Morning Pages July 2023

What is one to do in this heat but pray?

I think.

Trying to keep my daughter clean between meals.
Her high chair. Our kitchen table. The floor.

I think about what to eat constantly.

There is kale and corn and tofu and broccoli.
There is still some tinned fish.
Avocados and cheese.
The watermelon on the edge of turning.
Store bought peaches because our tree only produced six and the squirrels got away with the last few and the heat might have taken the rest.

There are no eggs.

I watch a hawk float along the sky cleared out. The heat doing something to it. Searing blue. Stratus clouds. The Mimosa trees on the hill in full bloom.

There is chicken soup my mother in law bought trying to rid us all of a cold we got after my daughter turned one.

A party so beautiful we felt like we were dreaming.
What did we do to deserve all of this?

70 people all full of love.

A healthy child.

A home with air conditioning.

How are you? Everyone asks. Are you writing?

And I think, maybe when I stop breastfeeding. Maybe if I can get up at 5:30 am, maybe after she is two and I can drop her at school.

The excuses are rampant with you. One of my poetry professors said in college. Sitting at the head of the table, her short hair spiked and ferocious, in one of the old stone buildings and I across from her when I was 20. And they were. Because I always felt I had to apologize for my work. And I was jealous of the boy three seats over handsome and so sure of himself saying can I read one more? I was looking through my journal this morning. Knocking on my door one evening because he found himself in my building and suddenly wanted to smoke pot. How one of the most romantic things my husband said was you have to stop telling people what to think of your work before they even get a chance to enjoy it. After I showed him a movie I had made, taking my heart out of my chest.

But I had wanted to write about the heat.
About how I shhhhhhhed my way up and down Angeles Crest Highway watching my daughter’s head drop and the temperature on the dashboard rise.

86.

88.

89.

96.

How I woke her accidentally pulling into the picnic grounds and not seeing the divot in the concrete worn away.

I was only thinking about water.

The Arroyo Secco.

If it would be cooler down by the stream.

If there was parking in the shade - maybe she could still sleep, maybe I could pee.

I wanted to write about how there was a parking spot in front of the movie theater that had saved my life, nestled almost up against the mountains. How it had been bought and none of the people I had grown to know worked there any more. How the new establishment had thrown a haphazard bar in the middle of the lobby.

Took all the art down.

Threw some big red chairs in, but didn’t bother to change anything else. And it felt janky, and like nobody cared, and how the movie I saw felt the same. That underneath everything was this undeniable pervading sense of doom.

Everything was coming undone and fast. And there was nothing to do to stop it. No amount of giving up meat or car or composting. And I think of what will happen to A. That once my therapist said I’m just glad I won’t be here to see it. I feel very sorry for you and my grandchildren. I’m sorry that I have nothing better to say.

Before A. was born I thought about buying a boat and putting it in the yard so it would be ready for flood. I thought about water constantly. How to save it, how to store it.

I often joked that my depression wouldn’t let me have a vegetable garden. But for her I would have to learn how to grow. So I could teach her. How to dig into the earth, how to tend, how to hot wire a vehicle, cut open a cactus, search for what was edible along the cracks of the concrete.

At my daughter’s one year appointment her doctor says. There are two categories I have found children fall under. And I think, how many children has he seen, he can’t be much older than me, and it is part of why we liked him, his youth, his willingness at first to really listen, so open we thought he wasn’t wearing a mask when we first met him. There are fast talkers and slow walkers. When we start to tell him about her words. When we tell him she will walk when holding on to the furniture, take a step or two on her own and then sit down, how we are not helping her, and he turned from his computer, surprised because we want her to walk upright, holding her own center, not bend forward to our hands. To feel secure on her own two feet.

And you Mom? He says. Have you gotten back to writing?