not a naked chef

my fingers grease the keys. waxed and well-oiled for the first time in many, many months, inspired most probably by the seemingly premature bulging of my belly and the steady demise of this summer's muscle tone. or perhaps just the glaring fact that nothing, nothing ever gets done. damp laundry collects mildew in the washer, garbage bins overflow, stale semen speckles all horizontal (and some vertical) surfaces of my space, dishes dance around the crusted splotches, begging to be gathered, cleaned, my world throbs unhygienically, strewn.
cheese, eggs, bacon, buttery toast, not barfing.
some trade-off.
i have to remind myself to internalize beauty (although she called me, cuttingly, cynical and completely negativistic yesterday); somewhere in me there was something sort of pretty.
my feet have gotten ridiculously ugly and i have got to stop being such a superficial fuck.
a ripe plum today: his digits are now completely distinct, perfect little conches on either side of his head, genitals forming, cementing her fate or perhaps proving me wrong.
his words disturb me to the core. but entice me so immensely i can't pry my eyes from his written desire to corrupt her innocence. and i know what happens to little girls sexualized too soon. on the phone with him last night, mental list of my favorite works, nothing is healthy, nothing is untortured, painless or simplistic. everything is twisted, lurkingly insidious, doomingly diseased. this is sort of what she meant yesterday. my sense of humor, the things i gravitate towards....it's all a little broken.
i'm still trying to figure how, where and why he fits into the disaster of my desires. possibly just that there's a kindred inkling.
the post office is twenty-five minutes closed. the actual mailing of my spiteful letter will have to wait till monday. i hope she reads it and knows i mean it, senses how badly i yearned to seal it with a bomb. he echoes in my ears: stuck with that bitch for life.
that my religion was her primary concern boggles me completely. perhaps if i ascribed to something, i would better comprehend this demographic urgency. faithless, floundering me. better that, i think, than thrusting myself blindly into the throes of a church rampaged by men forced into pedophilia as a sexual outlet because try as they might they could not pray away their erections or their evolutionary urge to spill. alternatively, they may have chosen the church because they knew priesthood would engender a trust sturdy enough to shroud their misbehavior. which might be worse. happily atheitic me.
his picture the other day stared through me. perhaps i should have directed them to international adoption, to AIDS-orphaned , love-starved kids like him instead. had i their resources, their urge and their impediments, it's probably the route that i would take. but then genes matter less to me than most. which is why i could tell her on the phone despite her gasps that, in fact, i hate him.
family is a striking difference between the two of us. i have cleaved so readily. perhaps not healthily, but it is done. their influence is marginal and i alter myself for their benefit not at all. if head-butting ensues, i root myself, stand my ground. i can't stomach forced mirages, which seem much more palatable to him.
she yelps with hunger and he after her. responsible, responsible, responsible. i scramble for clothing.

stand still, whirlwind

time slips. i've got a truly weak grip.
she doesn't let me read. she doesn't let me write. he edges in, encouraging bile in my throat, and i'm done for.
she drives her crazy, and half the world around us. although i did not look homeward, the holidays have not been as low-key or stress-free as i'd have liked them. she initiates difficult conversations, dredges up words i'd rather show her on a page, inspires tears.
she flitters.
he's been absent. i've been thinking lots, dreaming hard, distracted much.
all she can do is lodge complaints about my world and repeat that that which does not kill one....
i love reading terminal market, mangoes, and not having to go to work.
i hate briskness, holiday hype, and trying to organize the files of my life.
i need to: not be so pissed off, find a functional venue, make us work a little better, strengthen my faltering voice.
here, it invited me to summarize my 2003 in 20 words or less. ever verbose, i went right to the limit:

vacation, exploration, frustration, desolation, actualization, appreciation, graduation, adoration, copulation, elation, procrastination, accomodation, rumination, procreation, tribulation, aggravation, desperation, visualization, anticipation


gratification.

preemptive, but it could be more than another five days, already into 2004, before i manage again.

tapping in

lots of other blogs make me think of that dork. lord, was he a loser. and a wretched e-mailer. what was i thinking?
i hate to schmooze. hate it, hate it, hate it. the vapid conversations, the giddiness and hugging of perfumed people you won't think twice about once you're out the door, the air-kissing, the superficial questions no one really wants the answers to.
yech.
how often i've bitten back my lies: nice to see you, too. oh, things have been fine. except that i slit my wrists again last night. starting to get a tad irksome, if you know what i mean. cleaning up the towels and the bathtub and all that. oh, things are going as well as could be expected, considering the terminal colon cancer. if only my ass would stop gushing pints of blood, i'd be able to wrap my presents more efficiently. oh, yes, i'm looking forward to the holidays, too. too bad my house just burned to the ground and my angry rottweiler gnawed off my little girl's left leg. in this day and age, though, it's really not that bad to be a cripple, so things are generally looking up. oh, yeah, i'm good. i've been having such incredible sex lately. my boyfriend and i just started experimenting with gender roles. i tell you, nothing instills power better than a strap-on purple penis. just for shits. and colorful reactions. just to splash a little jarring pollock across the feather softness of their monets.
i'm sure it's vastly more horrendous elsewhere. i should not complain. i just wish to be more of a anthropologist and less of an active participant.
the glimmer. the splash of pollock: he asked if i was writing, if i had a chance to do any writing with my job. he identified something i never knew he saw. he identified a need that many people who are more intimately involved with me do not recognize. he was dissatisfied with the standardized, superficial response. he knows that i am unhappy. he can sense it. which is why i'm drawn to him and have been since i bolted upright in his class four years ago and told him he was full of shit, since he appreciated me for it. i need to try to take a class with him in the spring. he is tapped into me. he's teaching a class that might help me better understand certain people in my world, and i can't devote 5 hours straight to exploring the topic that truly entices me. it's free. i need to learn. he can really teach me. it would be an interesting anthropological endeavor, anyway, to observe swatties in class with a pregnant student in their midst. he would laugh loudly at that rationale for taking his class.
i wonder how he's doing, if he's finished with his finals, if he's preparing meticulously for his departure to the sunnier side of the nation. i worry about him during finals, hermiting himself, succumbing to the stress. i hope he smokes some pot.
i can't wait for him to be finished with his finals. we need to reconnect. we drifted too far apart last night.
she's cleaning for him, hoping, i guess, that he'll break up with his girlfriend and fall head over heels for tidy her. god help me if i ever makeover my world to impress a man.
yesterday's repetitious reminder that we are social misfits smacked me flatly in the face. just because i remember being there, hating my parents for being so weird, wanting so badly to belong to the crowd. of mindless cows. retrospectively, my parents were right. the world was wrong. they were right to steer me away from the herd, to encourage me to knock over trees and boulders and other obstacles so that i could forge my own path. but i didn't know that then. and she won't know that now. which is why she writes about the bearded jolly man in her journal. she wants to be just like them. she wants to fit. and they're trying to make her fit. "she needs a best friend," presumably because the best friend would normalize her and my child would stop being so weird. he chastised me for pining for private school. i don't know how i couldn't. she needs someone like she had in the afternoons last year, someone who appreciates her soul the way he appreciates mine. that's the only way to really learn and grow.
potato chips and jellybeans. i can't get enough. this child is in for a rough few months. time to complete my application and hope for a positive return. time to stop dwelling on tomorrow's findings. time to race around the office because i'm on a complete sucrose buzz and, god, two weeks away from this stagnancy will be glorious.

slowly s.......n.....a.......PING

argh. so much space.
trying for the new gig, hoping it pans out, brings some whew to my life. i need the relief. things are too much in the red.
i can't talk. the words are there and need to be spat, but i can't accelerate them out. whatever holds me back can only be insidious, indicative of future decay. i tried, feebly, skirtingly. and failed miserably, shamefully. i always disconnect. i have no bulletproof legal case, nothing but my heart, my impulse, which even i have never learned to trust.
i don't know if i want to be doing this anymore. i am making mistake after mistake after mistake.
everything's a game and i am the least strategic player on any of life's courts.
forest for the trees. i should have read her book, $4.99 discounted, now shoved in some dusty crevice, page 12 folded over, knowledge unimparted and stale. maybe it would help me finish.
he tried to motivate me towards the things he knows i need to be doing with myself. he is such a powerful force, even if he is a slightly silly. he motivates me more than he knows...in tiny, rushing waves...to find a new job because he can't stand my misery, to send out my stuff because he wants to read my words between hardcovers. carpe diem. which is why he momentarily wished that he were back there, celebrating at the apex of the mess.
he disappeared already and i'm aching for not having followed through. were bile not constantly cascading from my throat, i could have finished. i could have been the friend i wished to be, somewhat reciprocal.

i am over my head.

sisyphus

i have a trust issue i can't shake. in his hand, in my dreams, in the way we operate.
sometimes superficially bumbling.
we are both voyeurs in our own ways; sorta scares me.
i am dishonest with the world almost as much as i am with myself.
i need this trip, this escape.
i need to drive away from monotonous boulder rolling, laugh, sing, marvel.
enjoy them because i haven't managed in some time.
look at different buildings, different time, different space, fresh place.
he needs time to focus without our incessant distraction.
desperate for food but nothing appeals; i have to learn to cram myself before i fall asleep.
she is perplexingly pleasant-- almost as though it were seven years before.
i bore myself and covet his blue hair only because it signifies a velocity i've long lost.
yawn.

cherry alive

it's working, however weird and crazy it makes me feel. sort of has me wanting giant needles penetrating many parts of me. if two tiny nubs prodding at my wrists can have me this improved, imagine what ten or twenty carefully and precisely inserted needles might do.
it's snapped me back to reality. so i can get through the day, so i can manage the minutia of my mornings, so i can arise more pleasant, so i can do a load of laundry.
they responded so unexpectedly, so pleasantly, teaching me yet again how very little i understand about them and the value of setting distinctive boundaries and warning people against crossing them. nothing could have prepared me for love you no matter what. maybe they've realized their mortality? she's obviously been charting the years. maybe with each white hair and facial crease, with each new organic failure, he's charting his, too, beginning to appreciate that his time with each of us is preciously finite.
as i get multiple messages for vacation packages, i am increasingly inclined to flit away. barcelona haunts me. i want to go back. i want to get away. the holiday stuff, the pressure, the discussions are gnawing me. fresh traditions are so welcome. christmas in europe might be okay; christmas in mexico could be amazing. christmas in swarthmore, trying to type, trying to finish will have to suffice. it needs to get done so i can move on.
she told me a story about her son that broke my heart--how he refuses to hug her, ducks down in the car when she drops him off at school so no one sees that she's his mom. i hope when i have a little boy he will still request and welcome his mama's hugs when he's tall and hairy and gruff. i hope my little boy would love me like he seems to love his mom: unabashedly. but then i hope my little girl will love me when she starts plucking her brows and shaving her legs, provoking boys and smearing her lipstick. she is a cancer, too, and she will never be controlled, but i hope she'll still be willing to let her crab-ish mother into the carefully guarded aperture of her tough shell. and hug.
i am the sahara, guzzling water, never getting wet. i just wish it weren't also dripping from the sky. he deserves a more celebratory day.
the size of a cherry today with paddles for limbs and external ear buds. supposedly, now moving spontaneously, though there's nothing large enough for me to feel. she's in maternity wear already and it's a matter of weeks for me. i didn't expect such rapid expansion, but my pregnancy expectations have all proven rather flawed. time to roll more, devise less.
cherry: losing mine on his hand in his bedroom with his mother upstairs, arguing, and his brothers in the next room, nintendoing, was not what i expected it to be. and then i learned i'd never really lost it. not until her. not until we were already faded, clinging and he'd long since forgotten the trickle of my blood through his decorated fingers. so much surfacing from the baby in my belly, the anticipation of july 28, the implication of her message. she remembers distinctly what i remember vaguely. that's why she responded so frantically, why she pounced protectively, why she cringed when she thought of another obstetrical bout for me. i give her so little credit. she did love me. hard. when i most needed it. and i loved her back like crazy.
somewhere i stopped needing her love and she started feeling rejected, like she'd lost her daughter, like her daughter didn't respect her, like her daughter went away to an ivory tower where she finally discovered that her mother wasn't the entire world, that her mother fucked things up, too, and badly, that her mother didn't know as much as she liked to pretend she did. and she felt threatened. so we fell apart. like we fell apart when suddenly i had boobs and wanted tampons and she didn't know what to do. pseudo-motherhood has me incessantly occupied with her, earth mother, my mother, for a time my friend. she still loves me. she's just had to let me go and accept that we may never understand each other, all while still secretly hoping that when she's ancient and surrounded by cats listening to cold play and old bob marley, wearing her hair is an unruly, massive white 'fro, i'll come visit her and we will suddenly, instantaneously click. i don't know what she'll do if i get published. if it weren't mine, she'd love the work. since it's mine, it could kill her. sometimes she's so strong, others so feeble.

needily nauseated

sick sick sick sick sick. and sick of being sick. i asked her to find a way to fix it. anything, anyway. i'm just tired of feeling like this, for me for him for her. for my messy, muddled apartment. for all the things that should have been long done.
i'm ready for a good five minutes of feeling fine, not needing to shove my face in the shitter and retch. i'm ready for a new phase, and i'm oddly disturbed by my intolerance. those second-order desires again. i want to want to be.
the scrap in the mail claims i owe so much, too much. i don't know how i'll ever crawl back out of my indebted hole. sell my soul, most likely. if i had a dollar, i would buy a powerball ticket, a numbered shred of hope.
the m word passed my lips and i didn't faint, he didn't cringe, the earth did not suddenly and raucously split in two. he didn't disapparate before my eyes or even seem inclined to. not that anything would have been before my eyes; i couldn't force myself to turn and face him. i spoke cowardly to my hands.
he is being good to me in spite of it all and it makes me love him even harder, which is tough to handle when pressing your lips against another's causes churning in your gut.
i was a ninja last night and a good one. lithe and limber, i leapt nimbly around my opponents, my large sword slicing the air, my legs rapidly and gracefully leaving and meeting the ground. and i looked hella good in my little black suit. dreamy me.
his comment yesterday, combined with his grating snicker, sliced through me. the samurai sword of his nasty, vulgar words collapsed me. as if i weren't worried enough without degrading remarks from hypersexualized men my father's age. i wanted to slice him back as brazenly, wanted to remark on his fatness, his baldness, the way he smells so incredibly wretched that his simply leaning on my bed is enough to make me scramble for clean sheets. but it would have been destructive. so i swallowed. lack of money and absent alternatives motivate incredible endurance.
his plea crawls up my spine. i know the cycle and i need him to be ok. if i can be helpful to him, he only needs to ask. he should know that. and that i love him.
she changed it to firranch79, which makes me think that there was something about that time that she loved, something pre-me, pre-him, pre-surgery. something that they shared that she treasured, something that she hasn't entirely lost, bitter and wasted as she now routinely seems. fir ranch must have meant something i've never known in her. i wonder if she looks at the sepia pictures in her yellow albums and wanders wistfully back to that time, no water, no electricity, shotgun by the door to protect her against bears when he'd left her alone. i wonder if she wishes she'd stopped after him, if she regrets me, him, him, him, her, him, him and her. i wonder if she wishes things could have stayed the same between them, if she pines for days of just them minus the alcohol problems, young, subversive and totally in love. so much has happened since then: surgery and jail time and psych wards and lost jobs and many children and abandoned dreams and lots of loans and bootstrap pulling and disability checks and lawsuits and adult children who grow up and totter away to resent you from afar. so much has ruined whatever existed then with shona and bear and little butt and fresh, forested love. i wonder how it feels for her to type 79 and trip along all the closed roads since then.
like it might someday feel for me to type 96. or 03.
water has me queasy. how's this kid supposed to live?

psyched down

snow today and i love the way she relished it this morning, love the poet in her, the incredible appreciation of beauty and detail that flows from her, lilting in her six year-old vocabularly. snow today outside my window lining the trees with silence. accidents everywhere so i'm glad i'm not driving and i worry slightly about his trips into and out of the city, but mostly i admire its majesty. because nature, so often neglected in my world, really is incredible. and independent. and apathetic. but gorgeous.
snow today and chocolate chip cookies that she brought me now nestling atop the entire bag of salty popcorn that expanded to calm my stomach. at least for the moment. my subjective well-being is off the charts. for the moment.
strangely, he soothed me by telling me i had hurt him, and how much. he soothed me by telling me why he takes great pride in his monogamy. and i pained for having upset him, but luxuriated in knowing he was sincere, serious. neurotic me.
i kept drifting into the slumber i fought furiously against; i wanted to hear his words, wanted to know his thoughts, feel his logical connections, the pulse of the turning gears of his head. he is so consistently brilliant.
according to myers and diener, you cannot purchase happiness. for the most part, i buy this, whether i agree with their purportedly objective measurement methods or not. however, i don't think that i wouldn't necessarily be loads happier if i had the cash to fill my fridge more frequently or pay my bills less stressfully or think about solstice gifts less confinedly. hedonic treadmill or not, i think my life satisfaction would dramatically improve were i just a few thousand dollars richer. not that i'm particularly sad, generally, but the major malfunction of my life tends to be monetary. its elimination would probably ratchet my objective measures up a great deal. which i suppose makes me more like destitute india than prosperous canada.
the more i consider brickman and cambell's propositon of ultimate hedonic neutrality, the more i gag. and the support they offer and the later studies that claim to lend further support. i want to corner these men in a room with a barrage of inquiry. if hedonic neutrality is real, why do people kill themselves? is everything so adaptable, so bearable? and why do these two men get to decide what is bearable? what qualifies them?
she told me today that they've stopped considering personality an integral part of the curriculum and have mostly rejected its coverage from the department. with his retirement. and, god, he was a crackpot, but they needed one. he spiced things up. what's psychology without a few good psychos? while i'm entirely in agreement about the social nature of the human being and the importance of studying humans in groups, i don't believe one can rightly study the human mind or human interactions without somehow accounting for individual personality, temperament, traits (heritable or otherwise). these affect so much, alter interactions and interpretations immeasurably. must everything be generalizable when, really, nothing is general, everything is customized? it's a huge part of why i enjoy the classroom manifestations of my summer work; the personalities that breathe life into the skeleton i provided, that make this job worth tolerating, the project worth considering. if that's the department's trend, then it's little wonder that she's chosen to ignore so many individualized variables in this project. i suppose she can't capture them all and that it would be tedious and somewhat counter to her purposes to analyze data individually. but that for me is most intriguing: the longitudinal individual has undeniable appeal.
which is why i could never conduct my own grand-scale research. i would forget about the groups, focus on the individuals, want to pull a robert coles and take pictures, capture stages of individual lives, lose myself in the development and growth of isolated points and completely miss the trend. i would want favorite colors, childhood stories, 3-d characters.
i sit in classes and dream up lives for the kids, dream up thoughts for the kids, ambitions for the kids, where they'll be in ten years, who they'll be, what they'll be doing. this is what i ache to write. this is what i need to create. if only i had the discipline to actually sit down and do it.
this might be part of why i disliked that movie that everyone else seemed to fairly enjoy. its scope was too broad. i wanted the nitty-gritty, the dirty fingernails, the flecking elbow skin. i wanted the life histories, the deeply personal connections. the general looping of those four letters through the skimmed over lives of many only scratched the surface of my interest. for that to truly captivate me would have taken ten hours more.
queasy again and the fluff's stopped flowing, mostly melting off the branches that sag beneath its dampening weight. she exclaimed about the pooch of my belly this morning and he defended me so sweetly. how shocked she'll be when i start to get really big, when she topples off my lap because timmy's inching into her sacred space.

dissonance

2 months of us disappeared. i'm not sure where. i'm not sure why. i need to stop reading into everything. or reading anything.
she sleeps with other girls' boyfriends and doesn't see the harm in it. she says she's doing their relationships a service, that she's helping the girls out by keeping their boyfriends happy. he'll come see her this weekend just to fuck her and she doesn't mind because she takes what she can get and i'm increasingly less surprised that she's been long without a boyfriend. not that it's significant, except that it seems to matter a remarkable lot to her.
there's little more depressing than the image of her, standing beside her clock radio, new joni in her ears, clenching her jaw and the side of the bureau, growing rigid against the swell of tears she didn't want her kids to witness beside the christmas tree as she realized it wasn't her, wrinkled and discarded, it wasn't her, the safe zone, taken for granted, who was getting the better parts of him. watching her grin and bear it for the sake of not upsetting the children killed me. absorbing her taut words, "no, you've made a fool out of me, my life," had me buckled in tears.
pregnancy is not for me what i thought it would be. i discounted too much. i need him too much and too weirdly and the impact on me is not good. i can't erase him over me in my bunk bed, where i'd fallen asleep at seven, heavy with taco grease and weed, wanting to kiss me, fuck me, only to send me lurching into the safety bucket stowed beneath my bed. and he, like him, sat sighing on the end of my bed, watching my blotchy cheeks and teary eyes, trying to avoid staring at the strings of sticky puke hanging from my mouth. it wasn't long before he didn't bother me at night anymore, before he had found a more palatable replacement, someone who wouldn't barf when he kissed her, someone whose body wasn't covered in zebra pelt, someone on whose thin frame his jeans would be saggy, someone who didn't look like hell and feel like hell and cry like hell every time she stopped to think.
possibly it is too much to expect of him not to go that route. the weak and wounded part of me tinkers with preemptive protection and the realization that i remember every single day while for him it's much more hazy. maybe now is not a good time for us to be sharing,. as much as i want to think it can only help us grow. maybe now i am too needy, too fragile. maybe we are not equipped to go there. many people who have been together, committed, for dozens of years awake to find they're not. when did my expectations become so absurd? when did i lose my valuably defensive compartmentalizing ability? i feel stark naked on a hilltop bathed in artificial light, a thousand magnifying lenses on every inch of me, shutters prepared to blink. and i'm not roaring, the way he said, standing nude with his eyes squeezed shut before me, he hoped i would.
she keeps telling me how their two lives will become one. i don't believe that can happen. i don't believe in utter union. because i don't think anyone could ever be that honest, that exposed. and people should not too readily relinquish themselves and every dirty little secret they've ever kept tightly sealed in their closets for the sake of forming a deeper bond. i don't know what will give us a deeper bond, an ignorance that has me scrambling rawly in the dark after he's quickly rolled from me to fall fast into a steady snore. probably not total immersive intertwining.
i am too much, this is too much right now. i don't know how to steer her from the bottomless pit that i tripped into long before i was her age. i don't know how to steer him from the bottomless pit that is me. i don't know how to steer myself from the bottomless pit that is trying to piece together the fragments of his words.

scattered = shattered?

so good going down, but repeatedly bubbling up is slightly less pleasant.
talking to him sticks needles in my eyeballs. it's never really worth it. he only dominates, never listens, never fulfills, talks cyclically, repetitiously, aggravatingly. sometime, i will learn. sometime, i will remember to tell him to slow down, shut up, listen. or i just won't call.
talking to him, i told him today, is dysfunctional. the only option, at this point, is to end our communication altogether. and if he dies i can regret it.
she's such trouble. but i want to believe she's not. i want to believe she's a good kid who's just not being taught appropriately. my instinct is to yank her away from everyone who's so quick to dish out diagnoses, so quick to point their fingers, slap labels: disruptive, disturbed, disabled. i know that she is brilliant. i know that she is capable. i don't want to see what she has fade behind a pharmaceutical. i don't want to watch her vibrance disappear. she is regularly exactly what i'm not, which leads as often to admiration as irritation. is lying the same as embellishing? does it matter?
he started taking pills and it restructured his entire life, his entire brain. but he's not like her at all, except that his quiet lack of focus is analogous to her vivacious one. he started taking pills and suddenly couldn't imagine life without them, before them. maybe there's something there for her, but i want all the options, all the alternatives first. i don't want to hastily opt for the quick fix, potential brain-fry.
i dreamt of being a clumsy misfit, of fucking up a modeling session, of tripping along a runway and talking loudly out of turn and burping and laughing and being accused of having no class and eventually being asked to leave the session because it obviously wasn't where i belonged, because i couldn't keep it together long enough to blend into the group. the woman in charge was angry, haughty, disgusted by me. the woman in charge dressed with precision in black stilettos and a flowing black gown. she peered over her spectacles at me with judgmental eyes. the other participants stared me down. and i walked sheepishly out the door, into my parents' kitchen, breeding ground of misfits.
i have never fit. there is no place for me, even where i thought i'd fit and be understood, even where misfits congregate in the name of higher learning, a liberal education. i still didn't fit. i was still distorted, warped.
she is not a misfit like i have been a misfit. she's much more gregarious, much more extroverted, in many ways my lighter, brighter side. still, she feels the misfit when she's with her friends, when she's sitting in class, when she can't keep it together to act exactly like all of them. she feels the misfit when she watches them in their more traditional roles, with houses and daddies and mothers of a much earlier generation. we actively and ardently homogenize our society from such an early stage; she's distorted, warped, too scattered and loosely wound to be 'normal,' but she's six and still everyone can't stop themselves from pointing her, it out.
this is so big for me. i don't know why it chokes me up. i don't know why i act like her, want to believe that, in the face of it all, my kid is ok.
we don't want to change her, she said, just help her. she's wonderful in many ways, she said, but those ways sometimes get in the way. be more open, she said, stop being so defensive, stop being so mad at them. they're professionals who are only trying to do their jobs. or make them easier.
she said she doesn't want him to color my experience. she wants my experience to be my own. she said she doesn't want them to color my experience for the same reason. i don't know how to make my experience my own without integrating them. they are all slices of my world, of this experience. they will all be there, watching. they will all be there, experiencing. it will not be a bubble; my experience will not be distinct from any of their experiences, so we might as well not pretend to parse things now.
yawning and gurgling, how i wish to be a cat, well-fed and ready for a nap.

shrinking down my world

just one, which is both a relief and a shock. 2.5mm today and its brain is no longer exposed. its vertebrae are fairly well-developed. it will soon have hands and feet, though webbed. i like the pictures in the book she brought me, like the way it shows the various stages in teensy increments so that i can follow with incredible precision the phase of the terribly tiny guy who is wreaking such enormous havoc on my body. she called them 'alien dogs.' and said they'd give her nightmares. at six, i was highly familiar with fetal faces. i deprive her of so much: grandparents, parents, normalcy, information.
last night, i needed to sleep and sleep and sleep. he came in and i didn't notice until this morning the smell of his body beside mine, the solidity of his strong back against mine. like so many mornings, when i leapt shouting out of bed, i only wanted to crawl back beneath the sheets. i only wanted to spend the day abed with him. but, unlike many other mornings, i mostly just wanted the two of us to sleep. i could have slept much more than i did. all i'm inclined towards is sleeping and eating; which she said was normal. she said she couldn't do anything at all, even in the first trimester. she said she would go to the grocery store and that would be it for her for the day. now, she said, in the second trimester, she can't do anything for more than ten minutes without wanting to lie down. she said it'll be better for me, because there's just the one, but that it will still be tough. she said it's hard for women who are used to doing everything for themselves to resign themselves to the fact that there's motivation and energy for very little once they're pregnant. i'd forgotten all these nuances. it has been so long.
i'm irked already with 34 weeks to go. and this is entirely elective for me. poor him. poor her. i don't know how they'll tolerate me with the nausea and the drowsiness/incapacitation, the rotting face and the incessant hunger. i knew all this, in the abstract, i just thought i'd deal with it better, less superficially. i have all these second-order desires about the person i could be.
i dreamt him slaughtering a terracotta cow moose in the backyard of a house i suppose i owned, which was filled with a medley of bizarre animals, probably inspired by his statement about my animal loving. i dreamt him the way he once was, laughing, free-spirited, not defensive, indoctrinated, brash. i dreamt him with the gorgeously crinkled, smiling eyes that used to be the object of our cruelty: gremlin eyes, bird turd, la nariz. we were ruthless. no wonder he's grown to hate me. i don't know how i could expect otherwise. abuse someone long enough and they're bound to despise you. maybe die overseas doing so.
i am communicating poorly. i am not connecting or, really, even attempting to connect. i am recoiling into myself, rolling solo on the waves of remembrance. because i imagine the people in my world will quickly tire of my recurrent revelations. times and places and people who were never a part of their experience of me. even so, i am shutting down and that's not healthy. i need to get to a different place.
and i need to tell them, stop hoping for their indirect discovery. i need to transcend the rejection. and so much worry. maybe i'm the one in need of medication, not her.
i want my throat less constricted and bilely, my brain less addled by anxiety, my heart less willing to eagerly establish unrealistic, unfair dreams about us.
i need my feet to touch the ground and find it solid.

i need to read the fucking paper. and digest. he tried to set me straight and, in some ways, he was right: the world is bigger than my bubble.