Inner Sunset 4 pm

I'm not a huge fan of the Inner Sunset. Something about the loudness on the street, the dull cafes, the apathetic restaurants, the dismal parking situation...I rarely have a good time in that particular neighborhood, let's put it that way. I should add that there are, however, a few decent places to catch a meal--Ebisu, for instance, and on the low end, the ever-reliable and cheap Gordo's; and the Beanery cafe is staffed with remarkably friendly counter people...oh, and there's Le Video...but other than that, I'd rather be almost anywhere else, on any given day.

But the baby was desperate for a stroller ride, and I happened to be in the Inner Sunset at 4 pm. So I pulled the stroller frame out of the trunk and attached baby and carseat to it, and we set out. After a few minutes, I realized that the Inner Sunset at 4 pm provides no vibrations whatsoever. (By "vibrations" I mean, no sense of connection to the lost and the unknown--no unfathomability). One house offered a faint whisper of something more than the mundane--but only a whisper.

Set back a good distance from the sidewalk, unlike all the other houses nearby, it looked like a New England bed and breakfast, only a lot smaller and more rundown. An automatic sprinkler was watering one small section of grass on the long front lawn. It would have been a pleasant sight, but there was something dull and dispirited about the whole scene.

Nevertheless--for one split second, I saw myself as a wizened grandmother, sitting in a large rocking chair near the front window, meditating and remembering. Was this a happy thought or not? Mostly happy, I suppose. So tired these days that any thought of making it to my seventies seems a happy one.

Old New Mom

By the sixth month, nothing feels all that new about being a mother. The initial awe has not worn off, and moments of surprise are no less frequent. What has dissipated, however, is the surprise I used to feel that I was, actually, now playing the role of "Mom" to someone. The shock of it would ripple through me almost every day, the first few months. I still feel it, but it's much less acute.

What seems important now, at least as important as thinking carefully about how I would like to raise my son, is to think about how to build a life apart from him. Because I have precious little time--in terms of the rest of my life, and in terms of my current daily existence.

Yes, just because I've had a child late in life, it doesn't mean that I am ready to sacrifice any and all non-child-related activities. But so far--during the past six months--only a couple days, or half-days, really, have been spent away from my son. We only know one couple, in our circle of family, friends, and acquaintances, who is available for very occasional babysitting; and they've come up to stay with the child only two times. The second visit occurred earlier today.

Also--during the time they babysat today, I was at the local spa jumping in and out of the steam room, bath and sauna. This, not so much as a way to forget about the baby, but as a way to rejuvenate myself just enough to be useful to him again.

How to achieve a balance, then?

Saturday evening 11 pm

A late posting because I decided to spend quality time this evening with, no, not the baby, but the other two members of the family, after the baby went to sleep...one of those other members just dropped something very heavy in her room before going to bed and somehow, the baby slept on. The determination of babies to sleep at certain moments is remarkable. Though they show an equal determination to stay awake, at others. Yes, my heart and that of my husband's nearly stopped, both of us thinking something horrible had happened to the baby; but he was sleeping calmly through it all.

Sometimes it seems like everything about raising a child is designed to throw a parent completely out of balance. I'm getting a little bit better at not panicking at the drop of a hat, but it's a hard skill to learn.

Still exhausted. My brother and his wife are babysitting for four hours tomorrow. The only thing I feel like doing with those golden hours of free time is visiting a sauna and lying on the couch reading the paper.

Fatigue

The only thing I can possibly write about at the moment is an intense fatigue permeating every cell of my body.

I said I wasn't going to discuss his private, intimate habits--including his feeding schedule. But I'll make this one further exception. The reason I'm so tired is the frequency with which he wakes up at night, and the length of time that he's sometimes awake. He still wakes up three times, most nights.

That means that I'm usually sleeping between one hour and two and a half hours before I have to get up. Over and over and over.

Some nights (like last night) he's up five times. And some nights (like last night), he's also playful and active during one of those wake-up sessions, for about an hour or an hour and a half.

I'm exhausted.

"Sleeping through the night" is described in parenting books as that golden moment when the baby sleeps five hours in a row. From midnight to 5 am, for instance.

I can't imagine anymore what that's like.

More importantly--I have no reserves of energy left. Completely wiped out at the moment. Never felt this tired before.

What's depressing, though, is not the fatigue, but the idea that it could get even worse.

Not Falling in Love

Trying not to worry too much about this thing that seems to happen to so many, many babies and their parents...the possibility of my baby falling. Is there any fear for a new parent that is more potent and more prevalent? Today, visiting a friend I hadn't seen in ages, I protested immediately when she offered to carry the twenty-pound baby in his eighteen-pound carseat down some very steep stairs. "Oh, no, I'll do it," I said, trying to sound loose and casual. Actually I might have sounded loose and casual, because I never imagined she'd try to do it. But after I brought the stroller down to the street I looked up and there she was, carrying this enormous baby in his enormous carseat down those awful stairs. "I'm not a ninety-pound weakling yet," she said in a joyful, determined way. Suddenly I just felt an enormous amount of love emanating from this older woman (who is, actually, very thin and in somewhat shaky health). And maybe that's what I need to remember: where there's love there are strengths of all kinds.

Alma, Beulah and Belvedere

Even more fatigued tonight than last night--but after having an impromptu lunch with a dear old friend, am feeling much less demoralized. In the late afternoon, baby and I spent a relaxing hour touring Cole Valley. The little one seemed peaceful and well-rested after his early-afternoon nap.

Sunlight and a blue sky made a brief appearance, much to my surprise, before the fog came racing back in. It was one of those late-afternoon moments when everyone on the street seems to relax and breathe a little more slowly, recovering from the hectic day after plunging into their nighttime activities. Certain streets themselves seemed to exhale deeply in the afternoon sun. I enjoyed Alma and Beulah streets in particular, the sudden quiet that descended as I turned onto them from busier places. I wondered why the area includes streets with such old-fashioned names, thinking there must be a good story there. Like the names of certain alleys in downtown San Francisco, presumably named after famous madams of the city's Gold Rush era (Annie Street, for instance).

I'm almost certain I ran into someone famous in the Internet start-up world--I won't name him, to respect his privacy. He was exiting one of the cafes of the neighborhood, a small but inviting place with a back patio exploding with lush greenery. Following his lead, I went into the cafe, purchased a gingersnap cookie and a small coffee and pushed the stroller out to the patio.

This small outdoor space offered a pleasant degree of privacy for each of the customers lounging there, due to the effective positioning of tables and chairs. A man sitting in a dark corner was staring intently into his computer with a cigarette dangling from his lips and his fingers poised above the keyboard, playing the part of the Next Big Novelist. A group of seven or eight young men and women, dressed predominantly in black, sat in another corner playing card games and chatting laconically. A man with a shaved head and tight black jeans sat directly in front of me, speaking in a quiet but businesslike tone into his cell phone. My baby looked at me expectantly. "A real San Francisco scene," I almost whispered to him, as I pushed back the stroller's top awning to let him take a look.

This patio reminded me of all the great backyards I'd seen in San Francisco (I'm assuming this cafe was once a private house). These little spaces offer a true sanctuary for San Francisco residents, a respite from the constant barrage of noise and visual stimulation the city provides.

San Francisco is not nearly as laid-back a place as it might seem at first. People are either determined to have fun and thus, make as much noise as possible, or to make money quickly and thus, make as much noise as possible. Or both. So the streets can be noisy, surprisingly noisy for such a small town. I remember, of the many places I've lived in in San Francisco, the backyards and courtyards more vividly than many of the interiors of the houses and apartments. Pockets of quiet and tranquility amidst the daily cacophony. That's why I enjoyed that cafe patio so much today--it reminded me of that why-the-rush feeling that always comes over me in the backyards of this city. Like gracious old nineteenth century names like Alma, Beulah and Belvedere, these backyards transport me to some other era, and a different mode of existence.

Just a Moment

For various reasons, this week is particularly dense with projects, urgent errands, and gatherings that have nothing to do with the baby. As a result, I'm fighting for time to relax with him at home (never mind strolling with him at a leisurely pace in a new neighborhood). And when he's sleeping and I have some time to myself, there are four or five people to call and a busload of small chores to tackle. Getting to this blog has been challenging as well; for the last few days I've usually written in a state of near-desperation at close to 10 pm, when sleep presses down on me with the energy of a vortex.

Be that as it may. At noon today we found ourselves strolling for twenty minutes near my mother's house. He was sleeping; I was remembering how it felt to walk with her after the lung cancer had made it necessary for her to be hooked up to a constant oxygen supply. Even with oxygen, her lungs had all but given up; she only managed to walk at a glacial pace and had to sit down on a bench near her house after just a few minutes. There was little conversation; I knew that towards the end she was just going through the motions. And this was a woman who had never just gone through the motions.

And yet. Walking with her along the pathway directly behind her house, gazing at the grass, fruit trees and flowers all around us, I think we both felt good. The moment was distilled into just a sense of being alive, and enjoying the presence of the person next to us. And it was a good moment. Something I've experienced almost every day with the little guy, over and over again.

Writing Daily

I admit that I'm making a point now of writing every day. It's something that regulates me at a time when little seems regulated. Learning the ways of a new baby involves learning how to deal with constant change. Coming here to write, through thick and thin, gives me the sense of resting near a quiet stream in the middle of a long march. Yes, having a baby sometimes feels like surviving a war. But war was never this full of smiles and giggles, so I take that back.

(By the way, he only woke up three times last night, but two of those times, he was wide awake for about an hour and a half. The first time, because I changed him; the second, because he wet himself, as I had changed him poorly.)

That's all for today since it's late and I'm bleary-eyed.

Sunday evening 11:30 pm

A good moment, during these long days of his early babyhood, is the 11 pm or 12 midnight feeding, usually the first feeding of the night, when he is reliably half-asleep, and eats seriously but calmly--without dislodging repeatedly to look at my face (a trick he adopted a few weeks ago) and without doing yoga moves with one foot on my leg and his back slightly arched. He eats, I sit in the dark of his room (just one nightlight on) and look forward to at least two and a half hours of sleep before the next feeding; my mind wanders over various events of the day that just passed, as I admire the way that his silky hair frames his forehead, the way that his nose is developing a definite shape, the way that his small body feels against mine.

But tonight, just like last night, he fell asleep at 8 pm and woke up for the first feeding at 9:50. (A bad sign, insofar as last night he was up five times during the night, and was wide awake between 5:45 and 7:30 am.) So I'm dreading the hour of 11-12. I'm writing this with a feeling that I have to rush to bed as soon as possible, to be awake enough to feed him again at 11:30 or midnight...waking up three times a night instead of four or five seems like a blessing to me, when just a few weeks ago it felt like a curse. But I know that I'll get back to that sometime soon. And it'll get even better in a few months' time.

Long Day

With a baby to care for, and to feed at least three times a night, day blends into night and back into day...in other words, time takes on a different quality, and life takes on a distinctly different rhythm. I don't know quite how to describe it. It's not that time has stopped, or that one day blends into the next. But the old demarcations between the different dates on the calendar seem to have softened. The individual days require so much energy that I can't quite focus on individual dates. Also, each hour of the day has its own character--much more so than before. Five o'clock in the morning (if my baby wakes me up then) is invariably grim; seven-thirty (if my baby has allowed me to sleep in a little) is much, much better, and sometimes delightful. Four o'clock is often when baby is tired and I feel restless--a good time for one of our quiet strolls through the city, when the little guy sleeps and I let my thoughts wander.

Today at four o'clock we were in the Lower Haight, near Duboce Park and Fillmore Street. I stopped at an old soft brown and gold-colored Victorian house to admire the architecture; when I inquired, the man sweeping the sidewalk in front of it told me its history. Apparently it was constructed by distant relatives of Mayor Gavin Newsom's, in the late 19th century. What was perhaps more interesting was to hear that I was passing through the "Mint Hill" neighborhood. A tiny subsection of the Lower Haight, Mint Hill (named for the old Mint that used to be nearby) consists of the houses between Fillmore and Buchanan, and between Haight and Hermann. This sort of very local history intrigues me, just as the very old history of San Francisco (the Spanish explorers) has its own attraction--these histories that are almost, but not quite, lost. The man sweeping the sidewalk seemed to identify still with his neighborhood as "Mint Hill"--and I can understand why--the houses in that area are well-maintained and perhaps not quite as gaudy as in other parts of the Haight. But he said that the old Mint Hill neighborhood association has been subsumed by the Lower Haight neighborhood assocation; so in twenty years, the name "Mint Hill" might be known only to a few of the people that live there.

What really marked this day, however, was the devastating news about a friend of mine, about what happened to her child. I cannot write about it more directly than that, at this point in time. Suffice it to say that hearing this news this morning, I kept thinking all day what a remarkable, remarkable blessing it is to have, not just children, but loved ones, any loved ones at all, in one's life--and to know that they are happy and healthy.

Walk Dependence

Did not walk the baby today--it was a scrambled day, in which he did not take a real nap at all. He might have been excited and intrigued by the fact that his first tooth emerged--perhaps last night, perhaps sometime this morning. My husband discovered it. Just a little whiteness, about a millimeter in height--but when you put your finger on it, there it is--a real, definite tooth.

I had no idea that when the tooth emerges, what comes through is just the very uppermost portion--I don't know what I expected, but I guess my mental image was that the entire tooth pops out all of a sudden. Of course, that doesn't make much sense.

A tooth. I can understand why this is such a celebrated event, why entire pages of baby scrapbooks are devoted to the emergence of teeth. Yet somehow I did not feel the elation that is supposed to accompany such events...instead, because he never took a real nap, I spent most of the day feeling agitated, from overtiredness but also from lack of contact with the outside world. I really missed that walk. Somehow that anchors the day for me now--the walk, the investigation of some quiet local scene, and later, writing about our walks in this blog.

Strange how quickly I've become dependent on the writing as well as the walks themselves.

Almost

We almost didn't have him. It was my fourth try at having a baby and I'd all but given up. I thought I was too old. In my previous forty-odd years, I'd never imagined being my age and becoming a new mother.

I say, "fourth try"; what this means is, I'd been pregnant three previous times. All three times, I miscarried sometime before the tenth week.

Sometime I'll try to write about the miscarriages. Perhaps. Maybe it's not something to write about.

I was thinking today about the "almost"--I was with an older gay man this afternoon; the baby was playing on the floor in front of us. The man said, "Wow, your baby's really active for a five-month-old...of course, I don't really know..." he didn't finish the sentence; a hint of sadness played across his face. I don't know much about this man, but looking at his expression, I remembered for a moment how devastated I was after each miscarriage, and how unfair it felt to know that the pleasure enjoyed by millions of people, without any thought given to it--the pleasure of being a parent-was something I might never experience.

Now that I'm experiencing it--part of me still can't believe it. Part of me stands back in amazement, every day, wondering if it's really true. Part of me is still scared to death.

I know enough about what I went through with the miscarriages to know that I cannot imagine what this man is feeling when he looks at my child. Do we ever know what another person's loneliness really feels like?

The Unbearable Lightness of Crying--Part 2

Yesterday's post was perhaps melodramatic and overblown--however, as much as I'd like to moderate my feelings about my own baby crying, how I described it yesterday is pretty much how I feel sometimes. Not all the time.

And yet--maybe lightness springs up most successfully from sorrow...it reminds me of an old Greek poet from whom I had the good fortune to take a couple literature classes. He spent a good portion of each class session describing some aspect of his past or musing about the future--and because he'd lived a rich, eventful life, these long digressions proved just as fascinating as anything he said about poetry and art. During one class he described his experience in London during World War II. What was really terrifying was the Germans' V-2 Rocket, he told us--unlike the V-1, the V-2 came in silently. You didn't know it was coming--the only sign it was out there was a sudden explosion, perhaps just a few houses away from you, perhaps right on top of you. After the long, horrendous experience of the war, he felt himself almost going mad from grief. What saved him, he said, was humour--laughter, lightness; once he learned to laugh at things, he could function again.

Of course, a healthy baby letting out a good cry cannot be compared with the trauma of war. I do understand that. Yet, a baby's cry is so intense, at times, that it can't help but carry with it a reminder of the will to live. And thus, ironically, of death. Perhaps that is why we (the general public, whether parents or not) tend to dislike so much the sound of babies crying. And how can we regulate our reaction to this reminder of death, except, in the long run, to find lightness, even in that?

The Lightness of Crying?

Sometimes, when my baby cries, when he really sobs his eyes out, it's as if all consolation is no longer possible, for me as well as for him. It's as if all the possibility of lightness falls away and heaviness has begun a 50-year reign. It's as if speech itself has been rendered meaningless.

And it doesn't matter that, as they all say, "Babies will cry, sometimes for no clear reason. Sometimes there's just nothing you can do but let them cry." It doesn't matter that the crying eventually stops. When it's happening, it's as if my own death is meaningless. It's as if he's waking me up from my own future death; it's as if all present and future silence has been destroyed.

Hayes Street and Lightness

Many of the best neighborhoods in San Francisco are one step removed from a more popular, and thus more heavily trafficked, part of the city. The NOPA (North of Panhandle) district, with Hayes Street as one of its focal points, has always struck me as a much more agreeable spot for strolling than the Haight itself. Yesterday, during a late afternoon walk with the little guy, I checked out the business establishments to be found in the upper part of Hayes Street. An outfit that organizes treks for kids through the parks of San Francisco; a coffee shop that has not changed its slovenly decor since I first started visiting the neighborhood, about twenty-five years ago; a bicycle store where I took my first and only bicycle repair class, also sometime around 1985; a music studio which advertises the "natural method" of learning music; and--yes, a yoga studio--oh well, one yoga studio does not necessarily yuppify an entire neighborhood; overall, an eclectic and intriguing mix.

The fickle breeze was shifting all the time (one of those late-afternoon "devil winds") so it was hard to know in which direction I should take the stroller--no matter where I went the little one got wind blown in his face; in addition, the temperature had dropped about fifteen degrees in the last couple of hours (or so it seemed). Nevertheless, remarkably, the baby took his fourth nap of the day.

One of the joys of having a baby are those moments of lightness that spring up out of the blue--including the moment when you stare at your baby's sleeping face and realize that, if there's any such thing as heaven on earth, there it is on full display. The trick is--to internalize that heaven, make it a part of your every waking moment, let it enter into your thoughts and, even, your thought patterns...who needs religion if you can accomplish that?

Beautiful Sleep

The poet William Carlos Williams has a poem that starts something like, "When my wife is sleeping, / And Katherine and the baby are sleeping," then goes on to describe how he suddenly rises up and dances ridiculously, feeling himself to be the master of his own household. It's a lovely poem, expressing contentment and restlessness at the same time. I can understand the feeling at this moment--my husband is sleeping (rare for him to sleep in the middle of the day), and my baby is sleeping...I don't feel like dancing however. Mostly I feel like joining them. And sleeping for about five hours.

Even fifteen minutes will suffice.

Lake of Mercy

Went with husband and baby to Lake Merced today--it's actually four lakes combined, as it turns out (in spite of 10 total years of living in SF, this is my first time visiting the lake). A sign along the North Lake says that Spanish explorers visiting the lake in 1774 christened it "La Laguna de Nuestra Senora de la Merced" (The Lake of Our Lady of Mercy)." So they were there two years before Bautista de Anza visited Mountain Lake? Nothing was mentioned about Bautista de Anza, but the north shore of North Lake Merced also features a large statue of the Spanish explorer on horseback, which was given to the State of California by the State of Sonora in Mexico.

To my surprise, one can walk along parts of the north lake without being bombarded by traffic noise. A path winds through and beyond the picnic area and golf course; large crews in dragon boats were energetically plying the waters of the main part of the north lake, while in the small eastern portion of the lake, only shorebirds and, sadly, one large dead turtle could be found. A couple elderly Irish men had stopped on a pedestrian bridge to gaze down at the turtle as it floated among some reeds on the shore; they didn't realize it was dead and were staring bemusedly at it, wondering aloud if it were asleep. I didn't realize either that it was dead, but my husband said he could tell right away. He didn't want to break into the reverie of the two older men, but a less considerate young man walking across the bridge said in a loud voice to his girlfriend, "That thing's dead." How on earth such a large turtle (as big as the green sea turtles one sees in Hawaiian waters) arrived at Lake Merced is a mystery. At any rate--seeing the turtle did not put too much of a damper on the walk as a whole, and it was wonderful to find yet another spot in San Francisco for relaxing with a kid and daydreaming.

Beautiful Fatigue? -- Part 2

Thinking about yesterday's post (written in a state of exhaustion, of course), I'm reflecting again on what that woman said. It's perhaps a dangerous thing, to fall in love too much with one's own "suffering state" as a mom...and to believe that one is doing something whose level of difficulty is such that non-mothers cannot even fathom it. After all...maybe those non-mothers have taken care of sick fathers or brothers or sisters, or have had other difficult life situations thrust upon them.

In fact, I've never understood too well the "righteous mom syndrome" which seems especially prevalent in the United States. Baseball, mom and apple pie, right? It's the American Way...but "mom" should not be held up as some sort of symbol of perfect self-sacrifice and devotion to others...as it sometimes is.

As a new mom, I'd like to avoid that kind of thinking. But it's not always easy.

The other day, while walking in the Inner Richmond, I wondered if it would be possible to become progressively lighter in mood and philosophical outlook as one grows older--even as a mother, with all the cares and responsibilities that come with the job. I think my mother achieved this lightness to some extent--as I've already indicated in a previous post. I'd like to try it myself. More on this in the future.

Beautiful Fatigue?

"It's a harder job than people can imagine if they've never done it," I heard a woman say the other day, about raising a child. (I think she was referring more specifically to being a mother, but some fathers have full-time duties as caregivers, so I'll widen the reference to include them.) I wonder if what she said is true; but I do understand the sentiment.

I'm still waking up three or four times a night, that is, my child is still waking up that much to be fed. (I said I wasn't going to discuss his personal habits--well, I'll surely break my own rules more than once with this blog...) He's waking up, and I'm almost sure he's legitimately hungry, and is not just waking up to be comforted.

So yes, this is a harder job than I'd ever imagined. I'm almost walking into walls with fatigue sometimes, and yes, there are some extremely challenging moments.

The other side of it is the intense joy I feel when I go to him in the morning, that is, when he's really waking up--he almost always shoots me this gorgeous, beaming smile...it almost spoils it to write about it. Just that smile alone keeps me going through a long day and night, sometimes.

When I think about that smile, and other moments of intense joy, it seems to me that even fatigue can be beautiful...

(Although it is, sometimes, just damn difficult. No getting around it.)

Houses to Dream By

The idea of a poetics of place has always intrigued me--how particular environments harmonize (or clash) with our thoughts and moods. Today, walking with the kid through the Inner Richmond district, I came upon an interesting architectural phenomenon on 2nd Avenue between Balboa and Cabrillo: all the houses were uniform in style, something almost unheard of in any one particular block in the Richmond. They all had steep sloping roofs, which allowed for a garrett-like room upstairs with one smallish window overlooking the street (a perfect hideaway for an artist); they appeared to be houses from the latter part of the 19th century, but were not Victorians.

I wish I knew a little more about architecture, and in particular, the architecture of this city. But suffice it to say that these houses looked eminently liveable--more relaxed and less stuffy somehow than the trussed-up Victorians of the Haight, more inviting and friendly than most of the Richmond's older houses. These houses hidden away on an unfrequented block of the inner Richmond seemed to invite me to relax and stroll at a more leisurely pace. Which I did.

Was also intrigued by the large number of quirky shops and restaurants that have sprouted up on Balboa Street, from 6th to 2nd Avenue. From the general contractor whose storefront logo reads, "Building better--building greener" to the fish and aquarium store, to the Chinese restaurant advertising itself as a "seafood tea house" (if someone can explain what that is--or on second thought, I'd rather not know, it's more fun that way), Balboa Street feels like the future of San Francisco.

An entirely different atmosphere prevails in Glen Park these days--at least, in the part of Glen Park on and around Chenery and Diamond Streets. The large number of "holistic" health centers, yoga studios, and gourmet grocery stores that have appeared in recent years indicate a neighborhood that, though entirely working-class just a couple decades ago, has given itself over these days to the nouveau-chic set, a group whose favorite activities center heavily on personal health, fitness and "enlightenment." The architecture of Glen Park, however, consists of an eclectic jumble of older and newer houses, which almost makes up for the nouveau-chic feeling of the neighborhood's business establishments.

August 12th (barely)

I've been scoping out nearby playgrounds; found a good one today not far from the house. A good central structure for climbing and exploring; a decent slide; lots of spongy material underfoot; clean-looking sandboxes; and a set of swings small enough and protective enough for any baby who can hold his head up--my baby, at 5 months, just barely qualifies. Nevertheless, he woke up from his stroller nap and soon found himself sitting in this mysterious rubber device, swaying slowly back and forth; a tentative smile broke out on his face after maybe a minute.

The small playground was well-populated with babies, toddlers, older kids and moms; the moms were camped out in what few shady spots could be found and were chatting with each other in groups of two and three. Something almost absurdly human about the sight of moms talking to each other in playgrounds as they keep one eye on their kids. Absurd, because who takes the time to talk to strangers any more, anyway? But one mom is almost never a total stranger to another mom. And if that sounds a bit like a cult, well--motherhood is a bit like that, sometimes. I don't know if I totally approve--but nobody cares whether I do or not: the cult of motherhood will endure with or without anyone's protest.

The City of Raissa--2

The stresses of life in San Francisco have to do with the cost of living, traffic, and excessive fog in the summer--not necessarily in that order; few people would call it an unhappy place, however. People here are proud, all too proud perhaps, to call this home. (Of course the biggest stress factor that no one wants to think about is the possibility of an earthquake, but I won't dwell on that either.) So why do I need to search out those "lost places" of San Francisco? Because I also believe in the City of Raissa--in other words, those invisible threads of connection. And they cannot be forcefully woven together; they tend to thrive in lost places--not in centers of tourist activity.

Of course, the "lost" places aren't really lost--when you visit them, you realize that they hum with a quiet energy of their own. One example from the other day--after I walked around the reservoir in the Outer Sunset, then sat down with an espresso in the cafe, I glanced out the window and saw an Asian man, probably Chinese, probably about seventy years old, dressed in old-fashioned Chinese garb and walking at a glacially slow pace while balancing a long wooden pole on his shoulder. At the end of the pole dangled a medium-sized white garbage bag, stuffed with what appeared to be, well, garbage: an assortment of papers and rags and old cans. I don't know where he was going; he looked like someone you'd meet on a winding street in 1920s Shanghai (or my mental image of Shanghai in the 1920s since I can't say that I've actually been there). He unleashed that feeling in me--the feeling these lost places are supposed to unleash, I suppose--a feeling of uneasy happiness.

The City of Raissa

In Italo Calvino's "Invisible Cities," he describes the imaginary city of Raissa, where "life is not happy. People wring their hands as they walk the streets, curse the crying children, lean on the railings over the river and press their fists to their temples." And yet, he adds, "at every moment there is a child in a window who laughs seeing a dog that has jumped on a shed to bite into a piece of polenta dropped by a stonemason who has shouted from the top of a scaffolding, 'Darling, let me dip into it,' to a young serving-maid" and the sentence goes on from there. Threads of happiness stretch from one person to another, he says, even in this unhappy city. The exact way that he puts it: "at every second the unhappy city contains a happy city unaware of its own existence."

This reminds me of a certain afternoon in Verona, Italy (not an unhappy city as far as I could tell) where I saw three girls running around in the piazza, chasing each other, laughing up a storm, then stopping abruptly to catch their breath on a bench, and striking up a conversation with the old lady who was sitting there, though they obviously didn't know her. Something about that scene, the smiling old lady and the exuberant, respectful young girls, made me feel that life in the United States was so miserable in comparison--even if I'm over-romanticizing my entire encounter with Italy, that one moment with the girls and the old woman still resonates for me, as a prime example of how a society should organize itself--and how people should intermingle--all generations, all walks of life, freely and without hesitation.

It also reminds me of my daily encounters with "the lost," in San Francisco--which is really, a search for these missing threads of happiness. I'll try to explain that more in some subsequent post. Right now I'm craving about fifteen minutes with a good book before going to bed.

The Photo

Just a quick note about the photograph--a shot of me on a beach in Hawaii, pretending to read a guidebook; I chose a vague photo to maintain some level of anonymity, and, as previously mentioned, I've chosen not to display my son in photographs, nor, for the most part, in prose. But I also chose this photo because it speaks to the fantasies of any beleaguered new mother, suffering from lack of sleep and (just as painfully perhaps) lack of leisure time. The thought of reading a book, any silly book, on a beach anywhere, for an entire two hours or so--seems to me the most delicious luxury imaginable. I know that this one, simple event--reading a book on a beach--might not take place in my life for another two or three years, at the least.

On the other hand--perhaps I should make an effort to take my son to one of the city beaches and see if he will allow me a half-hour of restful reading, if not an entire two hours. The only way this will happen, as long as he is an infant or toddler, is if he is sleeping...then there's the thought of packing up all his gear and trucking it all the way to a beach...no, it's something less than a restful image, taking my son to the beach at this point in his life. Still, I suppose I might try it one of these days.

Graduation and Retirement

One of the disheartening and scary aspects of being an older parent is the thought of being a senior citizen already when your child is just entering adulthood. Imagining yourself in your early and mid-60s, watching your child graduate from high school and college. Wondering if you'll ever meet your grandchildren.

My own parents both died before the birth of my son. My father died in 2006; my mother, just last October. Experiencing their deaths (both died of cancer) probably taught me, to some degree, not to dwell on projections into the future and thoughts of "what if." When your "right now" is relatively healthy and happy, you are the luckiest person in the world. No point in thinking too much about twenty or even five years ahead.

My mother was an especially now-directed person (and it's not a stretch to say, her Buddhist background helped her become more and more that way as she entered her senior years). Nobody enjoyed eating a good meal and drinking sake more than that woman; no one laughed more heartily at a good joke; no one spoke more directly to me about life and, yes, my own shortcomings. I certainly didn't always appreciate her directness, but grew to understand its value as I matured.

It breaks my heart that my son will never meet her. It hurts me just as deeply, for different reasons, to think that my father will never look at my son--perhaps more accurately, that I will never experience my father seeing my son for the first time. I can see the quiet look of delight spreading across my father's face. Of course my mother would be in tears with happiness. I can see that so vividly right now. But in keeping with the philosophy of living for now, I won't dwell on those thoughts.

Nothing

The inner Outer Sunset isn't as lost as the outer Outer Sunset--but it's damn quiet; and I'd say Moraga Street from 19th Avenue on out to the ocean is one of the dullest streets in the City. Dull, and yet intriguing in its dullness. I found myself at Moraga and 28th Avenue today, parked just outside the Sunset Recreation Center--I'd launched myself out of the house, baby in tow of course, with no idea where I was going but with a somewhat urgent need to go anyway (my husband was making a crucial conference call and needed to know that the house would remain quiet for the next thirty minutes or so--and as soon as one desperately needs a baby to remain quiet for thirty minutes, it's almost guaranteed that he or she will not comply. Just one of the unspoken laws of baby-raising).

Nothing could be heard at all, not even a whisper on the breeze, as I got out of the car and loaded the little guy into his stroller. A. was fast asleep. I was already primed for an encounter with that elusive "lost" element of the city that I keep writing about. It did come; in fact, I felt time stop again; but unlike yesterday, the experience felt vaguely sinister. Maybe it was just that everything was so damn quiet.

I decided to head to the reservoir which occupies a plot of land two blocks in diameter, from Ortega to Quintara, and from 24th Avenue to 26th. It was a remarkably warm summer day, for the Outer Sunset--at around 65 degrees not exactly sweltering, but comfortable shirtsleeve weather. I pushed the stroller up a steep path that leads only to a tall fence, there only to block the entire reservoir (which is already cemented over) from public access. The path really leads nowhere, just up to the fence and back down again around the corner. I found this irritating. As I pushed the stroller up, I watched a young boy, 9 or 10 years old, jumping rope in a desultory fashion, near the top; he glanced sheepishly in my direction, as if to say, "Yeah, I'm doing this because I'm bored, please don't laugh at me."

Sometime around then I heard a melancholy voice in my head, repeating a simple phrase: "Nothing will ever happen to you."

I turned the corner and saw a man in a beige fisherman's sweater sitting on a bench; he gave me a stony stare as I passed. "Nothing will ever happen to you," the voice repeated. "Nothing." I wasn't taking the voice very seriously; even so, it made me nervous.

Of course I don't want to slip into the void without having accomplished something--without having lived my life to the fullest. But what if--what if all of it really does amount to nothing?

The pseudo-zen practitioner in me rejoiced at the thought of relinquishing all efforts towards something-ness. But at the same time, a small wave of fear passed through me. That reservoir, its blank surface covered with concrete, seemed to radiate nothingness, not the soul-satisfying emptiness of the meditative state.

I circled the entire reservoir as the baby slept. At Quintara and 24th Avenue I gazed with sadness at a bizarre playground, consisting of a very short plastic slide, a few swings, a pocket-sized sandbox and a tiny metal horse on a spring--all of it looking very bleak. The whole playground looked embarrassed at its own existence. It wasn't enclosed in anything. Usually a playground comes with some sort of demarcating border, but this one was just set up on the hard cement surface, with a few patches of rubber thrown down as some sort of minimal cushioning in case someone fell--no kid in his or her right mind would spend two minutes in that playground. A tiny girl with pigtails springing straight out from her head like insect antennae was attempting the slide, her parents standing on either side of her; I think they were just desperate for entertainment, or perhaps a bit insane.

That was when the "Nothing will ever happen to you" voice grew the loudest. "This is your life; walking past empty objects like this playground. Nothing will ever happen!" Nothing joyful about this particular experience of lost-ness. And yet...I realized the absurdity of the voice, of these gloomy thoughts. I was walking my baby. The weather was enticingly warm and sunny (a true rarity in the Sunset in August). All these people were just normal people getting through their lives somehow, not ghosts and insects.

Just the same--not planning to rush back to that reservoir any time soon. I headed back down the hill towards Moraga and 28th Ave--stopping first at a neighborhood cafe (run by a dignified looking man in his sixties and cheerful young people who always have a smile for their customers--not a common experience these days) for an espresso and croissant pick-me-up. The baby woke up and gazed at me with wondering brown eyes.

Looking for the Lost

It doesn't make sense to seek out the lost, the unknown and the unexpected; it has to surface on its own. However--like I said, I'm setting myself the task of exploring some quiet, relatively unknown part of San Francisco every day, with my baby in tow--setting the conditions, if possible, for encounters with the lost.

Why?

Because this is, in a sense, the essence of writing itself--to throw yourself into an unknown terrain and hope something meaningful comes of the encounter; because I've always been someone who loves secret hideaways and unexpected encounters, and it feels good to reconnect with that side of myself; because I'm spending part of every day walking the baby and I might as well set this agenda for myself--a new walk in "hidden San Francisco" every day.

Today we went to Mountain Lake Park, a wonderfully lost park in the Richmond District. When I lived on 9th Avenue near Clement, I spent several weeks in the neighborhood before I even knew this park existed; that's how hidden it is. Yet its historical significance couldn't be much greater: this was the spot where Juan Batista de Anza and his men ended their 900-mile, nine-month trek from Mexico on March 27, 1776. They camped at Mountain Lake for two days, then returned to Mexico; in three months a contingent of about 130 men returned to set up the Presidio and "a mission three miles to the south" (presumably, Mission Dolores). You might say that the first phase of the European life of the entire region began at Mountain Lake Park, which now has busy Park Presidio Drive at its northern border, but still exudes a certain quiet charm. Its small lake attracts any number of migratory birds, and I saw dozens of dragonflies floating across the paths as I walked. The grassy fields are bordered by impressively large Monterey Pines and plum trees, and the children's playground offers, among other things, an imaginative climbing apparatus. So the park offers future delights for my son, as well as a voyage into the deep history of San Francisco.

The unexpected did not emerge here at the park, however--it came somewhere between California and Lake Streets as I walked up 9th Avenue. Time stopped, somewhere around there. By that I mean, everything became very still. No breezes ruffled the baby's blanket; an old man walked his dog off in the distance, but other than that I saw no one; the traffic noises were a vague hum in the background. Everything was very quiet, suddenly; and so the feeling came over me that time itself had stopped.

Then the odd thought came to me: "This very moment might be the exact middle of my life." This could be true, of course, if I live to be eighty-eight years old. But it doesn't matter if it's true or not. What matters is that the unexpected came to me, as I walked my sleeping baby up 9th Avenue.

Being a mother sometimes means: you feel as if nothing unexpected will ever happen again (not that babies aren't full of surprises--but after a while you feel like even the surprises are all drearily predictable). So that's why it was good to encounter something like the "inconnu" all over again--my old friend from those days spent exploring the world of the Surrealists, the Beats, and old San Francisco.

August 5th 10 am

I'm sure that my postings to this blog will be erratic; I'd like them to occur daily, just for the discipline of getting some writing done every day; but I'm sure that won't happen. (I'll try for three times a week to start.) So, for good measure, here are two posts on the first day.

Walking is, of course, a major activity for any new mother. I live in one of the more horizontally challenged parts of the city of San Francisco, so I usually drive to where I'm going to walk the baby; this has led me to explore many different neighborhoods in recent weeks. My baby stroller bounces the kid around quite a bit but he actually seems to like that; to make sure he's not jolted too much, however, I walk rather slowly. So my walks have taken on the quality of what the French 19th century poets called "la flanerie"; "flaner" means to wander; to stroll with no particular destination in mind, and (implied) to dream and meditate as one walks.

San Francisco is a good city for wanderers; in many respects it's a city for the lost. By "lost" I mean, those who have escaped the frenetic, media-driven side of 21st century civilization; those who have stepped "outside," as Andrei Codrescu might put it (see his book, The Disappearance of the Outside).

Most people would say that I'm nuts to call San Francisco a "city for the lost," insofar as it's also an epicenter of media-driven activity, as well as the invention of new media (given its connection to Silicon Valley). However, parts of the city fit that description.

Take, for example: the Outer Sunset. The Outer, Outer Sunset. Ocean Beach, the Great Highway; Sloat, Taraval, Noriega, Judah and Irving Streets, after 40th Avenue. A corner of the City where owners of small, eclectic businesses eke out a living; where homeless and near-homeless people seem to congregate; where people go to hear the foghorns and ocean waves and forget themselves in sand dunes and secret cafes. Perfect spot for the determined flaneur like me. My baby is, without his consent, being indoctrinated into the flaneur lifestyle. But then, all babies are born flaneurs.

August 5th 2 am

I'm new to the blogging world and this is my first post. I've hesitated to blog about the experience of being a new mother; there's something vaguely exploitative about such blogs, in my view. For one thing, I'm not posting a picture of my five-month-old son because, well, he has no say in the matter. For another--why should I describe some of his most intimate experiences online? How he's eating, sleeping, pooping and farting? No thanks. If I'm going to blog about being a new mom--and, yes, for a few different reasons I feel compelled to do so--it's going to be more of a study of what's happening to me, as I go through this--at a rather advanced age.

I became a mother at 44. That simple fact brings with it a host of complications, which I plan to explore in the days to come. For example: I've started a local group for older new moms (first-time mothers in their late 30s and 40s), and one of the members has had someone tell her, "You're too old to be a mom!" Another person has been asked if she's the grandmother of her own child. (More on this in later postings.) I've been spared those kinds of comments so far, but I know that it could have been me easily enough. So I'll ruminate here on what it feels like to be an older mom, and hopefully provide some kind of support for other women who've taken this step later in life.

The other reason to write this is simply to boost my own morale. I've written all my life, but recently (i.e. ever since the arrival of my beautiful son, about five months ago) the flow of writing has dried up to a trickle. Not that this drought matters a whit to anyone but me--but it matters deeply to me, and affects my life in various ways. I'm a grumpier person overall, I think, when I don't write. Somehow I need to spew out my thoughts in this way, need it almost as much as I need to breathe.

Finally--I have this weird ambition to take my son to someplace new in the world, or more specifically, to someplace new in San Francisco (where we live) and surrounding cities--every single day, and then, to write about our excursion in some small way. I'm a big believer in "traveling in place," which to me means, finding the new in the familiar; unearthing the unexpected in the predictable. This is the die-hard surrealist in me, perhaps. So that will also be one of my "goals" here, if any goal is needed.

It's 2:30 am...I've written for an entire half-hour, for perhaps the first time since my son was born five months ago. Being a new mom (at any age) means, in part, losing oneself in this new task of caring for another living being, and then struggling to find oneself again, at odd moments. This has been the case for me, certainly. I can't begin to describe how wonderful, how exhausting, how frustrating and how exciting it's been...but all that waxing rhapsodic will have to wait for another posting because I also need to sleep right now, somewhat desperately.