Girl in the Holocene

Last night Nick & I saw the Bowerbirds at Mississippi Studios, which is quite near my new place.  It is not the first show I’ve seen since the Little One was born, but it was the very best show. Their new record, Upper Air, has been in frequent rotation since it came out.

There’s a lot to love about their music, but the most compelling thing to me is the constant connection to nature in the lyrics. There’s a real romance with the natural world in their songs (and their lives, it seems, read their blog Olive Hearts). Working on my book, I often felt like I was geeking out with the references to glaciers and whales and moss and birds, like others would find this maudlin. But I wanted the natural world to be a character with whom the heroine has a profound and complicated relationship. When I listen to Bowerbirds I feel a kinship, in this way.

We arrived early, like good nerds, with books in our hands, so that we could sit up in the balcony and read while we waited for the opening acts. We met Phil & Beth out front before we went in. They are chums of Nick’s friends Jeremy & Allyson, back in VA (Allyson’s art features on some of the Bowerbirds lovely T-shirts). He showed Phil & Beth around town when they were on tour a few years ago. Nick & Beth compared new tattoos, both on their inner forearms. We went in & found some good seats. Watched the folks trickle in. Read snatches of our books. The opening acts were good. Some local fellows Run On Sentence, and Megafaun. Beards aplenty.

Bowerbirds are really just so good. The full, warm layering of violin & accordion, upright bass & subtle, idiosyncratic percussion. Phil’s singing is doleful but never dreary, and the harmonies manage to be both haunting & uplifting at the same time. About three songs into the set I realized I was holding my breath, barely breathing at all. I had to remind myself to take long, deep breaths and really let the music seep in.

What a lovely night.

When I started this blog I promised myself that it would be about what it is: writing.  With the book to finish, the long-hoped-for publication and every point between, I had hoped this would be a space apart from my daily life, perhaps even above it.  I had secretly promised myself that it would not be taken over by the vicissitudes of mothering.  While I could admit to being a mother, and depict a few of the more picturesque moments, I could not, would notlet this space become strewn with the trappings of mommy-hood and domestic reality.

Now, months after my first two short posts–many new posts begun and abandoned after repeated interruptions–I am willing to concede that this was utter delusion.  I like to think of myself as a sensible person.  Delusions make me queasy, like seasickness.  Tossing back & forth between what’s really going on and what one tells oneself is going on.   Well, this is what’s going on: I have a crawling, screeching, gnawing baby who is physically attached to me for the better part of every day.  When I do manage to detach him, there are diapers to wash & dry & fold, dishes to wash, food to procure & prepare, more dishes to wash, etc.  On the two barely tolerable days a week that I leave the house on my own, I encounter more helpless, needy creatures for hours on end in a ridiculously popular retail establishment. 

Of course I love my son and, in its own way, I even love taking care of a household.  Domestic rituals are important to me.  I try to have a special appreciation for what it means to have a home, a place not just to be, but to dwell, to gather resources and cultivate one’s own true self.  I believe that one’s physical space, how one chooses to live, is a reflection of one’s inner space.  My movement through this space does not end with my fingers, my feet, my skin or breath.  The way I treat the objects here, whether with care or carelessness, is an expression of my self.  It’s a way to imprint one’s energy and intentions on the world.

But domestic rituals have a way of tethering one to the physical.  Think of the word chore.  These things we must do, and do over and over again, because no matter how thoroughly & beautifully done, they will become undone, like a loop of time lapse photography, played endlessly over our days.  These are chores, and I do them at the expense of more pleasurable, and perhaps more consoling, activities because I must.

Lately I have been feeling particularly lost in my daily rituals, as if the movements were so ingrained that my body could go through the motions while my consciousness took a long nap.  I might try to think about this work as a good yogi and concentrate on every exhalation to stay present, inhabit the work and find some satisfaction in it.  But lately it has been trying seeing my work continuously undone by everyone else in the house. 

Yesterday I got the disappointing, though perhaps not unsurprising, news from my editor that my book needs a lot more work.  Honestly, if they had loved the book that I gave them, I might have begun to doubt their abilities as readers.  It’s a good book, and better now than it was before, but it is not (if I’m being truly honest with myself) the book I envisioned.  So many things about my perspective have changed since I began writing the book and now.  I need to find a way to use those shifts in perspective for the better of the book, instead of imagining them as impediments to getting back into that raw, angst-ridden, twenty-something space (who wants to be there, anyway?  yech).

Today Nick is kindly watching Amos so that I can sit here and gather my thoughts for a while before I go to work for the night.  I’m typing next to the sewing machine.  In half-hour increments over the last few months I have been making a patchwork quilt for the Little One’s first birthday (just a couple of weeks away, now).  It is intensely satisfying to stitch two pieces of cloth together.  There is something special in that moment, just after pressing the seams, when you realize that you have made something new, and useful, and pretty, out of separate things.

I have to remember that, and be thankful for it, I suppose.  That we are called by unknowable forces to do these things, fulfill our needs and desires to create and dismantle, and that it is all, always, work.

The Little One has been awake off and on since 4:30 this morning.  N tried to get him back to sleep for awhile, to no avail.  Wide awake by 6:30, I got up; made genmaicha & toast; fed Little One.  I have to work a closing shift at the Bookstore tonight, so I’m crossing my fingers for a nap later. 

The Little One & I have a morning ritual.  We open the blinds on the big dining room window and say, “Good Morning, World!”  This morning we opened the blinds and…FOG.  The kind grandmothers call Pea Soup.  Visibility is about two houses.  Good Morning, Fog! 

I can see the light in the kitchen window of the house across Clinton where another one of the many new babies in the neighborhood lives.  Their baby was born about three months after ours.  I’ve never met them, but I identify most with her, over the other mothers around here.  She seems more normal somehow, less obscured in the cloud of brand-name baby gear and swarms of identical visiting mother-friends.  I watch the other mothers in this neighborhood a lot, noticing which accoutrements they have and how quickly they lose their baby weight.  I feel like an alien compared to most of them.  We rent, we don’t work regular hours, we drive a ten-year-old Subaru with a dented rear bumper, almost nine months later I’m still 15lbs overweight.

If I’m being totally honest with myself though, I’d say I’m envious of what I perceive as their security: they don’t have to worry about rent going up in this neighborhood, or being able to afford health insurance and a car; they can buy whatever they want new instead of relying on what others give them or finding things at a second hand shop.  Then there’s the imaginary difference: that motherhood is somehow a simple adjustment for everyone else, like taking in a hem, while I feel stewed in it.  I struggle to get enough sleep, to feel satisfied with the few rare moments of leisure time I find, and to reconnect with the source of energy that defined who I was before I became a mother.

The last part does me in when I’m trying to write.  I wrote the novel when I was single, living in my lovely old bachelorette pad in Buckman, tending my balcony garden, reading books and books, pining for someone to love…

Well.  Now I have someone(s) to love.