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From the category archives:
O internet
When it comes to art, I enjoy complicated failures, an unintended consequence of all those years spent studying the unpublished fringes of New Zealand modernism.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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Emanations under Baby-Brain
16 August, 2010
in O internet, commentatrix, we are family
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.
[click to continue…]
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