Quick...

Babies are so unpredictable...in the noisiest and most difficult environments they can be angels. As my little one is right now...that's all I can write today.

For No Clear Reason...

For a moment today life came to a perfect standstill. I'd just fed the baby and put him to bed; I was sitting on the old futon couch just a few feet from his crib. I listened to him sigh and grunt a little as he put himself to sleep.

I was thinking to myself--various random thoughts. "Seven months old, still. How nice to have a seven-month-old baby and how quickly it'll pass. He'll be eight months before I know it. How wonderful it is when he leans his full weight against me, already almost asleep, as I lift him and carry him to his bed. How nice to feel his heavy chin balanced against my shoulder, just before I lay him in his crib. How extraordinary all of it is, really."

As I said, various random thoughts, nothing very profound. But as I sat there in the dark, listening to him, I felt completely still and quiet. It felt something like happiness.

Carbon Footprints

It's horrible to think that my baby's carbon footprint is about 35 times greater than that of a baby in, say, Nepal, or Bolivia--i.e., in most of the developing world. It's horrible to think that my own footprint is even worse than my baby's, and that I'm doing little or nothing at the moment to make things better. My house is not very conveniently situated, let's say, and so I'm driving somewhere with the baby almost every day.

It's foolish--because in thirty years, almost no one will be living like this. Almost no one but the extremely rich will be able to do so. And the answer is not hybrid cars. We're idiots if we think hybrid cars or even electric cars will solve the problem (unless the electricity is generated almost exclusively by renewables--solar, wind, and so forth--and that's nowhere on the horizon right now).

The main problem is, not enough people are making the choice to live more simply--to buy houses that are within walking or biking distance from shops, libraries, parks, and schools; to travel less; to eat lower down on the food chain, and buy food at farmer's markets; to stop buying so much unnecessary crap in general. And we need to develop communities designed for this kind of simple living. Most people realize this; and some people are even making these kinds of changes in their lives.

I see my own family making these changes, but it might take us five years, not the next one or two--for various reasons which I won't discuss here. However--in five years, I hope to be setting a much better example for the little guy. And there are plenty of changes I could make tomorrow, if I wanted to badly enough.

Well. It's time to stop talking about it and do something. I hate to think of the kind of world my son could inherit when he reaches adulthood.

Learning and "Toys"

Like all children, my son often prefers the "toys" that are not available in any toy store. Today the toy that he played with for over fifteen minutes during dinner was the take-out menu from our favorite Chinese restaurant. He came up with about twenty different things to do with it--slap it against the table, fold it, scrunch it up, slap his hand against it, wave it in the air, drop it on the floor, watch Mommy and Daddy pick it up, observe the English and Chinese written on it, and so on. His face is a study in concentration when he plays with these simple objects. He seems determined to unravel some untold mystery at the heart of each new thing he plays with.

Learning is not just about pleasure for him, then. Learning is also about intense desire.

The Pleasures of Learning; the Learning of Pleasure

Raising a baby reminds me of the degree to which language learning--learning of all kinds, perhaps--is based on pleasure. Once again this evening, the little guy laughed when I said, while he was nursing, "Your mommy and daddy love you very much." I'm sure he didn't understand the words, but he understood the tone of voice I was using. And he was completely bored with a toy I showed him yesterday--four cloth birds sitting in a cloth birdhouse--but when I made peeping noises and had them marching through the door into the house, then lifted the top of the house and they all came tumbling out, it was better than any action-adventure film for him. And whenever I read to him, and come to his favorite pictures, his eyes light up every single time--and this is what amazes me--he has different smiles or laughs for each of the pictures that he prefers. For pictures of tigers it's a look of intense pleasure. For the "Red" character in Hop on Pop, it's as if he's rediscovering an old friend. For the monkey in a pop-up book, it's a slight but intense giggle. He reacts differently for the different pictures, but in almost the same way each time one of his favorite pictures appears.

Just seeing his eyes light up once while I'm reading him a book or talking to him or playing a game with him, reminds me of the rich pleasures life offers those who are truly open to it. It's just my damn good fortune that it often happens several times a day.

Thursday Morning 9 am

Cold, grey morning, fog off the coast. Low inspiration for anything, including this blog. But I continue to believe something will be gained if I write every day...what, exactly? Perhaps, a transcendence of the heaviness of spirit that comes with being too focused on the practicalities of motherhood.

When one is feeling low inspiration, the best thing to write about (to shake things up a little) is what one finds terrifying.

I'm still terrified by the possibility that I won't "make the grade" as a mother; on my worst days I even imagine that someone will step forward and identify me as a sham, a charlatan, a "fake mom."

I look at my son--this evolving little person--with such a spirit for life, love, happiness, fun, and exploration, already shining out from him--I watch him in his crib, his face pressed against an old velour top of mine, sleeping, so tiny, so completely fragile and alone--and know that I'm looking at something more than I ever imagined possible in my life, something totally inexpressible in its beauty.

And seeing all that--I see the whole history of my time on this planet in stark relief, for the mess that it really is; and wonder, how on earth did I ever think I was qualified for this job?

And at 9 am on Thursday morning, I don't have any answer for this question.

What's in a Name

I find it difficult to call my child by his name. I like his name--very much--but somehow, it doesn't roll off the tongue. I end up calling him "Baby" or "Baby-Cake" or "Sweetie-pie" or "Sweetpea" most of the time, or even "Mister" or "Mister Baby." He's getting to an age where he really listens, and observes, and notices things. This has happened maybe in the last couple of weeks--the quality of his attention has shifted, if not the quantity--and I've guiltily made more of an effort to use his actual name, so that by the time he's talking, he isn't telling people "My name is Baby Cake."

The name I wanted to call a son (when I was having those miscarriages, mentioned in an earlier post) ended up becoming the middle name of our child--and I'm not sorry it worked out that way. As I said, I like his actual first name. And in a sense (though this may sound morbid) the middle name is in memory of those three babies who came before him. Both names are part of his story.

That's really what a name is, I suppose--a story.

Work

One of the frustrations about being a new mother, with a young child, is the constant, nagging feeling that nothing ever gets done. It's psychological--in reality we're probably twice as efficient with our use of time than we were before the baby was born. But the sense is that we're constantly dropping whatever we're doing to tend to a crying baby, or a hungry baby, or a baby that just spat up all over the carpet; so simple tasks, like cleaning a bathroom or paying a bill, just don't get done very quickly.

There's also the feeling--I have it, and I suppose many other mothers do as well--that caring for a baby cannot be considered a "real job." Our society imposes that feeling on us, I guess--by suggesting that a woman is not "fulfilled" unless she's caring for a child and working.

Those two feelings add up to one big sense of failure, for many new mothers...and I'm certainly not immune to what I'm describing. Just because I can diagnose the problem doesn't mean that I have it licked.

And it won't matter that much, I know, if I succeed at holding down two part-time jobs while caring for the little guy. I will still feel as if I'm not a legitimate person in society--or some part of me will feel that way.

But these feelings of guilt and shame and failure that society imposes on us are so far from the real point of our lives that they're not even worth considering.

What I do realize, on my better days, is that no job in the world is more important than raising a healthy, happy little person who has learned how to integrate himself successfully into the society around him, and knows how to achieve a sense of personal fulfillment along the way. (I can't make my son into a success, but I need to help him find the tools to get there.)

On my best days, I realize that I myself am still, on many levels, striving for these same goals...I'm reasonably healthy and happy but could be doing better in those areas, and I'm not sure how successfully integrated and personally fulfilled I am. The real work I see ahead, then, has to do with achieving all that--for my son and, equally, for myself.

Having Time

Mothers often gripe about how little time they have. But every situation is so different--some mothers are paired with terrific, helpful partners; some mothers have full-time nannies; some mothers have no help at all, and cannot afford to purchase any--some mothers are single and working full-time--that it seems impossible to have a tension-free conversation with another mother about how much or little time we actually have.

"When are you planning to return to work?" I've been asked, by more than one new mother. The question itself is so loaded, even when said out of something like innocent curiosity, that I find it difficult to answer. But I do answer, most of the time. I'm unemployed and will remain that way at least for another year. I'm lucky enough to have that option of not looking for a job.

The fact is, however, that I'm also looking to do some sort of part-time work while I'm homebound (and have already started one very small part-time job, with minimal hours).

But maybe becoming a mother has made me think differently about "work" in general, as well as "time." More on that tomorrow--as right now, my eyelids are drooping, the whole house is quiet, and I need to get to bed more than I need to think about time.

Motherhood in Fragments

Blogging is popular these days, it seems to me, precisely because of our sense that reality has become more and more fragmented and distorted. Blogs seem to cut to the chase--so immediate! So unmediated! At least in appearance...and blogs tell us that, yes, we can learn about life by picking up one shard of a fragment after another.

I also like the immediacy and fragmentariness of blogging--perhaps because motherhood itself is so much about not being fragmentary--about remembering where I put the keys and the cell phone because the baby is in the carseat already and I have to go now, remembering whether the baby Tylenol is in the baby's room or in the kitchen, remembering how to do a thousand little things to keep a child well-fed, well-rested, well-exercised, clean, dry on his bottom, and (ultimate hat trick!) happy...motherhood is about being solid, above all else--

And blogging feels like the reverse. But maybe it's not true. Maybe one learns to be a mother in fragments. I do feel sometimes like I'm dancing in place--learning one new skill today, only to find that some mysterious new event has taken place with my child that will force me to learn another new skill tomorrow. And since we never really master motherhood--maybe all we have are these fragments of knowledge, and just like blogs, we hope that they will someday form something like a complete story.

Perhaps my dream the other night had something to do with my feeling of ignorance where motherhood is concerned...a Japanese woman I'd just met was angry with me because she had not received guidebooks and maps when she had disembarked from the airplane at San Francisco Airport. "At every other airport I've been to," she told me, "I receive these things. Why weren't they available this time?" I felt horribly guilty. Why she should be especially upset with me is besides the point--somehow, in the dream, this woman was my responsibility. In the dream, then, I was both myself and this woman--the lost woman looking for a guidebook, and the woman who feels that somehow, she should have had a guidebook ready for the other woman, even though in reality, no one ever receives such things at the airport terminal--nor when one takes off into the frightening and not-too-friendly skies of motherhood.

New Novels, New Metaphors

I used two metaphors to describe the effects of new novels, in my recent posts--"another layer of chatter in an echo chamber" and "another mirror in a hall of mirrors." I'm not sure either of those really get at what I'm trying to say. I suppose I'm trying to say that the mimetic function that novels have always fulfilled--even in our postmodern era--seems, to many of us, more and more irrelevant or unnecessary. But maybe what's irritating to me is that most contemporary novelists still pretend to speak in some sort of omnipotent voice, instead of acknowledging, at least in some indirect way, that their role in society is now miniscule--and the "reality" they reflect is less than a shard of a fragment of anyone's actual reality.

So what does this have to do with being a new older mother?

Perhaps I also need to watch out about making any grand statements about motherhood. More on this tomorrow, I suppose.

Baby Gadgets, Baby Laughter

Feeling a bit oppressed today by the plethora of devices to keep baby entertained--exersaucers, jumperoos, activity centers, even the garden-variety swings. Almost all of them are too big, too plasticky and are used only a few months by the baby, or even less time than that. Nevertheless, I did buy a low-tech swing for him back when he was much younger (he's long since outgrown it) and I just purchased, online, a very simple doorway jumper for him. I think that will be my limit in terms of the jumping/activity gadgets I buy for him.

Today I spent a minute or two bouncing him up and down on a large pillow--big delighted laughs from him. Not too surprising, of course; but last night at an exhausted moment after dinner, and partly in continuation of something I'd been saying to my husband, I leaned into the baby's playpen and said, in a cheerful voice, "The things we do for you!" while shaking a musical toy of his. To my surprise, the baby laughed. I kept it up, shaking the toy and smiling and repeating, "The things we do for you!" in a rhythmic chant. The baby laughed each time I did it. Then this evening--he laughed like a maniac when I was saying something equally uninteresting and grumpy-sounding. My husband and I shake our heads at each other when these outbursts of merriment arrive; I think we're both realizing that our baby has a perfect understanding of the meaning of life, something mystics and gurus spend years trying to figure out.

Stories, Part 2

What most novelists write nowadays feels more like shtick to me than storytelling. In other words--in contemporary fiction, the voice of the novelist always feels so intrusive, so writer's-workshopped-to-death, so unnecessary to the story. Writers can't seem to get out of the way of their own writing these days.

Of course some literary theorists might point to "the Death of the Author" to explain all this, or the Death of Capitalism, or the Last Tortured Movements of Capitalism or something along those lines. I'm just wondering why I get no pleasure from novels these days (which I keep reading nonetheless--in search of a good story I suppose, and great characters) and I don't think it's because of the Death of the Author. But I do think the author, of novels at least, is becoming more and more irrelevant.