Why is writing about lack so much easier than writing about plenitude?
I need to stop writing about lack.
Why is writing about lack so much easier than writing about plenitude? What would it be to write about being and expanding outward, rather than writing about the tightness of experience closing in on the identity I used to have.
I’ve tried to remove my phone from S’s playroom when I am with him, to be with him, with and alongside his experience. To be full of him. To watch his moves—like the way he hurriedly moves the pages of a book with his left hand as we read it. I read to S several times a day. Reading started as part of his night night ritual with Kitten’s First Full Moon (thank you Sarah!) and the classic Goodnight Moon. The ritual also includes S’s homeopathic Camilia drops I call his night-night juice. Sometimes the nights call for Motrin. S's dad jokes: “It’s not some sleep panacea you know; it’s a drug.” I shrug, knowing I’ve put more allopathic drugs inside my son since he’s been born than into my own body since then too. The drugs make it so easy and promise reprieve.
He is over nine months old now; soon a toddler. I make notes of his milestones like a quantified being. Mostly I forget. I’m supposed to write down when he holds himself up for the first time, or his first step, or whatever else he does that is the progress to turn him into an autonomous being. It makes me uncomfortable—marking a baby by their race against time, taking photos of their body next to some made-by-child-labour blocks to quantify their visage. Why does it matter if he learned to crawl by five months or that he said his first word at fourteen months? Why do I need to mark how old he is in every fucking photo?
Sometimes S naps longer than 40 minutes and I forget what to do. I scramble to get so much quiet me time in those minutes that by the end of it I have done nothing of consequence. I research wool stockings and mitts and hats. I perform capitalism instead of poems.
When he was inside me, I was able to be motherhood, now I am a mother and my belly moves with nothing inside. I lack.
Every moment must be productive, filled with something to do. Every moment I am not with Solon I feel guilty if I am doing ‘leisure’. In some ways, I have learned to do more with less time. But, in some ways, the guilt of inaction has occluded my ability to take time for myself or time to process life. It is unhealthy to be at the extreme. Having a baby is a constant negotiation with time.
—october 2016
I am shattering fields of time around me
& experiencing time differently from those I pass
last night I saw my son’s adult self &
in the same moment toddler self this really
happened he was playing “Wish You Were Here”
by Pink Floyd on his electric guitar & feeling it
he’s 11 & in between 2 kinds of time
—Rachel Zucker