Morning Pages Thursday July 6th 2023

Again I am up all night with my daughter. On the precipice of walking. Taking one step and then two. Her feet full of splinters. Her bottom left tooth bulging and swollen and still not through the gum. The right side following behind.

It’s been three weeks of sleeplessness.

The heat arriving in Montana and it is almost unbearable.

Back in Los Angeles my daughter won’t nap and then finally at 5 pm she does and there are rules about this but I don’t know the consequences. And I let her sleep. A later bedtime? I google. And it’s just full of don’t don’t don’t. The sun out until past 9 pm.

At one year everyone says something will change. She will sleep through the night. She will stop needing milk. I will have energy again. She might begin to like Neil Young.

I think about what I want to tell my friends who are pregnant, my friends that have just had babies. And all I can think of saying is that it is hard. That I wish someone had told me about the relentlessness of it. Of motherhood. It surprises me how much I don’t remember of the first few months, except that we walked and walked and walked. And I got dressed every day in some sort of postpartum mania, in some sort of middle finger to all who said my life was over - I would have it all. I still believed almost a year ago.

I make 6 cups of coffee and buy a pair of shoes I do not need but want. To feel something more than an ache. Leaving Wyoming. Grief arrives swift and hot and catching me off guard. I play Bob Dylan all day.

Someone who has known me for almost 17 years says when I lament an old home that no longer feels the same Well you have changed! You’ve had a baby! And then later the same friend says You haven’t changed at all. When I say I was expecting this sentence - and first, I thought I had too, when she was 4 months old and I was still swollen from birth and sore going to meet young friends in the park. I felt I had changed. But at almost a year, I know I haven’t. Gratefully. I have just become deeper but not different.

My daughter has begun saying agua when she wants water. Because I say Quieres este? Quieres eso. Because I say listo! Beso? Agua. Mas. Nostoros vamos a nadar. Comida? Hasta manana.

I find myself wanting to say to whoever might listen. I still have fantasies. Like wanting to be a grove of olive trees. Like wanting my daughter to get everything I did not. Like wanting to take a hand and run it over my scar.

My daughter says flower. To the wild rose bush in front of Rock Creek. To the peonies gorgeous on my mother’s kitchen table To the orchid on the counter.

Do you want another? Everyone asks.

And my friend says when I pause for a moment in the night off the river.

Why? She is perfect.
Teasing me.

But she is! I say. I hope one day you will get to meet her.

For this was now my desire.