the modernity ward

Sunshine in February

I sit in undying gratitude that I was brought up to believe that small children are best left to their own happy devices out in the mud and chicken shit, chattering to hens and inventing worlds with pebbles, while mothers sit and write. Or draw. Or think. 

Well done, Mom. 

I can see how some would criticize it as a type of detachment parenting -- the polar opposite of the symbiotic closeness of the baby days, where I wore my children on my body and fed them that way too, reading their needs without a conscious thought. I think it is exactly the same thing: an honoring of essential human nature, which likes its needs met without a struggle and then to go off wandering.

At any rate: the kitchen sits in disarray and I have a clean spot at the table for my sketchbook, and Daphne has come inside with two eggs still hot from a hen's body. Why waste sunshine in February wiping up crumbs? 

It's Time for the Internet to Talk About My Period Again

Dude, you know how I can tell my period is a scant week away?

I bounce around like I'm on club drugs and I eat like I just met a bong and don't know how to handle my shit.

Thanks to many months of eating Primal with a side of intuition, I have no other physical symptoms, and I don't crave brownies or chocolate or pretzels or any of that crap. I'm just really fucking hungry. All day long. 

Oh and I get an extra five pounds of water weight that disappears all at once on the second day of my period. 

Back to the hunger, though. I figured it for something psychological -- everybody knows PMSing Women to be Totes Craycray -- but Google turns up a lot of (poorly substantiated) claims that under the influence of progesterone your metabolism kicks into higher gear, burning as much as 300-500 extra calories a day. And your body notices a thing like that.

 

 

I can't find a nice source for the caloric amount, but it stands to reason. See that jump in the basal body temperature? Means you're running a little bit hotter. And that big bump in the purple progesterone line corresponds pretty nicely to when I start feeling like if I don't eat an gallon pot of broccoli and maybe a cow leg, I'll faint dead away, and are you going to eat that stick of butter?

I tried an experiment last month. When the hunger kicked in, I told myself I could eat as much as I wanted -- as long as it was very strictly Primal, and almost entirely protein and fat. No grain at all, no sugar, very limited amount of fruit. I gorged on macadamia nuts, coconut oil, meat, and vegetables.

I stopped feeling so hungry about a day before I started bleeding -- and by the time my period ended I was down four pounds from where I'd been before I gained the water weight. Are you totally fucking stunned? Because I was. 

I'm going to have the opportunity to try the same experiment again in oh about RIGHT NOW. I'll let you know how it goes. I still haven't gotten over the fact that I actually do crave things like kale and cashew butter and pumpkin seeds and red meat, instead of the bag of Twix I thought I needed.  

Not that I don't intend to purchase and consume an entire box of Thin Mints all by myself, of course. That's a social justice thing. You have to do right. 

 

 

Seriously

First let me state that as I write this I am having the most batshit insane excuse for a snack: a pile of cacao nibs and a single prune. It's like opening a cigarette and eating what falls out. And a prune.

I'm eating it by leaning over the bowl and sticking the nibs to my tongue anteater-style.

This is all just to set the stage.

I made some things once. Some of them were poems. Some of those poems were very good, at least some Real Actual Poets thought so. I also made some art, and some of that was okay, although my printmaking professor was of the opinion that art that looked like things was not in fact art, no matter the effort that went into making that copper drypoint. Whatever. The important thing is that at one point I made things, a lot of things, just for the pleasure and necessity of making things. Then I stopped making things.

It wasn't that I didn't want to make things; it's that I didn't think the things I made were worth the making. I couldn't take myself seriously. Why, that would be TOTALLY DOUCHEY OF ME. 

Why that should be so, I was never able to adequately explain to myself. 

I decided to make other things. Little human things. When those things didn't come along, I started writing about that, which is a kind of making things. It was terrifying at first but I had no choice: if I didn't make this thing, and show it all around to other people, I was going to die. Or at least become completely unrecognizable to myself. Which is arguably the same thing. It was hard to be new at it, but I kept going, and for once, a thing I made attracted some positive attention. For which I thank you.

Fast forward.

* * * * *

I eventually succeeded in making some little human things. And periodically would be stricken by the urge to make other things, non-living things, but it is difficult to bring something new into being when you are being shat on by your existing creations, or they are howling at you, or waking you up every forty-five minutes. You may buy time in fifteen-minute increments with small cookies but eventually you are going to have to deal with the seven pounds of ground-up cookies that are lodged under your sofa cushions and in your carpet fibers. Because you will be very tired, and you will want to sit down somewhere. 

Besides, what was the point? Who would care about the things I might make? They wouldn't be any good. There wouldn't be any reason for them to exist. It was better not to make them. Easier. Where I wanted to be, in the field of making things, was so far away from where I actually was. Frustrating.

* * * * *

That same impulse of unknown origin that drives me to make things one day pushed me into running shoes and down the street at a humiliatingly slow clip. I just had to, and damned if I could tell you why even to this day. It was a new thing for me: running, yes, but starting something. Doing something that I wasn't already sure I could be good at. 

I admit it was an unprecedented cliff dive. How silly, what a minor thing, but I had spent my entire life to that point avoiding precisely that sort of thing. It was my first time at being a novice, and not using that as an excuse to quit entirely.

I kept going. Slowly. And then faster, and more, until I was a decent runner, though still a novice, but at least comfortable with my newness -- but I never believed I was a real runner until I ran so much I hurt something and had to stop running. Then had to restructure my whole life around getting back to real running.

But the running. I never thought I could do it -- I said terrible things about myself all the while -- I doubted my ability to progress even as I got faster and stronger. Until suddenly the only way I could hang onto it was to take myself seriously enough to form a plan to get back. 

* * * * *

I need to make things. And now, having made two very demanding and increasingly large things who are right now watching Wild Kratts because before I turned the TV on I was rousted from my chair literally every 45 seconds, I am stuck with the fact that the only way to make things is to take myself seriously as a maker of things. There are new challenges, of course. There is no waiting for the muse to strike, and as it turns out you can't sit around wishing you could draw better and magically have those lines organize themselves on the paper. There is only practice, practice, practice, in the hour you steal a minute at a time from everything else that wants you. 

It's the pen and paper equivalent of logging road miles, of abrading the rubber off the soles of your shoes one molecule at a time, this draining a Sakura Micron dry of ink. I might tell myself I can't do it at the beginning of each run but my body puts the lie to that every time. It's harder with a pen and paper. For that to work, the editor in my head must die. Or at least take a long and complete sabbatical. For that to work I have to promise myself and mean it, that I will fill this entire sketchbook with garbage and not argue each line out of existence before it even hits the page. Let the body do the work behind the back of the mind. It means a pared-down practice of art, black and white, three pencils, two pens, one Mars plastic eraser. And a vow to use that eraser only to refine, and never to second-guess. 

This is terrifying. And exhilarating. It took me thirty-five years to take myself seriously enough to buy a pen without being told which pen to buy.

Sean has been telling me for twelve years that he likes the things I make. That he thinks they're interesting. Worth looking at. And that that is reason enough to make them. I finally heard him yesterday. Was ready to hear him. 

So here's to a sketchbook inked to the edges with crap. 

 

Pancake Breakfast

It's not easy to shock Kateri but I managed it this morning. We were talking about our bodies, as Teh Laideez are wont to do, and I mentioned that I'd gotten some new and rather insubstantial bras. 

"I actually like my pancake tits!" I exclaimed.

There was a sound on the phone like a small dog being stepped on.

"I said, I really like my pancake tits!"

That same yelp. Silence.

"Weren't you the one telling the whole internet about your gigantic Enell bra just a few months ago?" she asked dubiously. 

I was, yes. A year ago I had just weaned Daphne and wore a 32F (you read that right. F as in Fuck me, them's some big ol' titties!). Anything cut lower than a turtleneck looked delectably wanton; my cleavage was porntacular. Jackets wouldn't button at the chest.

It was pretty awesome.

Well, it turns out you can't do this to the rest of your body without having to cash in some of that wonderful endowment. 

I enjoyed the return to bra sizes found at Target for under fifteen bucks; the ability to look halfway decent in a bra whose engineering did not rival that of the Verrazano Bridge. It simplified matters quite a bit.

Then one day I realized that there was enough room in my foam bra cup to stash a clementine in one side and a phone in the other, and it was time to buy new bras. First I worked with the usual foam-lined coconut-half-lookin' things you can find at any Target, but...something wasn't working for me.

See, the thing about these slack, flattish breasts that I'm rocking is that I think they're great. I know the giant mountains of tittage were pretty socially acceptable in the hotness department (even my gay uncle copped a feel on one memorable visit home) -- abundant, fecund, evolutionarily sound as a measure of attractiveness, and BOY could they fill out a shirt -- but these new ones? They're understated, spare -- and raw, I guess, in their unaltered form. They're unexpected. They're not what you'd see in a magazine. 

They go with my face, too: lean. Matured. They don't look like undeveloped breasts; they look like breasts that have done some serious work. (And they have -- I fed children with them for a total of four and a half years!) 

The real is beautiful. The evidence of living is sexy. Sometimes the foam cup makes a better line under clothing, but I think that hint of movable flesh, of a responsive body, is breathtakingly hot. I like my pancake tits. And I aim to revel in their hotness. 

Besides, the bras are amazing. 

This is All So I Can Shit in Peace

I cannot stop with the fucking Diet Mountain Dew. It's like an embarrassing old boyfriend or something, you know, spend a little time apart, get to remembering the good stuff and wanting a taste again, and then you pound one and twenty minutes later you're sitting in a minivan taking deep breaths through your mouth and trying not to lacquer your steering wheel in electric yellow glop. And someone asks if you're okay and all you can say is "...hlk."

Just like that.

So I've had people -- contractor, plumber, electrician, a handful of police officers who probably did NOT need to come in with guns unholstered -- in my house for about two weeks now. The upshot of this Parade of Men is that we will soon have an awesome new bathroom two feet from my side of the bed, bonus points for being the only room in the house I'd trust not to collapse in a stiff breeze, so as in the case of late pregnancy it will ALL BE WORTH IT IN THE END when I can enjoy my morning alone time with the newspaper and no children dangling in the doorway whining about hooooow looooong is it gonna beeeee when they could very well go to the perfectly operational toilet upstairs but in the meantime I am having to parent in front of other people all day and shower just one paltry layer of drywall away from strangers and not that this changes anything, my slack-ass Blue's Clues-allowing ways and creative swearing, but I do feel weird having to elbow men out of the way just to dig my underpants out of the drawer. 

There's no way to hide what you're doing there. Hey, fellas, don't mind me. What do you think today, purple? The purple ones? With this bra? Okay. High five. 

It's harshing my mellow, is what I'm saying. I don't know if a man who spends his days elbow-deep in sewage has the wherewithal to notice the Costco-size bottle of lube nobody ever remembers to put away or judge my habit of just leaving the play-doh on the floor until it's dry enough to sweep up, but I'm thinking about it. Not hard enough to pick up the play-doh ahead of schedule, of course. You don't fuck with a successful routine.

 

 

Pack of Unfiltereds, Please

Compared to the America you find inside of Walgreens and shopping malls and chain restaurants, with institutional carpeting and bright lights and shiny surfaces that bounce sound waves like hyperactive rubber balls and people people people, the internet is a haven for introverts. It leaves us free to interact at our own pace, with time to take in, time to filter, a limited amount of sensory input arriving at one time (text but no facial expressions, one thing to interpret). It lets us play at being extroverts without having to show our faces. 

And some of us do need that interaction. Lord knows I do. I'm trying to branch out into the face-to-face world, though -- toughen myself up a bit for the next round of living, where I'll interact with people all day. I need to remember how to do it.

I'm not sure if it's fair to refer to myself as an introvert -- I love people, but they exhaust me so -- because that misses something important. "Introvert" implies, wrongly I think, shyness, a turning away from other people. I'm not shy. I'm the opposite of shy, which is readily apparent if you've spent any kind of time with me in person or on the internets. I will tell you anything, whether you want to know it or not, and the less you want to hear it the more I want to say it. 

It's just that this model doesn't come with a filter. Anything is liable to come out of my mouth (insert dirty joke about what might be liable to get in), but it's nothing compared to the torrent I take in. I mostly choose, these days, not to filter what goes out -- but I am just flat unable to filter what comes in. Everything gets in. Sounds, tastes, smells, activity, visual stimuli, emotions, like a fucking fire hose. Which is why it's nice to cut down a bit by interacting online, or with one or two people, or by (oh yes please) being alone in a quiet clean place. 

Guess how often that last one happens.

Music is amazing. Food is sublime. Other people's feelings can overwhelm me. As can my own.  

It's worth it, though, right? I can love with such intensity. I can disappear into a song. Hallucinogens are sort of beside the point. 

What's it like to be you?

 

 

I Had it Coming

I have been informed in no uncertain terms, over the years, that it is unseemly at best, the way I gripe about the daily clatterbang-in-the-ear that is the reality of childrearing. Particularly the stay-at-home variety. You wanted this more than anything in the world, I've been told. And now all you do is complain about it. 

Or more pointed: You remember what it was like to want this reality so desperately you would shoot your body full of mare's urine and blow up your ovaries like Jiffy Pop -- and you have the audacity to complain? Other people can read this, you know. The walking wounded with Jiffy Pop ovaries and no carseats full of fishy crackers. A windwhistling gap in the heart.

I know. I know.

I do remember, you know. What that was like, living with my head somewhere detached from the earthly plane, lost in the what-if. How it blurred everything I did, the fuzz of grief, like a migraine in its infancy. The multithreaded timelines for each possibility: if the first baby had lived, if the second had, if I got pregnant now, if we had the home study a month from today. Wanting to take all the unknowns in hand and press them into a shape I could at least recognize.

I keep that with me, that time, a little rock in my pocket to reach in and feel. A weight light to carry hidden, solid enough that I don't forget it.

Here's the thing though: that little rock, it isn't magic. I can't brandish it at the children when they're abrading my last taut nerve and transform them; hell, I can't even transform myself with it. It does what it does, which is to sit tucked away, providing ballast; but it doesn't change the moments, either joyous or difficult. 

It made me notice the little pebbles other people are carrying around, though. I can sense the heft of another person's pain. I wouldn't trade that for lighter pockets.

But I can't carry someone else's pebbles. You carry your own, I carry mine. Some people won't be able to read about the ugliness inside my mothering, and that's all right. We know our own boundaries. We keep ourselves safe.

Here's the other thing: this part of mothering, the constant aggravation tempered by (and sometimes made the worse for) moments of incomparable sweetness, the noise and the clutter and the brain-static that I can't shake off even in a rare moment of quiet -- I knew this was coming. Hell, I'd read enough Erma Bombeck to know what was in store for me.

And this was exactly what I wanted. This mess, this chaos, this panic of needing aloneness and never quite being able to get it -- the hilarity, the impossible stories, the silliness -- this is what I wanted. The struggle of figuring out how to handle a child's first attempts at lying, of helping a tiny person get a handle on big feelings. All this.

If nothing else, daily interaction with small children is great for comedy material. Dark comedy. Very dark. 

It's not accurate to say that no one talks about this part of mothering; it might be true, though, that nobody understands it until they're in it, and then the depth of understanding defies words. I don't know if it changes much to talk about it, like this -- but I do know that if I don't talk about it, I'll die.

 

Oh for the Fuck of Shit, Children

Sit right in your goddamn chair. Don't make that disgusting chuffing slurping noise when you spoon your milk into your mouth instead of fucking drinking it like a regular person. No, don't tell your sister to be quiet STOP SCREAMING STOP SCREAMING okay. 

Don't clink your spoon on your cup that way. Don't touch me. Don't CLUTCH at me. Don't GODDAMN FUCKING RUN WITH THAT. No you may not climb on that WE ARE NOT GETTING THE PLAY DOH OUT it is BEDTIME. Would you PLEASE sit like a person in that chair. Turn your legs TURN YOUR LEGS so that they go under the table and FACE YOUR FOOD. No, I don't care if you hate it, and I can't hear you when you use that whiny voice. Or I wish to god I couldn't. I don't care if you never eat anything again, that's right, Mommy don't give a shit. Here's your goddamn rice, assholes. It already has butter in it OH GOD DO NOT CRY ABOUT THE BUTTER how on earth could I have anticipated you would want to put the butter on it yourself GODDAMN IT DO YOU NEED TO CRY IN YOUR ROOM.

Let go. No, get off. Do not climb on me. Do not touch me with your tiny greasy fingers or put them on my glasses or OH MY GOD YOU BENT MY GLASSES.  I am trying to eat my goddamn dinner OH HOLY JESUS DID YOU JUST SPIT IN IT? DID YOU?

I don't even care because it's still hot and I'm eating it. Except OH FINE I will get you a drink of water because it's not worth it to watch you climb in and out of that stupid booster seat and almost tip the chair and want to do it "all by yourself" and it'll take forty-five minutes and here is your water.

You want a what? More bread? No more bread. No more goddamn bread. Eat a carrot. Eat those carrots that are right in front of you. DO NOT WHINE AT ME about the carrots. Just eat them. You begged for them yesterday.

If you ask me for dessert I am going to spear my own motherfucking eyeball with a carrot and I am going to goddamn well serve it to you and YOU WILL EAT IT. 

 

Complaints

Turns out that trying to fit an entire modernity ward into Facebook just clogs up everybody's pipes and attracts crowds of disgusted onlookers. I abandoned my blog at a nadir of creative energy -- or so I thought, anyway (more in a bit on that) -- and then found that the constraints of Facebook's itty-bitty short form reignited that energy and lent an element of focus to the proceedings as well.

In other words, I get strongest when I have something to push against.

In the blogless interim, I transformed some things: some relationships. The backyard. The inside of the house (ongoing). I surprised the hell out of myself by becoming a disciplined runner and changing the way I ate -- not the what, but the how.

I learned to sit with hunger a little bit. I learned that I could push myself. I learned that I could start from essentially nothing and become something new, and that being new on something was uncomfortable but freeing as well.

And I feel stronger and more grounded and more resilient than I ever have in my life.  

In retrospect it wasn't a nadir of creative energy, just a shift: something telling me I needed to focus that beam inward, elsewhere. There are a lot of transformations coming down the pike and I needed to make myself ready for them. In reading back through my blog I realized that I have been talking about nursing school for THREE YEARS. And now my applications are in and I'm just waiting to hear back (in a month? Two?) about what will happen next. School is just the tip of the iceberg. Underneath the water line is something new: confidence, I guess. Ballast.

So here's the blog back, you wonderful vultures. I should be a little embarrassed at how much I depend on you all for your responses and your commentary but maybe that's a relic from an era when the internet seemed separate from real life. I don't think there's a line there any more. So, real people of the internets, thank you for everything. I'm ready to start putting out again. 

 

The Day the Music Died

So we were in Philadelphia for a couple of days, and Sean was working so I had the girls at the zoo, and there in the children's zoo, itself crammed with school groups and every kind of stroller you could imagine and about seven zillion pushy ducks, was a lady with a stack of flyers, handing them out to passing mothers.

"It's for a blog? You know, just a place where women can go to be women and talk about parenting and things like that." And indeed the flyer promised me a community of like-minded mothers talking together about the important blah blah blah crumple toss. It had a lot of corporate sponsors, this blog.

Now, longtime readers may recall that I myself have a 'blog, you know, short for "web log." As a member of the great eruption of blogs and bloggers and internets, I'm no purist when it comes to media; I accept the constant shifting of form and function inherent in a world where we all run around with tricorders and laser eyes and whatever the hell you kids are up to these days. But something in my heart collapsed like a perturbed cake upon receipt of that flyer. That's it, then, I thought. I'm done.

Big things have happened to the internet since I started keeping the Leery Polyp back in ought-four. The first is that the internet sort of blew its load all over the world, and a field that was once relatively sparsely populated became a reflection of the heaving sea of humanity that is the whole world. Everybody and his camera and her uterus and their urban farm and homeschooling operation and political viewpoint and cupcake bakery and twee little children's room furnished with hand-sewn mushrooms and actual living faeries* went out and started a blog. Which, you know, fine. It was bound to happen. It was actually very freeing to realize that I was not the only Underutilized Writer floating around in the world. For a long while it was a lot of fun, like a virtual city block populated with interesting people who sat out on their front porches and chatted with each other. Unlike message boards, more akin to a bustling market, blogs belonged to individuals -- you could decorate your front porch. You could dictate the terms of discourse to a point, and you were free to carve your own niche. (My own particular niche, people without children who desperately wanted them but were encountering an assortment of roadblocks, meant a lot to me. These people understood, they wrote eloquently about the dark times, but they were funny as hell too. It was a way to wrest meaning and comfort and community from baffling times. I still keep in touch with lots of folks from those days, and I will always be grateful for commenters, readers, and other bloggers.)

And then things started to get really commodified.

A lot of us, and by "us" I mean those bloggers who had acquired children by some means or another, got slapped with the label "mommyblogger." I don't know where it came from; some people started out blogging that way, as mothers looking for community, and maybe that's how it came to be applied to pretty much any female blogger who ever mentioned her children. There's a whole dissertation about divisions in the blog world, and how the term "mommyblogger" infantilizes and segregates women writers (OH GOD MY BIAS IS SHOWING), but not too long after mommyblogging became a thing, corporate reps started pelting mommybloggers with "opportunities" to provide free advertising in exchange for, I don't know, a coupon? Or better still a coupon to give to a reader! At the same time blogging was becoming legitimized as a business...thingy, and conferences popped up and there was advertising and professionalism and all those things I just do not do well. And I kind of watched from the sidelines as the indie zine-y world of blogs turned into a different place entirely, for better and for worse.

Meanwhile, all my dreams came true.

No, no, I know it sounds flip. But for me the jumping-off place for writing this blog was the shock and grief I felt at my subfertility (can't rightly call it infertility, now, can I?). And then the astonishing transformation into a mother with a baby and a serious case of OCD, and then a mother of two, now with less OCD, and then someone whose focus was obviously shifting away from the blog that she abandoned like a pickup truck full of construction debris on the side of the road and goddamnit I have been calling the city about this for weeks and WHEN is somebody going to tow that thing away?

Well, now.

What the blog world needed from me is over; what I needed from the blog world is past. I have so many friends because of blogs -- I can't imagine what it would be like without everyone! And then there's the drug of approval, of instant feedback. It is a heady, intoxicating thing -- but I'm finding I need to be doing the actual work of human give-and-take. It's harder but more fulfilling, and I only got to this point because of everyone who ever commented on a post and made me feel important and like what I said mattered.

So. Now. I'm not going to take the blog down. I intend to archive it better, put a page up with links to posts and the whole story. I don't know that I'll start any new projects any time soon -- it turns out that school and the ongoing art installation that is my house eat up a lot of time and energy -- but if I do I'll put them up here. In the meantime, do feel free to friend me on Facebook; just drop me a note telling me who you are when you send the request. Thank you so much for everything. You guys are the best.

*If I knew how to get these I would order some.