, it seems. She has a five-year-old son and is somewhat lonely in it. I will be company — and she for me. It’s possible this child will bring us back together — as was always meant to be.
Wishing in summer for the negative numbers, attracted to the below zero, I agreed to come up here near the Canadian border for a week of teaching. Careful of the ice. I work hard and try to stay focused on the student papers. Also need to complete an essay for Jason. I must say I’m not sure I have the powers of concentration. I’ll just have to let that dictate the way the piece goes. What are my choices? I don’t know why I agree ever to write an essay. I always suffer them — though I’m happy after they are done to have a record of sorts of the person I once was. I’ve gotten a second wind this trimester, which is a lucky thing since there is a lot of work to do up here.
I resist reading Defiance out loud. Not in front of the one who is still forming. The book feels that visceral, that poisonous to me. The pages burn in my hands. It broke my heart to write. Unlike any of the other books. A harrowing process. I don’t want her to hear my voice spitting out those grim syllables.
Usually I get a little crazy around the time a book is coming out — but it’s different this time. I am not really so invested in it. It will be out in May and I will be eight months pregnant. This will preclude my traveling to “promote” it and nothing could make me happier. It is an undue burden I usually feel compelled to take on. Sorry, not this time. A great excuse — no airplane will carry me in the eighth month of pregnancy. Quelle dommage! I must say it does now feel like the pregnancy has taken — and that there will actually be a baby. I know there are premature births and every other kind of mishap still to move through — but I’m not worried anymore. And Defiance? It is a tough book. It can take care of itself.
At what week is the baby viable?
It presents itself as an angular shape in my mind — the next corner to turn. I try to prepare myself for the next possible thing and then the next, every step of the way. Premature birth.
Late in the seventh month you are viable, I have found out.
Steve Moore, my former editor at Dalkey Archive, calls her Baby Defiance.
Those my age, in serious mid-life crisis mode, their children grown, look at me a bit bewildered. To have gone about this in such a strange fashion. But to have had children young — for me it seemed not unimaginable, but simply not possible. The kind of mother I would have been back then: resentful, depressed, detached, enraged, indifferent.
“What is known is that she liked and was good at talking to children (there are many witnesses to this), that she often bitterly regretted not having them, and that she never consoled herself with the belief that her books were a substitute or an equivalent. These feelings would surface whenever she was depressed. In her deepest plunges into ‘melancholy’ or a sense of failure, she always uttered the words ‘children’: ‘It’s having no children,’ it’s ‘a desire for children.’”
— from the Hermione Lee biography of Virginia Woolf
“I put my life blood into writing, she (Vanessa) had children.”
To wait — it was not such a calculated risk, considering the options. All along I was willing to forgo it all entirely. It is why I am so good at getting jobs, I think: I am perfectly content not to have the job at all.
Once, when I was sure I was pregnant and far too young to consider such a thing but dreaded the options, Helen said, We do not have to decide right away, and she took me to a Yankees game — an oddly consoling thing — and held my hand. The father a good friend of ours. She had known about the affair.