Sweet Pea, It is strange to write you when you can't read.
The first of five mothers' letters: a project.
Today marks eight months of Aoife. Like most moms, I had planned to take to social to share her milestones: crawl-hobbling with one leg straight and one leg bent, pulling herself up onto footrests and the lowest rung of bookshelves, heaving her weight forward using a drawer knob as a climbing hold, her legs bracing. I had planned to post her happy dance and the eyelashes that rim her gray-green eyes, her one-two-three jumping into the pool and her smiling through a smear of blueberries and her holding a gifted a-dough-able sticker in her sticky hands. And, I probably still will—oxytocin: an all-powerful and all-mysterious thing.
But I also wanted to make space for something else—specifically, a series of letters that started as interviews a few months ago.
In the last eight months, there has been so much love in me, it feels like wall-to-wall squeezability, impossible to contain. But there is also exhaustion. I continue to tirelessly write when I can—with help from Travis and my parents and soon in-home care, blindly following Corita Kent’s rule that says if you work tirelessly enough, your tireless work will lead to something. It is an unfounded belief that the person who commits to all of the work all of the time will eventually catch onto things, and people onto their things, and if I’m being honest “onto what" I'm catching I'm not entirely sure.
I am also working, or having anxiety about the work I should be doing when I'm not working, loitering my inbox with a till in the shape of hope, seed packets shaking with need, and one huge rake of regret. At these times, I feel badly I'm not with my baby or feeling badly I don't feel bad about not being with my baby and hoping from this feeling bad: something better might grow like a beanstalk toward the sky.
Like many new moms, I also have this feeling of having so many edges and slipping from all of them.
Anne Carson writes that last among God's list of liquids—alcohol, blood, gratitude, memory, semen, song, tears—is time.
For me, time is not just flowing under my being like a thick river but thinning itself into vapor, ether, air—motherhood: the fastest sieve. Everything about it—my baby’s dimpled smiles, tiny crooked teeth, and little bulldog cheeks, time spent writing about those cheeks and cleaning bottles and changing diapers—seems to barely last long enough to even touch the meshed fingers of a figurative net. The only thing holding shape, form: my Mother smile that’s been beaten into a metal prong, smiling through real happiness and also forced happiness—the smiling intent on making every moment a moment and every moment magic and in doing so losing them all.
This feeling—a feeling of slipping into and out of skins and time and never fully embodying a moment—that I still feel as strongly today as I did a month ago also reminded me of a small interview project I undertook this March, a project undertaken in a workshop on all things zines and zine-making with Shabby Doll House.
When I found out we were going to be tackling interviews as a form in the workshop, I thought back to what had engrossed me about the features in Vogue and Elle I had read as a teen.
For one, they were interviews that didn't read as interviews but conversations. For another, we were shown, not just told: what the celebrity wore—acrylic heels, fitted cream blazer, barrel leg jeans—and also how she held her fork and how she dabbed the corner of her upturned or downturned mouth and the way she rolled, halved, slid her napkin across a table. As readers, we were left gleaning insights about beauty, essence, aria from what she ordered: a chopped salad showered in pepitas, loose leaf tea, a burger medium-rare, fully loaded fries. And we bore witness to how she ordered, as if there was some final truth hidden in the words she used and how she spoke to the waitstaff, her fidgeting and gestures and particular lilt. I liked how these moments, though deeply studied, felt somehow unplanned—or at least not overly practiced.
Ironically, at the start of my own interview project, I felt anything but glamorous, effortless—beautiful.
My baby and I were connected by an invisible tether and intrusive thoughts filled my head and I could fit into two milk-stained v-neck shirts and I had to get back to work to pay for the tethered baby and the psychiatrist for the thoughts and all my milk-stained shirts. I also knew other mothers were going through the same quietly, silently, and wondered how I might write to the experience in a way that was what it was: without polish, devoid of posturing. I wanted to show the lip-stained and food-soaked napkin, the purse rummaging and mouth dabbing and eye squinting, and also what was ordered and when, and how rare.
And, how that rareness might bleed.
The resulting project became my attempt at invoking a kind of realness. The operative phrase being a kind of, for what can really ever be real.
The long of it, put plainly:
I emailed five questions for five days to a set of mother friends (including myself), asking them to respond separately, anonymously—using just five minutes of their day to write not to me but to their babies. The hope was that this would loosen the pretense, rattle the decorum—let the shine we put on as new moms for others rub off, for just a little.
The responses—including my own—were then merged into five letters that I hoped did the individual and collective experience justice. The result: a blending—blurring—of voices.
Inspiration was taken from Bhanu Kapil's The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers, but the ambition of this project (written in a week) was tinier—a thimble of song compared to the scape of Kapil's spare beauty and lyrical richness, earthy and visceral.
The goal: to share a shared—yet infinitely nuanced—experience. To bring together and create a body of new moms' voices, however disembodied those voices were, are, feel, felt, remain…
And, so, this is the first of five letters.
The other four are to follow over the next few days.
I hope they connect with you, wherever you are in mothering which is also sieve which is also time which is also liquid and liquid air and happening all at once.
Lastly, immense gratitude to my mom friends, who all also go by Mama and who all graciously shared so much of themselves and then okayed this sharing.
Letter 1 of 5
Bubba, Ells Bels, Boo Boo, Samoo Bear, Sweet Pea,
I'm wondering how this day is so long, and also how I wish these weekends were longer.
Today was a short while ago, and a bit later than usual.
Today, I put you down to sleep in your crib, wondering if it was enough.
It is strange to write to you when you can't read.
It is strange this is the first time I've ever tried.
You my dear are with grandma and grandpa as I write this.
As I write this, I have a video about sourdough starters playing in the background, and you are asleep.
It is a Monday in March, and I'm at your bedside in the PICU.
It is the first day of Ramadan, and I am regretting fasting.
We just sprang forward in time, and I have lost time, and you are not here.
It is nine months since you arrived, and I am working and
it makes me sad.
This having to have to work, having to work to live.
I dread it.
And, working for the government.
And, working for a government that doesn’t care.
And, clothes.
The trying to find clothes and trying on clothes and especially clothes that fit.
I am wearing the same black, t-shirt, dress I wore yesterday, am having trouble moving past.
But, you.
You have me and have me being and being careful, eating fearfully.
Candied pecans and moist banana bread from the overpriced organic bananas, a slice of “summer” pizza on a saucer.
My sweatpants too big for my current shape.
Whatever “summer” means.
Miss Sweets,
Sweetie,
Sweet Thing,
My Son,
I wish I could be upstairs with you.
Playing and laughing, singing, dancing.
Instead, I am at the hospital
in the basement
at my computer
walking around the empty house aimlessly on a call.
To be present is hard, and I am working hard at it, and also working, and also tired, and tiring, and
I love you.
I love how much I love you and I love how much you love.
I love how you love bread and how it brings memories of when I was a little girl watching my mom, your masani.
The kitchen, baking, cooking, Sunday.
There is nothing brighter.
The sun high in the sky.
You: breathing evenly,
You breathing, evenly.. .
Little Sweet Baby,
Stinky Minky,
Bum Bum,
Goosie,
I love you.
Where are you.
Get well soon.