Trust Yourself ... Except Maybe at 1:00 a.m.

I was honored to be included in a reading at the KGB Bar this January. The reading was recorded, and though the video was posted to YouTube quite some time ago, only late last night did I venture to watch it. I watched with a sense of fascinated narcissism and repelled shame, and I was left with a sense of dissatisfaction with my work. So I can make people laugh, big deal, so what?

An hour or so later, at 1 a.m., I was still awake and pacing in our bedroom, trying to settle the mysteriously unsettled Critter in my arms. For some reason (the YouTube video? the fact that I did not write that evening, as I usually do after the Critter goes to bed and before I begin my evening hours of paid work?) all I could think about was that maybe I should just give up poetry altogether, except as a casual thing. Give it up because ... the dissatisfaction is too unsatisfying, the longing too painful.

On the one hand, I don't give up poetry because I doubt that the painful longing would vanish if I did. Quite the opposite: through high school I freely and happily drew and painted on my own, and in college, when I no longer had time to do so, I forgot how; and now, just setting foot inside an art supply store is almost unbearably painful. Surrounded by tools I no longer know how to use, I feel an ache as though from the ghost of a limb I myself tore off.

On the other hand, I see that some part of me (my shitbird, of course) is holding me back. The last statement in Rilke's "Archaic Torso of Apollo" haunts me (and yes, usually in German): Du musst dein Leben ändern. Though I do keep changing my life and giving things up (eating meat, eating sushi, running marathons, holding a regular job, following baseball any more than casually, sleeping eight hours each night), whatever it is that must change seems to remain unchanged.

I am beginning to realize that what must change is actually quite simple and already included in my rules for being a poet: write every day, and trust the process. Like giving myself over to the breath in zazen ...

This

This is what you have been waiting for, he used to say to me.
And I'd say, What?

And he'd say, This — holding up my cheese and mustard sandwich.
And I'd say, What?

And he'd say, This, sort of looking around.

— Marie Howe, from "The Gate"

In the days after the Critter was first born, I felt as though my old life — the one in which nobody wailed day and night for the sustenance of my milk, my warm arms — was like a bird, perched on the ledge just outside our bedroom window. I felt as though a day would come when, if I opened that window, the bird would fly back into our apartment. And then one day I realized: that bird has flown, never never never to come back.

And so I let go of the past (and have since forgotten what it was like), and though I had no desire to wish away the Critter's infancy and toddlerhood, I looked ahead to the future, when he will be in school and I no longer working odd hours and late into the night. And the future seemed so so distant, and I wondered if I would survive to see it.

And then one day, I realized that I had forgotten about both the bird and my dream of the future. The Critter was napping in his room and the apartment silent but for the mysterious clicking of the refrigerator, and there I was, sitting at my desk, to one side the unmade bed and to the other side a plate emptied of all but a few crumbs from my lunch, and I was no longer planning, expecting, or in any way even thinking about being anywhere else.

Though now that it comes to mind, I must say I do like to think about that bird and imagine where it has gone — somewhere far south of here, I hope, where the ocean waters are a clear and saturated blue. Or perhaps north of here, to the mountains ...

My To-Do List

Lately I've had Ogden Nash on my mind, specifically his poem "Portrait of the Artist as a Prematurely Old Man," which hit me like a kick to the gut the first time I heard it, probably on WNYC. In the poem, Nash compares the sins of omission with the sins of commission and concludes that if you are going to sin, at least to "remember to do it by doing rather than by not doing." After all, "you never get any fun / Out of things you haven't done ..."

Indeed not. Alas, mine are the sins of omission, of procrastination, of the 4-page-long to-do list that includes things I have failed to do (or to let go of) for weeks, months, even a year or longer. Mine are the sins of the still-unwritten thank-you notes, the stacks of paper on my desk, the neatly folded shower curtain on top of my bureau (why?), the old computer equipment in a closet (including a Mac PowerBook Duo and its dock; again, why?), the boxes of clothing and gently used items for the Salvation Army piled in a corner of the bedroom, the other boxes of who-knows-what in the living room, the fans gathering dust in another corner of the living room ...

The situation has improved much since the Critter was born, at which time the nursery was still more or less a storage room for miscellaneous items and the surface of my desk was not to be found. And yet I still find myself thinking and thinking and thinking about what remains to be done. It's shitbird thinking, and it's tricky to withstand. On the one hand, I have to take care of these things. On the other hand, I must not treat the necessity of taking care of these things as an obstacle in itself. For example, while I have to get my desk clean (and then keep it clean), in the meantime I have to keep writing anyway. I must not tell myself, desk too cluttered, can't write. I must not sit there thinking and thinking and thinking about the cluttered desk during the time I should be writing. Thinking about the desk doesn't get it clean, and it doesn't get any poems written!

Traps

A long time ago, I promised a post on commitment mechanisms. At the time, I was reading Kidding Ourselves, by Rhona Mahony, who applies economics and game theory in an attempt to give women the tools to negotiate for a better deal in their marriages. For six months, I did not write the promised post. I was too busy, and I was too angry.

Why so angry? As it happens, the anger and resentment that I tend to foster against my husband (try try try though I do to let it go) has to do with the two commitment mechanisms that function with the greatest force in our family life: his studio and my working at home. A commitment mechanism, writes Mahony, "is anything that makes it very expensive for you not to do something that you want to do.... That is, it traps you into doing what you want to do." So, we're trapped: he into making art (otherwise we're paying the rent for his studio for no reason) and I into being the primary Critter caregiver.

I want Beckett to make his art. (For one thing, I have no interest in being married to an embittered ex-artist.) But his art-making commits him to hours elsewhere, in addition to the hours he spends at his job, and I want him here. Meanwhile, to what am I committed? Hours on my own with the Critter, during which I marshal us through a routine of diaper changes, meals that end up on the floor, bundling him up for the necessary daily trip outdoors, settling him down for the necessary naps, nursing and then nursing and then nursing ... and then doing most of my work at night, while the Critter sleeps, beginning with a few minutes to work on my own writing before I turn to the job, which usually keeps me up well past the time I should have gone to sleep.

Of course, this way of looking at my life is only one way of looking at my life. Yesterday, while Beckett was away at the studio, I stayed at home and passed most of the day on our bed, cuddling with a lethargic, moderately feverish Critter. I read, he slept, we listened to music, and eventually the honeyed sunlight faded from the bedroom. It is a day I will remember for the rest of my life.

How Do You Do It?

Or, Life as a Work-at-Home Mom

I work while the Critter naps and at night, after he has gone to bed, sometimes until 1:00 or 2:00 or even (two or three times) 3:00 in the morning. By then, the Critter usually has joined Beckett in bed, and so my favorite time of the day is at the end of it, when I creep quietly as I can into the bedroom, lie down, and cuddle in the darkness with my two boys. More weekends than not, I work as much as I do during the rest of the week, though I try to keep at least Saturday evening free for a Netflix video with Beckett on the couch. Between naps and before dinner is the time for grocery shopping, getting and returning library books, Music Together, playdates, and trips to the tot lot, park, or Brooklyn Botanic Garden. I make dinner, keep track of our budget and spending, and try to manage the tides of clutter that wash through the apartment. Beckett washes the dishes, takes out the garbage and recycling, keeps the bathroom and litter box clean, and (usually) does the laundry. I vacuum when I can. Piles of paperwork, bills, and who knows what else drift from my desk to the top of my bureau to the dining table and back again. My to-do list is four pages long.

The sitter comes for a few hours on Tuesdays, and now we have two full days each week at the day care center for the Critter. Friday was his first full day there. I went to the office (my client's) and called the day care center at 2:30, just after nap time. "He's eating well, slept a little, crying some," I was told. I almost cried myself. Why was I at the office? Why was he elsewhere?