Salad Baby

When we’d put off her first bath embarrassingly long enough, I finally placed the wailing newborn in my parents’ oversized stainless steel salad bowl, on their deck, in the fishhook of August heat. I counted to ten: a newborn bath should take about as long as roasting a marshmallow, or dipping cantaloupe in chocolate fondue. 

 “Delay” is the recommendation for the bath in the hospital. Always late to the party, we “delayed” almost an entire moon cycle, until Mercury was in bath-e-grade. During a particularly ragged 3AM feed, I paced in the thinning dark, nursing her while walking to stay awake, when suddenly, the vanishing stars became didactic. Orion lashed my consciousness with his scar-crossed belt: BATHE HER! (Ya know-it-all-male-bastard, how about you get your ass down here and try?). The Big Dipper dangled like Damocles sword, an accusatory oversized diaper pail. Aren’t you going to at least DIP her in something water-like? I was a trash parent, wasn’t I? I could handle this. 

With the baby draped over my shoulder, I hunted through the cabinets for something usable. It seemed safe enough: stainless steel is gleamingly nontoxic. You can’t really slip or drown in a salad bowl, unless you try very very very hard, something newborns are not known for. For me, a diehard vegetable-aholic, the bowl held congenial associations, if you find Earth Bound mixed spring lettuces and cucumber comforting. 

Once the sun rose and I “filled” the bowl, she just barely fit in it, the water displaced along the line of her belly, and the WTF look spreading across her face like a second, way less satisfying dawn. Try new things with infants in the morning, right?  If you can call placing someone in dishware with an inch of water in it bathing, it was successful, ish. I couldn’t tell if I was resourceful or completely useless. 

Read the rest on my substack, MOTHERINK. (Become a free or paid subscriber!). See you there.

To The A-Hole In The Pool Lane, Before My Cesarean

When I was 8 months pregnant and my rogue pinky toe was broken, a lane-hogging swimmer, an older man with a bushy mustache and an algae bloom of chest hair, tapped my shoulder blade percussively as I clung to the pool wall after completing a lap. "Maybe you should go in the slow lane instead?" He suggested, huffing his water droplets all over me. 

"Or maybe you should go in the asshole lane?" I replied, as if trying out the next general theory of matter. In it, people like him would show unprecedented atomic density.  I held up fake binoculars and sought bluer pastures across the plastic separators. 

His black fins sent torrents of water sloshing over the perimeter of the pool, making it impossible for someone to swim even a near distance behind him. Would you swim in the wake of Cuisinart blades?  The asshole always needs to make a splash.

He blinked, pushed off the wall, and began his next flailing lap, propulsed by his self-righteousness, which was as pronounced and visible as an Achilles tendon. As a slightly anemic and very pregnant person, it took me as long to catch my breath as it had to swim the 25 yards. Maybe he was right. 

My overstretched bikini bottom (but do you honestly buy another one this late in pregnancy? My theory is always: no) dragged behind me when I dove under the water, and the refracted light was a coronation on no one, nothing. I loved that moment before I ran out of breath, which would go on to characterize 98 percent of my birth.  
In truth: the asshole lane is open longer than all of the others and is always crowded, because every row is theirs and (your) time is nothing (and not in the liberating way) to them. They are not hard to spot, like a hammerhead shark in a jelly jar. Most are ableist, sexist, and notably horrible at the breaststroke. The dividing line painted down the middle of the pool floor-- which stands for basic principles of sharing & caring -- is irrelevant. Why notice what doesn’t apply to you?  

I’ve heard that same tone of surety when (some!) OB's in the MIC speak to clients, or to me. Pretending to be a lifeguard, their suggestions are too often demeaning threats. In order not to drown, we might contort around their ego’s deliberately exaggerated and space-hogging crawl. Or we accept the ladder they are holding out, despite not having signed up to be saved. 

My baby hung from my belly in the water, the weight lifted off my back and legs, and my uterus felt, briefly, like it could evade the ravages of gravity. I tried to focus on the beautiful things behind and ahead and the sharp peck of chlorine in my nose. I imagined all the children who had peed here, their low-grade biohazard (parenting, you realize pee is the least worrisome bodily fluid) dissipated by the paradox of harsh chemicals that keep us, the public, somehow healthy enough.

It's a terrible thought that you might not make it to the end of the lane, to the touching of the  wall that weeps differently, to your recovery breaths. That you might not recover. It's a terrible thought that, confident you could cut through the sensations, you might just dematerialize, decompose, drift apart like spit fronds in a rushing river.

But assholes energize me. No sooner had he made his next pivot than I lapped him. Mild Anemia be damned. My baby, whoever they were, should know how to handle assholes too. And definitely never to be one. As he crashed towards me, panting, more donkey than dolphin, I tapped his shoulder blade (like unto like) before he completed his final stroke. Should I pee right there, to highlight my announcement? What could he do? The chlorine would not protect his dignity.  

"I'm 8 months pregnant, asshole," I reported. "How fast would you swim if you were carrying three chain-saws?” I pushed off with the non-broken foot, and began a languorous doggy paddle just ahead of him, moving slowly, awkwardly and flaccidly enough that each palm, on its downstroke, gave effleurage to the baby's uterine domain.  He spluttered at me. I was a Noh performance, on quaaludes. He could wait. 

Originally, I planned to give birth at home in an inflated pool, perfect blue, the plastic elephant in the room. Instead, half-submerged in the lukewarm water, I felt like someone was driving a stake up into my pelvis. “ASSHOLE!!!!!” I might have yelled at God, who quietly made more room for me to be me in our shared aqueduct. 

At the darkest midnight of my labor, where I expected to experience a deep surrender to the tide, everything felt crass, debilitated, sharp. The wrong direction, the wrong texture. But wasn’t I in the optimal medium for the smooth, fleshy baby to wrangle its way out, traveling from original waters to expressly recruited tap waters? Wasn’t my body sort of made for this? 

In those brutal hours begging for mercy in the birth pool, I cried: the fucking waterbirth website lied! If this is reduced pain, what is pain? If this is maternal satisfaction, what is misery? The water trembled, my husband gave counterpressure like a boulder gives to the earth, but the baby–yield and breathe and holler and whistle-blow as we might– would not change lanes. There was no other lane but the one we were traveling. 

Later I knew: it was too slow. I was too slow, then too fast, too fast. Later I understood: the light was coming through anyway, dazzling, dappling, broken, salvatory, an invisible coronation. The baby was not supposed to come out in that context. The asshole was not supposed to make way for me, nor was his wake supposed to christen me as anything lesser than a powerful being encasing a powerful being, albeit in an underwhelming nylon bikini. Sometimes, the pace is not up to us. Sometimes, our most heroic gesture is to swim in the other direction, displacing the space our old self was suspended in. 

***
AFTERWORD

**Because I’m a labor doula, I want to differentiate my experience from the data:  the waterbirth website didn’t lie at all. There are many deeply positive effects of laboring and birthing in water. However, we can feel betrayed in our birth when our experiences differ radically from what we hoped or expected. I would recommend waterbirth to someone who is interested and for whom that is a safe option. My first baby experienced a cord prolapse, a very rare medical emergency, and was born (thankfully safely) by emergency cesarean after a homebirth transfer.

https://evidencebasedbirth.com/waterbirth/

She just needs a flower

My 4 y/o completely lost her s*&t on the cold-ass street, jellyfishing and refusing to not refuse to walk. We were about to miss pickup for my 7 y/o from his DOE school bus, which waits for no one, and I was not feeling her not feeling it– like, at all.

But then this shopkeeper stuck his head out of the flower shop, in front of which her fit was unfolding with impressively vast limbic inflection for someone only on her 1200th day of life or so. He asked, “Does she need a flower?”

The surprise cut her off from her operatic emotional outburst. Well of-fahking course she does! THAT WAS THE PROBLEM ALL ALONG! NOT ENOUGH FLORAL TONES AROUND HERE! She stared at him, too much of a yes to say yes. “Be right back!” He reassured me. My frustration was carbonated. No prob! Timely! He popped back into his expensive-as-all-high-hell flower shop. The door jangled. I could not afford these minutes, but I could not afford to not have the flower happen.

We stared. Sure enough, jangle-jangle, he came back out with a fat-petaled purple tulip and peach-pink rose, dewdrops still in formation, and handed them to her with a robust smile, and that salesman inner knowing that I would buy overpriced plants from him for the rest of my days. “Hope it works!” he winked at me.

She took them, awe creeping across her face: “My favorite clolors!”[sic]- and she sheltered them in her jacket all the way to the bus, fit interrupted, fit forgotten. “Look!” she whispered to the flowers, or to me, or to everyone. The wind *clolored* in her face a deep wounded red, but the flowers were and remained perfectly intact and undisturbed.

I could milk this experience for analogies forever, but a few things stick out:

1. When the emotions are too big to bear, give someone a flower.

2. When the emotions are too big to bear, a little act of beauty can help a whole lot.

3. He totally didn’t need to give her the flower.

4. If you want people to buy shit from you, help them through a very tough moment.

5. It was March and he had a sign on his shop door that mother’s day was May 14th. Plan ahead!

#parenting #emotions #beauty #protips #tantrums

My Regards to the Monitor

Hours after I had the baby, Dr. F told the monitor near my face that it was very sick and would need a blood transfusion. I felt bad for the monitor, such a rough start to the day– it was only 5:30AM. 

I could smell life: some people were having toasted onion bagels with cream cheese falling out the sides or hospital hazelnut Keurig coffee which burned their tongues. Other people were being transfused. The monitor had worked hard all night in emergency childbirth. For what? 

Minutes later, when the monitor didn’t respond or react to his announcement, I realized he meant me, I was very sick, he just hadn’t thought to look down 45 degrees to where my face was.

I didn’t think I could get up from the hospital bed anyway. The fact that the bed could be completely broken down was the only reason I had confidence I’d ever not be in it. My sacrum was one with the thin padding they referred to as “mattress.” I tried to explain this to Dr. F but it came out like this: “OK.”

I wasn’t on drugs, exactly. I mean drugs were in me– morphine, and rights to tap the pump further- but I felt nothing like a person on them. It was like the drugs were scoping out my vascular system, an apartment they were considering renting, but it turned out the infrastructure was kind of shitty, and there were exposed wires in the kitchen– so, no.

Dr. F left to go make other statements other places, and some family who were around held my hands and tried to show me pictures of the newborn in his little bin, and that was helpful, because in theory there was a beautiful tiny fighter of a person who had come out of me and he was in a different room, that was all.

I didn’t actually understand what transfusion meant or why I was suddenly sick except that emergency surgery is always a roll of the dice, so when the doctor eventually came back, I asked why and how and what, and he nodded at the monitor. I guess his procedure was not the rushing and yelling kind of transfusion that I remembered from the show ER. But oh how I wished George Clooney was here, because he would definitely take my questions, or blink compassionately at me with his lifesaving and only-slight-egotistical big eyes.

Being inside the ambulance hearing the siren is very different than being outside. On the streets, your adrenaline and empathy stirs, even raising hairs, and you are fleetingly aware of some of the most profound human misfortunes, and maybe cover your ears. Inside the ambulance, you are the peristaltic movement of misfortune. You are misfortune’s etiology. You may have had your last toasted bagel, and you reckon with that in a metal box traveling at the highest permissible speed. 

When Dr. F came back back for the third time, the monitor had gone to sleep. In my memory, he apologized. He didn’t want to wake up the monitor. It’s against hospital policies for postpartum people to get satisfying naps, but monitors, no problem. They need a little recovery time. But also: I wasn’t sick. It was a mistake. They had retaken my iron. My iron levels were fine. Lab error. Oops. Happens sometime. My blood was red. The sky was blue. The sheet was white. And the baby was alive, and I was going to see him, in his little incubator box, his little eyes programmed to find my eyes, and stay. 

**

Still making sense of your birth? Want to get it all out, the way you remember it? The gorgeous and the difficult? In your “Tell Your Birth Story” session, we do just that, and you receive a complete narrative record as a keepsake. Flexible scheduling link is sent with your purchase receipt. 

Lil Placenta

My four year-old daughter held out the bright red slime she’d pilfered from my son’s Valentine’s Day goodie bag. “Look, it’s a placenta!” 

Well, no, it was actually just slime. The placenta is more formidable. Heavier. A different kind of party favor. But at our house, we don’t use cute pseudonyms for things bodies do and are. Biology comes to the dinner table, and knows the fork from the spoon from the sex-iled knife.  

One time, I transported my labor client’s freshly delivered placenta in a soft cooler bag, on ice, on the bus. Another rider shoved past me, pushing the cooler out of my hand. 

“CAREFUL WITH MY PLACENTA,” I whisper-shouted (“my” in the loose sense). Because it’s New York City, the commuter– a guy– did not blink. 

All the way uptown on the bus, I felt like I had a secret in the silver insulated bag, held by its too-small plastic handles– and I kind of did. But only as much of a secret as any of us have who cart around a heart all day. A brain. A wedge of sadness they just can’t swallow. 

Now my daughter twirled through the apartment with the beginnings of a reproductive agenda, the red slime in a repurposed take-out container, like a misplaced sacrament. There used to be Lashevet’s babaganoush in there. From Eggplant to egg sustainer.  

Generally, I don’t really do take out. It’s Home kitchen all the way, and green vegetable panacea. I’m very aware that these cheap plastic containers easily degrade. Claw their way into your food– your organs– your (in the loose sense) placenta. Yet manufacturers make these little containers the perfect size for future storage. A convenience slowly poisoning the planet, for the sake of transportable hummus. 

When you order for 6+ hungry people (blended family, many appetites) the containers are fruitful and multiply. Once emptied, you can nest them in a planet-defying tower, like vertebrae without a body to hold up. But children can do anything with anything. 

The four year old admired the shape-shifting organ of which she was now the only Keeper. 

Little Rules, my 7 year-old, insisted, “That’s NOT a placenta, you can’t just keep calling it one!” His brain works like a deli meat slicer. “That’s like saying an elephant is a speck of dust.” 

Little Pleasure refuted his argument by shaking her head until she fell over.

Little Rules felt the power of his first analogy and immediately upgraded, “That’s like calling a mouse a LION. It’s not a thing just because YOU SAID IT IS.” 

Oh? Isn’t that what writers do? 

Little Pleasure was not dissuaded, “It’s a placenta from mommy’s body. And you can’t touch it!”

Yes, I’d lost two of those glorious, multi-talented organs that support and maintain incipient life. The shared, indisputable arbiters of survival. Both to the hospital pathology bin. I didn’t touch either. One I never even viewed. 

More adults have seen the neon slime elementary school kids love to fling and fake-sneeze with than have seen a placenta. Why? 

Kids have more experience with slime than awareness of placentas. Why?  

Most grown people don’t understand what’s so important about the placenta, either. You know how you only understand the architecture and function of a knee cap when something goes wrong with yours?

I have questions. Like: 

Can’t we do better? 

Can we remember that, once, we each needed a placenta? Like, wholly? And like, be a little kinder now, because we all still need something? 

That we are made of layers, complicated layers? Some a tad slimy? 

Can we consider that we’re temporary take-out containers, too. The biology that holds the transient mystery? 

Also: did you know more than 900 species of slime mold occur globally, an indomitable force, isogamous organisms? Me neither. Little Rules told me that, with the gloppy red substance-- definitely not-placenta but still subjectively magical-- wobbling in his lap.

***

Not sure what parts of your birth or the aftermath you want to talk about? Not sure what parts matter to you? Already missing your placenta, or forgetting what it meant to create and birth a human? 

Come tell your birth story in a 1:1 private session with me, fully supported, in organic detail, and create a meaningful narrative record for yourself and your family. www.tellyourbirthstory.com

The Most Expensive Sound In the World

In the middle of the season I transitioned into stepmother, the retired cop sat my students down in the conference room where trillion dollar deals are brokered, as they squirmed in their suits, heading into their second semester of senior year and then one wild summer before college. He played the sound of a baby crying for a full minute.

“You know what that is?”

My students looked at each other, laughing nervously.

“C’mon, seriously. I am asking you,” the cop smiled tightly. “You know what that sound is?” The cry cut through the bank offices where the fellowship was held, cracking inoperable windows, and setting the oversized Warhols askew. The bathroom orchids averted their stamens.

Teen 1 raised his hand. “Is this a trick question?”

Cop, “Do I look like I am playing around?” He stuck his thumbs in his holster, for effect, where an unloaded gun hung, of course for effect. A cop had to look cop! “Well?” My ovaries covered their eyes.

Teen 1: “No.”

Cop: “You are telling me that you don't know that sound? Brother, for real?”

Louder and louder grew the newborn’s siren.

Then, Quiet. The jittery feeling of being tested. Who likes to falter in the face of the obvious? Definitely not a room full of jocular guys.

Teen 2 stepped in, he could always smell tautology coming from down the hall: “It’s a baby crying, yo!”

Cop: “Nope.”

Teen 1’s collarbones hiked up, indignant: “It is!” He stood up. “It IS!”

Cop: “No, it is not. That, fellows, is the most expensive sound in the world.”

You could have heard an embryo fart.

I was, at that very moment, paying for Saturday childcare for my almost stepkids. 20, 40, 60, 80, 100. 120. Late train, 140. Quick phone call with a client on the street outside our apartment, 160.

“So when your girl is telling you ‘baby daddy make a baby with me i just want your baby’ and you’re getting off, remember this,” he projected a spreadsheet on the moveable wall. The itemized costs went code red—diapers, more diapers, formula (maybe!), food and more food, clothes, clothes, college. Then that sound again, 2 straight minutes of wailing.

The sound tugged my ovaries, hovering huge as the plastic drumsticks on the Thanksgiving Day Parade Turkey Float. I thought of my beautiful almost-husband, our unprofitable, flaming urgency, the pricey primigravida I might become. The leather conference chairs sighed under the shifting weight of adolescent pelvises.

Afterwards, my students went to lunch soberly, the cop grinning and high-fiving and making each of them say, as their exit ticket, which was the most expensive sound, now?

On my break, I called the sitter to check in on the kids. Her ringing phone was the sound of coins clinking in the gastrointestinal chamber of a porcelain pig.“They are doing great!” she said perkily, which is what they all say. “Great!” I said. “Great! I’ll be home by 6.” “Great”! So much greatness. The kids were almost old enough to not need a sitter. Almost.

Nonetheless, advice only takes us so far. At the ultra-corporate celebration for my students after their high school graduations, tables piled high with Panera bread and unidentifiable dips, cold cuts rolled in logs and glossy bagels, they mingled with their mentors and donors, their jumpy lives about to firework. Their hands jammed in their suit pockets, weight shifting from polished shoe to polished shoe, smiles as loaded as the buffet, they made jokes, still a bit too loudly, about what they were going to do with—to?— their girls, how far they were going to go. How good it was going to be.

That summer, 5 minutes after we married, my husband became my actual baby daddy. We watched the sun come up the next morning over the Catskill treeline, leafy branches poking at the ATM of the sky, from which light makes all of us wealthy, hoping our cellular investment, sperm freestyling for the deep end of the ovum, would soon yield cellular returns.

And indeed the ferocious baby grew inside me, with countless practice swallows and practice breaths to ensure he would perfect the most expensive sound in the world when his body was ready to make it.

When the bill arrived for my emergency cesarean birth, millions upon millions of pennies, I laughed. I put that invoice with its old friends, under the coupon for fencing equipment on the dining room table, where mail went to die. Subsequent invoices, I’d rip up, just for dramatic effect. You know what that sound is? The most inexpensive sound in the world! I kissed the new baby: “You know how much I love you?” I asked. “No, you don’t,” I answered for him. “Because it is not an amount!” In fact, some things evade quantification.

The flowering orchid, gifted to us to mark new parenthood, another overpriced thing we could marginally fail, seemed to blush a darker–browner?–magenta at such banter. Or maybe it was dying, lowering its regal head as the baby got better at lifting his. It was hard to figure out, in this life, if you were looking in the right place, for the right things.

Just then, my former student texted me: im near yr apt, w my mom. Can we meet yr baby? (“YES!”) I knew the baby, in those days pressed flush to my body like a man’s wallet to a back pants pocket, would prove to my student everything the cop had told them was true: yes, the baby would deliver the powerful cry that crashed banks, raised APR, and bounced checks. I knew I could count on him.

**

Did your birth or parenting story not unfold exactly like you were told it would? Did that first cry indebt you, too? Come tell your birth story your way, with us. January is pay what you can for sessions.

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Newborn Eye Ointment & Other BS

When they asked us if we had applied the antibiotic eye ointment to the crystalline gaze of the newborn, we lied. Would you smear Elmer’s Glue on the Mona Lisa? 

“I think so?” My husband squinted convincingly at the baby’s soupy pupils, crass verification.  

“There has just been so much ointment around,” I added. I spooned yesterday’s cold butter fish, which basically looked like melted ointment, into my mouth from a tupperware, trying to enhance the overall ointment-y feel in the postpartum bed, still smudged with my blood.

They came back 10 minutes later. The baby was still gazing at the atoms in the air. “Has the eye ointment been applied?”

“Definitely, likely,” I gestured in the directions of her eyes, each of them tracing a wandering star. 

“We got it,” my husband reassured them, with the patriarchy’s absolute confidence in its own capabilities. 

The nurse blinked at us intolerantly through her “I wasn’t born 1.5 hours ago” glasses. She held out the chart as if it were a valid form of life. Maybe even something that itself needed to be fed and burped. And appeased.

I kept voraciously putting butter fish into my mouth, the baby in my husband’s elbow, observing how hunger works from the middle distance. Yes, birth inundates you with a world of potential harms, but also with garlic sauce, hot showers, eyebrow stroking. The untouched ointment lay on the closest shelf, like a fresh catch minnow, stranded on a shore it couldn’t comprehend, a tube as bulging full as a Colgate commercial.

When my new daughter was first placed on my chest, I couldn’t unlock my face. No angels horned. The universe did not exhale. I was still arched, still wincing, and with some coaxing, collapsed back into the bed. 

Holding her body ventral, I waited for the first angel to clear its throat. It was July, the hospital AC making the vents hum. The baby opened her mouth like an opera singer and the nipple waited there, still and stalwart like a school bus whose riders were being dismissed from the yard. “It’s right there, Close your mouth!” I whispered-commanded to her, “And give off that ointment vibe.” 

She didn’t listen to either piece of advice, as parenting is full of sinkholes.

They came back. “She needs the ointment now. It’s not charted!”

In order not to go blind from a disease we, her parents, didn’t have, and so couldn’t have transmitted?

I raised my water bottle in a sordid toast. “Well, Let’s name her Chlamydia, then? Shall we? From the Ancient Greek, ‘Small Cloak?’” My husband nodded. We take names fucking seriously. 

Her mouth was still open like a diva’s in the moment after her cadenza, before the grand theater is torn apart by violent applause. She wasn’t going to latch on my breast: she was going to sing to it forever. So she would be Aria.

In myths, the blind sing. The power of truth reverbs off the pure sense of their voice. The charts flap in the throaty wind, and all the bullshit scatters.

In the end, I did not give my informed refusal hard enough and they coated her eyes with the unnecessary antibiotic. “I am pretty sure the other nurse already applied it,” my husband tried one last time as they popped the cap. But the finger of the hospital was already upon her. 

As soon as she was in my arms again, we wiped it off with her swaddle. Off fell her useless newborn hat. Enamored at life being life, we stared at her big, fishy stare. Her body felt like the verse of a song I had always known but never sang.

When we had our fill, she fell asleep with my husband’s upturned finger giving comforting pressure to the roof of her mouth. That tiny cathedral where the angels tuned their tiniest harps, where her reflexes tied us in a primordial knot.

This felt like the least of the lies we live on: that inside every moment, no matter the bullshit our conditioning and institutions try to coat us in, there is a nearly imperceptible 8th note of Completely OK.

Maybe Mona Lisa coated her own nipples, too, raw with pain for the child she’d never nurse. Maybe she’d take Elmer’s glue after all, if that was all they had to patch a wound, pushing a smile out through the fog, eyes on an indeterminate future where antibiotics both saved us and clouded our visions.

The goop had come and gone, and we were bare, fleetingly asleep. Is it more frightening for our children to see us clearly, or not to see us clearly? I’m not sure.

Ticking Time Bomb, Little Life

I was walking in Prospect Park with the 11 week old baby tied to me in the wrap, “helping” her sleep, which requires myself not sleep. Those two words always together, like Ernie & Bert: SLEEP + NOT. Anyway, if you sleep, life wooshes you by, right? You miss autumn’s golden filaments. Your rights to complain are nil, and other mothers hate you but pretend not to. The scariest thing is about to happen to me but right now the scariest thing is: will she sleep?

Sleep when the baby sleeps, they say with a chirp. Surely said by folks who drug their babies into long stretches of sleep, and then drug themselves into the same. Or how about shut the hell up when you’re not asked? That’s right, parenting advice column, I’m talking to you. And have you checked out the first gold filaments of autumn? No, that’s right, you haven’t. Too busy catching up on sleep. Nature’s not going to wait for you, honey.

Somewhere along the way, my brain switched to thinking about career writers, to a NYT’s review I’d read. Since, along with not sleeping, I was not sending out my writing, this seemed like a natural way to bash my self esteem. This particular writer’s character described her life as hurtling indifferently through space strapped to a ticking time bomb.

I felt that. Or maybe it was just a regular old breeze, with no message attached.

To keep things quaint, a couple of ducks screeched—hurtled— from the sky into the lake.

Hey, ducks! I said.

Well, because it’s a well known fact that ducks are anti-social assholes, they didn’t have the common decency to even quack back. Fine. I kept walking. A couple passed me, both heavily tattooed, both with eyes glued down to their respective phones—while on the most beautiful path in the park on the most beautiful day the autumn could come up with.

ASSHOLES, I thought, chock-full-a judgment. Look up!

Well, no sooner did I dish out advice, my nose nestled into the baby for a hit of that Baby Smell, when I felt one foot go out from under me, the ground rolled and threw me forward. I hit the path with my one hand out, the other trying to tuck the baby’s head somewhere completely safe, maybe back into my womb. About to know what it felt like to crush your own baby.

I felt myself bounce, roll, and then I was on my back, in a pile of the season’s first unglamorous dry brown leaves, looking up at the tree canopy, quiet rustle of leaves.

The tattooed couple (I LOVE YOU BOTH) came rushing back: oh my god oh my god oh my god, they spluttered. Even at that moment my judgment stood tall:  HAVE YOU HEARD OF KEEPING CALM IN OTHER PEOPLE’S EMERGENCIES HO HUM IF YOU ARE LOOKING FOR A SECOND CAREER YOU GUYS SHOULD NOT BE EMT’s BUT ANYWAY.

Are you ok is the baby ok are you ok is the baby ok is she ok are you, you —baby—you—baby?

i guess if her head was smashed they wouldn’t ask, would they? Or would they?

I think so? I was not sure if I was speaking or thinking. The baby lifted her mighty head on her mighty neck from my chest and began to wail. So she was not dead. She was not bashed.

They knelt by my side, and I had a tour of their tattoos.

CAN WE HELP YOU?
Surely they were not yelling, but the ducks began to.

Yes, but SHHHHHHHHH.SHHHHHH. SLEEP WHEN THE BABY SLEEPS.

Because, of course, she had fallen asleep just before I fell.

They helped me sit up, nervously.

REALLY ARE YOU OK?

REALLY I AM NOT.

I checked the baby. I checked her like she was the last one boarding Noah’s arc, an audition before the flood. Body parts. Sound.

Her hair still stood up straight, as if she’d been electrocuted in a lightning storm.

I think I’m OK, I said. But if you can give me a minute, I think I’m in shock. If you could just stay with me a minute..

SURE SURE SURE, they said, reminding me of the nervous blabbering goose in Charlotte’s web.

It was the middle of the day, I could not have been more in love with them than I was with my husband when I agreed to marry him-- for being on that path at that moment, and for having the impulse to kneel and assist.

We sat up. I checked her again.

They pointed to the stick like it was the true ASSHOLE VILLAIN of this story. It was a very small but thick stick, the size of my pointer finger. No wonder I had not seen it.  No wonder looking up is not always the best way to go through life.

I was pretty sure my ankle, which has been rolled approximately a million times in my almost four decades, was going to suck.  But for now, it could hold my weight.

I’m going to walk, I told them, and was hoping for drum-rolls, angels clapping, a “NOT THE BIGGEST ASSHOLE, ASSHOLE” type award.

ARE YOU SURE DO YOU NEED TO GO SOMEWHERE? They rose with me and offered what they could, which was company. They picked the leaves out of my hair gingerly.

I wanted to let them continue on their tattooed way, so I could be alone with the fact that one of my biggest fears had just passed. I had fallen with her tied to me. I could have injured or killed the baby. I did not injure or kill the baby.

My mama stunt double had jumped in and taught me how to fall just so in an instant. And yet I knew she could have just have easily been busy elsewhere. I was glad I had not been on my phone, texting my husband something snarky or desperate. Then, my asshole status would have been confirmed. This was an innocent fall, holding my babe, smelling her, appreciating her ticking time bomb-ness, which some stick sought to detonate.

I thought of innocent people dying in innocent ways, surely long before they felt their work was done.

Sometimes all it takes is a stick, like in a zen master’s parable, to untangle you from the drama of yourself.

I walked very very slowly out through the park, checking every footfall, nursing my daughter on a bench along the way while guys in rasta gear smoked spliffs unapologetically across from me. I looked for signs she’d become demented or maimed that the filter of shock had not revealed. Was she missed a hand, some skin somewhere, was her jaw unhinged?

But she was just herself.

Nursing felt like the holiest thing since the nativity manger.

It is easy, when it happens, to respect how life changes, or can, in an ordinary, stick-in-the-path instant.

Of course, we don’t perceive that all our instants are like that: tiny capsules of mortality, which we are forced to swallow, until the one we gag on.

We can lurch to the ground anytime, causes obvious or not, warning signs obvious or not. There may or may not be passerby’s who can help us; the circumstances may be dignified, or they may be rather banal. My Tai Chi teacher in Thailand, for example, slipped ironically in the bath tub—chi doesn’t provide traction— and died of concussion. Her gentle hands did not brake her fall.

Sometimes, we fall down fatally in bathtubs. If that isn’t an asshole death what is?   Only in literature might a death mirror a life in its poetic-ness. More often it’s a duck screeching into a bottomless dark lake.

Perhaps appreciating how slippery our lives really are should make my steps heavier, more decisive. NOPE. Lighter, tentative: can I commit to this if there are no guarantees? If fortune cookies are just, well, highly processed cookies?

I’ll be right here with my sneaker hovering, hormonal sweat trickling down my back, scanning the path for sticks with legs.

I had a baby; that’s what having a baby is: SLEEP, NOT. Once a pregnancy gets rolling, there’s a biological commitment to making a person, but how that person will be formed, its destiny, what will go right and wrong, is not up to me or you or the ducks or hills or trees or leaves.

When my daughter came out, she was examined and swaddled, but I’m pretty sure what they did back there, under the bland gaze of the pediatrician, was strap on the bomb, adjusting the buckles to suit her tiny form, and start it ticking.

Like the umbilical cord, these straps soon aren’t visible. But just as no person can (as of yet) come to be without having been tied to a placenta, no life can exist without premise of explosion, matter returning to matter, crumbling leaves to crumbling leaves, breathy trees to breathy trees.

When I get home with her, I sit on the couch, a little dumb. I drink some tea, and as my shock wears off, the ankle sets off sirens of pain. I can hardly put weight on it as I go back and forth on my domestic circuit, my son naked and yelling at me from the couch “I won’t listen to anything you say ever!” and my infant daughter, tripped by his asshole cortisol spouting, screams for an hour and a half straight. I yell at my son, no better for my scrape with mortality.

I call my sister, embarrassed, and confess to her that I am only calling her so I don’t keep yelling at him, while he launches himself off the couch over and over, knocking the paintings and photos sideways, like our lives. And the baby quivers from her own screaming, and I quiver from how exposed and exploded and present I feel.

Tomorrow we will walk that path again. I will apologize to my son, and explain. We will kick asshole sticks to the side, chipmunks darting, the weather temporarily just fine. I will be slower, hold her body even tighter, smell her head with one eye straining to see the ground.  But there will still be that thing I will miss, the stumbling. The tattoo’d folks will pass, nothing to see here. But I’ll hear the ticking, barely masked by the soft sound the leaves make.

Artist Residency In MotherHood-- When Is Yours?

When I was invited by Stella Fiore, writer-mama and curator of the hit radio show Cut + Paste, to be part of an Artist's Residency in Motherhood (ARIM) this month, I said YES impulsively and before thinking through anything even vaguely like the Logistics.  She was setting up a Facebook group (NOT ANOTHER FACEBOOK GROUP BUT YES) for that very purpose, and we could opt in if we wanted.  Stella and I were colleagues pre-baby eons ago at as instructors at Sponsors in Education Opportunity. Our reconnection was random and fortuitous.

Her CUT + PASTE group differed from Every Other Facebook Group your Random Friend invited you to because of one thing I can hardly find the words for-- people showed up.  Even the lurkers lurked well; but the moms who were posting were a brilliant balance of heartfelt ambitious and real(ist); fired up equally by dreams and delays on dreams. Each mom was participating in whatever way she could in an Artist's Residency--self-hosted, self-directed, self-sustained-- loosely scheduled over the weekend of Feb 2-5. 

Lenka Clayton created this concept and inclusive shelter, Artist Residency in Motherhood, and I must say she is a MacArthur Level Genius. As an artist and newmother, she saw how art and motherhood are too often pitted as incompatible, inside oneself and by the world at large. Clayton decided to say a Fertile Fuckit, and make her art out of the materials of motherhood instead-- quite literally.  Rather than see her two callings and practices as in conflict, she did brilliant recycling, for example: fished things out of her baby's mouth (when her baby was in that EVERYTHING ORAL stage) and used them to collage. Nap-length works, at the pace of a baby's fickle developing nervous system. 

The deal is such: many mothers pull more than their weight around the home, and work damn hard for big and tiny bosses, for rough inner bosses, for the good of their families; and as kids come into our lives, it is harder and harder to justify time for ourselves-YOURSELF- to focus on your art. This is ESPECIALLY so if you are the (considerable) breadwinner (EVEN IF THE BREAD YOU WIN IS KINDA LIKE SHITTY OLD WHITE BREAD, IT IS STILL YOUR BREAD!) and EVEN IF your art is part (or, lucky lady, all) of how you win that bread.

It is something about prioritizing our needs --and to MAKE (ART) is a NEED-- that can rub us-- or is it the patriarchal culture?-- the wrong way. 

Over the weekend, all kinds of moms did all kinds of things in all kinds of ways.  We leaned into villages we didn't even know existed as such, or partners and friends who gave us time and spaces in which to write. Some of us had three hours to dedicate, some could take 36 or more.  But behind whatever concrete time we had was the feeling and solidarity of all the moms-- and it was an international group-- doing Something that was theirs, that was from their making heart, that was about the Something Else we need to do in the world, even if it's intimately entwined in our mothering or parenting.

What did I do? Nothing, I hid out from the fam and read Samantha Irby and Lucy Grealy and ate dinner by myself in a bar where two men fawning over each other were exceptionally, teenagers-out-of-school-on-Friday type loud!  Well, let me revise that: what I did was revise, and pour myself into something I knew would not be interrupted by anyone else's MASLOWISH TYRANNY. 

My first goal was to have no goals-- because what good is a residency if it only leaves you disappointed in yourself? I wanted to revise personal essays, difficult ones, that had been sitting in my drafts too long-- but ones that aren't posted here because-- well, I want to publish them, and sometimes when you want to publish, outlets specify it can't have appeared EVEN ON YOUR GRANDMOTHER'S FRIEND'S UNCLE'S BLOG.  These essays were about personhood and love and uncertainty (always) and my husband's challenging ex and my students who showed me a photo (or tried to) of a huge poop. They were, like life, about everything.

I meant to submit them; I didn't.  But I got my pitches ready, and I got to saturate in the feeling that we were all doing something worthy and supporting each other, hard.

It's actually not hard to support each other. 

My husband didn't clean while I was gone (boo) but he did say, "Everything was just so easy with the toddler!" Proof that 1. I should go away more because it's good for the toddler's grasp of etiquette and 2. Family doesn't cave in if a pillar goes for restoration. 

And, finally: My old friend insomnia came to visit during the night.  She is an orgy gal and rarely hangs with me when I am alone these days (because I never am?) but there she was. So I got to read books in the middle of the night, and do yoga nidra, which I highly suggest for you when INSOM comes to call. 

Essay Experiment #18: Peacock Procreation

Just as the male peacock is about to have its way with the female, feathers spread in an alluring fan, exposing extra layers of tail pompadour, rattling and shaking and calling in a pre-hump display of color, texture and sound, my toddler runs up to it.

PEACOCK! He yells. PEEEEEEEEEEEACOCK!

You know, if someone ran up to you and yelled HUMAN HUMAAAAAAAAAAN! HUMANNNNNCOCK! just before you hit the roof with an orgasm, you might pull back too-- just saying.  And toddlers know these things intuitively, the way they know crackers and fruit are good and everything else is not. 

Understandably, the male honks away, annoyed, at best, blue-balled at worst, not gonna propagate at worst worst.  Its glorious fan of feathers collapses and drags on the asphalt behind it.  

We stand on the curb of a lawn in San Antonio suburbs, at the cul de sac on Dusquesne street, rolypoly bugs and mosquitoes prowling, and watch the marvel of domesticated peafowl trying to get it on. Animal behaviorists call this place a "lek", where males assemble and engage in competitive displays to attract females.  It's mid April, the dizzying season for baby-making.  

My husband reaches out and pinches my butt gently, so the children cannot see. 

The toddler startles a few males into retreat, moments before their sperm can begin its spasm-assisted journey up the cloaca into the uterus of the peahen.  He explores a parked car with a busted tire and dented fender with the same untempered interest, running his palms along its hub like my stepson ran his along my back during labor. "CAR!" Ro yells, ruining its chances of scoring with the lady cars; "CARRRRRRRRRRR." and "It's hurt?" He points to the dangling fender bit. It does look sad and hurt.  

He pat-pats the greasy deflated wheel, tries to wrench the fender back, because toddlers know that everything feels intensely, intuitively, the same way they know intuitively that laundry is for dumping on the floor.

When Ro senses in our shared bed that we want to "snuggle," he wields his complete sentences: "Daddy, don't hug Mommy! No, Mommy, go over there!" He doesn't know exactly why this is funny to us but he'll physically remove my husbands' hands from my body, because toddlers know intuitively that their parents' procreation would disrupt their social order, which is to say their ability to be the only one who gives orders and because: boobs are theirs. 

The male peacocks fan and flutter and ruffle and flutter and pitter patter.  And the females--peahens, much drabber in color and more self-possessed- peck with disinterest at the lawns, eating who knows what little critter.  It's fun to watch the males try so damn hard, and the females be so unflinchingly picky, hard to please.  It's actually inspiring.  

I remove my husband's hands and pretend to look at the bugs.  I haven't seen roly-poly bugs since my childhood, when they were common in our backyard, easily frightened into little balls. 

I cannot imagine the peacocks tritely agreeing-- in their unnerving mating cry to accept this human behavior-- toddlers will be toddlers! This too is one of the way life manifests itself: toddlers capsize sex and insert themselves like punctuation marks--and species fail to commiserate. 

Such Interruption is the story of our lives. 

And by "our" I mean my husband and mine.

And the rest of humanity who somehow got through the toddler stage with their hinges intact.

In this neighborhood, peacocks roam free, loose and ubiquitous, not an anomaly, not a majesty, in the conjoined front yards of Texas Suburbia and up and down their concrete driveways. Suburbia has a shocking, refreshing amount of green; it soothes my too-much-on-the-computer-too-much-urban-life eyes. 

Here, peacocks are neither pet nor pestilence; they are their own thing, glorious in juxtaposition with suburbia's main feature of being unremarkable.  They move through the property lines, honking, flapping, strutting, and pooping. 

We are roaming streets to find the peacocks being peacocks with the children, my husband pushing against the weight of nostalgia. These are the streets he grew up on, playing ball, the moss in the heavy trees, this one neighbor--can you see her?--who was so uptight she didn't want kids touching her lawn. If your ball happened to roll there, you had to be fast, but she was faster, waiting at the window for a transgression. 

Peacocks appear in paintings, in kingdoms. Their long feathers are strewn across the lawn, catching the light, defiled exotic.  Royalty would never visit here; they have sent their fowl ambassadors and because they were fed-- grains-- they stayed.

We are fed; we stay, too.

Texas in Spring is forgiving, while Texas in the summer makes outside unbearable.  The birds too seem to know they are in a period of pleasantness, and in their biology they prepare for the future by creating those who will populate it. 

It hasn't hit 80 degrees--yet-- as the mosquitoes hoped it would, sweat making every living thing more scrumptious.  It rained too much in the past two weeks, and so the grass is an excruciating green. 

Our minds still filed down from long days of plane travel, we pack into the rental car and drive through Hill Country to see my husband's old dear high school friend, who has had some hard times. 

Down the road from her dark house are two horses at pasture, white and brown.  A sturdy white fence marks the perimeter of the field.  The land is dusted in fuschia and yellow flowers, like a jigsaw puzzle that would make you crazy, especially once you realized your kids had lost the final pieces.

LeAnn leans against the fence, her hair in a tight blond bun, fiddling with her fingers and looking out at nothing much. She tells me not too quietly that my husband's ex was always jealous of her, just because she and John were longtime friends. I'm incredulous but she can't say much more about it, because my stepsons are right there, scaling the fence, doing parkour in the grass-filled ditch on the side of the road. 

The toddler tries to copy them, then begs to go through the slats of the fence and see the HORSIES. Toddlers don't understand fences. Horses have a better sense of them.

The peacocks have no fences, but they seem to contain themselves within certain areas of the neighborhood, only occasionally and idiotically getting run over by a car.  My mother-in-law's second husband, R, tells me that one peacock was hit by a doctor, speeding through to get to his shift at the hospital.  The doctor was remorseless, the huge bird lying with a track mark through its fat breast in the road.  Residents yelled from their homes, and the doctor said something to the effect of, stupid birds, I have to get to work to take care of all you assholes.  

Mmmm, the ethos of healing. 

LeAnn's house, like its owner, is too depressed, and after everyone has had nutella and peanut butter and sugar and sugar and sugar sandwiches, we set out again, down to a lakefront where you can swim if you want to be slimed and cold. The geese on the shoreline honk in their pissed off way, waiting for whatever visitor will give them more fresh-ripped pieces of stale whitebread. I can feel them feeling our dietary idiocy and loving it.  Their sex is undainty. 

The trees look like something Dr Seuss would draw, but on a morning he woke up slightly and inexplicable aesthetically inclined to be a realist. The grass is as long as my son's hair.  Everything feels jacked up and totally alive, photoshopped into a perfection just by looking, past made vestigial by the flip of sky reflected in the incandescent water.  We are sandwiched here between earth and heaven, and that is the whole thing. 

My son narrates his own movements and everylittlething he sees, and attempts hazardly to climb a playground set.

He has me chasing him through plastic tunnels, bright red and blue, that the light of the sun shines through. He make intermittent, predictable announcements about his own whereabouts, like a conductor announcing train stops, just in case you weren't paying attention: I am in here, I am back, mama don't come in with roro, I am in the plane! 

Hands and knees, crawling after him, waiting, listening to him.

Listening.

He imitates the peacock's cry, calling.  I keep expecting a peacock, from miles away, to yank up her picky head, turn her eyes to him, melt. 

We are, essentially, killing time at the playground, waiting to end this visit and drive to another, conversation slimming down to nothing, down to just sitting and standing around together and that being enough because: the past. Because: the present. All day in a kind of neither pleasant or unpleasant stasis, I keep thinking, this is it, this is all there is. 

This is it this is all there is this is it and yet we keep going.

A moment of stillness from a silent meditation retreat of a decade earlier slides back into my bones like an egg resting in the bottom of a freshly dug nesting hole.

It is like getting the realization without the cost of the meditation retreat. Or you could say that your whole life is the cost of the realization.

When we are back in San Antonio, we walk again.  This time, it's apparent mating has already begun in earnest, and with results. The Peacocks have dug holes and laid their fat eggs in the lawns. The exotic meets the cliche. The eggs are not well hidden and many nests stay unprotected, hardly sat on. You would think it would take more work and discretion to make something as complicated, spectacular and bizarre as a peacock.

By contrast, our human mothers volunteer their very lives to be sure we come to developmental fruition--you want her, you will have to take me, our gestation method announces, even if the mother privately feels anything but. We protect you wee things with our whole existence.

But my toddler runs after his abler big brothers, then climbs a bank of dirt and ivies and plunges his hand into the nest full of eggs. His Grammie assures us this one has been abandoned, but I am not as confident why. He holds the egg up high enough to break it if he drops it, which he is wont to do just to check if, you know, gravity is still a thing and what his special powers are. 

I feel worried for the incipient peafowl, though my husband can tell by holding a light to the egg that nothing is growing there, there is no vasculation, no ghostly yolk becoming a discernible embryonic particular. 

Put it down, I say with too much worry in my voice. Already giving the toddler too much power. He flashes me the creepy grin of knowing he can do something he should not.  He's already stepped on hundreds of innocent rolypoly bugs, stomp stomp killing for no reason-- Gentle, I say. This is like the egg Fossey came from. 

Fossey is our hand-reared baby parrot. I met Fossey right after birth when we heard a peeppeep and a grisly creature with no neck control wobbling in the nesting scraps. Sooner after birth than I met my own son.  My husband and I peering into the nest box and starting to cry simultaneously, which is something that just happens to people-- even assholes, as one doctor told us-- when they witness the beginning of life. 

The peacocks honk and wail-- but for sex, not protection. Begging for it, some might say.  Like Fossey, I remind my toddler again, thinking the personal connection will be enough to stay his throwing arm. He wouldn't hurt that, would he? He grins again, but I can tell the analogy didn't hit home with the moral harness I'd intended. Egg! He says, and holds it up even higher on his tippy toes, peacocks fornicating on the cul-de-sac all around him. The power of man, I think. To hold on to someone's fate at every moment, to unthinkingly let go.

Experiment in Essay #17: Starring, Pants--#52essays2017

I am making a movie about tantrums. It is going to star my 23 month-old son. He is handy and doesn't need to be paid and knows a thing or two about the subject. I have a day job--most days, it is called getting through the day-- but I feel fairly confident we can shoot footage even in the middle of the night if we need to. Such is the convenience of living with a star. 

His verbal ability is rocketing. He says things like NO I DON'T WANT TO PUT ON MY PANTS MKAY?

He repeats it as you approach with the sad sack of pants with all the benign respectful leadershippy approaches you learned from podcasts on graceful parenting, damnit, with the vague and vain hope someone would some day write an article on you. You're that good at this crap.

Pants? I DONT WANT PANTS, he reminds you in case sentences die on impact. MKAY? I NEED MILK. DONT PANTS! 

And he still yells just to make sure you have understood.

Writer's interlude, in which she pretends she can still think critically: If google is so advanced why didn't its spellcheck guess that I was missing an apostrophe in the contraction above, when I spelled "don't" like it sounds-- DONT? Autocorrect suggested WONT and FONT. As in: No, I WONT want to do what you want--no matter your fucking clever essay FONT.

 I, the mother, am suggestive under the influence of tantshrooms. I start saying things, nonsense things. I am no better than the toddler. If such clothing anarchy doesn't bring out the worst in you, take me out for drinks and tell me how. I will put you in the film credits, near the end.

Brute force is not my thing. Forcing someone to put on their pants feels like inverse violation. Don't we teach kids no means no? But we don't like it when they use that against us. "I threwed it!" The 23 month old star says about his shirt, gloating, but also about my equilibrium. My equilibrium is the opposite of pants, look at them, the right leg and left leg perfect reflections of each other, such admirable balance. Who could hate them, with what cause? Isn't that like hating puppies, baby giraffes?

In the grips of TanTrum, in the dark main street of TanTrum Town, things are bleak. Clouds roll in and make the light for our shoot crappy, but we don't care, because we have star power. My toddler leans back in his high chair nude as the day he was born which was not that long ago in relative time. He is ready to play his part so well you would never know it took his whole life of training to arrive at such a convincing show.

So, check it, critics: Today sucks the most but tomorrow could suck even more which is why we need to get the documentation on so we can remember how good we had it before things tanked. Also, mamaguilt sets in as I try to squeeze satire out of my own sad attempts at dressing him: after all this using him for material-- what if Ro has ACTUAL sensory issues? Not so much that he likes being in his diaper as that he hates the feeling of everything else? And then I would feel awful for not commiserating more, for getting into a battle of wills rather than being a paragon of empathy. I would be the accidental villain, part of the job description of parenting, the part they put in small print and hope you don't read until your contract is signed.

Brute force is not my thing but I am kinda thinking I might need to black market purchase a hospital smock and go hide out in the postpartum recovery welcometotheshitshowofmaternity ward...and watch the shaking baby video.

Or maybe wherever you birthed  should invite you by 20 months postpartum to a special screening of Shaking Toddlers. Or mail you cartons and cartons of box wine and a note: "Not everything improves with age!"

So I tell my brilliant agreeable son--because I still speak to him like he is capable of apprehending reasonable speech-- he will have to star in this video we are going to make together about tantrums, huge tantrums, and that when I put on his clothes he should go apeshit and yell.  He has been doing this all morning anyway to new levels of intensity and has it down pat. 

Writer's interlude (because you guessed, didn't you, that I had to have escaped into the real world to write this all down? You know that can't happen when I am rescuing pants all day, right?): Look, Look around for proof that life goes on, and will even after our movie is made; on my subway, there is some guy, dressed in tight blue jeans and a seablue synthetic sports shirt, trying so hard to give away the empty seat on the train to a woman before he occupies it. "M'am would you like to sit?" He asks me, with incredible self-satisfaction. When I at first don't realize he is talking to me, he repeats it: JUST LIKE his mama taught him. I shake my head, and wonder if I look pregnant or ill. In New York, little else propels Random Acts of Politeness. But then he asks another woman the same thing, and another, with a pained pinched "This is how I was brought up!" Smile on his face. I wonder at what age he started putting his pants on himself with no fuss or if he still, in the privacy of his home, cries hysterically to no one while he sticks his foot into his jeans.

I coach Ro while I change his diaper, which also offends his sensibilities-- and I pull it off surprisingly without summary execution by his foot into my throat. "OK I am going to pick a pair of pants and when I do you need to go buckwild, yelling and protesting and doing the worm and stiff as a board and crying!" Maybe I am getting carried away but he says mmmhmmm, like he is a Jew fleeing the plagues with Moses giving instructions, the first plague is Outfits, towering over the Earth.

I continue, conspiratorial, egging on the overblown drama of our little lives: "And then your shirt, okay? Do not let mama put that shirt on whatever you do. Yell, scream, howl, bitch, make sure the neighbors think I am sacrificing your testicles, OK? You have to do it like you really mean it and do not back down. If I get the shirt over your head and colossal green protruding noseboogers, do NOT LET me win, pull it in the opposite direction as hard as you can! OK, ready?"

We are both super into it. Parenting is amazing. 

I run into the livingroom for the surprise clothes move-- trust me, every other more enlightened approach hasn't worked for shit-- and whisk him into my lap and the pants and the shirt and ---

He is mute and cooperative and holds out one legs tentatively but amiably. 

My movie is a flop, but my life a riveting, riveting success.
 

Experiment in the Essay #14: Just Almost

"Just a few more, you're almost through," the trainer encourages, two reps into the set.


These days, I feel like the queen of almost: almost got the job, almost missed the train, almost burnt the toast. A palm-reader would frown at my life-lines and declare: "Almost!"  But Justin isn't talking to me, in particular.   He is talking to the camera, his buff-ness redoubled in an off-screen mirror. What he says doesn't have to be true, it just has to sound convincing. The way muscles convince us of strength despite invisible vulnerabilities.


"Almost there!" he repeats, like "almost" is a scarf of indefinite length being pulled from a clown's throat.  And if you're wondering, you're the clown.


And: No, we're not almost through. Personal training is all about accepting motivational lies, and using them as a reason to carry on in the face of something hard.


Anyway, this is not personal: he's leading a workout video on youtube. He doesn't even know I exist.  He doesn't know if I'm exercising along with him, or just watching him perform, standing there in the living room, surrounded by toy cars and scattered Legos and a balled up diaper, in my billowy lace nightgown, picking my toes.


Which I'm not, I'm trying to keep up--and I don't and never will own a billowy lace nightgown-- but still. "Just a couple more, we're almost there, c'mon, sweethearts!"


What? No, we've just done three reps.   Three out of maybe twenty?  We're not almost anywhere.


The trainer has comically sculpted arms, and a delicate mustache, which looks like an accident he then made the best out of.  And while he's clearly bench-pressed his arms until they are as unmissable as a cathedral dome, he's plucked his mustache with converse intentions, until it's as subtle as floss in a mound of newly fleeced wool.


Being hugged by him would be like getting hugged by a trash compactor: too much muscle, not enough tender places.  But he's not going to hug you; he's going to work you, so c'mon.


I chose this video because it is low impact, which my inflammation-prone feet require. It's got a brand name to indicate: LIT.  The shorthand promise is that Justin- that's his name, and no, I didn't make that up for literary resonance with my essay title, m'kay? -- will light you up. He's got two slender women behind him, doing the workout, just to prove it.


They glow.  Beads of sweat make them look like Rockefeller Christmas Trees.


He calls them, singly and collectively, "Sweet Heart."


Dani, stage right, does MODIFICATIONS--you know, the not that hard stuff, NO SHAME IN THAT-- because, he explains, she "just" had a baby.


What? Just had a what?


Now "just" is an unfortunately casual, highly overused, too-many-reps-per-speech-act temporal adverb.  It really means nothing, because it means too many things, and like beauty, the time scale intended/signified by  "just" is in the eye of the beholder.


For example, 23 months later, I also sometimes feel-- but don't always any longer say-- that I "just" had a baby.  My stomach has repaired itself by a lot, but the extra skin and ropy scar tell another story of pregnancy that doesn't end with labor.  Mostly, things are in tact down there.  I stopped doing postpartum-specific workouts only a few months ago, and almost by accident did the word leave me behind.  My identity loosened as my abdomen tightened.


But hold on there; if Dani "just" had a baby, like, literally, why the hell is she doing this workout at all? With her imaginary hand weights and sweat-slicked face, slightly reduced range of motion.  I can see the new moms cringe at her, or even, god help us, try a few of the modified moves themselves, baby in a football hold in one arm, or draped over the shoulder puking on a cloth-- that baby, the permanent hand weight, skewing the neckline, fatiguing the trapezius.


Even minor exertion makes tissue we didn't even know we had throb, like an ice cream headache in the uterus.  


Most new moms lose any concrete, objective sense of time and duration, desperate too soon for their body "back" (that doesn't happen, not in the way we think we mean- some things change you permanently) or their old routines, a familiar self, or to do reps like Dani-- no, no way, she did not "just" have a baby.  


But also, we're not "just" doing a few more until the set's done; the set has just begun.


So what is this, the rush to have (hard) things be over, before they've hardly gotten going?


And what is this other thing, how we redefine ourselves in the wake of transformative events (say, a death or, say, labor-- or God's labor, whereby we get the grand calendar markings of AD and BC), and count time from there, in quantum?  


By this logic I am still new to the universe; because, you see, I "just" got born, 37 years ago.  


Give me all the ab-strengtheners you want, trash-compactor, Justin. There is some damage you can do nothing about. There is still a larger hole in the tissue behind my belly button. I can palpate it, sink fingers into it.  It's where the micro-tears on the transverse abdominus amounted to the muscular separation that precedes postnatal separation. Diastasis recti.


You can correct the condition, of course, with consistent targeted exercise.  The exercises are subtle and repetitive, ad nauseam, like blinking if you squeezed where the lashes touched, every time. Eventually your eyelids would become very, very strong-- but you'd lose your mind in the process.   


The thing is, no real workout is autonomic, and it shouldn't be.  Except, you might say, what the heart "just" does without our consent, without a training plan, daily.


9 months pregnant, I would sometimes joke with my husband that maybe my baby would take the easier route out, skip the vagina altogether, and pop through my umbilicus like a chip-n-dale dancer from a white frosted cake.  It seemed like there was sufficient diameter in the torn muscle for a head to fit.


In the end, that's sorta what happened.


Back to Just Almost Justin.


And what is this, these lies about recovery that make postpartum women damage themselves, judge themselves, rue their new condition?  It's true that a few Amazon tribal woman could-- or must-- handle a workout a few days after child-birth.  But it's not the norm.


It "just" what we expect from ourselves, to always look as if nothing has happened to us.  God forbid someone can tell birth took effort.  God forbid if someone can tell waking up in the morning, pouring the tea, turning on the lights, took effort. And then, of course, we must feign that negotiating with our minds is no effort at all.  The seamless sweaty package of our lives is easily lifted.


I want to pull Dani out of the video and give her savory lamb stew, chunks of parsnip, water and green vegetables sauteed in pasture-raised cow butter. But instead I work out with her, wondering. Where are her leaky breasts? Why aren't you knighting her with a gold medal for getting through two reps? Why is there no baby nearby, who might need to nurse?  Why is she in form-fitting sexy clothes?


Many of us live starting each thing only to be done with it.  And perhaps a workout is meant to echo this-- push yourself, it's almost over.


It's not almost over.  Or maybe it is.  Depends how you view time.  Einstein apparently said that time is not an arrow at all, contrary to pedestrian belief, contrary to the industry that sells you new calendars every year, daily planners.  But I learned from a physicist that, actually, Einstein asserted his revised theory of time only after the loss of his beloved, and facing his own death, trying to make sense of his grief and pending destruction of self.  If time is not an arrow, then death does not always have the ace.


So Einstein was hoping for a loop, for personal reasons, he did not want this to be the last rep.  He wrote elaborate equations to chart a different kind of progression.  But in the end, he died.


The post-partum woman is in possession of the most delicate arrow nature ever suggested. She must go through major postural adjustments to hold this creature effectively to the breast, or properly offer a bottle.  She positions this creature towards the future, and with her whole body, she shoots.


Justin's arms glisten with new sweat, he keeps sweating, he's working out right with you. Or maybe he's been rubbed down with vaseline, shiny and clotting his pores. In personal training, sweat is testimony.  Sweat is evidence that either THIS THING WORKS --OR you are in terrible shape or hormonally driven metabolic flux, m'kay?  


Stop picking your toes.  Tie your nightgown up in knot so you don't trip.  Fake like you changed your socks this week.


Look at Justin's arms-- don't they inspire you to do that final push-up?


The camera zooms in, but we know why, his biceps are meant to keep you just a tad jealous. We live in a culture of Biceps, as a synonym for accomplishment, discipline, pushing yourself to the end.  


Women, gather near. Justin will be happy to give you a workout tailored for the sweetheart you know you have somewhere inside you.  The one who's not pissed about the dishes being dirty, about the crap all over the apartment, about the number of times we forget the rice in the cooker and have to throw it out, but not until you again google, "How long can you keep cooked rice in the rice-cooker?" and read through the string of contradictory answers.  


No, you are just a sweetie with a body, and you are almost there.


Justin's full attention is on your low-impact needs.


Have you ever seen a woman's face when she's pushing a baby out?  It's purple-red sweatasfreshplum. It's eyespoppingjawclenching. It's too many words too close together.  I never got to push, I never got coached to press the plum through the veil of my body.  Just when I felt that urge-- and they say you'll "Just know"-- the ambulance pulled up  I leaned against the door of the building trash chute, heavily coated in thick, jet black paint. The paint glistened, feigned freshness. This is how something old stays looking new.


I was burning fat, all right; burning right through each fat motivational lie meant to make you think you can forge the impossible and move a baby through objecting bones, using muscles you're only partially in charge of. In the face of this repetition, well-meaning people say things like, "Just breathe," or "Just one more” and “you’re almost there!” When what they really mean is that there are few things to say that actually help, so they are just picking one, because they have to say something. An almost truth. Just for now. One small lie to move the needle. And then just one more.


--


Etymology:

just (adv.) "merely, barely," 1660s, from Middle English sense of "exactly, precisely, punctually" (c. 1400), from just (adj.), and paralleling the adverbial use of French juste. Just now "a short time ago" is from 1680s. For sense decay, compare anon, soon. Just-so story first attested 1902 in Kipling, from the expression just so "exactly that, in that very way" (1751).


And this infographic:

https://www.myenglishteacher.eu/question/how-to-use-just-can-you-explain-the-meaning-of-this-adverb/

--


 

Essay Experiment #15: Monopoly Problems--#52essays2017

Let's talk about monopoly.

Wait, don't leave.

It is not as boring as you fear.

It's (even) more boring, more, more, more.

But so is breathing, right? And few quit that earlier than they have to.

Hey, anyway, the board is already set up. Clean piles of money. And you? You are a good parent, invested in the interests of your children. They don't want to read your books on dark money or addiction memoirs that end in water or breastfeeding either, m'kay? They find those tedious. And so you find yourself on the floor, shins crossed, wishing the game would vanish inexplicably.

Monopoly.

The plot and purpose and structure are: You go around and around in circles and buy shit and hope people land on your property so you can charge them for shit.

I have never on purpose wanted to have something so someone else couldn't have it, but I may have done so accidentally because: whiteness.

I wonder if Monopoly is a white person's game.

So let's start like this. After 5 hours on a Saturday morning with my toddler and my 10 year-old (while my 12 year-old was off at a gaming store in midtown Manhattan, exploring his new freedom to be only with peers in someone else's monopoly, and his ad hoc social life) my toddler fell asleep. This only happens if you try to put his pants on to go outside, he has a fit and falls asleep because: pants.

He basically has clothing narcolepsy.

So facing an aborted trip to the park and with a bright hour to myself to write ohmygodmygodohmygod I vie for sainthood and instead ask my 10 year old if he wants to play a game.

Now, he is fun to play games with and my stepsons have a towering pile of real games in their rooms that don't get played with enough, games with pieces that you could for example lose because: don't give enough of a shit about stuff. He has strategy and is just growing out of changing the rules when he's losing, a phase I am glad to be almost maybe next week done with.

However, what does he come back with? Connect 4 and Monopoly. Connect 4 is the back up plan. I love Connect 4. But, alas. Monopoly is the plan. And I must be vying for Sainthood because I said OK great let's play as I felt giant tears of boredom trickle from the armpit of my soul, if you will.

Now before you canonize me, please know that because my baby only takes long naps when, say, I have to be somewhere important and have no help, I knew there was no way this game would last more than an hour and a half because he would wake up and throw pieces everywhere and rub the money around and done.

Sorry, toddler tornados everywhere destroy valuable wastes of time.

So, spoiler alert: Yup, Monopoly is just as boring as I remember.

You basically go in circles and buy stuff until you go bankrupt and then you keep buying stuff because this is America. You gotta keep up with the Joneses and the Rodriguez's and the Trumps. Did I say that? And the system has all kinds of ways to help you go into debt because: capitalism and economic oppression.

Aren't credit cards a miracle of geometry? So thin you could pick a lock with them, yet so thick with narrative.  The foundation for a tower of loss from which you can grow and grow your hair but will never get out without a collection agency stabbing you in the back. Rumple-monthly-statements-kin, or some such mythical creature that hounds and hounds. 

Then you have to hope people roll the dice and land on your shit because if they lose you win hence capitalism hence whiteness and hence: acquisition.

You buy shit you don't want and maybe can't afford and definitely don't need--just so someone else can't have it.

You spend time thinking how you can get that golden 500 bill out of the bank without anyone seeing.

The banker, if you're playing with kids, has to be Not You. Your opponent who is forgetful pretends to forget what denomination bill you gave him and gives you wrong change, too little. They call this cheating but let's be real, the real bank is always taking more than its share. Cheating is contagious.  Every time you stroke an ATM, a bit of that value is spat into the culture with your withdrawal.

In fact, it is a known that Monopoly bankers cheat. Conflict of interest and the allure is too great. It is almost a job description. An ethical banker ruins the ambiguous, seedierthanwebelieveweare human element. But more importantly, there is nothing else to do. So cheating adds that essential spark of strategy and adrenaline that makes a game a game. Not that I've ever cheated voraciously at monopoly. You gotta take what you can when you can.

Most people have cheated or thieved in some way off-board, too, but called it something else. I also stole extra hospital underwear after childbirth just because. It felt good to leave with more than I went in with--hence: capitalism. It would take months, more than a year, for the hospital to send all the bills. They were staggeringly high and each one had a perplexing itemization for everylittlefuckingthing. The ferry of debt is the last one to leave. You never just missed it.

But those hospital gauzy chucks --Made me feel like I had really GOTTEN something out of the experience, you know?  I'm still sad I wore through them all and had nothing to show for my trip.  

Speaking of trips, let's talk about Monopoly, those tiny silver shiny game pieces. A crisp shopping bag, a compact iron, a little lap dog? Urbanity? Icons of Affluence? Oddly, in the older version, a thimble? The only person I'd ever seen use a thimble in my real life is my grandmother, who repaired clothing and made doilies. Doilies. But she comes later in the essay, and never personally purchased anything beyond household items, all the banking in her husband's name, hence patriarchy. 

You pay Monopoly taxes not based on any fiscal calendar but randomly. Often just when you have nothing else left to draw on. Like, say, sex after a newborn. When the bank has collected on your misfortune, then the IRS comes along and says: me too.

And then, JAIL. In my opinion monopoly jail is a little harsh and always feels like a non-sequitur. What have I done to deserve this, the poor inmate might ask. Well, that's not the point, friend. 

[Would it be much better if Monopoly involved obligatory corporal punishment for unethical behaviors? If you were too greedy, or caught cheating, instead of temporary imprisonment, the other players delivered you shocks, minor but aggravating paper-cuts with your property deeds, you had to put your face down to the ground and grovel, "I WILL NOT TAKE MORE THAN WHAT IS MINE, I WILL NOT TAKE MORE THAN WHAT IS MINE." Because: more. Because: no. Because: limits.]
Jail serves only as a lull in an otherwise deadly boring game, and nothing bad happens to you there except missing a turn. Which is a myth about jail in real life, too. But maybe not white collar jail. That actually might be a bit more like: missing your turn to buy shit, while spending your time in a clean square room, with three square meals a day and WIFI, a space from which you will soon be released with no other consequential change in circumstance-- except maybe a new job title.

You acquire. The more you acquire the more you want to acquire because: more.

You have deeds for your property laid out in front of you. You can keep constant tabs on what and how much and did you just land on something I own? Excellent, excellent.

But, let's be real. What you own is 2" by 3" inches on a foldable board.

But, more.

So let's talk about how this is like life, shall we? We set up the board and agree to the rules. There are 2 piles for chance events, opportunities that can randomly improve or degrade your circumstances. Like, oops, ran up a wine tab at the bar or, oops, invested in the wrong arm of my business and owe IRS back-taxes. This kind of normal shit. Occasionally you get the monopoly version of finding a twenty in your winter coat pocket. That happens too, m'kay?

But I noticed that there is no love on the monopoly board, though. Did you? Not even the chance events of grandpa mailing you a crisp folded ten on your birthday. (He doesn't know $10 only buys you half of anything you actually want).  

And by the way, speaking of real  people: after my grandma died my grandpa sent the next birthday card from both of them. I wasn't sure if he did it on purpose or by accident. But the year after that, he didn't sign it from both. I don't know if he did it on purpose or by accident, but each tiny signature cleaved my heart in half. Both cards expressed the minutiae of grief and loss amidst trying to go on. But you didn't want to hear about my grandparents.

No emotions on the board, nary a one. Fitting, because no one can have a monopoly on those, not even if you own all the property in the world, and every single dollar. The 1% are not 99% more affective-rich. By converse, you can't pay a mortgage with compassion.

So you buy and buy and buy and build and build and build incrementally upping your rent costs. You gloat when the dice deliver players to your properties--as if you have done something special, been someone special, to have all this. And yet I repeat: capitalism. Capitalism really has your back, you louse.

But the thing is: dice are random. Someone lands on things you own if the dice tell them to. And as you buy up the board, it is more and more likely you will be owed, and more and more likely others will have nothing to pay you with. Because: whiteness. No, I didn't mean that. Because: monopoly.

But that's it. Do you follow me? Nothing but purchase power, no beautiful insights or mental maps. No peaked cognition, no self reliance, no strategic plan or think tank, no, no mentors, no trailblazers, no. And when you get done with all your "no's" you just get = capitalism, the fib of eternal yes, endless resources, and pathetic individualism.

But the ten year old is winning, and worse than playing monopoly is slowly losing at monopoly. He doesn't even look that thrilled with himself which either means he is becoming an adult or the game is absurdly boring and takes way too long (to get out of).

In this way it is like...poverty?

My husband and I talked about taking a vow of poverty because at least then it would look like this was all on purpose. The phrase is ennobling. It doesn't at all sound like you are still paying off a tremendous credit card balance from when you left your conflictaddicted ex and lived out of your car and faked normalcy for your children, one meal at a time. Not that.

Suddenly, like a life raft, I hear the toddler yelling, and I am snatched from an abyss of monoboredom. I am so bored I can't even listen well to the podcast we have agreed to have on--Myths & Legends, Oedipus. Interesting thing to listen to with a stepson whose relationship with his mom is mighty enmeshed but: another essay.

I AWAKE!! The toddler calls.

Exactly what I wish to feel. I AWAKE, he says, liking his own sound, hearing us laugh because: healthy ego formation.

The 10 year-old and I run in to get the toddler and I tell the older one to be prepared for the game to be ruined and I try to sound sad about it.

The 10 year-old jumps on the toddler and they do whacky flips on the bed and the 10 year-old has agreeably walked away from a situation where he + minor cheating was beating me senseless. I was about to become a monk, begging for supper of a few rice grains and lotus flowers. So this is the real sign that the game is death by boredom. Doesn't the winner always gloat?

Well, not in love.

And then the toddler comes in with us and sees the board and his sense of life purpose goes through the roof. He doubles in size and strength over the six steps it takes him to get from the door to the game. With both hands and both feet and a glorious shriek, he wrecks the system, with no sense of boring or order, hence: parenthood. Hence: instinct. Hence: all our systems are temporary, honey. 

So sell me your boardwalk, quick, side deal, and sell it to me for way too little, say, just my undying affection. In the vastest sense you have nothing to lose. Or that's what I will tell you as I scoop you up and we shake on the shitty deal. As I fold you into my arms and the ceiling fan blows away what was left of the bank's kitty. Most of it is under the couch and will stay there because: I have kids. Because: love. Because: capitalism must have at least one opponent. Because, monopoly problems. Or just because.
 

Essay Experiment #16: Don't hold your breath--#52essays2017

I once held my breath for 4 minutes and 27 seconds.

6 years later, it would take only a quarter of that time for my newborn to be pulled out of my body, under duress. For a perfect cup of tea, tea afficionados will tell you two minutes is best. The Q train takes 4 minutes to speed across the park, underground. 

Holding your breath, you float in a dark that feels ancient, wide and inexplicable. That darkness is comforting, frighteningly so--despite the Christ-on-the-cross-on-day-two-type discomfort that sets into your cells as you resist exhaling. 

So, consider it: 4 min, 27 seconds. Go ahead, set a timer, I'll wait. 

I was face down in the water, all those minutes, Mike the Stud gently holding my hand.

We communicated in little pulses. When he squeezed me, I had to squeeze right back. Otherwise he would I assume I had gone unconscious and needed to be saved.

To do this, to rescue me, he would right my body and tilt my head back. There was some mammalian reflex involved that would keep a mammal-- I am one, fur bleached from South East Asia sun--from drowning herself. 

To hold your breath like this is like practicing a stellar kind of dying, on purpose. Your body has paroxysms of carbon dioxide buildup. The whole blank black universe is inside your head. Something begs to be expelled, and with your whole body relaxed, relaxed, every single cell, you say, no. 

Then Mike the Stud squeezes your hand and you squeeze back, floating like the desiccated husk of a shrimp at the surface of a chlorinated pool. Your rented wetsuit is dorky and too big.

You have not even dreamed of having babies yet. Well, you have dreamed many times but the dreams were cul-de-sacs full of could-be-anywhere shrubbery, thickets of heartache, boring too-tall-trees with no aesthetic charm.

Now, I know labor is a little like this.  Dying practice. Sport Apnea. The lungs trying to clutch themselves, to find something that isn't there. The body in a series of spasms that feel as old as its lizard-like knowledge of fear and poisoned berries.

The spasms continue, but I am limp. 

Mike is a pro-Relaxer, and it's his stalwart embodiment of doing so that I feel every time he gives his squeeze.

We spent a few hours with him in a classroom, learning the mechanics of this process.  What, exactly, was happening with our body chemistry as the gasses didn't exchange in their usual rhythm.  How the relaxation response would sustain disruption of the pattern of the autonomic nervous system. We drew little diagrams.  We practiced holding out breath without the conditions of water.  We heard Mike say, "Relax a little more." When a sexy person tells you to relax, part of you wants to listen just because. 

It's the same instruction you get in labor: relax. Your body revolts from the cue.  In labor, you are wet but without a wet suit.  If there is a friendly hand available, you are destroying it with the wrench of your grip. Light touch feels awful.  The water feels worse.

I never want to let go of Stud Mike. He is keeping track of me. What more could I ask? He is watching my body for even the tiniest sign that I cannot take it any more. 

After, when I am breathing air again and he congratulates me, he tells me my time. 4 min 27 seconds. Not bad, though not a world record. That was hit in 2012: 22 minutes, 22 seconds, by Stig Severinson.  So multiply my experience by 5 and you get his. That's the length of a television show.  That's how long it takes me to commute to work, on an easy day. That's how long it takes for my stepson to eat four bites of his breakfast cereal.  

But then again, Stig's never been in labor for 27 hours standing up, and refused nitrous oxide, has he.  But me? Scratch that off my bucket list. Endurance doesn't always translate: maybe 5 uteran contractions in, Stig would be crying for mercymercymercy, for his mommy, for one decent exhale.   We don't know. Talent is segmented; pain is bearable where you tell yourself it is, and even then, sometimes biology hoses down your pride, gives you a pie in the scrunched up face. 

Under water, static, breath not doing the one thing it's supposed to, people outclass me by a full quarter of an hour, and these pros spear fish and who knows, write underworld novellas in their minds, clip their elegant nose hairs-- while they are down there.

But I've lifted my head, I've said, that's all I can do. My hair gets caught on the zipper on my wetsuit.  

SMACK. Oxygen gives me a standing ovation, courses back into my body, makes reality as crisp as military haircut, as new hotel bedding.  I've always hated pulling back that kind of bedding, washed too hard, with too harsh detergent, trying to get rid of too much.  

Air flits around my head, competes for my mouth hole, like the molecules-- and I can feel each one-- are bees from a hive I've knocked over. 

My sad boyfriend takes our photograph. Me and Stud Mike, arms around each others' necks. Sad Boyfriend has held his breath longer than I have, and been better at it, and wants to try it again tomorrow, to be even more better than, with stud Mike. 

Stud Mike lives like a sport apnea monk 1/3 of the year, everything he ingests or efforts for or even thinks about weighed against whether or not it will improve or hamper his breathhold, increase his time spent under water, decrease his chance of passing out.

Some people do this static apnea sunk in a metal vessel, so they can't obey early impulses and break to the surface.

How long can you not do the very thing that you must do to live? It is such a weird challenge. I think I understand the urge to cheat something so basic. To be better than your autonomic demands. 

Sad Boyfriend and I were in Bali. We'd been traveling and teaching, and now we were by ourselves, together, completely alone, together, each of us drowning side by side and neither, with even the lightest grip, saving the other.  The island roads were too hot. My intestines had not yet turned to confetti. For some reason I had taught our hotel girl how to say "Babaganoush." Or maybe she had taught me, with a big grin used for word play with Westerners, that the local word for hello sounded like a middle eastern dish, mashed eggplant with tahini.  We said Babaganoush back and forth, because when you have one word in common, it's good to share it. It functions like Oxygen. 

Sand in my mouth most of that week. Sleeping as far as I could get to the other side of the bed from sad boyfriend.

Every time he went to ask me a question I held my breath. I most feared he would ask me to marry him, after traveling for the year together; I feared I would say yes.  It's how a movie would end.  He'd emerge from the water glistening, flexing his stocky muscles, a bright ring in his mouth. 

Relaxing holding a breath under water was a great displacement for our weak conversation, for the things we weren't saying. Mike, Mike, Mike. Mike lived the Island life and was completely confident in himself and his abilities. His tan looked painted on.  He was a clear teacher, was chiseled, happily poised on the perimeter of the impossible. He'd taught us free-diving in the days before, which sad boyfriend was also better at.  I kept popping back up to the surface, nothing could keep me upsidedown. It was hard to dive at all that way, my legs like pylons on a jetty. I felt like a stupid bath toy, bobbing senselessly in the wobbly rush of blue.

This happened in labor, too.  Someone would say, stay with it, stay in your pelvis, but there I was popping up to the surface, looking around for the sky.  Like the sky would save mammal me.  The sky has never once saved anyone. It's just a bigger place to get lost. 

My bathing suit was stretched out under my wetsuit, my hair too long, my body too depressed from who knows what.

The next day sad boyfriend left to do it again. To arrest time and be better than me, to go longer, to have the gentle touch of the stud on his wrist, to prove something.

I stayed at home at the little hotel, not wanting to feel so barren on the hot roads, crammed with tourists trying to find things to do that would make them look happy.  So I sat with a stray cat and an almost-used-up journal in the sunshine, smiling foolishly at hotel girl, saying back and forth, Babaganoush.

Later she asked me, he not your husband? 

It had made it easier to call ourselves married when we reserved rooms. 

No, I said. We are just traveling.

She nodded. 

I picked up my pen. Waited for Sad Boyfriend to come back, walking the roads without shoes just to show how natural he was.  I waited for Sad Boyfriend to come back and ate whatever vegetables they had on hand, and wrote things down.  Stud Mike on my wrist.  My whole body fighting to breathe, and over-riding, over-riding.  The puff of my wet suit above the blue-glow water, looking like a baby whale that had gotten confused and wound up in a sport pool.  Mike's pulse.  My pulse back.  Imperceptible, almost, in the end, like that moment before a baby loosens its primordial bond and replaces mother with oxygen.

The cry it makes, by most accounts, is horrible, the sweetest most broken sound in the world.

Experiment in the Essay #13-- What is it to be a person?: #52essays2017

What does it mean to be a person?

What is a person?

I swim laps past the stooped old lady-- I think she's part Jellyfish on Valium-- doing her ghostly butterfly stroke, legs moving in the slowest circles, her skin lagging behind her.  I am swimming with questions the way some people swim with dolphins. 

What is it to be a person? 

You could say this question is keeping time with me. It is stroke for stroke pacing me to the shallow end and back to the deep, where I see a band-aid that's come loose from a swimmer slowly, spirally sink.   

What is a person?  Once you are one, you forget to ask. You just strip off your suit, and wonder if you'll get fungus in your feet for lack of flipflops, from all that shared water on the only-sometimes-bleached tiles. 

Is it a different question if I write it slightly differently? Yes, technically; maybe, entirely. Depends if you hear it differently or how closely you read.  

Depends on what you think a sentence does.

Even the tiniest parts of words can make a world of difference, say,"I do" vs. "I don't." Two persons becoming, in effect, one thing; one person, in effect, denying the whole thing. 

What is a person? It's the kind of question a three year-old asks you that you're never ready for.  It exposes the edges of your resourcefulness.  You point and grunt. Hand the kid a pancake and say, "I don't know." or "Let me just write some things down." My son is  nearly two.  He's content to know whatever he assumes, but somewhere in the next year doubt creeps in and he'll have to check.

Maya Angelou: We don't tell you enough how special you are. She said this to young people, as a general message: you are all we've got and we should tell you so everyday.

I trust my wise poet elder. OK, so a person is something special, who should be told that when young, but then weaned off that belief before it becomes narcissism later.

John, my husband, not poet laureate, but with a world-view that makes human self-importance seem as appealing as winters-old-summers-melted cherry chapstick: we (humans) are not special, but we are especially good at trying to convince ourselves of our specialness.

He favors animals. They greet you on...simple terms? I try to see through his eyes. But when I look at the African Grey parrots he keeps, half the time I see only animals who want to peck my hand and crap on the coffee table.

Maybe we spend our whole lives trying to sort out whether we are special or not in the eyes of the universe.

Some of us think the universe has eyes, anyway, or are willing to uptick the final judgment: what is a person?

It always seems weird to me that we stand around naked in locker rooms. A bunch of strangers naked as the day they were born rifling through bags and combing wet hair. Everything is about context. If I took off all my clothes on the subway and stood there texting/writing, as I am doing now, I would be arrested. Even if I tried to look like I belonged, like I was not special.

If I stood thigh-deep in a pool of water and jesuschristmaryfucker screamed birthfuckingbabywater you would call the police, eventually. But If I told you I was in labor, you'd cover your head with a pillow and wait it out. The fucking miracle of life.

Labor is a special moment. It's a wrecking ball to your body, to your sense of being inside skin, to the fiction of a person as a singular thing.

All life is transformation. To accept that is a kind of death. To reject that is a worse death. I take the first.

I think.

As I was swimming, circling in the water, going nowhere, going whaledolphinfishanythingbutperson, I was thinking --what makes writing and do we write to figure out what a person is? We must be naked in art. We must birth a definition. Those who have been there (birthed babies) warn you that you will also shit a bit on the delivery "table." At one birth I attended the mama's shit was so tiny, like a polite pebble, like it didn't want to outclass the baby or particularly stick out in the memory of that special day (The thing you want to brag about is not: "My partner took the most giant shit ever, they weighed it!"). The mother won't know she's shit unless someone tells her. What is a person.

I remember shitting in my bathing suit in the pool in a retirement village (somewhere, you don't have to know where you are when you're that young) when I was still little enough to have what parents call "accidents."  It felt heavy. I don't remember if I reported it or it was found by adults. 

My mother rinsing the suit and shit out in the sink in a big public bathroom. My nose could reach the white sink basin. I don't remember shame or embarrassment or my exact age. Just my suit insideout and the white nylon streaked crotch and one of those dumb faucets you have to keep holding down or it will shut off. Very hard to clean soiled things under that.

Sometimes sentences need a tap with consistent unrelenting pressure too. Clear away the muddy brown accident parts to find out what a person is.

After you grow a person inside you and all your muscles cells bones hormones nerves numbstruckdumb collaborate to get it out, you are changed.

But, why?

I think birth is a clobbernumber on the baby. It is sad to think you will never have it better than in the womb and the rest of life is a downhill tutorial in separation.

I think birth is this ordeal, right, at the end of which you get the deal. You didn't ask to be a person. It is probably the biggest decision of your life and you didn't make it.

As I stand here naked, I am trying to get pregnant again. Well, not right this minute in the locker room, but generally. As a practice that makes my animal husband animal us happy. A newborn is an animal dressed up and treated specially. That's it. As close to the kingdom as we get, but then we walk away backward with blindfold on tripping over our own feet. We sense we are losing something primary but we don't know what. We wreck our posture by not standing around naked enough.

We spend the rest of our lives trying to get back into the pair of arms that will help us know why we were here in the first place.

Real arms work best. It's because there is blood in them and we who are held feel it run warm beneath the fiction of skin. The bloodstream is comforting to us, as our blood once made an infinity sign with our mother's. Even if she was unable to mother, if she could not transform, still, the blood precedes the personality.

What, then, how, when--is a person?  

Experiment in the Essay #12: Who Broke This? #52essays2017

I think I'm supposed to tell you a story about breaking a chair in the JP Morgan Chase conference center.  I didn't break it. One of my students-- or a bunch of them-- did: 17 year -old males of color, so in their bodies, so hyped up,  that decorum was like aftershave: nice on occasion, but not today.

I was working as a writing coach for a college-bound cohort, "middle-performing" young men largely from adverse circumstances, helping them plan and write their personal admissions essays.  "Middle performing" means, loosely, you're not pulling A's but you are also not trailing F's, and you have other compelling qualities besides your GPA. JPMC philanthropy was gonna make somethin' outta them all right.

We had breakout sessions after a long day to workshop drafts.  I think some took the term "break out" literally. (Do you know the adolescent refrain, "But you said ....!!!") Students not in session were supposed to be revising independently on their company laptops in the main conference room-- which was, typically, huge-- and updating their college apps. The students were getting loopy.  Too much brain in one day. 

But when I came back from my small group process, their ED, T, was very unhappy. Her name is Twinkle, and she can get more done in a day than an earthquake. She was standing next to a chair that looked like a bank vault had been dropped on it.  The florescent lights made tracks down her brown forehead. 

"Who did this?" She asked, in her angry mom voice.

The boys looked at the floor, the ceiling, the window, that little itty bit of dust on the....

When no one owned up, she snapped, "Well, you'll have to buy the chair then. All of you. How much do you think it costs?"

JPMC spends on stupid shit. This is part of corporate culture.  The boys blinked.  They honestly had no sense, but to be fair, there was an original Warhol in the hallway bathroom.  IN THE FUCKING BATHROOM.

My ED stood there with her hands on her hips and her high heels digging into the carpet.  I was waiting for her to take off her red suit jacket and start the spankings.  We'd find out later what had happened was the cushy armchair with a small fold-down work "arm" had become a parkour obstacle.  And the desk had cracked off and the chair, somehow, lost a squat leg.  Sometimes you don't even want to know how.

I could see in the boys' eyes they still thought that three minutes of athletic fun had been worth it.  

Finally she whisper-yelled, "THAT CHAIR WAS 200 dollars!  Do you know who's going to pay for it? You all are paying for it! Who's got 200?"

I know her well.  She couldn't care less about the chair or replacing it-- what she cared about was the carelessness, the lack of forethought, their disconnect from common sense about what behavior was appropriate in what environment, no matter the motive.

These boys were being groomed for survival in corporate culture, m'kay? And last time I saw an executive break a chair between meetings was never.  Of course, I rarely see them drunk, but still I think the company chairs are not what gets wrecked.  

The boys winced. They were play-serious, trying not to laugh, but also aware the liability-- and stupidity-- could be a tad serious.

I knew also that T would never make them pay.  She gave up sleep and family life for these boys; she gave up her health and the salary she could have commanded. She loved these brown boys, and she was not going to let people who looked like them break shit on her watch and feel OK about it.

Who among them had a casual 200 dollars? Which one's mother wouldn't beat him over the bill? 

She called for circling up to problem solve. Manhattan was right outside the huge windows waiting, innumerable ugly mega bank buildings like the one we were in peeking back at us. I was shoulder to shoulder with the fellows as they shifted on their feet in their suits -- all 25 of them-- while she waited in the center, arms crossed.  "Where's that money going to come from? That chair was 200 dollars!" she repeated.  

Where is that money going to come from is maybe the question all of us are asking.

Not JPMC though. JPMC makes money appear like white rabbits out of white hats, held up by black bodies. 

I was next to K, a short and slight kid who could pass for 10 but had learned everything there was to know off youtube. If you were close enough to him-- he dreamed of opening hotel chains-- you could catch his almost constant unsolicited snarky commentary, with which he deflected realities under his breath.  Because I was close enough, I heard what he muttered, "Well they got that chair at the wrong store.  Same thing at K-Mart is 20 dollars." Saw his expert Eye rolling.  At the establishment.  At the inflation. I had to try not to laugh, too, just like my boys. I bit my lip. I agreed with him so much. He was completely not flummoxed by the price tag. In fact, he thought it could lose a zero to save face. 

"Maybe we could write a note explaining we made a bad choice?"  A  reasonable student proposed, smoothing back his hair, one hand in his suit pants pocket. "Apologizing?"  

But to whom?  Was it their fault JPMC had such lopsided aesthetic priorities?  That what it is worth is determined by what did you pay?

"They got that chair at the wrong store," K said again, a little louder but with his head turned away from the circle. With a preacher's cadence and a teen's sarcasm, already understanding completely how the world works. 

Later my ED admitted to me in private she had no idea how much the chair cost, probably even more than the number she'd given, but she just wanted to scare them into not doing it again.  And also-- the parkour move had been pretty impressive, by all reports. 

But you can't have a bunch of brown n' black boys breakin' the chairs in the conference center, can yah? 

The busted chair was removed by staff by the next day, and as far as I know, no one paid for it nor, as often happens in corporate culture, did anyone miss it very much.  It was replaceable, if you had the funds. 

But as K had pointed out, Chase missed the point.  That thing didn't have to cost anything.  Instead, people-- young black men-- were paying for it with their lives. 

***

Coda: This happened when I was just gaining stepsons and before I had my own baby. These boys were, for a few years, like my sons. I loved them and love them still, and so does T, though she works for another group of kids now in education equity. They have gone on to do startlingly great things, to participate in corporate culture or critique it. And I hope they will have the chance to teach my son that some things are worth (not) paying for, if you get just the right lift and a moment of irreverent flight.

Experiment in the Essay #10 & 11: Naming The Baby-- #52essays2017

Have you picked out a name yet? They would ask constantly, the meddlesome Greek Chorus, A Concerned Citizens Brigade, gesturing at my big-big-big belly.  A pregnant belly is a marquee with the lights blown out. What are your top picks?

To function according to their literary trope, a Greek Chorus must consist of no one identifiable in particular.  So "they" means, suitably, almost anyone, or everyone. I'm a writer, and pronoun vagueness affronts my sensibility.  But, still-- it seemed like the most socially acceptable prying question anyone had, and everyone expected an answer to. The deli clerk. The UPS guy. My friend's auntie. The hair stylist. You.

I perfected a kind of beatific, Mother-Mary smile to beam at them, like I was trying to remember exactly what sex with God had been like, a bit distracted from the pedestrian world and its nominations.  The kind of smile that is holy-but-weird enough that the original question gets deflected.  So that when I said eventually, "We don't have one yet, for a boy, if it's a boy...." it didn't even sound all that bad or bothersome.

Meanwhile, hormones collided in my bloodstream like poorly steered go-carts on a racetrack.  A million bitchy replies thankfully didn't make it past the blood brain barrier, and so, praise Mother Mary in her immaculacy, didn't come out of my mouth. Only an idiot curses at a Greek Chorus: the person you are really annoyed at is yourself.  Like a good Chorus, these interrogators just expose your psyche for what it is.

A hot mess, soupy with nouns. 

But then someone you like or love asks the same question.  And, it gouges deeper. Even fond memories of the sex you never had with god can't distract you from your own inability to answer: Have you picked out a name yet? 

I wanted to be a landline giving off a dial tone-- but, no.

A name is deeply personal, almost embarrassing in the formative stages-- for you to ask me about a name-- whether I have one picked or not, or what it is-- is like me asking you if my embryo is cute, which it is not. Holding out the prints from the ultrasound, look! The big-headed vaguely-toed, curled bean of a thing is not even a distant cousin of cute.  Maybe just a bit beautiful because, hey, even a cockroach-- periplanata Americana, a product of global trading-- is beautiful, if you consider it the craft of natural selection. But this embryo?  Let's keep it to descriptive, non-subjective, clinical language. It's only cute to the parent-to-be because they know it's theirs, and they can't believe it.

But since you're cornered by the rhetorical question, the only answer you can give is, Yes, that's a gorgeous bit of whatever in your uterus! Why don't you put it on Facebook and crowd-source your joy! People will give you some OMG's and virtual cigars and congratulatory specialness will abound until they scroll down and forget your gray blur. 

Also, I actually don't want to know what you think.

If I tell you the name I've picked-- if I, in fact, have one-- maybe you'll wince.  Or start to opine and riff on all the problems; "But did you think about the fact that Jumilla rhymes with Gorilla?" or "Isn't Azalea a flower, and did you think about the fact that the baby will have to LIVE WITH THAT NAME FOR THE REST OF HER LIFE?" Someone actually said that-- maybe my father?-- about one of our names. 

Anyway, it wasn't the girls' names that were the issue; it was boys, damn them to a one.  I'd suspected the patriarchy was stupid, and now I was sure. If I had a son, he'd have to be given a girl's name: Jasmine, because I could only think as far as my preferred tea, right?  

Maybe the Chorus-Master, who was known to thumb aggressively through a rolodex shoved deep into her robe pocket, had tried to offer commentary on my pick using all caps: DID YOU THINK ABOUT THE FACT? She meant well, trying to shift the action in the direction of safe choices.

Please, sirs, madams: I am doing my very best not to think. 

Every name rhymes with something, is one problem.  And people aren't practiced at the art of authentic deference, is another. 

I developed a belief, and talked about it: No one should be allowed to preview the names of the not-yet-born.  Because all names trigger memories, associations.  Like every plant in the forest is connected in mutual exchange of gas and nutrients, every name communes with bigger meanings. And unlike any plant in the forest, it stands naked and alone at recess in the school yard, its balls shriveling in the wind. 

I never felt more or less like a writer; sitting there staring at the blank page of my not-yet-born little person, and coming up with nothing suitable. The absence of a name burned a hole.  It left a black mark on my decisiveness as a fallen cigarette leaves a scar in a couch.  I turned that feeling perniciously inward: I felt as glaringly deficient as I was pregnant for my lack of YES when it came to basically any boy's name ever. 

I prayed a bit, for clarity, for revelation of Just Right. I don't normally do this, and if I'm quite sure Mother Mary and the rest know an opportunist when they see one. The results were sparse. And I couldn't take it up with the Greek Chorus directly: they are unbudging and ungenerous when the main character is in crisis.  Their role is not to offer sympathy, or empathy.  They are the filler around the pathos. 

A name, once given, also burns a hole in your sense of being singular. There were five Sara/h's in my high school class alone. And my husband's name, John, is the generic name for a man, it means, essentially, "everyman": "Any old John." Your name unites you, if casually, with every other human who has ever been given that name, and felt special, and not been. 

And so we could not pick.  For a boy, that is. Every noun was a misfit. 

The blank stayed blank.  And as we got closer and closer to birth, a weird inevitability of pregnancy, the blank grew bigger, and more fierce, until it terrorized me the way driving blinding rain on an interstate is terrifying.  Griping the wheel, your reaction time compromised by your clenched muscles, you can feel the whoosh of barreling trucks, hazards blinking, on either side of you. If I can take this metaphor way too far--this  was the sense that everyone else alive had a name and it was fine, all the other expectant parents gladly previewed you their "Kai" (we already had one, stepson #1), "Quin" (We already had one, stepson #2), Caleb, Aidan (Which I still like, but it was too popular, it was even the name of a popular book on selecting a name, "Getting Beyond Ada and Aidan"), Myles, Miles, and the list doesn't end. 

And since you asked: the name could not rhyme with Kai or Quin or be a conglomerate of those names, hence many we liked well enough got nixed early.  We were wary of being too Dr Seuss-y when introducing ourselves as a family: "Hi, meet my sons Kai, Quin and Cian, who is basically my first two sons squished together." It just reeked of coyness and lack of imagination, attachment to certain sounds. 

My stepsons liked Phoenix, and other badass mythological names. But somehow-- 

We gave up on all of them, one by one: River, Sticks, Styx, Branch, Root, Sky, Skye, Titan (are you judging us yet? Do you trust me on that one?) and, fuck it, Matthew, Matteo. 

John and I would lie in bed at night before sleep (his, not mine, I was the watch-guard for nouns) and in the mornings after sleep (his, not mine, I was there with a sweet and savory casserole to greet dawn for all her hard work of arrival, hoping she'd show up with a plus one: a name) and pull up naming websites on our phones. Insomniacs and everyone else should not have phones in bed, but there is nothing like pretending to relax while you are deeply stressed.  

There are, literally, hundreds of naming websites, each with hundreds of lists reflecting the agony of (unnatural) selection. 

I became familiar with them all, like you'd become familiar with your lover's tics. We'd devour etymology, historical information, cultural beliefs. But none of the names stuck on our lips, none had the traction, the click, the absolute fit of my mouth with my husband's-- that is, the convincing connection of a good kiss. 

For fun, we explored the lists themselves. We read off names popular in the 1890's, 1910's, 1930's, in the US and elsewhere, dim elsewheres vaguely related to my husband's or my ethnic backgrounds: Mexican, A little Native American a few generations removed, Polish, Russian, Irish, French Canadian, whatever that was ...it seemed endless, like an intestine miles long pulled from a sacrificial animal. 

We'd read them to ourselves, then aloud, where they floated in the air like blimps; we'd turn over each name on our tongue, hear each other again, lapse into silence. It became like a poem, like mantra, sounds for their own sake.  I was embarrassed and involved. 

Making a person, naming a person, is a tremendous responsibility.  I have always had trouble titling my poems, titling my essays, even coming up with passwords.  The title says too much while never being enough. 

This inability to nominate made my heart palpitate, my armpits sweat, met with big frowns from the Greek Chorus-- watch out, as they say to kids on the school yard, your face could get stuck like that. A furrow line like a comma separated the halves of my forehead.  We'd leave the question alone for months or weeks-- what if it was a girl?  We had girls names we liked.  What if all this time spent searching was for naught?  But like blisters arise only from certain shoes, the name quandary would bubble and chafe as we tried to take steps in the direction of finality.

Another casserole baked for dawn, when never in my life had I made a real casserole.  Dawn was always grateful, and always the same, promising false hope, shreds of pink and blue in her jogging suit.   

Our narcissism made us sick-- there were real problems in the world to think about; but at the same time, the way the name kept eluding us was dispiriting.  There is no child ever, as far as I know, that was unnamed. That might set ours apart.  In some cultures, they don't name bastard children-- or the parent must claim the child by doing so.  In other cultures, your community picks for you, and you hardly get a vote. 

DO YOU HAVE A NAME PICKED OUT WHAT IS IT?  The Greek Chorus asked with intensity like when people stop being able to hear each other over cell phones and so speak louder, and we shrugged. DID YOU THINK ABOUT HOW CIAN HOW LUCA HOW PAOLO HOW HOW HOW....

Even a Greek Chorus tackling me wouldn't pull out that fucking noun, if I had it to share. Even if they used forceps, or the "last bit of toothpaste" method, or water torture.

As is a trope for me, I used my insomnia well. It was too easy, the way sleep was too hard, to think of quips dismissing other people's inappropriate imbecility when I was feeling so sour, like I was no longer made of cells, but only of blinks.  The baby rolled over in the belly while my mind rolled over possible dismissive replies: We don't believe in names. My husband and I have decided names are for losers.  

I was going to save that cathartic crisis for the maternity ward if you don't mind. Plus, every single boys name is fucked and awful.

Do you want to know the flavor of my anxiety attack when at three days old my son-- we had a son, we did!-- still was not named? At one week?

Because, yes: Baby arrived.  Baby was a boy. 

We had called him/her/it/pronoun-less one "Nugget" in the womb. That stuck and as far as I was concerned that was it.  Little Nugget, I would say, as I held the tiny creature that was my nameless son. The NICU's plastic armchair-- blue-- wheezed when you sat down in it to cradle the baby; I listened to my husband, hovering in his blue smock that only he could look sexy in, as he read off yet more names from his phone for the billionth time, and then from the whittled down list.  I shook my head endlessly, my No so acute it might become the baby's moniker. And I could live with that.  We'd explain it as a shortened version of my surname-- Nolan. It was almost workable. 

Are you real before you have a name?

"My little person," apparently, is not satisfying enough, nor enduring. The devil is thwarted when hoping to tempt you, as we are all tempted at times, to go down an uglier path than we like to admit we're walking. 

In the NICU, we found that we were not alone in feeling bereft, and without intercession from God. There was an orthodox Jewish couple hanging around the incubator next to us. They had a little girl who also lolly-gagged nameless, getting her diaper changed, being given bottles held upright by the huge hands of the huge NICU nurse, the gentlest and largest man I'd ever seen. 

"Baby Nolan" our tag read. They identified baby with mom for the hospital stay. I liked that. I fended off the patriarchy (my husband's name, Gonzalez) with the patriarchy (my father's name, Nolan). It made no sense. 

But for one feeding time, I zombie-walked into the NICU, having scrubbed myself free of contaminants with their harsh pink soap, and they had rearranged the babies.  Moved so and so to this incubator, so and so to that.  My son was now in the stabler cohort, because obviously the only thing wrong with him at this point was that he had no name, and his mom was possibly deranged from lack of sleep.  A new nurse was on shift; she asked the baby's name. I said "Gonzalez."  She disappeared, and returned, looking confused and distraught, with no baby and no instructions. "Are you sure?" She asked.  

I'm sure. NOT, I AM NOT FUCKING SURE, I MEANT BABY NOLAN.

Thank god they had the hospital tags on my wrist. You cannot just walk in there and lie about your baby.

"Baby Nolan," I corrected, carefully.

She raised an eyebrow and then pointed to my son's incubator.  I could hear him yelling, though first it just looked like his mouth was trilling, singing opera, the pacifier-- the emotion-stultifying pacifier!-- lying on its side near his head.  I was pretty sure he was having a fit about his mother's indecision, about his--still-- anonymity, even as he'd become a raging particular.  He was burrito'd in the stock swaddles and had no arms-- they were trapped.   I ran to him and nursed my way to redemption.  The nurse in the area told me ruefully he'd been screaming for hours.  MOTHER WISHES TO BE CALLED, I'd had them write in all caps on the baby's folder.  That worked well...

Baby Nolan, Nugget, I sang to the little person.  Little one, Nugget, Whoever-you-are Gonzalez, I love you, does that not matter more?

Are you so-and-so? we'd ask, as we changed his diaper around his awkwardly jerking, tiny legs, are you so and so? 

No answer. So the baby was not going to pick for us, suddenly open his eyes in rapture and clarity at the sound of his not-yet-definite appellation. No, he was just going to be his newborn self, spastic in the dim lights of the NICU, waiting for us to do something for god's sake.

Sucking and yelling and sucking and quiet, the no-name baby was sleeping! But just for a minute. Crying and yelling and crying and yelling. 

The 12 panic attacks I had considered changing my last name to Gonzalez (and maybe did, and maybe did not) at the court clerk's desk when we signed our marriage license came rushing back to me.  Shakespeare's question is oft quoted, and it rubs: What is in a name?  A rose by any other name might smell as sweet, but you'd think of it differently.  If you called a rose, instead, Booty Blooms, try as you might, you'd seen an inflorescent asshole. For example.

Once you've had panic attacks, you have a sixth sense for when someone else is having them.  As I walked the hospital halls, I heard Hasidic babygirl's dad having his own version, sweating under his yarmulke, on the phone with a Rabbi, trying to pick-- or get the Rabbi to pick--what else? --an auspicious name. I had a feeling his question was fraught differently, but in the end, it was the same question.  

He was asking fretfully, jerking to and fro-- Please please help me come up with a good one, maybe Sarah? Sarah you think? And me, Sarah is pretty cool man. But why you stressing it? Let your religion save you for once. Can you not just call her Devorah Leah like all the other little girls in your neighborhood and be done? 

 I shuffled behind him, pathetic people must stick together-- my gray hospital socks somehow making me, awkward from my stitches, weirdly sneaky. I ghosted and glided along the hallways where everyone else's heels clicked, or shoe soles made slaps; a numb spot in my mind where the perfect name should have appeared. The writer's shame...that the noun wouldn't manifest. 

BUT DID YOU THINK ABOUT THE FACT...

This new father's obvious discomfort, so public, seemed like emasculation, and I was embarrassed and tickled to witness him so helpless. Truthfully his struggle was validating: even in cultures where naming draws from a fairly small pool, choosing one carries tremendous weight. You don't want to limit someone's becoming -- someone who, for godsake, just became in the first place. Someone who is the opposite of a noun, pure potential and yet total presence. The power of association is nauseating. 

I also hate choosing definitively, and I respect language too much to think it doesn't all come pre-charged, weighed down by figurative filaments, by history, by incidence. It's always fraught; it has always already been taken from you.  Perhaps this is one reason there is such a trend now, a panic even, to spell names oddly, uniquely-- say Micchal-with-two-c's or no e, forever causing a stutter in the poor teacher calling attendance from the roster.  But we also don't want to be corny like that. 

This name is MMINE, the spelling declares, defends-- and you can't even spell it properly.  

The process of picking gave rise to a tilting existential doom for me. Professional Doom. I who had loved the power of words since I first heard them.  The Greek Chorus developed a permanent scowl; got bored; passed notes IS SHE EVEN THINKING?. Not picking at least left open the option one could pick correctly, perfectly, an equation with the baby on one side and all the variables accounted for on the other. 

But instead, this little face, trilling. To chill him and myself out, I sang him a Sanskrit chant, calling on divinities whose names had been chanted by thousands of people for thousands of years trying to get closer to their Big Who. 

Divinities on repeat coming out of my mouth and coating the atmosphere were soothing to me, when the naming process was as sore and ripped open and guts hanging out as me and my new wound.  I held Baby Nolan round the clock, scrubbing in and out, returning with vials of colostrum, until John texted me from the NICU, while I lay in my hospital bed for ten minutes with a onesie over my eyes: "How about Ronen? We can call him Ron."

RON ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME? RON SOUNDS LIKE AN IRS AUDITOR WITH ALL DUE RESPECT TO THE IRS.

I cried backwards into my pillow.  ABSOLUTELY NOT.

Everything was becoming all caps, crisis, critical.  I was sure they were not going to let us leave the hospital without something specific to put on the birth certificate.  I was equally sure I was not going to be able to pick, I would die indecisive, so we were going to have to rent this mercifully private room forever, me and ________, and John would move out and go back to work and we'd shuffle around the linoleum and drink ice water from pink pitchers and bone broth heated in their microwave and commune as mother and son, through love alone.

The last afternoon before discharge in fact John had to go off to work, to teach a fencing class, and I was crushed.  I didn't want to be left alone to manage, to check out.  He said, let's flip a coin, I'll pick Ronen for the name if it's heads.  

HEADS? TAILS?

Or, he said, you can pick, and I'm OK with whatever you pick.

Reasonable people are the worst kind because they throw your unreason into harsh contrast. 

I cried, wailed, blubbered.  

And then limped into the closet-sized discharge office.  Brenda, the discharge diva, was an angular, exceedingly tall black woman. Her uniform of hospital scrubs, pink, and patterned in bears, despite how infantilizing it was, didn't jeopardize her power in the least.  I don't know, honestly, how she tolerated the pattern, but she rose above it. She reeked of freshly smoked cigarettes and had a personal pizza on her desk. Her skin was nearly jet black, fresh as perfect ink, her hair so sharply cut around her jaw and cheekbones that it could have been a wig.  Her face gruff, her smile geometric, almost manly. I loved her already.  She frowned at me.  

"I'm here to sign the discharge papers. But by when do I need to pick the name?" I asked. I tried to keep the crisis out of my tone.  I was pure calm, the panic attacks stuffed under my hospital gown with the rest of the damage. 

She shuffled my papers around.  "He was born on Tuesday?"

"3:30AM Tuesday."  Three days ago.  You can feel someone judging you, on occasion. It feels like fireflies dying in a jar whose lid you can't unscrew.  

She frowned for emphasis, again.  I could see that this was like folding a piece of paper too many times along the same crease: eventually it would give.

"By next Tuesday, Honey," she said.  She was both old and ageless and took a big bite of her pizza, and chewed it for a long while as those size bites require. "And don't cry."

This was Friday.  I could live with that.  I had a long weekend. I was a teacher, and we are known for putting too much faith in the restorative powers of a long weekend. 

"Put Baby Nolan on there, then," I said, preserving the matriarchy-cum-patriarchy for another few minutes.  "I'll call you by Tuesday."  Like I actually knew what day it was or would be for the next two months. 

Brenda gave me the frown that was fast becoming her facial signature.  She wrote in flowering script on a post-it note; "Mother will call by Tuesday, 5/XX."

I could only imagine the bureaucratic nightmares that would ensue if that post-it fell off her manila folder, and thought I was setting myself up for interminable headache and anxiety, but I let her frown and post me into submission.   She stuck another post-it on the fat royal blue face-slap of a folder she was handing me with the signed discharge papers.  "Call me, don't forget," she said, and in went the pepperoni pizza.  She waved me out with her non-greasy hand and, wiping the other on a tiny napkin, placed my folder in the big stack. I backed out of her miniature  office, and went down the hall to retrieve my even more miniature bundle. 

God's coin-- the one we hadn't tossed, but which was tossed for us-- had landed on heads, I thought, already sure I was not sure, that I'd never be sure, but that I'd have to pick against and despite the weight of that. 

All the long weekend we called him Ronen, just to see.  And it stuck. 

But Ron?  Ron was the bitter pill of nicknames, and I would not allow for it.  I'd fight to the death anyone who called him Ron. 

And then I thought, Ro.  Ro will do. 

We had ourselves six pound boy, "Ronen Lucis Nolan Gonzalez." A name for a Prince, maybe. 

So, Ronen. Ronen was the matriarchy returned, my mother's Hebrew name-- Rena-- and also meant song of Joy. But there was Ronan and Rowen, both common and loved these days-- so we were sentencing our son to regular vowel correction during attendance checks, or a life with his name so frequently spelled wrong he'd learn to shrug it off.  He'd always be tutoring people which syllable to emphasize.  Maybe he'd change his mind in his 20's-- say it a new way. I was the first one to spell his name wrong at our postpartum visit to the pediatrician.    

And his middle name, Lucis- Latin language, genitive case, "belonging to the light, of the light." His spiritual lineage.  My nerdy background in the classics, my insistence that Luc had to be in his name somewhere, I would have no son, no child, without illumination, and that was also the only thing I could never give him, but that he must find himself in the collective dark. 

Nolan-- my last name, my father's people.  The drunken Irish, the Roman Catholics reaching for the rosary beads or stowing them in the shit drawer.  The name that felt too familiar to give up, marrying late; familiar, like the shape of your own teeth against your tongue. 

Gonzalez-- my husband's last name, and my somewhere-on-paper last name, that I'd never use, and never tell anyone I had legally adopted.  The Mexicans who had long crossed the border into Texas, settled, and began erasing their Mexican-ness; the name my husband's mother had already given up when she remarried her high school sweetheart, trading patriarchy for patriarchy; Gonzalez, the name of John's father, also a John, who died of the most toxic blood the hospital had ever seen, who, more rational than emotive, had written a short note as his mind started to go: "I am afraid of what is happening to me." It was unclear who the note was for. This name that my stepsons have; this name that their mother, to my dismay, still has.  This name that my husband signs at the bottom of his oil paintings, in the good years he has any time to paint. 

Roro, we call him, little dude, Ro, Ro-Bear, Little Bear-- Ronen.  Ronen Lucis. Ronen Lucis Nolan Gonzalez. Do you care? Since you asked...since you once needed so much to know.  Now, I'm telling you. At 22 months, he now knows his own name, that people have names, and refers to himself proudly, Roro.  The first person pronoun has organized his syntax. He knows himself as a person who does things, who things happen to, who should listen when he is called-- and also as a subject. Who can choose not to listen when called.  Who can hear his name, and decide from there. Who says it like it was always his, like there was never any question. 

After all that asking, his name matters little to anyone. I mean, it's a good one  Sure, the chorus might still jocularly eye-roll, might be tempted to say, "But did you think about how Ro rhymes with...."

Yes, trust me, I've thought about it.

A name is just somewhere to start, after all.  It is just the opener to a little life, and way to claim our place in the populus, and something to put on a grave, eventually.   The name is just our initiation into form, into concept. Also, it's our way of saying, hey, you-- and knowing who we mean. Calling out to each other, lest our beloveds forget that we are here; praying that our personhood have had meaning, and be a stepping stone toward the sky.   That we have been somebody's top picks, that we have been what we were meant to be, whatever that is. 

____

Some Notes on Greek Chorus, to be further explored:

Although the historical origins of Greek drama are unclear it may be said it had relevance to religion, art and to the love of expression and perceptive storytelling in general. The origins of the chorus in particular may have stemmed out of ancient rites and rituals with elements of song and dance, and most importantly – the gathering of people.

In order to understand the function of the chorus one must remember that at the origins of Greek drama there was only one actor; and even at later dates no more than three actors occupied the stage, each of whom may have played several roles. As there was this clear need to distract the audience while the actors went off-stage to change clothes and costumes, and perhaps prepare for their next role, the function of the chorus may have had more to do with practicality, than with artistic or philosophical considerations.

Aside from the practical the chorus would have had numerous functions in providing a comprehensive and continuous artistic unit. Firstly, according to a view accepted by many scholars, the chorus would provide commentary on actions and events that were taking place before the audience. By doing this the chorus would create a deeper and more meaningful connection between the characters and the audience. Secondly, the chorus would allow the playwright to create a kind of literary complexity only achievable by a literary device controlling the atmosphere and expectations of the audience. Thirdly, the chorus would allow the playwright to prepare the audience for certain key moments in the storyline, build up momentum or slow down the tempo; he could underline certain elements and downplay others. Such usage of the choral structure-making functions may be observed throughout many classical plays but may be more obvious in some than in others.

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Experiment in the Essay #9: Lumps in Mind, #52essays2017

Some days, it's hard to think. I could blame it on the sky, or the way sleep is an inefficient janitor in scuffy shoes. I could blame it on memory and emotion-- say, of my son's birth, or my mother sobbing so hard when she turned 40 she had to leave the table. But these things didn't happen last night, nor yesterday.  Last night I bathed my kid from a tupperware waterfall and cried with him when the water drained out of the tub, because he wanted it back.  Then we went to bed, with wet hair, and I sang the wrong words to a song I didn't know well until he fell asleep; even that degraded into humming.  The lump in my throat rose and colonized my head.  And now it's morning, the gray pushing through the space in the blinds where the light usually appears in a vertical line, like the spine of a magical creature standing in the window.   

"Think": The word even sounds clunkier than the act is supposed to be, those clean neurons firing, ideas like the scaffold for a skyscraper, not a house drawn on an etch-a-sketch by a toddler. When I was young, in elementary school, I'd look at words the teacher wrote on the board until they deteriorated.  THINK. THINK. Language was just a thing that could and would, eventually, fall apart.  I made each of the sounds, and saw something I recognized faintly. But the nature of the sign as interloper-- to be just a sign, to be arbitrary, and so to do its job-- was as evident as a flat-chested person wearing a bra stuffed with balled up tennis socks.  We are not real breasts, the lumpy fakers call out to the would-be groper. THINK.  When my husband comes home late, he cups my small breast in his hand and gives me a kiss and I blink at him from the bed. He thinks I'm asleep and sometimes I am, the janitor pushing his mop in the hallway of my mind. 

I roll over and look at the wall, the baby sleeping horizontal, with his head abutting my low back. I imagine even the most engine of an intellect-- say, Susan Sontag's, or Obama's-- must, some mornings, awaken only as sharp-edged as a lint ball.  THINK. FEEL. 

My thinking feels like an overripe plum.  It leaks weak juice when pressed, flesh mush, the sides dent, you know, the way a metaphor does when taken too far or too hard or left in a basket with a banana overnight. 

My thinking may be an overripe plum, of which a bite will leave you disappointed-- but my breast has a tiny hard pebble, like the seed of a plum, smaller, the seed of a cherry, and smooth. Which is really what I wanted to say, what I didn't want to touch, what I hoped I was not touching. The grief of what we lose, which is everything, but right now makes itself into concrete shapes-- plum, mop, window-- floated to my throat, like a bottle bobbing around the perimeter of water. Sadness, the colonizer. At the end of a long day of thinking, I find the lump while I'm nursing my son to sleep, lying on the bed, his hand stroking and fiddling with my nipple in this way that will embarrass him when he is older, so I'll never bring it up. 

Gynecologists have often said to me, apropos of nothing, "You have nice breasts!" or "What pliable tissue!" This is not the same thing as, say, your crush complimenting your rack; I don't have a rack, I have two small mounds.  What the doctors mean is that the tissue is easy to investigate, not particularly fibrous, or whatever makes our breasts hard to know.  It means they can check for lumps easily and feel good about themselves, like they've been thorough, like the self-congratulatory sense you feel when you actually wash out your peanut butter jar before recycling it. 

I find the lump lying on my back, my son's mouth slack, his hand twitching as he begins to dream-- in the morning, he'll always say it was about lions, when I ask if he dreamed about lions.  You're supposed to check your breasts monthly, around the same time every month; but I check mine in a panic of remembrance every few months, on whatever day I remember, sure cancer took the chance to sneak in there and roost, and now is crowing, cawing, calling. My period has always been irregular anyway.  I can't clock anything by it. Not even itself.

Ah, now the lump is red (in my mind of course), like some varieties of plum.  The lump in my throat, I mean.  Two nights ago, after a long day of thinking, I dreamed about my period coming back, an old friend I've missed, in fat red drops, brick red, into the toilet.  And I was amazed by it and watched it come, as I did when I first started menstruating again not long after I'd met my husband. I called him "the period whisperer." He said, "You should be able to be a mother if you want to."  We were eating dinner.  He had told me about one of his paintings, the menstruating goddess, who sat in a forest surrounded by lush endangered plants, bleeding onto a fat wasp.  She was in full frontal, long hair akimbo, breasts loose and large, everything large the way we usually imagine Mother Earth is no pipsqueak.  An old man bought the painting from a gallery in New York City and had it shipped to Florida.  His wife, enraged, made him send it back.  It remains under wraps in the gallery, no one's property, everyone's origin.

The lump is near the right armpit and it moves around when I prod it, which -- I am assured by 15 different websites, checking on my phone in the dark-- means it's NOT cancer.  I understand for the first time why people avoid going to the doctor, even once symptoms present with the bluntness of a metal bat.  Or why they go to websites first to test out their fearful hypothesis, to preview possible horrors. Their fingertips fumble, fondle, moving pebbles. The breasts respond in code. 

The first time I take my son to the beach, to the bay, we sit in the mild curl of small waves, waves that are done being waves before they've any heft-- and sink our palms into the pebbly sand.  He picks up and drops pebbles for hours.  I think about how, bored on the beach as a kid, I gave each tiny rock a personality, a will, a want to be picked up and palmed.  Their color and shape suggested how to personify, and I did it rabidly as the sun adjusted its angle, tired, inching closer to the water like every sane thing does.  The sun makes it hard to think, easy to play.  The bay and maybe even the whole world rises up to meet it like the breast of a bosomed person lying down-- with the inhale. I'm quite sure this is how the goddess was first conceived of, somebody on the water line looking out at the horizon, aching to suckle anything, even a ripe plum. 

But what did I know, I was just a kid, thinking. The pebbles rumbled in my bucket and later I'd wash them in the sink and coat them in vaseline and fill glasses with them, and set the glasses up around the house, until there was nowhere else to perch rocks and no more glasses and collectively they began to smell like something, like rotting flowers. 

You can't tell me, therefore, that a rock doesn't flower, and that the tiniest rock, say, one in your breast that is definitely not cancer, can't grow, develop a web of roots, act, for all attempts to think around it, like a living thing. 

Once you know something, you must live with that knowledge.  If you don't know, you can tell yourself whatever you want.  Your story can be mushy or firm, there is no contrary one.  You can leave your story all night beside a banana and when you check on it, anxiously, in the morning, it will not have turned brown, or cave in with rot.  You can lie in bed all night with your son, awake and thinking, fearing you know something awful, counting pebbles from your childhood, remembering your mother's sobs, the intubation jammed in your throat, that boyfriend who put pebbles down your bathing suit top, and then unknotted it so the top fell off and the pebbles cascaded onto the sand.  It could be like that, I think, the bits of the world we've collected leaving a lump in our throats.  

Forgive me, I've eaten the plums that were in the icebox.  But they were so delicious.   

Experiment in the Essay #8: It's All Yight-- #52Essays2017

My toddler points at bright morning sunlight splashing onto the living room wall and over his sprawling toys: "Yights! Yight! Yight, Mommy!"

No verb is quite going to capture what the sun does, and my toddler knows not to try but only to yelp. This spilled yellow silk we can't measure. The stuff poets rely on.

I'm sipping my harshly floral jasmine tea, Mommy-tea-notforbabies; he's chasing the mercurial sunshine along the floorboard. I throw a dirty dinner napkin over the pile of IRS adjustments and insurance notifications and subpoenas so I'm not tempted to deal, and instead I open myself to my toddler's way of seeing.

There is a lot that is not Yight afoot, my husband's ex dragging us back into court sure we've got thousands stuffed under the mattress. Her empty claims have eerie confidence, Make My Bank Account Great Again! For the sake of the children, she cries! Ass! Hole!

Or maybe just hole...

The hardest mornings are the ones when I wake before 5, my husband's breathing louder than the noise-maker, and the toddler at perpendicular angle in the bed. His ex has taken custody of my dream-space, where I often tenderly care for her weird neediness. When I'm not dreaming of her, apocalyptic themes take over, car hoods bursting into flames, and I must make snap decisions about which child I will save.

Wake up. Trump is sitting smugly behind a desk of the Oval Office, when he can bear to be away from his lucrative Resort. Reporters try to grill him on the basics, just for reality checks, but reality gets checked at the door: Mr Prez, Do you know how the Oval Office got its name? Because it's an Oval. DT: Ah, But I say it's a square. And anyone who doesn't think this is a square has been conned by years of media coverage. It's like that.

I keep thinking he must be photoshopped into those pictures, behind the apron of the American flag. I don't want to tell my toddler that his job is to run a country; run it into the ground.

In that office, where many odd men have sat, his ass alone desecrates the chair; he makes his deranged, only-to-self-evident proclamations. For the sake of my bank account, he cries! Spacious Skies darkened by what looks like untreated personality disorder: His cabinet of horrors leaning in to watch him get off on the narcissistic spike of writing his signature. 

My toddler throws a little red car at the light. It doesn't respond. He throws his purple stuffed hippo. No response, except to cover the aggressors in itself.

At what point does being an asshole blur into a true illness? Even my toddler is occasionally a bit of an asshole-- but the difference is he recognizes it and makes repairs. After he clocks me in the head with his toy on purpose, he throws his arms around me, and asks for milk, and says, "No no, Not so hard. Not Mommy head."

But the Trump just excoriates the media, and looks down a woman's shirt to refresh his mind.

This is the stuff worth turning away from. Sometimes it's better to notice what the toddlers notice with the same joy and exuberance they see it with. Rather than the crap that is hitting the fan all around us, why not take a moment to really see the light hitting on your living room? MOMMY, YIGHTS!

And honestly, this rare bold winter light is such a big flirt, slinking along, making everything look just a little more alive and attractive. It's buttering up our piles of (toys, books, bills, laundry) crap right now, and my toddler knows awesome when he sees it, and he's not quiet about it. Like they say on the subway: IF YOU SEE SOMETHING SAY SOMETHING.

To think-- Here I was, ruminating about destructive forces, getting "my panties all in a bunch" (or so chides my husband's ex, when he asks her to please not discuss the custody schedule with my young stepsons) about the death of democracy. Those supremacist marauders in the white house-- my nightmares couldn't even create such character sketches-- chopping up the body politic limb by limb and stowing it sloppily down the sort-of-president's pants. All to make his dick look bigger, as he looks more and more clueless in every other category of leadership. He's all dick, just a dick with a big bank roll. So those who want to stay on his good side-- and there are too many of them-- must prop up the gilded lily of his unhinged ego.

See? It doesn't take much to go the low road. I don't like the word dick. I like dick-ish people even less. My thoughts stoop to his level of crass incompetence. Elite Ivy education at least gives your syntax a leg-up, no? But your vocabulary can still go down a black hole.

I wonder if it is possible to have compassion for someone who intentionally causes harm. To stay heart connected and aware that they are suffering, too, though they might lack the awareness to know it. They say the Narcissist doesn't actually suffer-- and so can't be treated. His self-esteem is so low as to be unsalvageable.

I dream all the time about my husband's ex, that she is just a bumbling clueless child-like person, who goes about trying to connect the wrong way. Is her dark behavior forgivable if her brain is a hot mess of chemicals? Is it forgivable that she tries to turn the children against their father's character? No. I don't know. The edges of my heart stretch. The heart has a special kind of lactic acid when its capacity is being strained. It burns with thousands of micro-tears.

I stay awake too late reading up about this, trying to find wisdom texts that will reframe for me. All I find is articles listing the latest Trump regime travesties, the urge to not-normalize the extremist affronts; one psychologist scolds the danger of armchair diagnosis of mental illness (oops, guilty). My exhales are shabby. The Buddha would not give me a standing ovation.

So I hold the phone just inches above my racing heart, looking for someone spiritually smarter than me to offer another way-- and then there's my baby's hand resting like a phone in its cradle on my sternum. I found that person. He's been on me all night, and for the last 21 months, and almost 10 incubating months before that--

But honestly, how can anyone look at that puffed up man and not say, "Honey, you're not well. Let me just take you somewhere quiet, somewhere with good light, good food, white walls, a big navel you can gaze at, compliments miked in from hidden speakers, an echo chamber where you can bathe in your own words and the words of those who pretend to love you....Honey, let me take you somewhere else, I get it it's hard being a toddler, I get it..."

I look away from my cell phone news feed because I have a kid and my kid needs me. He prances with excitement at just about everything. He has no idea who is president, or what a president is, or why we'd need one, though he knows when my anxiety spikes. His diaper looks like a duck-tail, and as he squiggles about chasing shadows, he farts and smiles at me-- because, gals, it's funny to emit wind. It breaks up the gloomy weather.

Also, I figured something out. The Sorta President doesn't want you or me or anyone to know this, but I'm going to lay it on you here: DT's got really bad gas, guys. I heard it on Facebook, but I deduced it anyway from the wincing look on his face. Leaders of other great, semi-great, and not-so-great nations won't come meet with him because they reject his unsound policies, but also, he's got the farts. He's fact-ose intolerant.

Stop joking about this! Or-- Joke about this like your life depends on it.

I am down to the bottom of my tea, and I'm still not sure if I have a sense of humor. My husband urges me to keep a sense of humor, and to keep hoping for some good to come of something. Is a laugh at this point just healthy, or just desperate?

"Yights, Mommy! Toys! Wall! Yights, the yight!" My toddler grows more animate and declarative the less tuned in I am. He knows he's my valve of love, some days my only reminder that, actually, life is incredibly simple under its symptoms. We-- it-- require touch, connection, and positive stimulation. I keep sipping on my Bittersweet tea to meet a bittersweet reality, and my toddler shouts, "I awake! I wake up!" and throws his arms around my neck, and I am back.

Ro's got this light to his personality. Now I feel that stretching in my chest again, an "aperture" my teacher calls it, and another teacher recommends imagining you have nostrils there, and can breathe directly into the smartest organ.

But can it really hold? Does it ever just reach capacity? Is this when activism will fail? Is this why the Civil Rights leaders prayed, first?

Don't turn away from the light.

I am trying to imagine the president just taking a minute to contemplate morning light. I fail.

I am trying to imagine my husband's ex wife allowing herself to get some help, even a peephole of light in the dark.

Now it's like tea steeping, the light saturating the walls and the floor and the toddler and his mommy.

They say when you're dying it's like this: the tunnel vision, the light beckoning you, a rampant inner toddler doing a happy dance because, honestly, it's really all good now. No one is bullshitting you. You have only one place to go, and you are going there.

"Yights, Mommy!" He's got me. Completely. He pulls on my hand with his little but weirdly strong one. We look at the light-splayed wall like it's the best thing that has ever happened to us, because it is.

You can get these live-in-the-moment hits from your toddler without having to do the hard work of reaching enlightenment on the meditation cushion. Your physiology naturally softens. It's like a second-hand high, where your lungs catch a break but your brain gets the loosening benefit. For the sake of the child! The heart cries. And the little one in each of us tilts her head toward the light, a heliotrope.

Less ass, more hole.

It's actually totally beautiful, what the sun is doing for us all the time. If resistance means doing whatever it takes not to normalize, then I refuse also to normalize the light. It's too particular. Too damn pristine. I understand why myths claim the gods come down to us, looking for a little bit of ass, or a connection with someone slightly less omni-potent, or perhaps even to conceive a child in our morass-- as these gold rays.

I stand with my toddler, point with him, and he's all the more elated for being joined. "Mommy gellup!", he cries! For the sake of the sake of! And the light just stays there, being gorgeous, forgiving all our trespasses, our weak attention spans, our crushing needs-- in advance.

Experiment in the Essay #6-- God's Paintbrush; #52Essays2017

After heavy snowfall, some New Yorkers look for signs of God in how swiftly the crosswalk slush piles clear.  We are-- most of us-- cynical by nature; not soaking our shoes on our commute is really all we need to find a modicum of faith. 

Today the deep, wet imprint of boot soles near the curb, a black puddle at the base, confirms for us we are IN FACT the forsaken people, at least for this week. Cynicism spreads again, so fast it could hold professional development trainings for the Flu Virus.  

I, however, look elsewhere for signs of God: in how readily the pinwheel of my mind slows down, how mercifully God's hot morning breath eases off the exhale, so that I can come up with a plan.  In this case, a plan about my kids' school situation. 

In NYC, you're well served to put your offspring, real and imagined, on (pre)school waiting lists when your newborn's first cry pierces your ears.  Think of it as substitute for the calendar reminder on your phone, albeit a bit tactlessly loud.

There's a wait-list for the wait-list, in infinite delay, like the staircase in an Escher painting which morphs into a flock of birds who won't ever land. 

However, my husband and I are not the types to think ahead sufficiently.  We're more apt to relish in the baby's cry for its own sake, and then deal with each looming life necessity as it approaches-- a bigger headache for not having anticipated its arrival.  When you choose this path, you need to be optimists by default-- because if you aren't, not only is the glass half empty, but you spilled half on your new laptop.  Double-sucky. That kind of regret.  

So I've got preschool on my mind for my 21 month-old. 

I'm rushing along faking a careful pace, the New Yorker way, on the icy sidewalk, late to work; my head is months ahead, considering the administrative job I might be selected for. This involves me getting more money and responsibility (good things), but less time with my offspring and step-offspring, and the choice hurts. 

For my youngest, I am hunting for a preschool anywhere close to my job to maximize time with him. Anywhere. We could commute together, read books on the train. Problem? I work in Flat Iron district, aka Flat-Broke Ironically district.  The relative cost of a bottle of water--$3 for the mini-- tells you about how much you'd get bank-yanked for the cost of early education. While your kid gets a head start, your ATM withdrawal only lets out long unproductive whistles. 

However, a few buildings down from my work, there is a storefront artsy preschool-- I think it's actually called Preschool of the Arts. Capital A. Like you could have a Preschool of Math and Sciences (Sorry, honey, we ONLY count and measure here), or Preschool of Economics (Sorry, sweetie: mommy and daddy had to drain their bank account to send you here, so consider this your higher ed!).  Fantastic. A girl can dream...

I peer in to the PoA window and see a bunch of strollers empty in their front room-- it's sort of a lobby but doubles as their arts library.  Not sure if this means this is the kind of preschool where the parents or caregivers must stay on during the day.  The lined up strollers remind me walruses sunning themselves on a huge rock. 

A friend told me some sea mammals looks innocuous, like these strollers do-- friendly if dinosaurian-- but are so viscous that a single dominant male kills all the other males so he can have all the lady sea mammals to himself.  And then he just chills on a rock gloating.  This is why you should watch nature videos.  This is why you should mind your metaphors.  Though I've heard preschool is pretty ruthless too.  And alpha strollers are definitely a thing. 

I'm ruminating about this geographically desirable preschool, which there is no way we could afford unless I harvested and sold an egg from my ovaries to solve the fertility issues of some poor other mom who desperately wants a kid who could then desperately want this kid to attend said artsy elite preschool and so on....when I see their bookshelves.  

The bookshelves are built so the book covers, not the spines, face out, a style we've copied in our apartment by deconstructing my old futon and mounting the frame low on the wall.  My son's favorite thing to do is to pull all the books out and leave them on the floor.  So very literary, he just wants to be among all the stories. They are the best thing to slip on, way better than the tiny hot wheels cars, which I somehow find in my bra, in my backpack, in our little cooler-- babies are closer to squirrels than we acknowledge in the tree of life.  

But these preschool bookshelves-- I can't help but snoop in their collection. I make myself later to work needing to know what they choose for their edifying library for these young creative types.  

This is one of my oldest and most unbreakable habits. If you invite me over to your place (no pressure) and station me remotely near your bookshelves, I will no longer even hear the things you're saying to me. I'll nod in the right places from years of practice-- tuning people out to commune with the books-- but don't be fooled.   

I'm quietly reviewing your library, and mooching in my mind, taking mental notes on how my own shelves could be more, better.  The books we have in common are our real kindred pulse.  If I have nothing to talk about with you but we own many of the same books, then we can sit there and nod at each other awkwardly and sip our drinks because there is a more important subterranean bond.  It has to do with how we exercise our imaginations, our literary liaisons.  

But these preschool bookshelves should tell me something about the place-- how multi-cultural, how cool, how conscious. Of all the outward facing titles, the one closest to the window, and most dominant is: "God's Paintbrush."

Come again?  

For the literal minded, the cover features a thick paintbrush, like you might use on your apartment walls, and an even thicker rainbow. 

Now, ignore the way the word "God" alone can make me prickly for a moment-- and it's not because I don't have a belief system of my own. God is the backrest suppled right when your lumbar is fatiguing; God is that cup of tea you somehow didn't finish but thought you had, the dregs of it, the pure bitter twitch, just enough punch to get you through the 45th phone call to your arcane insurance company; and yes, God is the mercy that lets you realize your fuck you's are not best spent here, on these unhelpful cogs in the machine; yes,  God is that force that causes you to dream of your husband's ex-wife as a benign, clueless barnacle, who just wants to tag along and do normal shit together, like shopping trips-- God; god is the way your husband looks right after he falls asleep, when his hands relax-- or when the baby flings his arm open to hug you, a trick he's learned will get your to squeal-- this, this, this--God, yes, God-- 

But, "God's Paintbrush?" The image of the rainbow on the cover has no variation from standard rainbow spectrum (Is God Boring and Predictable?), arcing across a cloud-free sky.  I know where this book is heading: "God with HIS paintbrush makes all the pretty colors of the world..."

I'd rather see a tropical storm, God going grey, God brooding about the weather systems, God branching out from tidy saccharine displays to a more muted, more ambiguous color scheme, God ruminating, from a place of great peace, I'm really not sure which way this is heading, folks, hope you don't mind my own ambivalence toward humanity, I'm not looking out for you, in particular, not any more than I'm looking out for the walruses or pigeons or slush piles, I'm just here, grand backdrop, ultimate mercy....but enjoy preschool sweetie, they have some good books--

....because in Preschool at least they'll make sure you wash the paint off before it seeps into your skin; that you have a reasonable snack at a reasonable time of day, a fake nap, rotate activities so different parts of your mind are stimulated--a predictable life that bespeaks an orderliness in the macrocosm that the microcosm is conveniently reflecting, most particular in how it educates its young.  That and teddy grams.  That and apple juice.  That and shape sorting.   That and learning the rules.  

I pushed the rules in Preschool.  I was a bit ungodly. I bit a boy's finger in our sharing circle, a boy I like and who liked me. I didn't want his hand on my chair, right?  I can still feel his pinky bone between my teeth, and how startled both of us were.  I don't think I drew blood, but it was a feral choice.  God's rainbow quivered, blanched. 

Did you know in some parts of the world, in some cultures, people pray all day long?  That's their day job?  You know what they're praying for?  Please let my son or daughter get into the preschool of choice, let my child find god on the bookshelf, not in, say, heroin, let my child remain chosen and say all the right prayers in the right order, o merciful merciful God who plays favorites transparently....

"God's Paintbrush." By the time I finished just those two words i had completely ruled out the preschool OF THE ARTS which I couldn't have afforded anyway, not with three times the salary I'd be making.   Because here's the thing. 

I don't want my son to be told what God does with her paintbrush.  I don't want my son to look up at the sun blistering through the barely clearing clouds and think, "Yup, there goes God, chez artist!" I want my son to come to his own conclusions.  To look up a the weird beauty and say to himself, "Damn, only God's paintbrush could do something that startling!"  But not because someone told him a story, you see.  Because with his own god's eyeballs, with his own only-so-free mind, with his own creative sensibilities, he saw the majesty the world sometimes coughs up, and called it like it was.

You could say I was judging a place by that cover; you're right.  (It's a stupid cover, K?) You could argue that I didn't look further: maybe that book was more like I imagined than like I feared.  I slowed down the rest of the way to work; I didn't slip on the ice, my mind raced less.  Ribbons of rainbows cut through the slush eddies.  People uncautiously continued using their phones despite the hazards on the sidewalks, making calculations, calls, and for all I know, prayers, putting themselves on preschool wait-lists in a timely, non-sarcastic fashion.  

I pulled open the heavy door to my office building. That post-storm sun behind me was god's little wink; his paintbrush is never fully rinsed, she's always finding that bit of canvas that needs just a touch of this, just a tiny bit more of that. It'll still be imperfect at the end.  I'll leave it to my son to tell me one day the things god has painted, maybe.  First, I gotta find him a preschool.