In my wrecked universe I take delight in the littlest things which seem to be the biggest. Icicles hanging off the flat mop head lit with sunshine leaning against the side of the deck. Cottage cheese with strings of honey-swirl. Oatmeal pancakes with fat bursts of berry and tangy butter and syrup. The wet folds and rough patches in crispy curls of bacon. My huge halo of genetic curls on the day of a washing, a colony of strands left to its own device: more buoyant than I ever remembered, in spite of my drawn face. My increasingly ability to sit in one place, covered in blankets, and stare out the window though raging inside--the sweet external meditative trance of despair and not knowing, at all, what to do.
I dream I eat a whole loaf of bread and grow panicked but there is nothing to do but wait. I start to bleed in a locker room at a place like the YMCA, but it's not a miscarriage. Later the baby comes and I leave it for a whole 24 hours, rushing around, trying to get what I need, perhaps I forgot or someone else didn't pull through. When I come back, there is diaper after diaper and each has a faint spot of blood, and I am crushed to the core. Is this a rejection of what I'm claiming to embrace? Or a deep indentification, since both of us bled? I am a woman who ended two pregnancies and now insists that this one I must carry. I'm not the first, at all, to make this transition: though it's difficult to trust myself as a mother, whether I'm only a "birthmom," or I have forever, a gooey little curly-haired friend. I romanticize. I intellectualize. I don't know.
Some things shouldn't be shared. I do not believe dreams are, inevitably, prophecy. I dream I am with my father and we are going to do something that is a mix of gentle downhill skiing, like gradual slopes (I'm no skiier, but who doesn't love gliding effortlessly down powder?) and horse-back riding. The activity exists in an attic and I grow woozy with claustrophobia. I can't fit into the narrow stairs, which seems a metaphor for his "path," on reflection. I don't think narrowness always causes righteousness, though there's a correlation, perhaps.
I dream I'm traveling with two other women. We are going from one beautiful empty house to another. They seem to have innumerable, winding stairways and passageways. I take food from the fridge, the more I take the more there seems to be: bread, American cheese, a small apple, a yogurt. I try to make it look like I haven't taken but it's too hard so I take more. I think I leave a note, and I think it will be fine, though I am desperate not to be caught, my heart racing and looking back.
When I was young my dad used to call me a primadonna. I became condescending at a young age. Once, when I was five or six, sitting in the backseat listening to my parents' typical stream of bicker, I announced, "God told me He wants you to stop fighting." Well, I'm sure He did, but I certainly was no prophetess. My parents responded to this with awe, as they often did when they weren't wondering out loud how I turned into such a hateful and unimaginably innovatively insulting individual. (Both have asked me, "How did you become so mean?" And it's true. I was mean. Today I went to counseling with D and the Pastor could not seem to fathom him being violent. He said it struck him as utterly uncharacteristic. That was the only point in which I almost lost my patience and I said I didn't think it married how people seemed because people are rarely what they appear and we all over-estimate our "discernment" in deciding who has character or does not based on our instincts and whims which are probably largely the work of idiosyncratic associations from youth that we can't even penetrate. I told the pastor that many people can't imagine that I am mean, yet I am often very, very mean.)
D and I are both leaning towards it won't work. It's funny and I cling and he's coming back after having a dinner with his friend R which I declined, respectfully, to participate in. He's coming back but we don't think it will work. It never has, why should it now? It's so very sad because in many ways we bound ourselves to each other through fear or rejection, and in our shared climate of desperation and indecision made a desperate indecisive leap which resonates into eternity with finality. It's ironic. Drunken one-night stand conceptions make me question the value of intention when they are just as likely to render a soul beautiful and majestic as the most planned into the rubble progenic masterpiece of the most compassionate and committed couple in the universe. I like to let my mind wander and make my rather careless combination of words. It anchors me, and you know, I've thought about this a lot, and I'm starting to think I don't really need a lot of time to do what I do. I don't think I, like a lot of people, would necessarily benefit or take off from having a life which supported many, many hours of uninterrupted writing. I write in snatches and jolts and always have. On the other hand: perhaps this is why I've never done anything significant or meaningful, why I only write about myself, because isn't that laziness? I don't know. It's in vogue, though of course with a jist and a shape in a way I've never managed. I have a certain something, but is it enough? I will say I'm more scared of losing whatever that tiny spark is then I am of losing my relationship with anyone but God, and before I would never admit it.
I convinced myself I needed D more than anything; I reveled, not in humility (which cleanses and perfects the soul), but degradation--and he is right in all those times he insisted that the obsession was about myself and not him. I do think he is a beautiful man, though obviously his beauty is more eccentric than conventional and requires a very patient, loving eye to reveal itself. We do have a physical chemistry that is staggering to the point of inducing terror and even sobs in me, and sometimes making my stomach rise up for days after an encounter. Sometimes I express myself best when tears are welling in my eyes, and sometimes I don't, but I will say (why do I always write, "I will say," before I say / it's like "I myself," and yet I don't stop myself, or I myself, I should say; inside jokes with, and loving, myself: and on and on, to infinity) this: sex is nothing to build a relationship on, and as I read on some online discussion forum somewhere, and is probably an idea in wide circulation: in a way it is a shame that babies come from sex, or something like that. That love and sex are supposed to come together, or something. Well, there are many sayings about how wisdom always comes when it is too late to apply it. My ravaged lust seems a million miles away (though I'm sure it is dormant and not extinct), that part of me that will seize anything, as though it is my God-given right to have whatever impulse I desire, and the way I've left others, well-meaning, in a lurch is enough to convince me that far from not deserving my current situation, whatever that means: I deserve far, far worse. And we probably all do. I'm all for loving ourselves and forgiving ourselves but we live in a culture that seems to glorify "self-esteem" at no expense.
I'm all over the place and probably making little sense but I do believe in original sin and I do believe that I came to a desperate place because I wanted to, I had to, and it's just my life and my karma and perhaps, even, something for a miracle to be made of. Or not. Who knows? If I choose to mother, and I will probably be a single parent, I trust myself to provide materially for my child and in the basic, emotional ways which are mostly instinctive and almost always attained through a bit of education and determination. Otherwise, I am lost.
I fear there are already attitudes and emotions being transmitted in the womb that will make life difficult. The child will probably have a temperament that will be, from the outset, challenging. I know that my own parents, in spite of admirable intentions, deeply scarred me with constant fighting, hysterics over this thing or that thing, drunkenness, and a sort of masochism, a reveling in rejection (my dad with my mom after she left him, his refusal to let go, his reduction to a puddle of tears and always singing the blues, zoned out, on his acoustic--though in other areas, like providing and intellectual stimulation, he worked so gorgeously hard; my mom with her going back, again and again, to her second husband who beat her almost to her death, and actually a photo of her wasted blackened swelling face was used as a warning against domestic violence, and he did unspeakable things to her, and even, a little, to me) and I find myself pursuing my own masochistic/sadistic cravings in my own life. So that there is, truly, a legacy that I believe is both genetic and environmental. Some would argue that I should not have reproduced because of my mental illnesses. I would argue that everyone has challenges and that the father and I have many things going for us (above average intelligence and physical health, to put it simply), and our illnesses are not debilitating, even when they subjectively seem so.
Some might argue that I could reduce the environmental dregs by adopting out, but then a cycle remains suspended and a child is deprived of their heritage which teaches us so, so much about our being and soul, even when it wounds us almost to paralysis, and hugely influences (but never guarantees, of course) shitty ass choices like most of the ones I've made and how to be gentle and how to trust God I don't know and I don't know if I'll ever know but I certainly think that if I know how to love, if I really learn, I'm all set: and if I don't love, I'm fucked. So who cares if I took a big, foolish bite of the pie? Many people in worse circumstances have done it, and now I'm intellectualizing again: because there's no pie, and in a certain, very charged and relevant sense, there are no other people, at least not in this context: there is only me and only my choice. And in another sense that is preposterous, and as the Orthodox faith look to the Saints for guidance and wisdom, and read the stories of their lives, we all have people whose examples we cling to, as that hipmother (one of like 8000, what narcissistic times, and who can escape zeitgeist? Not, really, a one, and how lame of me to drop that word, here) website put it, we cherish the good work of others in triumphing adversity, and hold them as proof and come back to them again and again like prayers.
(I wanted so badly to name the baby Fiona, thinking it unique and utterly precious, but I look up some projection research that - I don't know how they do this, but they have a good track record- puts it in the top 20 for girls by 2015. Names circulate through the upper classes the reserachers say and somehow, mysteriously, trickle down to the common and poor. Like, well, me. What can I do to escape these trends? I could make up a new word, as many have done before, but what do I prove by attaining a unique label, or, more broadly, by fighting the tide? Why not embrace it..)
But I don't know. I forget what this was supposed to be about.
