There is an art to this
Posted on | June 24, 2010 | 8 Comments
There is an art to this. To waiting, to being present in uncertainty when moments are only whatever it is that they are until the next moments arrive.
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Today writing terrifies me. It terrifies me because of the way these stories last, the way we tell ourselves stories in order to be who we are, to become who we are becoming. It makes me ache, to see the small uncertain snapshot of myself as I am right now: here at the dining room table, in a room so humid the pencil digs into the soft pulp of the paper like a finger nail scratching at mosquito bitten skin.
Outside it is pouring and green and warm. Water drips from the gutters in irregular staccato and farther out the rain falls steadily with a rushing noise that fills the valley, the house, the sky with sound. Upstairs, in his crib, my son is sleeping, likely on his belly with his cheek pressed softly into the matted sheepskin he’s slept on since the day he was born. He’ll sleep for another hour and then wake and my day will circle about again, and I will become something less productive and possibly more real.
In thirty years what will these moments mean?
Today I re-read, slowly, meticulously, intentionally, every line Joan Didion’s piece, “On Going Home,” examining each comma, each particular use of parenthesis, each use of metaphor and observation, and found myself nearly in tears at this last paragraph, knowing as I know, that her daughter died at 39.
It is time for the baby’s birthday party: a white cake, strawberry-marshmallow ice cream, a bottle of champagne saved from another party. In the evening after she has gone to sleep, I kneel beside the crib and touch her face, where it is pressed against the slats, with mine. She is an open and trusting child, unprepared for and unaccustomed to the ambushes of family life, and perhaps it is just as well that I can offer her little of that life. I would like to give her more. I would like to promise her that she will grow up with a sense of her cousins and of rivers and of her great-grandmother’s teacups, would like to pledge her a picnic on a river with fried chicken and her hair uncombed, would like to give her home for her birthday, but we live differently now and I can promise her nothing like that. I give her a xylophone and a sundress from Madeira, and promise to tell her a funny story.
What can I promise? What do these moments hold?
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8 Responses to “There is an art to this”
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I am Christina Rosalie
Hello. I'm so happy you've stopped by!
I am a multimedia storyteller, digital strategist, idea starter, stalker of wonder, finder of four leaf clovers, MFA graduate student, and mama of boys. My first book,
will be published by SKIRT! Books in September, 2012.
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June 25th, 2010 @ 12:30 am
This quote cut me to the quick. All I can think about is my friend, Nichole, who died in March. She also was 39. I like to pretend that this doesn’t really happen, and that it has no chance of happening to me or my children. I can feel your terror, through the tears in my eyes.
June 25th, 2010 @ 8:44 am
Oh Meg, your comment took my breath away… hugs!
June 25th, 2010 @ 3:03 pm
less productive and more real. yes, that is who i am today. softened, vulnerable, awkward and unsure how that story is told.
beautiful, thank you.
June 28th, 2010 @ 1:52 am
That was especially poignant because Quintana was adopted. So much of what Didion wrote about California depended on her blood heritage. So the disconnect she’s describing may have as much to do with that as with the presumed fragmentation of modern life.
A lot of your writing about your kids is imbued with a strong genetic connection – in your feelings for them, in your expectations. It was that way for mine, too.
I’m wondering if we’d write or think differently about an adopted child – stripping away history, focusing on the contemporary.
I can’t even contemplate my child’s death, even at 29.
June 28th, 2010 @ 8:23 am
You know, Phil, I wonder about that… I used to think that might make a difference, especially with someone like Didion who doesn’t seem the “parent” type particularly from how she puts herself forth in the world but then I ran across a different essay in Slouching Towards Bethlehem and she wrote one line about wanting a baby that was so poignant I realized that even though she doesn’t often write or speak about motherhood, I think the experience cuts her to the quick the way it does with everyone, adopted child or no. I have some dear friends, here in the blog world actually, who have adopted kiddos and I would imagine they’d have some fierce declarations to make in response to your statement…
June 28th, 2010 @ 9:09 pm
I wasn’t casting aspersions on adoptive parenting at all, merely speculating about how the experience may be different (but certainly not lesser). It seems it would be more of a contemporary context, since you couldn’t say, for instance, that such and such was just like crazy Uncle Harry.
I saw a play version of Year of Magical Thinking last year (haven’t read the book), and it was a personal, emotional side of Didion that does not come through in the mannered prose of her works that I have read.
June 28th, 2010 @ 9:23 pm
I knew you weren’t. And I am curious too–how it is similar or different–and imagine that only those parents who have both an adoptive and a genetic child could really speak to this… As for the Year of Magical Thinking (the book) oh, it is so good. There is a momentum to it, and a vulnerability that is… I don’t even really have the words. Simply: I loved the book. Wish I could see the play–I’m so interested in her screenplays.
June 29th, 2010 @ 2:15 pm
Oh yes, let me chime in on the adoption front. My daughter’s genetic history is a big ?? in my life and I think that helps me clear my head of expectations. Of course, I have hopes and dreams for her, but her unknown background helps me understand that she is her own person regardless of what I want for her. Her childhood experience is totally different from mine. Parenting for me is very current, very right now. My daughter is creating herself every day and I am trying to give her what she needs and deserves to let her become what she will. Maybe I would have the exact same experience with a biological child, but it’s a good lesson for me to keep learning and re-learning every day. She has her own make-up, her own genetics, her own history that is different but blending together with mine. I’m watching, with great interest, to see what she becomes.