Compare And Despair
on motherhood, and wanting another baby, and living in the city one grew up in
We start the solstice in a state of emergency. On Wednesday morning a warehouse in our neighborhood goes up in flames. Thick black smoke spreading all the way to Pasadena. This morning still the smell of fire, and ammonia underneath the drizzle. Burning plastic. No sky until 3:00 pm yesterday. There is no warning issued except what the body can smell. There is no warning issued and we know why. A historically and primarily Latin neighborhood. The woman I voted for for Congress, the only one speaking up. And today, they finally send out a warning. The fire re-igniting in the night.
I reach a breaking point, my health on the skids, and I find myself in an old building in Pasadena on the 8th floor, sitting before a beautiful mother I know primarily by sight, she asks me to stick out my tongue so she can look at it. I can see the cold you had last week. She tells me. Which is a relief, because I felt so bad, at some point I stopped believing I was sick and instead thought I was just worthless. I can also see some heat. She says, at the tip of my tongue. Prescribing me herbs that I look forward to drinking each morning and each afternoon. Sticking needles into different parts of my body. A little bit of blood left along my brow. I drift so many places at once. And it seems like everyone is pregnant again, and what a haunting it is, to want so badly a baby and feel like you won’t get it. Do you think we can manifest a girl? I text my girlfriend, who is pregnant with her third, and finally having who we call our girl. The husbands joking about it, that K and I are having this baby together. If anyone can do it, I believe it would be you. She writes back. And sometimes I think I want another baby because I can’t find my way back into the script, and sometimes I think I want to have another baby because there has been absolutely nothing more rewarding than my daughter standing tiny and healthy and happy, the wind in all of our faces. Last night saying wistfully and way past her bedtime (again) from the backseat Oh Mama, I wish we could stop, I want to photograph those beautiful yellow flowers I see outside my window. As we drive through one of my favorite canyons coming back from the beach. And I know the flowers. Because I too have wanted to stop and photograph them, year after year, of my running and my heartbreak. And I still don’t know what they are. Not the invasive and wild mustard. Maybe Monkey Paw. Maybe a lily of some sort.
Any cravings? The acupuncturist also asked. And I laugh and say sugar? And then I say and sleep. Which she has me clarify, so I am glad I didn’t continue with my cravings list, the other things my body wants - fame, and time, and the Mediterranean sea, a lace romper, a night of oblivion, your hand on my leg under the table, T. standing on his deck and smiling at me at two years sober. Things that surprise me. Waking up only once at the edge of the sea.
Yesterday waiting for my daughter in the lobby of her school, a part of my past walks in, thin and older, his hair thinning and I whisper to my husband I used to watch his band play before he was famous when I was 16. And I think how funny it would be to tell him, I saw you at the El Rey and the Silverlake Lounge and The Roxy and The Whiskey. But I had never been there for him, I didn’t like his band, I was always there to watch the Naturals and No Sex Just Dancing, sometimes I was there to watch the Revelators. Years later sending my husband to photograph one of the old frontman’s collections of gel sculptures. I tell him he used to wear a fur coat on stage, and my husband laughs. Hearing stories about him still from friends that came across his dating profile and ask me about him, and I always say yeah I know him. He had one of the most beautiful girlfriends I had ever seen. And sometimes I wonder about the others and when I will run into them. How funny it is to live in the same town one grew up in. How most people can’t leave Los Angeles. And the ones that do - well, lucky them. I keep reading the book I am reading not because of the story but because I love reading about Los Angeles. The way others describe the light and the smell of my childhood. That the poems that keep getting almost accepted, in the competitions I’ve been submitting them in, are all about scent and time, and one day they will be published, I am sure. One day there will be a book. On motherhood and longing. These snaking circular poems.
At my daughter’s swim lesson this morning I sit in the corner and continue reading Larry Sultan’s Water Over Thunder. And I am deeply moved by so much of his recorded process. By so much of his longing. By the generosity of his family to share these moments with the public. The artist trying to find himself, the artist wanting to transcend himself. That I met him before I had ever picked up a camera in any sort of serious way, just words, and I only met him once, but that week - there is a movie in the boardwalk, and the glass of the car that was broken into, M’s stereo torn out, the shock, the way the floor moved to Xaviar Rudd, J’s studio, and his assistant, the girl with the short bangs, the attic of Jonathan’s house. How they let me stay and stay. You need to take Jane shopping. M’s mother told him. And how later someone told me at a dinner in Sausalito everyone was hoping we would fall in love. And we had, but not like that. How a few years earlier obliterated by heartbreak and an unwise substance choice, but the beginning of realizing my instincts were usually right (E. was going to break up with me / I should have taken just half of a bar of what was offered and not the whole thing) I woke up a few hours later in M’s room in upstate New York. Curled into his bed, the blue of his coverlet, and we hadn’t spoken in over a year, and when I opened my eyes I knew exactly where I was even though I couldn’t remember how I got there, because of all the clowns on the dresser. And M’s face looming. I’m so sorry about your Dad. I said. M used to send me playlists through the years, when I would least expect them, directed at my travels. And even though we haven’t talked now, I still photograph any collection of ceramic clowns I see in a window, and I even once put a ceramic orange juicer shaped in a clown’s head into my electronic shopping cart, but never bought it, and I regret it on a regular basis. That somehow when I least expect it we make contact. The same way old friends try year after year to get me and when B. finally does on Sunday night at 7:30 pm I say I am feeling generous when I answer the phone, and he says If I give you some money can I get an executive producer credit on your movie. And it makes me laugh, his name attached to a very female, raw, and terribly sexy coming of age movie, and I’ve been meaning to text him to remind him of this contract. That when he asks if I remember the last movie we saw together, I say Of course. We were at the New Beverly and you arrived an hour and a half into the movie and then talked through the rest of it. And he said Do you remember what you said after the movie was over? And I say No what did I say? And he says You turned to me and said The 70s man. And I tell him, I still think Looking For Mr. Goodbar is one of the best movies ever to be made. It might be my favorite Diane Keaton movie, and certainly it’s my favorite Richard Gere movie, and who doesn’t love anything that Tuesday Weld is in. (Except Thief. And even then, it’s not her that I didn’t like, but the whole roiling rowdy crowd on a Friday night, where my husband and I just looked at each other and said should we just go home? Missing our daughter. Too tired to sit through anything that didn’t grab us.)
I see my friend’s child’s face on the internet, on Instagram, and it’s one of the first times I’ve ever seen it, and he is so beautiful, it takes my breathe away. How strange to see someone else’s child over a screen, and notice the features they share - their eyes their father’s, their hair, their complexion, to know and not know the little boy in the photographs. To maybe never know the little boy in the photographs, except by photograph and occasional word, or the wife even though I love everything she posts, or intimately the life. And it is one of the only remaining things I love about the internet and social media, that for me it is always a way to connect and to share with the people far away from me, though the parasocial collapses reality, though we’ve kept my daughter’s face hidden, a request my husband made when she was born, and one I’ve grown to understand more and more. What a gift it is to keep some things secret, even though that has never been my strong suit. My instinct is always to reach into my chest and pull out my heart.
I have been spending more and more time off my phone, hoping to find my way in again to the page, to the image, to complete the draft, to get the producers eyes on it, that today I began to realize, that I write these so that I am less likely to compare and despair. My days still so full of mothering.
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Oh how I didn't know how much I needed all of this. Thank you for getting these words down.