ChatGPT Named This Piece: Mommy, Are You Scary? (Then I rewrote it.)

On the quotidian, Sharon Olds & being great, whiskey, moons, and (many, many) verandas.

I am only interested in illness memoirs, my good friend writes me via text as someone who is suffering from illness. I am only interested in motherhood and the quotidian, I intend to write back, but forget as someone who was once sick but is no longer and is also a mother and is also someone buried by the actual quotidian.  

I insist on these words—Motherhood, Quotidian—that is, until, I read an old classmate’s Facebook post about the super moon and how big and white and whole it is. I am confused I realize. Yes, I have been going around conflating quotidian with simplicity, or is it routine-ness with everydayness, or is it everydayness with the world’s inescapable din. 

In my own bookmarked posts, I find there are new images—collected like leaves in a drain. 

Sarah Michelle Gellar and Freddie Prinze Jr. eating fro-yo in the 90s. 

A run-down cinema in Saint Martine-de-Re, “Wes Anderson” in palette, angle, feel. 

A mall kiosk, Cillian Murphy for Versace. 

In my feed, a poem appears. It’s a Sharon Olds’ poem for Sharon Olds on her birthday, and the post, poem a small slit of light between news of cabinet appointees. I home in on its middle:

The mist moves, over the bushes
bright with poison ivy and black
berries like stones. I am tired of the children,
I am tired of the laundry, I want to be great.
The fog pours across the underbrush in silence.

I think me. I think too. I think I am tired, I am tired, I am tired. I am. And, also, I want to be great. And, also, I selfishly want the line "bright with poison ivy and black" to end there. That is, I want the world to be bright with black, not have berries as stones.

Then I think: can Olds write more about the laundry? 

When I get an email asking me to complete a Q&A for new contributor role I’ve taken on, I take no time to answer the question, What's your copy ick?

I write–without thought: Everyday Enhanced. Everyday Elevated. Everyday Essentials. 

Everyday Everywhere Everything.

A few days ago, I jotted down ideas of opinion pieces I could possibly write for a workshop—pieces tied to motherhood, which is now the topic du jour, my projet du mois: really anything and everything I’ve written the whole year. I’ve spent every moment I am not naming products or iterating on taglines or rocking my baby to sleep under the wooly blanket of white noise or singing “London Bridge Is Falling Down”–while thinking the recent elimination of the word ‘fair lady’ is right, good, documenting It. It being maternal rage and maternal ambivalence, postpartum depression and postpartum anxiety, care work and labor, and who is a mother and who does the mothering and who loses self and who loses time, and time, before it is lost.  It being time before it is lost, which is also my child—Aoife siphoning seconds, minutes as she grows. This, her, I document this with abandon: her imp-like smile and how her legs and toes curl up pretzel-like to avoid being placed in the grass and how energy runs through her body so wildly when she sees a dog—her gritting her teeth, squeezing her hands open and shut like eyes, shaking full body—and the way Miss Rachel warms her little heart-shaped face, and how—when dressed in her Enchanted Garden Twirl Dress—she crawls like Samara in The Ring down the hall. Hair limp, arms outstretched.

Fro-yo in a cardboard cup.

The crumbling face of a wall.

Several years ago, I sat on a lone stool at Brass Tacks—a bar with craft beer in Hayes Valley, hefeweizen in hand and a hard cover copy of Murakami's Killing Commendatore opened before me. For hundreds of pages prior to this sitting, I waded through the humdrum life of the protagonist—an artist who, following the collapse of his marriage, lives on a secluded mountains across from a Gatsby-like man of considerable wealth.

Throughout those pages, the protagonist lives each day as the day before—going to and from a small teaching gig, painting, sitting with his neighbor, sitting on his veranda. Then, suddenly, there in the bar, I came to it: the famed turn and magical shadow world so typical of Murakami. In the book, a bell that had rung faintly in the night and over many, many pages and through many, many nights, pulls the protagonist toward a mysterious stone pit—and into another dimension. At last, I remember thinking then.

Finallyyyyy—the world ghosted, double exposed.

Now when I think of that book I don’t really remember the digging of the pit or the alternative dimension found or the surreal ending, but the protagonist’s quiet, repetitive days. How he sat on the veranda with a cup of coffee and watched clouds shift over the mountains. How he sat (again) on the veranda observing the forest, endless and indifferent. How he sat (once more) on the veranda, staring at the trees’ and their twisting branches. How he sat and sat and sat and sat: tea and toast in hand, breathing in the mountain air. 

Backlit shopping center.

Kiosk in the mall.

I was recently told that my writing of/on/into motherhood and the way I am writing is reminiscent of A Pillow Book, and so on my desk sits A Pillow Book. Not to be confused with Sei Shonagon’s The Pillow Book, Suzanne Buffan’s revision has black covered and the moon in its many silvered, slivered phases, its back reading: Not a memoir. Not an epic. Not an essay. Not a spell. Not a shopping list. Not a nocturne. Not a dream book. Not a prayer,. Not a novel. Not an apology. Not a dossier. Not a complaint. Not a manifest. Not a manifesto. Not a field report. Not a promissory note. Not a recipe. Not a resume. Not a confession. Not a lullaby. Not a secret letter sent through the silent palace hallways before dawn.

I remember when I first read the back cover thinking if one crosses off enough of what one doesn’t stand for, might one finally see for what they do? 

I also remember thinking, Honorable. What I meant was that one might keep a piece of paper or book below one’s pillow to write—as Suzanne might have, especially with a young child so near.

This book now sits unopened on my desk, because I read the first twenty pages, and then I stopped. I was unclear of the arc and if it was meant to be this affected. Concerned by my own intellect—that is, it was failing or had never existed at all, I visited the book’s Amazon page. There, I saw and read one one-star review: "[A Pillow Book] was assigned this book as part of a creative writing workshop, and my instructor said that this was some kind of "literary triumph," but it's just a steaming pile of self-indulgence and narcism. It's basically some shiny historical facts about pillows interspersed with lots and lots of lists." A patrician lyric, or a vainglory cantata. Later, as I flipped back through, I learned the speaker who I assume is also Suzanne employs a woman named Estella who plumps her pillows and also a nanny, who she refers to an “uncanonized Puerto Rican saint” and who also accepts Suzanne's gifts with “icy reserve.” Suzanne pressing on the page, rhetorically: Did you like the glass teapot? The framed poster of the blue morpho-butterfly? Are you fond of the throw pillows with matching afghan and slippers? 

Pulling up my latest text, I begin to see the reader’s point. Unlike a list of beautiful gifts, mine is a grocery list for an overdue Walmart run, and the only writing I’d written in four days: orange-and-banana pouches (organic!), Vaseline, paper towels, Aoife cheetos (a few cans!), cheese tortellini (big bag), 2 bags of carrots, 1 bag of celery, bag of spinach, frozen broccoli, diapers, Veri Veri Teriyaki. 

Plastic spoon.

Fro-yo.

Smalling cardboard cup. 

When it came to the symbolism of Killing Commendatore’s bell, some critic, some person of note–maybe even Murakami himself–said the digging was just digging until it wasn't just digging. The simple act: something transformed. 

But, I can’t help but think: what if it is all just the digging? What if it is all just the veranda and the whiskey—amber and hued. The cold white moon.

Alone in the evening and unsure what my opinion is for my soon-due opinion piece and how opinion is different from belief and belief from conviction and conviction from indoctrination and what the difference is between first thoughts and learned traits, affinity, bias, instinct, reflex, I ask ChatGPT to give me titles for a prospective piece on the quotidian. The results vary: The Quiet Power of the Ordinary, Why Small Moments Matter, Writing the Everyday: A Radical Act, Where Life Happens, The Quiet Life, Magic in the Monotony.

When the answer is returned, I hear Aoife’s tiny feet down the hall, the tinkle of Christmas bells in her hand, her father chasing her. Listening to her shake, jingle, laugh, I ask ChatGPT for different titles, titles for a piece on the child's gaze. The results: Mommy, Are You Scary?, The Fear of the Familiar, When Mom is Both Shelter and Storm, Mirrors of Authority, The Myth and the Mortal, When Love Feels Big. 

The final response: Terror and Tenderness. 

Lydia Davis once said in an interview: "The trouble starts—as has happened occasionally—when a story goes off in two directions, each equally valid." 

During an hour I should be writing but am not, I take Aoife to the local humane society PAWS with my family. Before the adoptable dogs parade before us, the librarian-turned-teacher-and-songstress teaches the gathered children to sign and sing. They tap their tiny crab-like fingers together for "more" then circle their balled-up hands like churning butter for "together.” They tap and circle, wave in joy, and link index fingers (“friends”). Though she loves the songs, Aoife quickly tires and crawls across the carpet only to learn the carpet is not a carpet but a brightly colored foam play mat and that the play mat is also really a puzzle and the puzzle is made up of minute pieces. She thumbs the foam then picks up a rubbery purple zero, the zero's innards. She holds the purple O and lime green middle in her hands up to the sky—the pieces a tiny offering.

When the song ends, the singer hands a small boy a gun and the small boy fires thousands of bubbles into the air. The littlest children—Aoife included—stare upward in awe. At first, they test their walking ability in chasing the ether, their pincer grasps on the floating glycerin, but, uncoordinated, give up early—arms still outstretched, eyes still transfixed by the bubbles falling around them. And, yet, the boy keeps shooting the gun up, up, up. As he does, I snap photos of Aoife in rapid succession. Aoife as worshiper. Aoife as supplicant. Aoife as a little Nixon. Aoife with her underbite. Aoife sprawled on the floor. Aoife as chubby mermaid, her legs stacked like a two-legged tail. 

Just the patio and the whiskey and the veranda.

Just a kiosk in the mall.

On our way home, I send several shots of Aoife—her hungrily eying the bubbles—to my friend who has yet to meet Aoife. She replies: Simple joy! Then, doubles down soon after: Magic! Then, it appears: the world's most popular, most used emoji. A cluster of three yellow four-pointed stars. The great shine of mundanity.