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Late pregnancy and early motherhood have eroded my poetic commitments these last three months. I am remedying that, slowly, by taking up my duties again at both ends of the archive.
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Since it appears that most of my mental wanderings now come back to the baby, I thought for the sake of my conscience it would be timely to map a little the mandala (or, for the vertically-minded among you, great chain of being) that spreads out, in my mind, from her. This comes in particular from the dimly-remember months interspersed throughout last year when I wasn’t pregnant.
Less this be too obtuse, I should be clearer. I am thinking about pregnant women, and women bereaved of their babies or their foetuses or denied their fertility, and of women too who make the vexed and private decision by which pregnancies don’t continue. I don’t want these baby-centred entries to be a source of pain for those whose experiences of fertility, natality and maternity have turned out differently from mine, and I don’t want this narrating of the fog of motherhood to obscure those other stories. This is all part, I suppose, of being what I am increasingly thinking of as a conscious writer (which is different — shut up — from all things to all people, or second guessing my reader).
I’ve been looking for some way in which I could acknowledge and reflect on all of this without sounding too heavy-handed, too overbearing. As is often the case with writing online, however, I’ve found a source in which someone else has done this first and in a manner comprehensive enough that I need only point to it to signal my own feelings.
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When it comes to art, I enjoy complicated failures, an unintended consequence of all those years spent studying the unpublished fringes of New Zealand modernism. When first I heard of it, therefore, I knew that The Room would likely be well up my street. The opportunity to see it in a theatre at this year’s film festival was too good to pass up, and so it was that it became the first (and thus far, only) outing for which a babysitter was required since the birth of the harvestbaby. I left her in the care of her grandparents and joined my lady-date, Wellington’s knowing cultural connoisseuse, at Hoyts Riccarton.
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Centripetal Emotion
The baby is a cementer, changer and concluder of relationships, and the baby’s needs a force around which the day spins in a variety of sometimes-predictable ways. We are initiated via experience into all kinds of secret societies. There is the witching hour, which runs any time from four until ten p.m. in our house, when the young cannot be pacified, entertained or settled and mothercraft becomes indistinguishable from chance and magic. There is the fallacious phrase “leg guards” concerning the nappies of a baby not much bigger in size than a newborn. There are the long moments and short hours of a life running entirely on hormones, in which holding a contended baby is the sweetest fix of all. The erratic sleep, strange dreams and rapid mood swings are like being a teenager in love, with the accompanying rising and setting of the emotional sun. Then there is the maternal body that, in spite of the habits of a lifetime, continues to shrink. This last point is in itself neutral were it not for the general bagging and falling down of jeans that were bought to fit. Money is tight, and I’d rather spend it on her (save for buying blue cheese, which never loses its deliciousness after a long abstention).
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Tom the puppy (seen on the left of the image)
keeps company in his new home with a cat (‘pon her owner’s knee)
and a dog, his great-grandsire (seen at far right).
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Dispatches from a Domestic Front
21 August, 2010
in at home, commentatrix, we are family
And just like that, I have a two-month-old baby.
From her birth-day, poured as if from a pan of batter into the crib (although I can assure you that was not the experience at the time)
to one who could go — and sleep — anywhere
to this bright spark who craves attention and entertainment (here looking at me at her grandparents’ house).
What is it like? It is a complete rethinking and re-experiencing of the passing of time. It is giving up the ego and going with the flow. It has, I realised yesterday, taken me ten weeks to unwind from my paid employment. That’s one week for every year I’ve been working there, plus an extra week. The recession of the minutiae of employment has allowed for the minutiae of baby-care to come to the fore. Come mid-October, I shall have to juggle both. I do not quite know how I am going to do this, other than that it will be different from anything I’ve done before.
[click to continue…]
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