Back to the grind: intellectualizing everything, accepting nothing. What the hell will I say when my time, my dark hour of terror, comes? But Kourtney Kardishian said it was not that bad, that it passed like a dream. Who knows? I've dropped, easily, cigarettes, alcohol, all "recreational" substances. Even kambucha and herbal tea. I'm struggling with coffee, keeping it under (just barely) two cups a day, still more than most recommend. But I don't want to write these boring itineraries; I don't want to submit week by week, the same concessions and not-at-all unusual symptoms everyone will know.
I want to explain, instead, the more taboo things, to keep the darkness moving out, and to be realistic. I can imagine the disgust I might insight, I did this to myself, what was I doing, if I wasn't fully prepared? If I chose a mate based mainly on my mother's injunction, three years ago as of yesterday, "Just choose whoever you think is the prettiest." And then I start to think of extended family, and the ole roll of the dice, celestial womb-knittings notwithstanding, and I realize this: the new person is in no way guaranteed to be the best of he & I. It could, in fact, be made of the dregs of any number/combination of our relations, and he does not like my negative comments. Also, how can I want that mate, now that we've mated? How can I pine in the same way, with the weight of the unwritten future, when now, all that burning and hair-rending, weeping and gnashing, seems so unnecessary, so silly? Now for the real task. That falling apart and coming together again, does it have spiritual elements? Will we bring anything good? Those other times, when I wanted to do what I am now doing, and I got encouragement which, in the context of what I chose, shamed me: do I now carry that encouragement? I've been struck by Castenada's idea that having a child diminishes the parent's energy or their "luminosity," in the face of the reality that I, like the late Brittany Murphy said, have "wanted a baby since I was a baby." And she will never. No, I am not gloating. Life is sad and makes little to no sense. What values do I have to impart? Well, my parents had little to say accept to love beauty and be grateful for pure life, and then my father became a fundamentalist Christian when I was seven. My brother and I, also, sitting in the kitchen with the man who led my father to Christ, and would three and a half years later lead my mother away from the family (my mother, she left our family. it was nothing personal, of course, but as I follow her chronology, with a man with the same sun and moon as my father, I do worry, and though the apple doesn't fall far, we are, of course, very very different), while my mother looked on with what could only be called scorn (but which, I imagine, concealed a deep fear) said the prayer and invited Jesus into our hearts. How I hope to God He is with me now! Perhaps I am destined to be a simpleton, and not a great artist/eccentric: well, good. I'm proceeding, mostly blindly: who am I to think I am above these things which almost everybody does?
I remember a story I read in an anthology of writers who suffered depression (an overwhelming preponderance, as has been noted. depression, for all its numbing gore, seems to correlate with sharpened insight, an artistic sensibility: and who knows which came first?). A woman, pressured by her husband, decided to have a baby, which involved going off her medication, and becoming very, very sick. They had an ongoing discussion about how she would be more like the "aunt." I don't feel like this. I do feel crushed by the expectations of people I know and, more broadly, my culture, by comments like the one my chemistry professor made at an awards ceremony: "For those of you looking to hire E. , you'll probably have to wait awhile, for I feel a PhD is in her future."
Has this changed? Is it all over? Why can't the order just be scrambled? That's what we are going to tell my Dad at any rate, regarding the f*rnication oversight.
But anyway. One argument I remember from the comments written in response to the article about whether or not having children actually decreased quality of life, was something like this: as narcissistic and simplistic as our [parents'] arguments must seem, we know what it's like both not having children, and having them. You only know one side of it. So. Geez!!
