Yesterday I Didn't Write, Nor The Day Before That, Or The Day Before That

Writer's Block etc.

Favorite Corner Of My Office. Photograph on the set of The Misfits By Eve Arnold

My husband and I have a deal. When he is not working he takes the baby to school and picks her up. We do lunch and then I take her up for some reading and some “quiet time.” Sometimes he does, and then when he is on a job, we switch. When I am on a deadline and he is not working he takes her for the whole day. We have a nanny twice a week and sometimes I successfully disappear, shocked to find a different life on the other side of the door, and when I first experienced it, when my daughter was 6 months old, and I finally admitted that I needed help, the spring so cold it snowed in the mountains and along the Arroyo. I thought oh this is what it must be like to be a man. Shocked coming out of my office to find I had a body, surprised to find my baby playing.

One of the things no one prepared me for about motherhood was the relentlessness of it. That even when there is time, there is never quite enough of it, that there is always going to be something to attend to, needing to change all the sheets, and pack, Sunday morning an unexplainable rash on the baby, a huge bite on her foot, Monday a squeezed in doctor’s appointment, Tuesday a drive to the west side to see family, Wednesday a trip to the market to gather supplies for the school picnic, chocolate and all purpose flour, eggs, a tart tin, needing to get keys duplicated, a jumpsuit hemmed, 2 weeks of covid, and what I can only assume now, is long covid gathering about my body. My chest with a rock in it, my limbs still aching, I stand in the kitchen and think what was I going to do? Or maybe it is just fascism, climate collapse, EPA dismantle, people being disappeared, a war, famine, billionaires, plastic in all of our blood streams. One of the other things nobody quite prepared me for about motherhood was the exhaustion, and the meals, and all that laundry.

Writing has never come easy (I sweat and suffer each syllable C.D. Wright has said) or it once came easy, when I was a child, now I have to chase myself down. Depression doesn’t help. 10:30 pm wake ups, 1:30 am wake ups, 5 am wake ups and no sign of going back to bed. Reading George and Martha in the big bed. The summer here and I can’t believe I haven’t put my body into the ocean, my favorite spot to swim a dumping ground for all the fire refuse.

My girlfriend writes about algorithms and what is it all for, another girlfriend and I talk about faces, for years I had a practice of taking a picture of myself a day, it was tongue in cheek and it was also deeply grounding. And I still do it now, though it looks different. Now it’s called a “selfie” and not a self-portrait, as if trying to remain tied to the self was vain, rather than a marker of time or a means to remember. Getting dressed first thing this morning,

That when I struggle to write, I know that what it is I am struggling against is fear. I am afraid that the subterranean will not hold, even though I know it will, I am afraid to go back in, how desire usurps everything and can leave one frozen.

I sit with my daughter now and during meals she says I’m eating I’m eating, when I suggest she might be done and we need to get going into something else, and I find myself saying Then show me. Show me you eating. And I laugh, thinking show me the scene. Go in there, dig in.