October 27, 2009

Is it possible to write in a form that is both immersed and distant, farseeing and swallowed? I am thinking now that this is what women have been attempting in the last decades. Not simply to enter the world of masculine discourse but to transform it with another kind of knowledge.
--from The Red Shoes by Susan Griffin

I think of a stone with a thumb print worried into it, of a piece of green beach glass, the edges worn soft. I think of the divots trod into the the center of a marbles staircase, of mattresses that retain the press of the sleeping one's spine, long after the person has left the bed.

My beliefs and practices, my own sense of the severe line between the public and the private are similarly worn into me. I take containers of old milk, hummus, half and half, beans and rice, stew meat, plastic bags filled with a slice of cantaloupe or head of lettuce or onion, and I dump all these things into a larger white garbage bag and twist tie it shut and drop it into the maroon garbage can in the garage--all because your grandparents, my in-laws, arrive today and I do not want them to see what has gone bad inside our house.

As you grow, we keep trying to get you to make distinctions: day vs. night, mommy vs. daddy, sleep vs. wakefulness. Similarly, I want to be able to preen you into good behavior for the arrival of these relatives. I have already dressed you in a clean onesie and a sleeper with lavender and pink flowers knit together at the breastbone. When they walk in the door I want you alert and cooing and smiling. And partly this is because I want to show you off, I want them to see immediately how perfect you are. But partly it is because I am already trying to teach you a public persona: this is how you smile big when the in-laws arrive, this is how you cover your breast out of modesty, this is how you tie a scarf around your neck so you will be taken more seriously.

But you don't know the difference yet between public and private and though you will need to figure out this division to succeed in the world, part of me is jealous that you still exist in a world where "should" is never attached to the way that you behave.

This morning I walked by where you lay in the Moses basket, your eyes flickering open and shut. You focused on me, your eyes widened, you shrieked, you smiled. The sunlight fell across your face while you nursed, turning your skin pale and translucent. You are in love with light; at every opportunity you crane your neck backward to track the glowing bulbs or the reflection of the bulbs on the painting's glass.