Keeping Time

One day after Trump was inaugurated I joined millions of women around the world in the streets. I brought a hand painted sign which said You’re Fired and somehow managed to drag my body there. I was three months postpartum, recovering from major abdominal surgery and had my premature infant son with me. What was overwhelming that day was not the crowd, or the noise - but how refreshing it felt to be around the fresh anger of other women. I had some of my own to share. 

My husband had recently gone back to work full time after a month of being in the trenches with me. The moment he stepped out the door felt like that scene in BeetleJuice when the kids step out of the attic and into the desert. A claymation monster writhing ominously in the distance, the alien light and textures of the new world unclear. The door closed and disappeared. I was on my own. Not exactly a Tim Burton hellscape, because we had our moments of nesting beauty and poetry and softness. But honestly at  times with the amount of shit and tears and shades of purple my son would turn, my own body morphed and tits akimbo, it felt not too far off. 

It’s an isolation that occurs in the stretches of elastic time when you have six, eight, ten, twelve hours alone with a baby.   Putting out little fires of crisis, responding to internal fires of need; hunger, sadness, pain, dirtiness. I was hard at work all day making milk for him and feeding it to him. Bending over and arching my back, twisting my wrists and ankles and neck in impossible contortions, reaching for things, holding him, catching him, chasing him. Wiping things up, getting lost looking for lost things on the floor, tired beyond coffee, beyond sleep. Angry that this work is not seen on my tax forms, that no one is asking for proof, that one is checking in. What do I have to show for making a home?

Seeing all the people in the streets at that march made something click, because I felt that I had so much to say to them about my new body and mind. Seeing a pregnant woman I felt a lump in my throat form. You are doing wonderful and difficult work and it will be so so hard for you. I am sorry that the world won’t be there to see you or help you. The artist in me began to feel the tug of responsibility to make that experience visible. To say if not with words, with actions what that pregnant women should realistically expect. Motherhood clearly has an image problem, and it felt like my job to fix it. Unlike inspiration, which has always implied joyfulness and freedom of some kind, this felt more like the work I was called to do.  Otherwise I feared being complicit in my own erasure and in the erasure of the millions of new parents and mothers who were grappling in their own possible hellscapes, who were also looking for a door to open out of it.

My door out of it came in the form of a blank sheet of paper, when it’s just me and paper ravenous for each other.  The page became like food. Or I was food. I was waiting to be swallowed up, and the paint on the tip of the brush was the tongue and both the paper and me are tasting each other.  It feels selfish and the laundry is not going to do itself but I hear a voice saying close the door, let the house fall apart, keep your mind free, you have created this universe and it is yours, yours to let fall into disarray, yours to lose control of. It’s your time to lose.

In new parenthood life became these five minute stretches. Five minutes to eat, to shower, to poop, call someone, check email, walk the dog. Can you imagine the delight of using a whole five minutes to cover a blank page with something useless and free and all my own? The paintings felt like fire, like an indulgence I was crouching towards.  As soon as my baby was nestled into my chest in the carrier, or in his own little bed, I would lick my lips and get the supplies together,  humming with my mouth, humming all over.

I didn’t have time to be creative in the way I recognized, but I thought of a simple way to capture my new reality. For every hour I spent with my son, I would paint what he was doing with a different symbol. Each day would have 24 lines, it would being blank and end full. I would create a key so that you can read what the paintings were saying about the day.  I started to play with the symbols, what if each stroke represented five minutes I spent nursing, and a circle for soothing him as he cried, a triangle for changing a diaper?

I chose to paint with the type of red I imagine my insides to be, the parts that fabricate life, the kind I first saw as girl of eleven in my underwear, the carnage of decades of menstruation, muted for nine months and concluding in an explosion of life and blood. The brush strokes are part word, and part glyph, they are also wanting to be numbers, to help me count. To see the time pass. To capture the  second day of motherhood the two hundred and eleventh, each one unique and its own, each one there and then gone forever, the red painted sticks on the sheet just a skeleton of all the love and anger and change I feel everyday. If they look manic, frenetic, desperate, clawing at meaning, it’s because they are.  Painting what he was doing everyday was in itself a way of expressing my own new reality: my life was his life and his life was my life. 

 I felt like I had cast a magic spell on the domestic monotony and found a way to turn it into math, into art, into something ANYTHING that wasn’t just the nothingness that I felt at the end of the day.  When I paint words they are the mantras that often come to me in moments of helplessness and confusion, buckling under the contradicting messages of what I should or should not be doing. Eat when he sleeps, sleep when he sleeps, cry when he sleeps, paint when he sleeps, think when he sleeps. I paint it, I print it out as a poster, I cover a wall with hundred of them. I think of a pregnant mother standing in front of it, her hand hanging over her stomach, and maybe her seeing me in those words,  trying to scream this hint at her of what is to come. 

Black Friday

It is 6:39 pm on “black” friday. I just woke up from a sweaty post partum nightmare which was too graphic and horrible to explain but  somehow ended in something like an orgasm and shooting back pain?

Most of my sleep since I gave birth has come in these 90 minute hot flash naps, and I savor each one even though I feel like I have been tossed around a hot slimy machine and have to crawl back into consciousness each time I wake up with an even more bruised body, each body different from the one I closed my eyes to. 

Now my hips are slightly curled up away from the bed, the pain lighting bolts shoot up my spine if I lie down flat or sit. 

A few naps ago  I woke up coughing and emptied my entire bladder into the  lavender adult diapers I was wearing.

I haven't been able to show my baby my face yet, because I have been wearing a baby blue or or baby pink mask to shield him from the cold that I brought home from the hospital with him.

Usually, I’d start the story with the part about him being born, but I’m starting with this very real and concrete moment a few days later because it is the part of parenthood we hide and which disappears behind the  photos and the birth announcement. It is the part that leaves parents trembling and asking the moon and their hands and any higher powers they have access to; how am I going to do this? Who is going to take care of us? How does anyone do this? 

We have built a new person and we did it in the midst of a dramatic meltdown of emotional, physical and psychological stability and control. In the chaos, moments of serenity emerge;

The first time my two sons and husband are all in the living room together, laughing and eating and acknowledging the changed arithmetic in us being four, happened today.

Or the euphoric calm of the moment after birth when I saw his dark hair emerge from a crevice at the very center of my  being, out of a waterfall of pain and light - the nurse saying, look in the mirror, your baby is almost here! I looked at that little bit of dark hair on the pale skull, maybe only the size of a sand dollar at that point, surrounded with what looked to me like a folded up kaleidoscope of blue gloves bright lights, blood and tools, all spiraling from between my legs in every direction.  I focused on that sand dollar, the color of the hair like the grey stones I was just looking at that very morning in a photo my son brought me  of him and his dad on the beach in Oregon. A little lighter than slate, Not yet silver. I looked at the color and pushed out of curiosity and an urgent need to see the rest of the head, and when he slipped out with the blood and pearly white coating of my insides, and the flurry of moments and sounds shuttled him into my arms, and little eyes opened to the world, they too were that beach rock grey and Zoe James was born.

The Labor of Erasure

I am cleaning the kitchen again. We’ve only lived in this house for a few months, and I feel like I have already cleaned this kitchen hundreds of times.  I’m not meticulous, I’m just doing it because I live here with another grown up, a toddler and a big dog.  Sometimes, I clean when I am procrastinating a painting or deadline. Other times, I’m painting or writing because I’m putting off cleaning. The cleaning and the art blur. 

These words I’m typing now are with fingers smelling strongly of the Clorax wipes I just used to clean the grime off the cabinet doors. I traced those doors, removing evidence of time and touch from them. It’s satisfying. It’s also shocking I never noticed how dirty they were. But mostly, it’s fucking boring.  So here I am, telling you about it is after cleaning three of those twenty cabinets.

Often when I am doing a thing but also writing a thing in my head, I try to fast forward and imagine you, a reader, maybe sitting on the other side of a magazine.  I don’t quite understand the social jiu jitsu required to get to you yet, but I also fear that if you are a man, you may have not made it this far anyway. I can see the words on the cutting room floor before they’ve even left my brain. So, on the kitchen floor I guess. How many billions of brilliant words have died on kitchen floors? How many women have great writing that they can’t write down, or do and self-doubt keeps it hidden.  I suspect a male reader would move on. There have been a lot of words about cleaning on this page so far. A lot of hints that this may be about women or mothering.Your is hand making its way to the corner of the page, hovering before turning it.  I imagine you flipping past this one, because cleaning doesn’t really interest you does it?  

What I’m trying to say is it doesn’t interest me either. But I’m here to make sure my kid grows up in a somewhat safe space and to help out my husband since he works really hard and pays for everything and also I love him but he is just not on top of all the cleaning all the time. So it is part of what I do, but also what is quietly expected of me in the very unpaid and unspoken housework category of life. I can’t help but seeing you as a man, and thinking about the woman or partner who ironed your pants or wiped down your microwave last. Maybe if you are a man, and you are still reading, it’s because it was you who last wiped down the microwave in your home. Maybe you were the one to dust off the welcome mat, and to fold the laundry and put it away. If so, can I just say, thank you. 

I don’t blame the reader who isn’t with us anymore for not being interested in my treatise on how the invisible labor of women has possibly paved the way for them to be carefree. Until now I wasn’t interested in the story of how a tidy and cunning woman paved the way for me, until I had my own house, had my own new reality come crashing down on me one counter wipe at a time. 

Now I’m on the kitchen floor, scrubbing the goopy gray splotches of dust and peach juice and dog hair off the tiles under the high chair. It’s actually really beautiful down here, between the stools.  Their legs remind me of the columns in huge gothic cathedrals, the light dappling them through stained glass, maybe in Tarragona or maybe in Reims. It’s late afternoon, and I hear a train. I’m having a romantic moment here on the ground. 

My fear is that  the written word can’t work well enough here. Like, I want you just here with me on the kitchen floor and just kind of talk you through it. But if you saw a video of a woman cleaning would you stay to hear what she thought? Would I? 

When your mother told you “You’ll see what it’s like one day, you’ll see.”  Did you also answer with certainty at least in your mind that you absolutely will not because “Mom, I HATE YOU. “

Cleaning work and care work is boring to even think about but I’d like for us to all go over the details together. I pay women to clean my house sometimes, to take care of my baby often. It’s because it is tiring work to watch a child, to keep it alive and fed and clean and dry and happy and rested but also exercised. Sometimes it feels like too much but really, I know that for me, it’s not enough.

But the words don’t make it off the kitchen floor and into your head without someone helping me watch him, someone else helping me clean. These are the invisible hands I wonder about now whenever I read an essay or a poem now. What actions were taken off your plate, so that you could speak to me? 

Where they taken of that plate by a woman’s hands? If you are a white woman, were those hands brown? Were they young or old? Were they well paid and well fed? Well rested and safe? Would you know either way?

Beach

A Beach

I imagine every pregnant person turning the words over and over again, trying to make sense of the puzzle unfolding inside them. 

I am the place someone is from. 

If when we die we go back  to where we came from, mothers are the afterlife.

Is death an arrival in another womb? 

What did this heartbeat leave behind to be here in me?

 It will leave me behind to begin breathing air. Before that it was all water and darkness. 

With each pregnancy come these quiet poems, a life trying to understand what it means to also carry life. We are each a result of these poems, there are words of wonder wrapped around each of us. It dries off, is wiped away. With blankets and time and hands which reach into the void and bring us here. 

But what happens to all that wonder we inspire in utero? There is some magic we are born with, some perfection our parents seem to unanimously acknowledge when we arrive.  “I remember the first moment I saw you” they reminisce, often with a similar romance and nostalgia. But at some point we transform from being the fruit of the womb into something more human and disappointing.  What I see behind the smiles of people who tell me to “enjoy it while it lasts” because it all “goes so fast” is a fall from grace. When babies become people with their own will. When as parents giving everything of yourself still isn’t enough for them.  

As I write this, there is a new baby dancing around making his little hands and feet known to me through a flurry of movements I can’t visualize but can feel distinctly between my hip bones. He is exploring and swimming. To him I am more a place than a person. Perhaps all mothers are just a place to leave, or a place to rest. 

I realized I was such a place when my son landed on my chest. Love ringing in my mind so loud it crowded out all the  bleeding and sewing up and beeping of the hospital. It was an honor to be this landing pad for him. It was fine to be a place to that could be left behind, just to see him arrive earthside. 

 I imagine I must have come to shore in a similar way. That my mother held her hand above me when I swam around in her. That when she held me for the first time and she watched me wade into personhood that the love swelled in her as it has in me.  And yet I cannot fathom her love,it’s just always been there. 

She was love itself, was the universe. And then she, like all mothers, and at some point like all beaches, became a place to leave. 

Becoming a place, losing my personhood when my son was born, in that room I can’t forget, taught me that we are all perfect when we are born, and that there is no need to aspire to be anyone but fully ourselves. That everywhere we go we are accepted as we are by the world. A love that is at once fierce and indifferent.

The part of me that is a place and not a person reassures me  that my varicose veins are fine, that my pregnancy is beautiful, that I am an image of life and joy itself. That my natural hair color is the right mix of sunlight and shadows, that my body in its untouched and natural state is all I will ever need to seduce and enchant my husband, or any other partner I should ever desire. 

Growing up and leaving my mother, finally, and entering into my own skin and family is like a molting. I am arriving and leaving, ending up where I started. A mother leaving her mother. Preparing for a life of sons leaving her for their own lives, towards their own voices and selves. It will be extraordinarily hard to let them go, and I will have no choice but to love them every minute of it and to stay behind. 

A beach with no people on it anymore is still a beautiful place.

Underwater or On Fire

Summer 2020

It’s been seven years since my dad died, since it felt like all of New York became inundated in an unfathomable grief, since I’ve tried to wrestle myself away from that metaphor, from always drowning and gulping and sinking. 

I’ve often succeeded. 

I’ve turned to metaphors of plants and suns and earth. I’ve moved to California and lost my sea legs and it feels good not to need them. I’ve had two children, one removed from my belly with a knife and one birthed in a roar of pain and after a hard day of labor. If love-math were simple then it would seem I have more love in my life than I had lost, but love math is not simple. There is still a deficit, despite the abundance.

Now we are six months into the global pandemic and I am saturated with anxiety and anger that the only metaphors available to me are the old standbys. Here I am drowning again. 

Because when they say the word ventilator on the news I am in white hot pain and back in the worst moment of my life. Every time they count the dead I feel the birth math we etch on tombstones- each birthday was a Mother’s day of labor or of separation from the womb. The fear of respiratory illness is so much more acute for me, for anyone who has watched someone struggle to breath, and then stop, and then be jolted and tricked into breathing and then fail. This is happening a thousand times a day right now in the US alone, a thousand babies dying alone. When I read Jesmyn Ward’s beautiful essay about watching her beloved die, I  felt the familiar electrical numbness radiate from my fingers to the rest of me as my senses withdrew from the world. Sometimes it lasts  for a few hours but I’ve been here since reading it a few days ago. I’m still sitting with that recognition of wishing someone back to life while watching them descend quickly in the other direction. 

If I were a machine, I’d be a strange multi-chambered pressure love cooker. Taking in air and creating heat and love and expelling steam and whistling or exploding. This may seem like an innocuous things, but those boys in Boston turned pressure cookers into bombs and removed limbs and lives from the world. Their simple machine made death. Harnessing the power of air, of wind, of power can be useful.  But it can be dangerous.

A game of would you rather, except we are not in seventh grade playing with thrilling hypotheticals anymore.  It’s 2020 and we are dealing with climate devastation on two of our three coasts. Wildfires and smoke where the land meets the Pacific, Hurricanes coming one after another and then hovering heavily for too long floodinging too much over the gulf - they are afraid this year they will run out of names for them.The hurricane and wildfire seasons have some early, threatening to stay late. 

Who knew it was coming when in small groups at school we peered over our knees to see who would respond and how, would you rather be burned alive or drown? The options no longer would-you-rathers in a fun game, but fears in the chests of millions.  Now, both options are here, lungs swelling and  closing or lungs imploding. You’re either underwater or on fire. And the virus is somehow both of those things at once. 

My dad explained to me that when I’m sailing I never need to feel like I’m not in control. That no matter how fast I’m going and how scared I am I can always let the sails go slack, stop harnessing the wind, and all that power and inertia will slow and eventually stop.Once  I was holding the steering wheel and the roar of wind in the sails was so loud and the land  loomed closer and closer and  my shoulders tensed and I looked around for help and my eyes found him imitating me holding the wheel, all tensed up. He held the position for a beat  and then tilted his head back to make a poof sound and lifted his hands off the imaginary wheel. Just let go he mouthed. As I did, the boat groaned as the sails went slack. We turned with the wind and the water and all was still. Long Island close and calm next to us. 

It is the same with the forces that propel our lives forward into certain directions, the society we live in and the culture we uphold. It feels like we have to hold on to the direction we are going, until we don’t. 

To me the word resistance implies hard work. We need to resist the status quo, resist the powers of white supremacy and patriarchy. But maybe we are thinking of it wrong. Maybe the world we live in feels so hard because we are resisting the natural ways of things. Like trying to slick down a wayward lock of hair on a boy's head which will always find it’s way over his forehead, eventually.  Maybe resistance is easier than we think. Maybe it’s just letting go of the power we give to those who have it. Maybe we just need the wind and water to do it’s thing, let the sails go slack. Let the steering wheel turn with the tide, let the whole boat spin out. Let us stop searching for old metaphors for how our lives and bodies and minds feel broken and realize it’s the systems oppressing us which are broken, our perfect selves are just waiting for us to wake up and take our own power back. 

Counting

The first paintings came from a place before thought and intent. An automatic response to the non-time I was living in. The paintings felt like fire, like an indulgence I was crouching towards. 

As soon as my baby was nestled into my chest in the carrier, or in his own little bed, I would lick my lips and get the supplies together,  humming with my mouth, humming all over. 

In art school my best work came a few days into a creative bender, when I hadn't slept or eaten or treated myself quite like a human. In that hallucinatory space, dazed by normal people's mornings I would shut out bright green trees and sunlight to nap, and at night under fluorescent lights and a mess of half started paintings I would find new ways into myself, animal and brave. 

    So when I found myself a few weeks into motherhood so easily able to summon this maker-spirit at just a moment's notice, I'll admit I was surprised. She had eluded me for my much of my twenties, when my work was more intellectual and formal, about photography and painting, about how my art fit into the puzzle of other art.  The “creative process” at that time felt more like bondage - I would sort of have to hold her down and choke the art out. Not much came easily, until surprisingly, this wonderfully soft and stunning person became part of my daily life. Something about his birthday being a scar which was healing on my stomach, brought the creator-maven back. Even during pregnancy, my swollen self seemed to hum with poems, the potential of creating universes unleashed, and yet I was mentally preparing myself  to step fully into his service and out of my own. I was even looking forward to it, I was tired of hearing only my own thoughts and needs. I was curious about parenting because of its bigness and its mystery, because of how I felt I wanted to do it differently than I had seen it done before and finally because of the unexplainable hormonal forces that spun in my body and mind compelling me to find out what life inside me felt like. 

There are two emotions which floated easiest to the surface in those early days, and still now, two years into parenthood. They fuel the paintings and these words. They sustain me and undo me in quick succession, multiple times a day.  There is love and there is anger. 

Love is the moment I heard him crying in the hospital, and asked my husband in a somewhat yelling disbelieving voice, "IS THAT HIM? IS THAT HIM CRYING? IS HE OK?" 

Not skipping a beat, in his nonchalant grumble he said  "Oh he's here, and he is very alive." He was chuckling as he carefully handed him to me, both of their eyes electric. 

Love is being in a room on a Friday that has six people in it, and then a moment later, seven, because one of them was just removed from your belly and began.

Love is the boy on my chest  looking up at me for the first time in that searching but found way, an eye in a hurricane, a supernova, and at the same time through all that light my husband is petting my hair and the doctors are saying I was losing too much blood and they had to take him and me I was laughing inside and I thought-screamed to myself "It's fine, It's fine. I can die. I brought him here and he is perfect and I'll never be happier."

Love is his little red handprints blooming against me, his sloppy kisses, his proud dance performances, his words and sentences that are not yet words but just joyous sounds stumbling their way towards meaning. Love is him not needing to do or prove a thing to anyone to be perfect. My own self-image is dwarfed by that love, it is a lesson I will be teaching myself for the rest of my life. 

And then there is the anger. I spend a good amount of my creative energies trying to express just how hard it is, in what specific ways. I try to map it out to help my husband understand it, to help myself see it.  My paintings are red, the type of red I imagine my insides to be, the parts that fabricate life, the kind I first saw as girl of eleven in my underwear, the carnage of decades of menstruation, muted for nine months and concluding in an explosion of life and blood.

The marks I make are part word, and part glyph, they are also wanting to be numbers, to help me count. To help me count myself. To see the time pass, to catch it as it's passing and put it on the paper. To capture the forty-first day of motherhood. To capture the two hundred and eleventh, each one unique and its own, each one there and then gone forever, the red painted sticks on the sheet just a skeleton of all the love and anger and change I feel everyday. The love is a natural byproduct of parenthood. But anger, that's an unnecessary and man-made problem. It's not natural at all to be so angry about parenthood, it's an indication that something doesn't add up.

The anger comes from being invisible. With my son I work all day making milk for him and feeding it to him. I am bending over and arching my back, twisting my wrists and ankles and neck in impossible contortions, reaching for things, holding him, catching him, chasing him. I am wiping things up, I am getting lost looking for lost things on the floor, I am tired beyond coffee, beyond sleep. I am angry that this work is not seen on my tax forms, on any form when I put my employment status except sometimes homemaker. There is no room on the form to be both does that mean I have to choose one? What does this form mean? What do I have to show for making a home? I am angry my mother and her mother did this and were not better rewarded for it, by me and by each other, and by the lucky men who placed the children in them, and the world for accepting these people we make as gifts but not paying its dues to the people who birth them. I am so angry for the silk worms, who spin a silk thread a mile long around themselves, the caccoon a self made womb to become a moth, but instead we boil them, take the silk.  I am angry that I love the silk. 

The anger is ripe and pure and almost full of glee. It's a red anger, I see red and I paint that, on the white hot rage of the paper. In the sleeplessness, in the swirl of words I want to write down but didn't have time to because my mind was never free, the blank page emerged as a way forward. In the past, the page was a precipice I didn't feel worthy of filling up with myself.  Now the blank page was food. Or I was food. It was waiting to be swallowed up, and the red paint on the tip of the brush was the tongue and both the paper and me are tasting each other. I drag the tip against the page and a line appears each minute. 

In new parenthood life becomes five minute stretches. Five minutes to eat, to shower, to poop, call someone, check email, walk the dog. Can you imagine the delight of using a whole five minutes to cover a blank page with red marks? I started to play with the marks, what if each x red mark represented five minutes I spent nursing, and a circle for soothing him as he cried,a triangle for changing a diaper? And so his actions drove the symbols of my paintings, sculpted their composition from just love and anger into lines and time that turned the chaos of my days into order, into a chart with a key and a legend until the moment someone asked me when I was going back to work or if I was bored at home with him and I could furnish the evidence at least to myself, at the very least a dutiful scribe of the most mundane tasks which are occurring in a million variations of care all over the world at any given moment. 

I am proud and full of accomplishment and my eyes may sometimes well up with tears at the sight of a blank page going away when it’s just me and paper ravenous for each other. It feels selfish and the laundry is not going to do itself but I hear Shirley Jackson in my ear saying close the door, let the house fall apart, keep your mind free, you have created this universe and it is yours, yours to let fall into disarray, yours to lose control of. Shirly Jackson wrote  "The Lottery" she wrote many books and stories and she had many children and a house. She died in the sixties when my parents were just kids in Warsaw who didn't know each other yet, and yet the little egg that would become me was already there in my mom and my dad was already probably charming little girls into trees to kiss but it would be another twenty years before I could be born and another thirty before I would become a mother and would learn that Shirley Jackson lived in Bennington, Vermont where I went to college and I would feel proud to have shared the world with her even if it was only half of me at the time, and that we shared a forest and a few streets and a college because of all the heroes I had ever read about, none ever made me feel as inspired and as alive as Shirley Jackson, the writer and defiant housewife. 

My red paintings show minute by minute what my son is doing, what I'm doing, they take the domestic and try to turn it into math, into art, into money, into anything that isn't just the nothingness that a day of child care and house-wifing produces. I am creating as an act of defiance. And yet the depth of my own self-doubt appears even as I spread out years of paintings in front of me and they fill up the walls and the floor of a long basement.  They are trying to tell me something or I am trying to say something with them but the truth is that many moments I feel that all of that work doesn't really amount to anything because I did not make my family more secure financially and I did not use my mind and body for retirement or savings. Until I saw that the paintings were telling me that I count, that in using my mind and body to count my time with my child it was a way to show that this most rewarding job of all time also had a cost. 

The Small Sublime

The Small Sublime

We go into nature and we say it makes us feel so small, so insignificant. There are the paintings by Turner and by Friedrich with endless skies and deep unfolding ravines. There are the poems and the novels, bouncing daffodils and restless seas. 

What a strange thing to chase, this feeling of smallness, this being a speck of dust in the big Universe. 

What about the things that make me feel big? Powerful? It makes me feel immense, like the actual scale of myself has increased, when I think that there are two men on earth who I built inside me.

I’ve been taught to be small and not take up space so sometimes when I see myself from the view of my children I am afraid. All double chin and ugly angles until I see in their eyes a portrait without standards, without judgement. It sounds simple, but for a woman, it is almost impossible to see your own self in this way. 

When my newborn nurses, looking up at me like I am God, a towering provider of milk and love,  I feel enormous. My hand is a huge clumsy mass next to his little head, but he is not afraid, just curious as he follows it and then grateful for a caress. He is falling into the love of being held by me. He looks out at the view from my arms and is suspicious of all that unsafe space beyond me. I am his realm and horizon. We too have felt the horizon reach its arms around us as the sun sets on the world around us. 

Good Blood

Good Blood 

Part 1

 I walk slowly through the locker room, flip flops smacking against my wet heels. It’s a defiant walk for someone like me, who is usually pretty reserved. My lumpy breasts have begun to sag since I started weaning and are now traced with veins and little scratch marks from hungry hands. I don’t recognize the body in the mirror anymore, so I don’t look. And yet-  it feels good to be seen, to exist in a space with so many other breasts also on their own trajectory between perky, lumpy, and saggy.  When I get to the steam room, a large black woman looks up at me. Her one piece bathing suit is folded down to expose enormous breasts nearly resting on her thighs. I sense in her a similar defiance to my own. I smile. She smiles back, nodding at me. She says “I been coming here fo twenty two years. This the one place where you can be you and do-you sister.” 

“Amen” I reply with a sigh. A-fucking-men I think to myself. I lie down on my towel and stretch my legs out straight and my arms up behind me, taking up a whole row.  I feel myself beginning to unwind. It feels good to take up space. A smile crawls into the twisted mouth which I brought in with me. I loudly exhale into the hot steam causing it to swirl.  I have learned to enjoy my child-free moments for what they are: fleeting, delicious, strange. I wonder if my boy is still crying. He was when the daycare attendant shooed me out, “Don’t look back he fine he fine go relax.” she insisted. But sometimes, he doesn’t stop crying. When that happens the intercom crackles on and everytime it does I flinch, expecting they will call my name, that they will pull me out of my hot, needed, rest.  The last few weeks I haven’t been able to stay more than 15 minutes. I try to push time out of my mind, but I can’t suppress the worry that he is crying. After a few of these minutes of forced relaxation I  can’t take it anymore, so I rush back to the showers and my locker, rubbing my shoulders and rolling my head in circles. I put the towels down on a stool in front of me when I see it: a red smear. Like an eye of a hurricane on a weather map; burgundy in the middle, bright red and fading to orange in the tail. Embarrassed, I immediately fold it over.  I lean forward slightly, looking between my legs, trying not to tip. I slide my finger down the familiar path to my vagina and place it there for a moment, as if telling my womanhood to shush. I try to look at my hand without anyone noticing, but I know that any woman watching knows this choreography well, has also performed its movements many, many times. It’s faint, but there is the familiar burnt umber film on my finger tip. I stand up and the smell wafts up, that slight smell of iron. 

I feel many things at that moment, it has been almost two years since my last period, before my pregnancy and birth. I feel that women suddenly arrive at the gym, the one I was before all this. But before I deal with her, I have to deal with the immediate problem of the blood on the towel. I fold it into my palm and walk to the sink. There are many women around me all looking suspiciously at my hand, so I place the towel down on the counter and pretend to wash my face. It doesn’t make any sense what I’m doing. Why am I hiding this? I unfold the towel and place it under the soap dispenser. The woman next to me looks at the towel and then up at me, before turning around to leave. I feel proud, I wash the blood away and look up at the mirror. 

That’s when I see the second splotch of blood. This one is on the towel which I have wrapped around my head, and is a large flash of red just above my left brow. A big rose this time.

Again, shame is the first wave. Did anyone else see? Why didn’t they tell me I was FUCKING BLEEDING. Are they ashamed too? Would I have said something? I take the towel off my head, my knotty wet hair falling on my shoulders. I want to yell at the woman who just left for not telling me I was bleeding. I want to tell her it’s the good kind of blood. The kind that says, I could have made a life if I wanted to, but I didn’t, and now you all know that. I squeeze pink soap on both stains, scrub them and wring out both towels. I twist them up and carry them like a little ball in front of my belly before I toss them in the dirty towel pail. I take little steps to the tampon machine just in case I am dripping blood down my thighs.

The machine stares back at me with two bright blue stickers. 25 CENTS Tampon. 25 CENTS Sanitary napkin. As I make my way back to locker for money, I am thinking about how strange it is to pay for something that is just part of the way our bodies are built. There is a free water fountain, because we are humans who have to drink.  The “feminine hygiene product dispenser” is next to the fountain full of endless free water. But the tampons and pads are not free. It feels like a punishment, to have to pay for this.  I wonder if anything is for sale in the men’s locker room. I want to ask men to pay for this. I want them to think to offer. But they are never in here, how would they even know?

Back at the machine I smirk at the 25 cents sticker, I put a quarter in, I turn the nob and nothing happens. I read the instructions again, trying to understand. If machines takes coin then it is not empty. 

 I feel the warmth and wetness inside me begin to seep. 

IF MACHINE TAKES COIN THEN IT IS NOT EMPTY. What the fuck does that even mean? 

The intercom crackles on and I close my eyes to try to hear the words over the blow dryers. “Attention all - and guests attention all members and guest - Patricia Macys ple-  report to Child Watch, Patricia Macys to Childwach, thank.”

I groan and go back to the sinks and grab a few brown paper towels.The women doing their makeup who have been watching me pace back and forth begin to give me that look. They too know this song and dance. But I don’t care about them anymore. Closing the bathroom stall behind me I wad the paper towels up into a ball, and hope it’s enough to not bleed through on my way home. But I don’t care about those feelings anymore. I don’t care about the pre-pregnancy Patti, or the trajectory of breasts on the perk spectrum.  I pass the tampon machine one more time as I waddle slowly out, reminded again the price we pay, but am already thinking to the warm moment my son is back in my arms. I am thinking about getting him home and what I’ll be preparing him for lunch and how much I love strawberry season. I’ll sort out my bleeding, but it’s a good blood, a hopeful blood. I’ll spend the rest of the day counting clouds and singing hello and goodbye to each airplane with someone by that blood made.

Part 2

The first time I got my period felt like a gift. By that time, I had already found what my friends and I called the tingly feeling between my legs, and I could tell even at a young age by exploring my own anatomy that this was a place of lush beauty. I was eleven when I found the blood, and I was excited to show my mom. She too, met it with warmth and a sadness I couldn’t yet understand. She hugged me and pet my hair. I can’t remember, but I’m sure she explained my different options, showing me how to apply a pad and that one day I could use what she used, a tampon! I couldn’t wait. She bought a rose plant for me and we planted it in the garden together to celebrate my arrival in womanhood. I remember at 18 leaving home, and looking at my roses, wondering what kind of woman I would become.  

For twenty years, every month my body produced and shed a new egg. WIth it, the contents of my uterus which was poised for life, emptied into my underwear, into cotton tampons and pads, into sheets and hands, onto partners and thighs and down the drain into the shower. The anger and tension the few days before it’s arrival, the relief and discomfort the day it arrived. For twenty years or two hundred and forty times, I found a way to live with this thing that made me a woman. 

I believe that I felt the precise moment that my pregnancy began, if one can find such a moment. I was on an airplane back from our honeymoon in Norway and expecting my period. I felt a strange cramp before being lulled asleep my the humming warmth and vibration of the flight. A few hours later in the bathroom found brown spots in my underwear. I remember researching this, implantation bleeding. Could this be it? I returned to my seat with the secret hope that it was, took my husbands hand and smiled, saying nothing. 

We had hiked deep into an empty fjord and made love in a cabin miles from any road or street light. I hummed and wondered at the stars if the semen would find its way deep enough inside me to spark life. That life, made itself known first as an interruption to that march of monthly periods. There was nausea, swelling, fatigue, dizziness, joy, weeks and weeks of waiting for the first heartbeat, months of growing and heaving and acid reflux and waiting more, hands and feet emerge, finally more news, a boy! And all this time I saw my body go into the machination that it had been anticipating since I planted roses in my mother’s yard twenty  years ago. 

The woman who stopped getting her period, the one I imagine suspended in the air over the Atlantic Ocean, between Norway and California was tan, plump, had long blonde hair, knew grief but knew fun, felt grounded, went dancing, listening to playlists she made, had favorite TV shows, made art but hated herself for not showing it to anyone. 

The girl who planted the roses was scrawny, her hair a dirt blonde that deflected more light than it reflected. She read endlessly and liked to run away into the mud at low tide, chasing crabs into their holes and watching the last blue bits of twilight stretch out on the bay before coming home to her disappointed mother, dirty and exhausted. 

And the mother here, on the other end of those periods, standing deflated in the locker room, scrounging for change? Is this what I imagined the other side of womanhood and motherhood to look like? Not the sex and the fun, but the things that happen to a life when a period doesn’t happen, when the universe is turned into another direction, the stars realigned to include a new member looking up at them, wondering about themselves. 

That is the true ineffable magic of bringing a new life to the world. It’s not the marks it left on my spirit and body on his way in and out, although they are profound. The miracle is that in the absence of a few months periods I brought him here, and with him that shade of his hair between strawberry blonde and ash, and a love deeper than any void I have dared ponder or look into. 

Letters to the Patriarchy

In 2016 I became a parent to a premature infant. I was overwhelmed, in love and unsure how I had never known the depths and details of what was involved with child-rearing. Like many people in duress, I was looking to point the figure, and I found the Patriarchy to blame for my suffering and confusion. Here is my correspondence with it.

Attn: The Patriarchy

℅ My Father

To blame the patriarchy is to point my finger at all the men, who intentionally or not, have made me feel invisible. It must begin, as all my stories seem to, with my own father. My father who I loved and who is gone, who was absent when I needed him most and who left the world before we got to fully articulate how we loved each other.

He was the perfect model of the imperfect patriarch. He was the most adept magician when it came to making me disappear. Meals appeared before him and dirty plates moved away from him in waves pushed along by the invisible hands of my mother, my grandmother and later his many young girlfriends. I learned to serve him invisibly enough to catch the occasional smile or pat on the head. In the kitchen we whispered of his moods and as a child I wavered around him, ready to hand a remote control or telephone.

When my mother met his mother for the first time, she was dumbfounded when she saw my father sit on the porch and watch his as his own mother carry two buckets full of water across the garden.

When he finally left us I folded within myself blame for their divorce. Inept at sports, clumsy with my hands, bad at chess. I was not a good son to my father, and perhaps that was my first experience of girlhood.

The echo of his booming voice and the pervasive fear that came with his comings and going, left our reformed household a cavernous outline of where he hurt us most. And in that space, we rebuilt ourselves, my mother and I. We held each other's hands, and moved each others hair out of one another's eyes.

Attn: The Patriarchy

℅ the people who don’t think there is one

A few of the things that you assume about a woman who writes a series of letters to the patriarchy are true; I don’t shave my legs or believe in God, I hate wearing makeup and heels, I am no fun at night time and I have opinions about things like different types of citrus and Terry Gross. And yet, I am also married to a man, I have been seen slinking around in sexy black dresses, have put sparkles on my eyelids and enjoyed what the sunlight does to my hair when it is swooping over one side of my face. I have liked luring men and toying with them, have felt desired and desire. I have sometimes made myself sweeter, dumber, skinnier and quieter. I have other times been defiant, annoying, shrill, bitchy and yes, bossy. I have agonized over which way the pendulum will swing almost every day of my life.

I have been a woman wrapped up tightly in my career, so tightly I have sneered at the round, pink person next to me as she rattled off reasons about day care closing early and left the office in the early afternoon. It was so easy in the gray room in my mid twenties, full of black buzzing machines and men, so many men, to hate her. To make a note to myself that when I became a mother, if I did, I wouldn’t let it make me leave work early.

So I can sense that hate, because it really is that, it’s a complete disapproval of somebody else being, I can sense it so clearly in the tone, in the lifted eyebrow, in the pause after I answer the question “What do you do?”

What do I do? The words tossed like rocks across a lake. Skip once or twice and then sink.

Attn: The Patriarchy

℅ My Son

Oh, Abraham. We named you after the father of all religions, the great patriarch! And yet here I am, trying to yell at the patriarchy. In this year of feeling crushed by the stupidity of men in power, I’m also eclipsed by the love that came with you into the world.

The patriarchy would have me be your servant, be your father’s servant. Millions of women are expected to cook, to clean, to soothe, to heal, to hold, to love the men in their lives before all else. Before themselves. In our house, you will see a mother with a partner who does his share of cleaning, cooking. A mother who does her share of dreaming, of having ambitions and providing for you.

In my dreams I buy a house for us made of my poems and paintings. It will be smaller and sweeter than the house I would have built for you with the cold hard cash earned from the marketing job I quit before you were born. You may have less things, but you will be raised by a complete woman, full of love for you and for herself. The walls of our home will be laid brick by brick with your father and I, equal partners like both the sun and the moon are equal partners in the sky.

Attn: The Patriarchy

℅ Myself

To blame the patriarchy is to point the finger at myself, at all the ways it has wrapped itself around my mind. It begins with how I second guess myself. It’s all the times I’ve said yes to things that made me uncomfortable, because I have learned to put other people’s needs before mine. The patriarchy is in a million mini-acts of self-erasure. I have performed them in classrooms, boardrooms, and living rooms.

It’s the professor who encouraged me to apply for a Fulbright Scholarship, but me deciding I wouldn’t get it anyway. It’s having twenty thousand words of a book and fifty pretty good poems, which have yet to be seen by more than a handful of people. It’s being too afraid to even propose the idea that they are worthy of being shared. It’s trembling every time I do share something at a writing group, on the internet, in email. It’s feeling terrified that people will hate it. It’s the actual trembling.

For me, being a woman has come with this tax. I often wake up in the middle of the night and am flooded by my shortcomings as a mother, as a partner. When I take stock of my last year, my stomach sinks. The yard is a mess. I barely cook anymore. I push dirty hair out of my face and feel the weight of a my own estranged body. It has swelled with life and many gallons of liquids pressing against each other through membranes of organs I would never think I would feel. (So this is what it’s like when my bladder and my stomach touch, or my heart and my lung?) I search for calm.

I imagine the Morskie Oko, a lake in the southern mountains of Poland, which means Eye of the Sea. I went for the first time just as my parents were separating, when I was seven years old. The lake is famous for how deep and cold it is, and I like to imagine the rocks at the bottom, catching just the slightest bit of daylight. The darkness and stillness comfort me. I try to find the part of me that is that pure. Is it in my gut? In the back of my throat? I feel a smooth black stone in my mouth, cold against my tongue.

This is where I go when I am afraid to speak, I go to the purity inside me. And I spit out the rock.

Attn: The Patriarchy

℅ The Media

We were perfect. Without makeup or the right lighting, just as women walking around a forest, we were perfect. And then you sold us impossible faces, with unreasonable hair. You put us in shoes that made it so we can’t run or sometimes walk. Then you told us to hurry up. Then to sit down. Finally, to stay home. I blame you for excluding women of all shapes, colors and sizes from your channels. I blame you for trying to program beauty and thinness and perfect skin and youth into our self-image. Show us smart, strong women. Ugly and fat women. Show us trans women and not women who also aren't men. Show us the beautiful in-betweens. Show us mothers. Show us what child care looks like, what breastfeeding looks like, what juggling work and family looks like. Let women be the heroes. Let the fur on our legs be there forever.