photos by my husband, Paul

Last weekend, I started a post in which I was describing a ho-hum afternoon:

It’s gray outside.  I’m still in my pajamas.

I’m trying to approach this fact with a glass half-full mentality.  It’s a luxury really.  To be in one’s pajamas at a quarter past one…

…Still, how do you conquer the afternoon in which you just can’t make it to the shower?  You know the type when you just stare at the yellow walls. Just stare.  Maybe wash a dish or two.  Get tired.  Continue staring.

That’s the kind of afternoon that I’m having.

…I’m completely unmotivated.  Not even to eat really.  And, now with Silas asleep and Paul setting up for his big gig,  it’s just you and me baby.  And since you are not even really real.  Then, well, it’s just me.

So, again, today, this is the kind-of afternoon I’m having.    Except that today is sunny, I was in my pajamas until 2:30 not 1:15, and Paul is working instead of preparing for a gig.  There is an obvious pattern here.  Of depression.  On the weekends of all things.

Today, I woke up late (blamed my medicine), missed church (blamed Silas’s low-grade fever), waited for Silas to take his nap so that I could get some work done (because our house is trashed and I’m behind at work), found it challenging to get anything done because I abhor the state of our house (Amityville), moped about (of course), talked on the phone with little to no enthusiasm (most likely spreading my ugly state of mind), and then finally decided to forget the house and the work and to lie on my bed an read (Ahhhhh….).

And, voila, a little bit of happiness ensued.

Why couldn’t I just have read on my bed in the first place?  It’s as if I have to have an excuse to do something pleasurable.  Like I just can’t allow myself to be happy.

Right now, I’m reading a novel, Bel Canto by Ann Patchett, in which a group of men and an opera singer are taken hostage in a house by a group of terrorists.  Despite their situation and due, in most part, to the fact that they have little to do but sit around and think and listen to the soprano sing, many of the hostages are finding elements of true happiness and discovering profound bits of truth within their lives.

I can relate to their situation.  I find that I have to be forced into moments of pleasure the same way that these men are forced into having the space that allows them their mental freedom.

I long for my breastfeeding days in which I was forced to sit and rock and hold my baby and read.  I found that the week I had to stay home with Silas when he had the flu was one of the most pleasurable and intimate times that we have spent together lately.  At the end of my pregnancy I was put on bed rest and while I originally resisted it, it turned out to be some of the best days of my pregnancy.  Even the stomach flu last year allowed me, between visits to the restroom, to be relaxed and to reflect upon the things that I love most about my life.

But should it take being bedridden to be relaxed?  To find happiness?

I should clarify, and I hope if you have read this blog before you already know this, but I don’t go through life and all I do in it feeling like there is a grey cloud hanging over me.  I really do relish life.  The odd thing for me is that, unlike the men in Bel Canto (and I am simplifying their situation here), I am most often depressed when left to my own devices.

In the past, I have written of silences and how I covet them with an almost unextinguishable fervor.  I’ve written about how silences– silence from work, from home, from family– often give me the now unusual opportunity to express myself without interruption.

flowers and weeds

But, as you can see, silences can go either way for me.  On my own, in a silent house, I too often see the piles of laundry, the unswept floor, the lawn that needs mowing.  I find it difficult to relax and then difficult to conquer the mess (some of which is in my mind, so I am told by friends and family) that is my home, my work, my sanity.

In my unfinished post, the one started last week, I discussed the work that I do with my therapist.  The reframing of negative ideas and the thought-stopping that is often so hard to do.  In this the “negative silence” everything is magnified.  The neighbors hate us, the house is a rotting mess, I am a worthless pile of fat and flesh and bones.

Recently, on Nina, my friend wrote about focusing.  She wrote about the separation of work and home and the ability (or lack thereof) to focus on the good life and the good moments with your child.  At home, in and out of my silences, I find it difficult to stay present, to look for the beauty in the chaos.

It’s like I don’t deserve to be happy when my kitchen looks disheveled.

This choice of mine– and it is a choice even when it doesn’t feel like it– to be wrapped up in the negative, leads to these hum-drum afternoons, to this inability to better my day, to this lack of focus.

I shouldn’t need to have to make excuses to be happy.  I should make pleasure a priority and paranoia a thing of the past.

I should focus on my son blowing bubbles in the tub, on my husband’s gigantic, delicious pot of jambalaya, and on the sunshine that is filtering through my windows.

As a friend said on the phone today (and this didn’t help my mood any), we live and then we die.  I am living right now.  I should be making the  best of it.

Even better, it’s thundering and lightning outside so I can’t mow the lawn.

Yippee!

So, I’m here again. And, yes, that means more silence.

Maybe you’ve gathered that I have little to do but read, and write, and do housework.  And since, more often than not, I avoid the housework, then, well, I have little to do but read and write.  And, now that I am a Facebook member, I also obsessively check my Facebook account.  Not quite sure what I’m expecting to find there.  Perhaps I’m just lonely.

I did go for a long hike today.

So, onto Mirielle Guiliano.

As I’ve said, I’m reading French Women Don’t Get Fat by M. G.   And here is my honest analysis:  While it may, in fact, be true– that french women don’t get fat– I do declare that french women get awfully pretentious.  (And, honestly, I’m sure there have to be some fat french women out there.)

Just the title of the book alone evokes a sense of snootery.  Who says a thing like that?  You get fat, we don’t.

At first I thought it was cute, but now I just think it’s just ludicrous.

Madame Guiliano even makes a point to shove it in your face:  “…my business requires me to eat out about three hundred times a year… I’ve been at it for twenty years, never without a glass of wine or Champagne…  these are full meals, no single course of frisee salad… and I’m not overweight.”

Congratulations! And, what the hell is a frisee salad?

Okay, you’re thinking I’m just jealous.  And, you’re right.  I’d love to eat out three hundred days out of the year and eat full portions and drink wine and be slim.  Who wouldn’t?

And, generally, I don’t mind hearing about it.  Except, for now.  When it comes from the mouth of the French.

My father, and this is no joke, hates the French.  I don’t think he knows a single French person, or has read a single French book, or has seen a single French film.  But, he hates the french just the same.  “We bailed them out in WWII,” he’ll say.  Or, in more current history: “they are too chicken to help us in the Iraq War”.

What juvenile, helpless bastards!

(The fathers I mean, not the French.  I fooled you, didn’t I?)

But, and I know this, though I wish I didn’t, M. Guiliano has a point.

She talks about quality ingredients (I’m sure she isn’t eating out at Mickee Dee’s everyday) and portion sizes (don’t those fancy restaurants actually serve appropriate portions?) and about eating for the intense pleasure of it (yum!).

So, French or no, I have to hand it to her, her philosophie makes good sense.

Still, as I continue to read, her cute little use of French phraseology is starting to get on my nerves.  As is her commentary about American diets.  I mean, I can make fun of American diets all I want.  But, a foreigner, huh!, has no right.  (In case you don’t know me, I am being sarcastic.  Although her phraseology is really getting on my nerves.)

I mean listen: “In fact, lots of French people adore hamburgers… some even like corn on the cob, though in France it is usually reserved for livestock.”

Moooooooo!

I get it.  We eat like cows and pigs.

But, you know, we do.  And, it’s not just the French who say so.

I remember when I was pregnant I became, at one point, completely obsessed with what I was eating.  I not only kept a food journal, but an erasable tally chart of the food groups on our refrigerator.   I tried (after the first trimester) to steer clear of ice cream and I walked everyday.

Still, my midwife, when I told her that I had a pregnancy-related addiction to cereal, she said the same thing:  “That is what they give to cows and pigs to make them fat.”  I was aghast.  But, again, she was right.

So, what to do with our barn house ways?

I for one, am going to keep reading zee book and my friend Carrie’s ‘Nina’ website.  (I don’t think she’ll mind me saying so, but the author of that blog does look rather nice in a swim suit.)

I am going to ask myself what pigs eat and am going to stay clear.

I am going to continue to go hiking and biking. (Well, I don’t bike.  It just rhymed.)

And, I am going to make the most of my ingredients.  Eat for pleasure.

And, lastly, when I go to nap, I am going to take Mireille with me.  Or, at least her book.

So, will you join me?  Join me in the fight against barn yard food?

Thanks.  Write me a comment and let me know how you’re doing.

Hmmm…

Furthermore, while I stuffed my face with these less-than-gourmet treats, I sat on my fat behind and read the first three chapters of French Women Don’t Get Fat.   (Damn the french!)
Why?

Je n’sais pas.

I simply don’t know.

I just wanted to point out the ironie.

But, I basically just poisoned myself with high fructose corn syrup and cheap sugar.

If you are not sick yet, I am.  (Literally.  I feel really gross.)
Anyhow, if I stick to reading the relatively uppity, but seemingly practical, dietary smash by Madame Guiliano, I will let you know.

For this evening, however, I will just continue to berate myself as I count sheep.

1-sheep-your-a-fool-2-sheep-your-thighs-are-like-tree-trunks-3-sheep-you-have-a-jellyfish-for-a-belly-4-sheep…

Bonne Nuit.

Oddly, I’m a wreck.

Okay, a wreck is stretching it.  I am nervous.  So nervous, in fact, that my stomach is churning.  My head hurts.  My fingers feel numb.

Pause.  Sorry.  Fast forward in time.  It is an hour, a pill, and a beer later (I was interrupted) and I am calm, confident, and full of ideas.

Still, I fear that when I resume writing the story that I hope will win, or at least place, that this stomach wrenching, palm sweating, diarrhea provoking monster will creep up and attack me again.  And even more frightful, I am scared that I might like it.  This devilish, adrenaline-abusing muse.

I tried to explain this phenomenon to another writer friend and she laughed.  “Isn’t writing supposed to be fun,” she chimed.  “But, what about the tortured poet,” I asked.  “The struggling artist-type.”  She remained silent and I took this silence to be a concession.  She recognized my genius.  I pointed this out.  She laughed again.

We’ll show her.

So, this story.  It is one of those not-so-fictional fictional stories based on some of the experiences that I’ve expounded upon on this blog.  Namely, my brush with postpartum psychosis.  I am looking back at some of my earlier posts to remember what I felt and then creating my characters/plot/prose around that experience.  I am hoping that as I write, the story will metamorphose into something more and more fantastical (or at least truly fictional) and something less like a memoir.

Either way, I’m willing to share the first skeletal bits of this up and coming masterpiece because I only have a few shoddy paragraphs.  That’s right.  I’m freaking out over just a few shoddy paragraphs.  That’s not exactly true.  I’ve started the started the story three different times.  So, I actually have three sets of a few shoddy paragraphs.  But don’t they always say that getting started is the hardest?  We’ll here, I’ll let you see…

The Most Completed Set of a Few Paragraphs of the Story that I Hope Will Win a Prize

It was six weeks since the last rain and the garden was holding on by a thread.  Still, I continued to water despite the water restrictions, despite the potential $400 fine or the neighbors’ dirty looks.  And, I also continued to turn new earth, rubbing open old blisters and sowing seeds too late for planting.  The garden had become both my obsession and my lifeline.  It had become my only source of peace.

But, as goal driven as I was outside, I was equally indolent inside.  The house, which, when I could manage a smile, I jokingly referred to as Amityville, was filled with piles of laundry, of old magazines and scattered paperbacks, of plates, and spoons, and sippy cups that needed washing.  I would more often than not find myself staring aimlessly at the mess too overwhelmed, too limp to attack it.  And the more I stood, the more I stared, the more the laundry, the papers, the dishes began to represent my personal failures.

That’s exactly when I would step back outside.

It had, even with the solace of the garden, become impossible to ignore my anxieties, my inability to cope with “normal” life. I could no longer hide the bouts of panic that left me unable to feel my arms, my legs.  Or the fact that the making of a grocery list left me in a life-or-death-like struggle with indecisiveness.

And, even more dangerous, I could no longer deny that I had seen a child behind our clothes dryer.

A child that did not exist.

That’s the reason, while sunk among the surviving beans and tomato plants, I talked myself into taking the pills.

Here’s where my shoddy paragraphs end.  I can’t figure out how to change the font in this program, so I am making this announcement.

Any comments will, most likely, be appreciated.

So, onto reading trash!

I just finished Charlaine Harris’s New York Times Best Selling trash novel Dead Until Dark.   (Sorry Heather for this unflattering review.  For those of you who would like to try the series, I have been told that the second novel far surpasses the first in both style and quality.  I also did not like The Other Boleyn Girl which I also referred to as trash.  But, now that I’ve read Dead Until Dark, I must admit that The Other Boleyn Girl isn’t quite trash.  At least of the Harris caliber.)

So, yeah, I just finished it.  And, I admit I gulped it up in a short couple of days.   Still, and I’m going to give something away but I don’t think it will ruin the book for you, my opinion was solidified when Elvis returned from the dead as a mentally retarded vampire.  Yes, I am not making that up.  That’s what happened.  And, the main character, who is supposed to be fairly attractive, still wears banana clips and scrunchies.  I have short hair, so maybe I’m out of the loop.  But, I thought banana clips and scrunchies went out a long time ago.  But, since there is so mcuh focus on the main character being Lousiana blue collar maybe I’m the one who is out of fashion sense.  (And yes, I’m being offensive and nit-picky.)

Okay, so I might read the second book.  So what?

I’m definitely going to watch the True Blood series (based on the book).   And, yes, since Twilight, which some readers refer to as trash, I am looking for another romantic vampire series to quench my thirst.

Does that make me lame?

]]> http://booknboob.com/blog/2009/07/17/on-writing-anxiety-and-reading-trash/feed/ 2 http://booknboob.com/blog/2008/03/19/mama-as-reader-and-thoughts-on-the-madonna-again/ http://booknboob.com/blog/2008/03/19/mama-as-reader-and-thoughts-on-the-madonna-again/#comments Wed, 19 Mar 2008 19:17:38 +0000 Administrator http://booknboob.com/blog/2008/03/19/mama-as-reader-and-thoughts-on-the-madonna-again/ As a mother, everything cuts so much closer to the bone.

I believe that I am a person who has always felt emotions with great passion. My highs, Mt. Everest; my lows, the Great Abyss. I am often covered in goosebumps. Photographs, songs, poems, novels, billboards. You name it, I’m inspired. I didn’t think my well of emotion could be dug much deeper.

Until I had Silas.

I have, several times, referred to the Madonna. Specifically a scene in The Passion of the Christ in which Mary, mother of Jesus, witnesses her son– beaten, bloodied, thorned, and haggard– fall while he is carrying his cross to execution. As I remember the film, she was watching the procession from an alleyway. She sees him fall. Remembers him fall as a small child. Remembers her panic and her fear. She runs to help him– her adult son–to mop his brow as Roman soldiers hoist him up again shoving her aside. The scene is helpless and desperate. Again, as I sit here typing, I am covered in goosebumps.

Before I continue, I should make one thing clear. I am not profoundly religious. I do, however, like to admit that I’m hip on Christ. He was a prophet and a radical. He believed in compassion and redemption. He is the protagonist in one of our world’s greatest stories. I can’t argue with that. Still, I went to see the Passion of the Christ alone and out of sheer curiosity. That same curiosity that prevented me, when I was nine, from looking away from the charred remains of slowly blackening whole pig at my uncle’s BBQ. I remember running down the driveway to get away as far away from that death as possible. Still, when I reached a point as close to the road as I could get without being punished, I stopped, hands on knees, and stared at that pig. Stared for what could have been hours. As much as I wanted to block it out, I couldn’t turn away. Perhaps that’s how it was with The Passion. I’m sure that’s what Mel Gibson was hoping for anyway.

And, yes, I was the only one in the theater enjoying my popcorn and fountain drink. (Truth be told, I felt like a real ass hole when I realized I was slurping from the bottom of my cup while everyone else was covering their eyes and crossing themselves during some of the film’s more violent scenes.)

Anyhow, I was largely unmoved by the film. That’s not true. I was unmoved by the gratuitous violence in the film. I was struck almost dumb by that scene with the Madonna. It was so terribly powerful.

And that was before I had Silas.

Now, as you can plainly see, I think of it quite frequently. Obsessively, perhaps. I am humbled and haunted by a mother’s great, undying love for her child.

I wasn’t intending to write about the Madonna. When I sat down to type, I intended to revisit For Colored Girls… by Ntozake Shange. I wanted to discuss how my reading of the choreopoem has changed. How I, as a reader, have changed. When I read For Colored Girls… in college I remember feeling only mildly enthusiastic about it. Last week as I finished it, I could barely stay in my seat. There is a scene in the end in which an abused young mother witnesses, well, an event similar to that in which Mary witnesses in The Passion. Honestly, I thought I might implode. I became nothing but my intake of breath. I just couldn’t deal with it. But still, I sat there reading and feeding my son and looking that fear square in the face. Just like I had with that pig.

Earlier, I said that I hadn’t thought that my well of emotion could be dug much deeper. Again, I find that I’ve lied. I do remember a time when I thought having a child might not be the right decision for me because I wouldn’t be able to handle it. Handle the love, that is. No, not the love. The vulnerability. The idea that if, like the Madonna or the mother in Shange, I were to lose this love, this child, I would be stripped down to nothing but the ugly core of my pain.

People talk about how children enhance their lives, how they give purpose and teach lessons. It seems to me, in many ways, children nudge us toward enlightenment. Until now, I’ve never understood the sacrifice of the Madonna. Never understood how that story might resonate with every mother. How subtle and powerful that character is in the story of Christ’s life. Why the angel came to Mary first.I am proud now to be able to understand. I am also deeply and inextricably afraid.

I finished Dreams from my Father by Barack Obama a few days ago and was excited to have recognized a reference to this choreopoem in the middle of his memoir. Hence, I decided to pick it back up.

Man, is it filled with pain. I was getting goosebumps every few lines. I was filled with that lightening buzz of excitement you get when you are reading something so powerful that you want to pick up the phone and share it that minute. Or, maybe you want to scream. Want to run uphill so when you buckle over gasping for breath you know you are alive.And, then there were the scenes about salsa.

Having just expounded– however lightly– upon the feminine experience, the transcendence, and the dance, I was thrilled to see it creep up again. And by Ntozake no less.

From the Lady in Orange:

i brought you what joy i found & i found joy/honest fingers round my face/with dead musicians on 78’s from cuba/or live musicians on five dollar lp’s from chicago/where i have never been/& i love willie colon & arsenio rodriguez/especially cuz i can make the music loud enuf/so there is no me but dance/& when i can dance like that/there’s nothin cd hurt me/but i get tired & i haveta come offa the floor…

And then later in that same stanza:

i cdnt stand bein sorry & colored at the same time/it’s so redundant in the modern world

And later still from the Lady in Purple:

i lived wit myths & music was my ol man & i cd dance a dance outta time/ a dance wit no partners/ take my pills & keep right on steppin/ linger in non-english speakin arms so there waz no possibility of understandin…

I’m sure I will comment on this more. I just had to get those lines out there. Not sure if they carry the same weight out of the context of the poem at large. But it was almost as if I had to cleanse myself of them.

Really, I should clarify that statement. I didn’t just pick the book up. I’d done that many times before– sometimes pressing the cover to my forehead hoping to ingest some of its unknown wisdom.

No, this time I actually picked up the book and read it.

Maybe it wasn’t my favorite book of all time. Maybe I didn’t drool all over myself with love for it. But, it was heart-wrenching and it was funny. There were times I was so struck with laughter that my son would lean back, startled and maybe a little frightened, and give me a bug-eyed look that unquestionably said: “Ma! You craaaaazy!”

I’d been told that for many the beauty in the memoir is held in the fact that it provokes in a new mom an overwhelming sense of relief. Relief in the fact that you are not, thank God, Anne Lamott.

“You know that no matter how bad you’ve got it, you don’t got it that bad,” a friend told me when speaking about the journal.

I admit, I have to agree.

However, I was struck less by my reaction to Lamott’s hardship (although I could empathize with her need to evacuate the room in which her son was crying) or to her humor (I, too, sat sucking on a pacifier one low and lonely afternoon), than I was by my inability to stop comparing Silas to Lamott’s son, Sam.

Soccer Moms, Move Over!

I’d be holding Silas and reading and breathing and before I knew it I’d find myself remarking aloud:

So, listen to this Sweetpea, Sam didn’t start babbling and laughing until he was– and here’s where I would look back to the beginning of the book and honest-to-God count the weeks since Sam was born to determine his age– oh, five months old! (Note: In case anyone has done the same, this date is only an example and is not accurate…) Isn’t that interesting, Sweetie?!?

Then I’d have to pinch myself when I realized what I was doing.

Four pinch bruises later. No matter. I couldn’t stop.

Babbling, laughing, eating, teething, rolling over, grabbing toys, crawling, sleeping, walking, talking… the list of possible skills that would allow me to unhealthily supersize my son were endless.

(Haven’t I mentioned before my status as future psycho-in-law?!?)

The beauty of reading and competing (as opposed to competing face-to-face) was that no one had to know. I could wildly exaggerate Silas’s abilities while simultaneously belittling Sam’s because, even though Sam is a real boy, it’s like he isn’t. He’s an intangible. A poetic character. A being created by the ink on a page. Mere words in a book. And, of course, he couldn’t prove me wrong. It was, oh-so-brilliantly, safe.

Still, I recognized in myself the potential for danger. I recognized my own perfectionist tendencies and my often failing self-esteem. Lamott, herself, suffered from the same. She hit the mark when she described herself as “a classic egomaniac with an inferiority complex.” Yeah, I get that one.So, as I flipped from page to page counting Sam’s age out on my fingers and chuckling to myself, was I starting to pass this wicked torch of unrest on to my son?

It’s possible. And I know I need to quit it, but…

did you realize that Sam didn’t start getting teeth until he was like 10 months old?!?

(Note: Ten months is a completely acceptable and beautiful time to start getting teeth.)

So, we went to see it.

Persepolis.

And, it happened again.

The protagonist, Marjane, was being sent to Vienna. Perhaps never to return. Her parents saw her off. Stood by the security gate. Smiled. Waved. Marjane turned around just in time to see her mother collapse. Her father lifting her, limp and lifeless, to carry her from the airport. Those same visions of the so-utterly-powerless Madonna running toward the fallen Christ welled up in my mind. I had to lean forward in my seat to catch my breath. To keep from filling with tears. To stop my eyes from rolling back in my head.

When you give birth to a child, it is like some small glass capsule inside you has burst. Some ancient, sacred part of you has cracked wide open. You are changed in these subtle, monumental ways. Ways you cannot quite explain. As if you are, somehow, eluding yourself. You are swept up by both love and despair. You hang on, steady yourself, reach to find your sea legs.It is like eating the apple. It is both beautiful and devastating. And you can never go back.

Sometimes I think about Silas and begin to choke. Maybe we shouldn’t have brought him into the world, I think. I try to think of myself as a vessel in order to resolve myself of the responsibility. I can’t pretend to know the mystery of birth and death and life, I say. Still, he’s so innocent and the world can be so inexplicably cruel.

Eventually, he will feel real pain. Eventually, someone he loves, or thinks he loves, will not love him back. One awful, earth-shattering day, he’ll look at himself in the mirror and wish he wasn’t so ugly. He’ll lose friends to fights, to distance, to time, to death. He’ll question himself, feel abandoned, not know which way to turn.

It is almost too much.

It is beautiful and devastating and I cannot turn back. I can only, ever, do my unfaltering, impossible best.