how, mother?
Last year around this time I made a paper crane from a portrait of Eileen Myles from a book of poet portraits for S's mobile. I optimistically but also in jest wrote: "If only I can make several more I can be a real mom and pretend I have a nesting instinct!"
I never finished the mobile. S, unlike all his peers, doesn't and never had a mobile hanging above his crib or change table. Maybe because he started sleeping in his crib at six months. Maybe because I cannot make a decision on how to decorate his room or position the furniture so that it will look just right. It will never look just right because I'd rather do my nails or memorize poems to recite as bedtime stories than pretend I know anything about being the kind of fantasy homemaker mom that could manage her nails, build a baby mobile and nap on cue.
Most of the time I'm amazed that I am a mom. It still doesn't feel real. Does it ever feel or become real? Because my pregnancy felt real, it felt me.
At 24 weeks pregnant: I have fully become my pregnant body. Everything is my growing abdomen. Everything I do is Pregnant M—where and how I sit, what I eat, how much I eat, my internet usage, the placement of our furniture because I trip over everything, strangers and acquaintances desperate to guess the gender of the baby against my wishes, what clothes I can still try to fit in, how I sleep, where I go. I want to go deeper. I want there to be nothing else but pregnancy. Except I want that as/for myself; I don’t want others to force me to perform it.
The day-to-day experience of the concept of pregnancy is different than carrying a growing child inside me. Being pregnant has become an obsession, a marker—it is now me as if nothing else of me has ever existed. As if this is it, the moment, the time of time. It is only at particular moments, when the baby kicks or rolls around I’m reminded that I’m not just pregnant, that there is a living creature inside of me making all of this happen. Even then, when I touch my moving belly, it is the belly and its growth I fixate on, not the baby inside me. Before I got pregnant I read many things about women, especially women artists, that developed intuitive connections with the world during their pregnancy. They were able to sense the baby, get to know them, be with them in these ways that read like myths. I thought I would get that too. I thought I would transform into an enlightened goddess that speaks to her baby every night and imagines it as part of her and her life and transforms the representative ways (because all there is is representations: medical diagrams and ultrasound images) into a feminine imaginary because she’s read Cixous enough to know the power of a woman. But I don’t do this; I don’t feel connected in the ways that I have read other women connect to their babies. I can’t imagine what it looks like, what tone of skin it has, or how it will be. Earlier on I used to hum deeply to get it to move, but now it moves regularly and usually on schedule so I don’t. How can a full absorption into a pregnant body also produce such detachment?
I do, however, listen to Sade (a Capricorn) every day in hopes the baby feels and hears her poetic power.