"I think she'll be a girl, and I think she'll be handicapped."*
Geez.
I'm sluggish from dinner two hours ago, and slumping over in bed with "A Guide to Rational Living" in the too hot apartment. I have to move in under two months, which will definitely rain on the sloth-party. The keyboard isn't working as well as it used to and certain keys aren't sticking.
I'm trying to focus on gratitude instead of wishing things were different but it's a constant battle. My eyes are burning a bit from the heat and the tiredness. Last night I dreamt I gave birth to sextuplets. The sensation was more strange than painful (one after another). Two died in the womb and I was going to need a D & C (dilation & cutterage, a surgery that is considered fairly safe unless it's for an elective abortion). I remember being overwhelmed at the prospect of a parade of Virgos more than anything else (at one time I was sitting at a booth with the two girls and the boy who lived and they were quite grown up and though I loved them I was sort of like, man, you kids are a bit dull) Of the four I gave birth to, there were two boys and two girls. The boys were seriously handicapped and the girls were fine. One boy was almost like a corndog on a stick, which explains nothing I realize. He perished almost immediately. The other boy was severely disabled mentally and physically which ended up being somehow a beautiful experience and though it's terrible lazy for me to just drop that like a stone, I can't imagine how to convey it.
My professor Jill Rubinson (I dream of her often) was around, and I gave her a very graceful hug which is something I'm not really good at it and I always jump a bit when I do it. (I tend to be more comfortable in sexual embraces. Physical displays of platonic affection elude me). I said something about wanting to go to grad school and she very tactfully changed the focus to a sixth grade teaching job which I later realized, sadly, was because I was saddled with all the children.
Fatalism is the enemy of rationalism and I wonder what I'm doing because I don't fully expect it to improve the quality of my life but more so to bring shame and stress. I feel compelled to do it so I might as well embrace it. There are plenty of appealing notions regarding having a child and I mainly only regret the mate I chose. I keep having awful and also condescending thoughts about how it's not all about me, and perhaps it is my mission to help him and improve the quality of his life and it doesn't matter if I'm happy with him.** The last time I clearly thought this, that someone was potentially gaining far more out of the relationship than I was, was with DH, who in a matter of a few short months, shot me with a rifle.
I made good on that experience by celebrating my individuality and pursuing pleasure as I always have. I love to eat and also drink and smoke, and after the initial shock, and hospitalization, and horrid days deprived even of eating because of huge doses of anesthesia (one surgery was nine hours, which is still nothing compared to some) I settled quite comfortably into several new routines. I lived with my brother in Whitefield in a lofty three room apartment in Richmond. The room I slept in used to be the Orthodox church sanctuary when the Russians first settled there. At night he lit a candle in the ikon, which at first bothered me, but was nothing compared to the brightness of the Boston hospital.
After four months with my brother in which we bickered (once he said, "Everyone's crazy, but you're a little more crazy than everyone else" and I slapped him in the face. Now he is practically begging me to move to Kentucky to be cared for by he & his soon to be wife. He has a dazzling faith, a child like optimism which never flogs for long) , I cooked strange dinners, I went by wheelchair and then crutches to the general store a couple blocks away and lingered there for inordinate amounts of time, leaving with a banana, two sweet potatos, who now can say? After this, he decided to go to a monastery, and El had been patiently courting me for some time, beginning in the hospital during which he slept on an incredibly uncomfortable padded surface in front of the window, bummed pain medication off me (I rarely ate even half of what they administered; with the exception of one notable weekend in ICU), took my money and bought me chicken caesar salad from the cafeteria every night and shared my overflowing trays of food. We watched a lot of bad movies.
He drove out to Richmond with increasing frequency and I kept saying I'm not going to date you, I'm not going to date you, and he would say I know, that's not why I do this. And one night we went to Augusta and drank rather heavily with FP and perhaps some others in the same building where I was shot, only a different apartment, and I was going to sleep on the spare bed in his basement bedroom at his parent's house, and it was something like 3 am, and he turned off the lights, and I jumped into his bed, and he said, You're going to hurt me, and I said, Yeah, that's probably true, and we were up long after the sun rose.
And so when my brother went to the monastery I moved into an apartment with El, and though we fought miserably- I was whacking him with crutches, the computer went flying, we made ourselves hoarse... I had my own mattress which shamed him, I wanted to sleep alone, I was always on my way out, and awful, I had bangs and we made a home movie in which I berate him and bask in his attraction to me and though it is funny on some level and on an even distanter plain slightly endearing, it is shocking cruel - I remember many good things, the dinners he made me, the way the leaves looked in the sunshine like a canopy out the slanting third story windows.
I left that apartment in a whirlwind. I was hospitalized immediately after a debaucherous Thanksgiving for an infection (my foot was huge and puffy and red, streaks were going up my leg, and I remember thinking, which: emergency room, or Karaoke Night at Bridge Street Tavern?) in which I sent El away from the hospital because D, on a whim I imagine, deigned to visit me there, and I told El this over the phone on a quadruple dose of intravaneous benadryl, because I'd started to swell in the throat from a certain antibiotic, and had hopped into the hall screaming for help when no one answered the nurse call bell. And El was hysterical, cursing me, who knows, and I fell asleep under the spell of legal narcotics.
I'd been plotting my escape with the Family Violence Project Homeless Shelter for some time... what an experience, I'm too lazy to continue. I was there for four months. I hope someday I really want to write, though it all slips away so fast. I think more than anything else, being in the shelter made me want to have children because I saw how they could be a joy under even dire circumstances.
I'd rather talk about those things which are impossible to explain, like how it's much harder to be kind to someone with whom you're very familiar, & utterly entrenched in a dynamic of petty disputes, to rise above this is nothing like rejecting a person's attempt at being cruel. The way I eat all kinds of rich things, and always have, but genuinely love hardboiled eggs, mashed up with salt and cayenne, and whatever else is on the table (bits of french fry, nutritional yeast, Annie's macaroni and cheese, whatever).
*This was a superstition/fear left over/inherited from the great electrical shock of the pregnancy of spicy shalom in the year of our Lord 2010.
**There is nothing, ever, to regret in kindness. What I do, however, is never consistent. I am kind and patient for awhile, cooking food, dispensing reminders, covering costs and (now) giving rides. Then I explode in rage and criticism because I don't see my efforts rewarded. Disinterested kindness is never as investment though.
And I miss other boys who waited on me in such obvious ways. This one is a good lover and very smart but very, very stuck and ineffective. He articulated his background in a way I'd never heard him do tonight, after an unusually relaxed dinner. (I don't consider us "back together," but I am straining, nearly popping at certain times, to try to hear what he has to say. It is worth a fucking shot...as long as the hands aren't for hitting.) He said his parents are trapped in a marriage in which they both resent the other, and it keeps them from getting anywhere. His dad recents his mother for coming from snobby intellectuals, for getting a free college education at Columbia, for believing her to be a workaholic who is overly success oriented. His mother resents his father for, I'm not actually sure, but if I were her I'd resent him for not doing his share (he doesn't work, he doesn't cook nearly as much, he doesn't attend church or drive their nine year old around nearly as much), and for regularly insulting her in front of people.
The more time passes the more I realize that it is not jealousy that I feel for this family but a sort of fascination with the stuck-ness, with the potential for beauty. D. has a certain flair and I've always hunted for its origin. I keep thinking about legacy, and who can escape it? I don't know where the deeper lesson is. In sticking it out and being kind and generous, or kicking someone who doesn't do their part to the curb. I think that when I'm purely rational about it, I realize that either way is okay. It's fatalism to believe I'm cursed to a certain path that doesn't aid me (that I've gone the wrong way), as though there were one correct way to live.
There are other men, if need be. I'm as guilty as everyone else of giving D mixed messages. Sometimes I tell him he must change, he must be responsible, what is wrong with him, everyone else does it. Other times I tell him I believe he can't. It's this age old sort of unspoken debate about the difference between one who can't and one who won't. As I wrote I think only a few posts ago, it does seem that if someone won't, they can't.
My mother is not one of those people who says she's an alcoholic because she sometimes drinks too much and it's an elegant or appealing notion in many circles. My mother is a black out, fall down, front-tooth losing, seizuring, failing-liver spectacle. I have honestly never seen anything like it. When I was a kid she used to drink twenty four packs. She's 5'6" and hovers around 115 when she's eating. She says the years when my brother and I were babies were the happiest of her life and the photographic evidence heavily supports this claim. She is an amazing cook. Her homemade bread, her challah, her pie crusts and the little cinnamon rolls she makes from the scraps make me cry.
She was so afraid of me getting my period. She used to nervously broach the topic whenever I was home from school. She used to always say that when it happened to her she had no idea, that she was so scared. My mom never had a mother. She lost her in infancy to breast cancer. My father lost his own father before his first year to a heart attack. In a way it's a miracle that my brother and I are (except for perhaps me), really okay. People can rise above practically anything.
When I finally got it (my period, of course), after my first school dance in sixth grade, she was nowhere to be found.
I had forgotten how truly angry her departure when I was ten (no contact for over a year while she worked in a gift shop and got drunk in a tiny, roach-inhabited apartment in Daytona Beach with her boyfriend, whose connection to our family is one of astounding irony as he was an old high school friend of my father's who resurfaced three years before the affair when he- my father - was suicidal over his own violence and failure and in this opportune environment, he, the soon-to-be boyfriend of my mother, converted my father to fundamentalist Christianity; he, the new-boyfriend, also had the same full name as my brother's then-best friend) made me until a few days ago when we had a spat regarding whether or not she would offer me support in terms of childcare. She was rather evasive, kept saying, I'll do what I can. When I asked her to please be more specific to help me plan the best course of action, she was unusually hostile. She said, What do you want me to do? Move in with you? Take care of your child all the time because you don't want to? I said, You're a bitch, and hung up the phone.
This was three days ago or so. She's been sober for months because she has hepatitis and could easily die if she's not. She is a great mystery to me and someone I'm inclined to avoid even when I give her accolades from afar and fantasize about her split pea soup with the stringy pieces of ham.
I haven't felt like writing any of this. I think I'm going to do some planning. I don't know if I want to write about my own life or not. It is simply the most accessible and the most potentially authentic, but it's growing rather boring to me.
