Why am I all the way up here?
I wish Helen were here to take my hand as we take off.
On the small plane now. Too late I realize it was a mistake to come. Feeling very strange. Strange indigestion. Why did I think this was worth the risk? Have decided I will drive back with Robin instead of flying again. It will be fun to spend time with her.
Ten years ago this spring. Robin was there. I walked the streets of Vence — a complete folle. Hanging on to that notebook for dear life. Season of the Bal des Pompiers, Front National, the three thieves. Stephane. Thought if I carried his child I’d be saved.
In last night’s dream the way I know I am in premature labor is that everything on the TV is backward and upside down. The frantic search for a TV at Penn State as a result today in order to verify that I am OK. How I hate the specificity of dreams. The exactitude of their demands, their clarity, their obviousness. The way they can convince you that absolutely anything is plausible.
Good Friday. Prayers to Saint Clare.
Interview with Publishers Weekly. PW has always been smart about my books and I do not take that for granted. Seemed very interested in this as my first “mainstream” book, and yet it seemed the interviewer wanted to hear very little about what I actually had to say about this. Not sexy enough, I suppose. My mythic hydra-headed self a lot more entertaining, I guess.
The conventionality of children — the hubris of boys — even the sweet ones. Nicholas, my nephew, four years old, as mild a boy as is possible to find, asks, How did you get the baby? I tell him the same as everyone gets one. Then you were married? I say you don’t have to be married to have a baby. No. And he says after thinking about it for a minute, Get married. Emily, his sister, the more opinionated and vocal one usually, just listens. Having no comment, but sensing — sensing what? The authority and judgments of little boys — even at age four. Something in the genetic code? Or the socialization process? Or perhaps it is a survival instinct? Little dictators. Even the sweetest of them. Get married, the baby patriarch commands.
On the other hand my seven-year-old niece Katie gleefully announces to her class, My aunt is having a baby and she didn’t even have to get married! She thinks this is one of the greatest things she’s ever heard.
Finally I’ve left Providence for the country to sit on my nest full time. It is the waiting now that is beautiful. This handful of days left. The absence of distraction.
In what we imagined paradise, serenity — spring in the country — a tick burrows its way into the back of my leg while I am out gardening.
Louis and Louise in their utmost kindness. They are wondering what helpful thing they can do next. They have prepared me little chickens. They have read me interesting things from magazines until I’ve drifted off to sleep. Now, Louise has found a gargantuan African dress in her closet for me to put on.
The questions of who am I and why am I here and all the rest give way now to what is a layette, and how long do you boil an egg?
How remote Defiance and all that rage seem to me now. It is as if all of a sudden someone in my head has adjusted the controls.
A robin redbreast sits on her nest in the giant rhododendron outside my bathroom window that was once filled with snow. How intent she looks sitting there. I stand on top of the toilet seat to see the eggs. Three.
Rose in waiting. Rose on the verge.
I love the seasons. How one thing turns into another. It is for me where all hopefulness lies. In the transformations.
The other thing that always kept me from having a baby: I never could imagine a future of any kind — and I do not quite know why. No future, no future for you. Johnny Rotten and the Sex Pistols sang my mantra in those years. It was before I began writing in earnest — when I was still completely lost. Could not imagine living. Not until 1986, when Gary died. After that it would take another twelve years to be ready to consider a child. To trust the notion of future. My God! At the pace I move.
Another aspect I notice is the belief in a self a journal necessarily implies. Confirmation of a construction I am not quite sure is real.
An odd time. Who do I concoct in these pages as the protagonist?
The teller of tales — and who do I assume will be interested? Do I write this solely for myself? How disingenuous am I, without knowing it?
Dr. Rehrer, who has not been around much at all, has now dropped out altogether. She has lupus. New York magazine has just named her one of the city’s best doctors. She laughed cynically. She’ll have to close her practice. I will stay with Dr. Matheson. Some say he does not have the bedside manner, but that he is the best. I am over forty. Not interested in bedside manner, hate sympathy, support groups, sharing, reaffirmations, etc. He’s my man: black, early middle age, and as calm as can be, the most natural thing in the world.
I turn my thoughts toward childbirth now. Begin to read.
In a flash I see you risen —
my sore rose Eros — ecstatic
in the mounting flush, a volcano
under snow, crowing to greet
the dawn within you.
The floating technique.
“The contractions seem to be coming in waves now, so it is valuable to think of relaxing the whole body and letting it float up to the peak of a contraction’s strength so you can just slip over the top” (from a Bradley Method pamphlet).
It sounds thrilling in a way and I realize I have waited my whole life for this.
Baby care class at St. Vincent’s. As I have not a clue what to do with a baby once a baby is produced. Sitting in a room of pregnant women and their mates. The husbands seem pale, shadowy, ghosts of themselves. Helen’s gone up to work on the house, so I am here alone. It’s fine with me. I like the space to think my thoughts, to dream. No running commentary necessary. These ordinary women all made extraordinary by their state. The power of eight pregnant women in one room — if we could harness that power it seems we might do anything — cleanse rivers, stop wars, bring on world peace. I notice what a secret this is kept. How belittled pregnant women are by our culture. How taken for granted. It doesn’t surprise me.
These women. I forget for a minute that they are really just human. Shocked to hear one of them being catty and insensitive when talking to a couple in the room who is about to adopt. Yet even she somehow mysteriously transcends her own mediocrity — carrying a miracle as she is.
A white room. Eight states of grace.
Despite themselves they radiate mystery, incredible darkness and light. I must say they all seem dull when they speak, but they are doing this miraculous work.
The miracle of us in that room.