The true test: to be in Berkeley and not drink even one cup of coffee. The most delicious coffee in the country. No latte, no leche, no capuccino, no mocha, not short, not tall, not dry, not wet… A strange torture.
Attractions of every sort considerably heightened in this condition. All is intensity. Extremity. The word shudder comes to mind.
The lushness and lusciousness of everything.
Read at Saint Mary’s for Brenda Hillman. A delicious meal at Chez Panisse with a very fun bunch of people afterwards. Two pregnant women at our table. What a giddy, weird joy.
E. M. Ciorin:
Children scare me. Their eyes carry too many promises of unhappiness. Why do they want to grow up? Children, like madmen, are graced with innate genius, soon lost in the void of lucidity.
Does he sentimentalize and therefore condescend to both children and madmen?
My book Aureole just out in paperback. When I read out loud now without a microphone I can’t get enough breath in my lungs. The effect is a particularly unfortunate one, especially with this book, overheated, hothouse flower that it is.
One can only laugh.
The insistence of the heart, even through the whoosh of water, magnified on a little public address system in the doctor’s office. I’m beginning to gain weight now and am already enjoying the heft.
That time — a period of several months — when every man who neared me felt that pull, that tone, that hum. The zone of fertility, the buzz of readiness, the surge of absolute ripeness. The ancient desire to replicate propels them toward me — a little bewildered, they can’t stay away. I had the pick of the lot. Last summer and fall. The demands of an attraction they willingly and sometimes unwillingly found themselves caught up in. That smell, that touch, they were irresistibly drawn to — hovering near my body. I understand it now. The mating signals activated in me. And the men wild — they don’t know why. I am not young anymore and have not had quite this kind of power over men in some time. They might have chosen younger, more promising specimens. If there had been a choice. But there is none.
I walk in a delirium laughing and crying. My graduate students are suspicious for I have suddenly stopped drinking altogether. It hasn’t been so hard, though I did regret not being able to keep up with Harry Mathews, who was here recently for a week. An extraordinary man and one of the great joyful drinkers.
Already I have had moments of genuine mourning for my old life. Will I ever get it back again? I feel the immensity, the gravity of this even now.
My sister Cathy guesses immediately when I tell her I have something important to tell her. She is ecstatic. I think all women with children are somehow pleased when someone else joins their ranks. Company of sorts — this island of motherhood. The deep isolation of it on one level. I feel it already. Or is it just my natural predilection?
I’m eating bread with lavender honey. A hot chocolate. I’m petting a gray poodle. Eating new potatoes out of a glass bowl. Hoping.
I’m dreaming of France again.
In The American Woman in the Chinese Hat, I tried to write a novel that appeared desultory, like a memoir or notebook, a day book, a chronicle of a life as it unfolded. How difficult that was — to artfully make events seem random, senseless. To unmake while I was making. This kind of writing is such a new experience for me. Just allowing thoughts to occur, with a kind of coherence and randomness, without a concern for shapeliness of any kind. A weird feeling — like I should be doing some thing more here. All my tentacles on end. Hard to relax. To simply allow — it is something I am not at all practiced in. Oh, now I have a thought about — my kangaroo pouch — Well, OK, write it down!
A dream in which the entire animal kingdom paraded out displaying the various ways they carry their young.
Why, I also wonder, do I find myself protecting my privacy far more in this journal than in my fictions? I create a slightly pristine version of myself here. I need to consider the ordinary assumptions again about fiction and nonfiction. This interests me, having never written like this before.
A certain reserve. Protectiveness already. Becoming a mother.
I can begin to understand surrogate motherhood. So far at any rate. So much serenity. As if there had been a visitation by angels.
I wait for the quickening. That first flutter within. Feel part of some ancient process — women whispering, “It’s the quickening. She’s got the quickening.” I believe I have already felt the baby move, though the books say probably no. I feel exactly like a pioneer woman for some reason.
This flying inside one’s own body. The women are whispering.
Time for a small celebration! I have passed the first trimester without a hitch!
At Thanksgiving my mother wishing out loud for another grandchild. How can she love babies so much? I have got to tell them soon. Louis and Louise are here with us this year. They just moved nearby. I couldn’t be happier about it.
A strange dream last night. The message: “Go to sleep like the flowers.” Something elegiac about it.
I have finally told my parents. The first trimester up. Thanksgiving come and gone. I had wanted to tell them in person but have not been able to get home. And there seems no more delaying it. My sister Cathy has known for some time and can scarcely contain herself. I call them on the phone from my office, filled with both excitement and trepidation. Mom is delighted, if a little incredulous. Poor Dad, gasping like a ghost.
Of course my mother would have been happy even if I had stolen a baby from the Kmart, so desperate was she always that I have one. But this! She couldn’t be more thrilled, though she has to be a little tempered for my father, who is having a harder time integrating the news. My mother says he hasn’t spoken for days. It is not convention, but it is something, something that is troubling him.
My friend Mirielle, when thinking of adopting a half-white, half-black baby from the South. Her mother: They throw babies like that away in the garbage and you want to adopt one! Now of course she is madly in love with the child.
Stretched out she might fit on a thumbnail now. I like to think of her stretched out and floating in there on a little raft perhaps.
As Christmas nears. My favorite season. A father’s fear. A mother’s delight. I am their child. First born.
Nothing to dispel the strangeness that we were seven people in one house late at night, dreaming our dreams. My family.
At twelve weeks she turns away from anything that touches her. Avoids rather than seeks. Her eyes are closed. She floats.
Ten years ago in the midst of a profound depression/breakdown. When I surface at last, after much, much suffering, why is the “solution” always children?
Why shouldn’t the old models, which are working with less and less success, be challenged — the world reimagined? Heterosexual privilege and power — and all its attendant rigmarole. Such a system, if it were to be taken seriously, would have precluded me from having a child. Luckily I have never taken it even the least bit seriously.