i think that my struggle has more to do with understanding my choice to be a mother. being a mother is a greater task than i could ask for. it takes everything of me, all the parts of me to do it as well as i like. i can do things outside of being a mom, and i do, but at the moment all roads lead back to that. the things that i am doing outside of being a mom include leading an attachment parenting group and organizing an attachment parenting group booth at a mother's day event. i also see a therapist to talk about being a mom, since my adult interaction is limited. i don't mind being a mom. i love it, it's fabulous. and i am still me even though i'm a mom. i guess i've found a career, you could say. but the struggle is that sometimes doubt creeps in. guilt creeps in. curiosity creeps in. and i begin to wonder if maybe there is some other version of my life. sometimes i feel the pressures of 70s-era feminism saying that opportunities were presented to me that i snotily declined. sometimes i feel the pressures of artisthood breathing down my neck saying that i should be progressing, growing, producing at all. at other times i realize that all of this is the stuff of life and if i were doing anything else i would be missing the real thing which is where i'm at - the purpose of the species, the intentions of my biology, to which i know that i am truly, truly dedicated. i know that despite the rhetoric, the goal of feminism was to allow for the choice, which as a culture we are only now remotely appreciating. i know that despite feminist gains that support for mothers at home or mothers at work or single mothers is decidely lacking and that the discrepancy between the pay rates of men and women is 75 cents on the dollar. i know that in order to be an artist fully, i must allow for life to feed the art. i also know how frida khalo struggled with the inertia to create, how fitzgerald felt that his earlier work was immature, and how salinger still hides in the woods. what history now tells me is that given all the time in the world (van gogh) or a hefty cocaine habit (basquiat), or the world's wealthiest sponsor (michelangelo), or some combination of the three, one can produce ad infinitum, provided one's back, or one's heart, or one's brain doesn't give out, which of course it eventually does. i am not yet 25. my world is not likely to end tomorrow. i must simply learn to accept everything in good time. i must also devise better methods for staving off all those gremlins of fear and doubt and guilt. and as an artist, for which the time will come, i must learn how to do as jack black has mastered and keep ego and critics away from my brain as my fingers type or paint or what have you. and you're right, indeed - fuck 'em.

i was wondering, do you ever feel the need for validation? because i was thinking about myself as an artist and realizing how i constantly need to be validated, whether or not i actually get it. i find myself even feeling a great pull for someone to tell me that i am doing what i should be doing, that this path that i am on makes sense regarding who i am and that it is good and right and that it is *who i am*. i feel sometimes that maybe i sold myself short in terms of art and that nothing i do is valuable and that nothing i've ever done was as great as it could be, or any good at all. and then i thought of you - and you seem so confident that what you do is good and of value and that how you actually make money, or that you make money or feel or find security is of little importance. that's the feeling i get from you - that you *know* absolutely that what you are doing is right. how ever did you get that way? is it something that your parents or community or society instilled in you? were you just born with that? did you/do you ever feel that you should be doing something better, or perhaps just outside pressure to do something more/better? i feel like i was told that i was good at so much and that i'm letting that image/idea of me down somehow, even though i know there's absolutely no real pressure to do anything other than what i'm doing. am i just overly neurotic? do i think through this too much? and why have i chosen you as my confessor (you might ask and even i ask myself)? i had this discussion with my father when he was here in february and he mentioned that everyone is surprised that i've become so "domesticated". no one ever expected that of me. i never even really expected it of myself, though it was what i really wanted. or maybe it was a cop-out. or maybe just a biological urge. but how can i reduce my love to biology? what the hell is wrong with me? why do i feel so twisted and turned about this? i speak about my life and get so tongue-tied. how do i get ahold of it, feel it, sense it, understand it, reconcile that which i dream with that which i do? where does understanding come? when do i feel sure of myself? how?

Birth Story

"it is five a.m. and the sun has charred the other side of the world and come back to us." it is five a.m. and i am stirred by a tensing in my belly, pressing on my bladder. this is nothing shocking, nothing new. this has become my life in these 15 days of delayed baby. i get up to pee, and for the first time in months, more than a few teaspoons of liquid trickles out. a lot more. i am confused. i am terrified of hoping that this is my amniotic sac sprung a leak and seeping down my leg. in my life, "maybe" always means "no". it has been 15 days since my due date. i am done waiting. i am through with hope. i am swollen from my spine to my navel with so much hope i can’t stand it anymore. we had tried every home induction and wives tale in the book to no avail: primrose oil, blue cohash, black cohash, sex, orgasms, swimming, spicy food, bouncing, nipple stimulation, castor oil, stripping the membranes, foot massage, spinal realignment, long walks and a raspberry tea leaf enema. and yet here is this trickling down my leg as i get back into bed and then another contraction. i check the clock and try to rest. in lieu of sleep, i periodically watch the time and realize that approximately every ten minutes another contraction comes. knowing that my husband has just recently fallen asleep due to a lifetime of insomnia, i let him be…

at seven, my mom got up for work. i got out of bed and went downstairs. i told her my water broke. she got the doppler and listened to the heart rate. it was fine. she asked if she should stay home. i told her to go ahead and go to work because i wasn't sure how long it would be. mom said i would have the baby today. i felt giddy. finally he was on his way. i ate breakfast and folded laundry, contractions still coming every ten minutes, maybe closer. at eight my mom left. i tried calling the backup OB's office to let them know i wasn't coming in to talk about induction.

at eight thirty, i woke jon up. he was groggy but immediately jumped up and got in the shower. i started to make the bed with two sets of sheets and the plastic cover, but had to stop because the contractions didn't let me focus outside of myself any longer. for some reason i wanted to be downstairs. i started to pace around, not knowing what to do. i wanted to get the bed made, but didn't want to go back upstairs. i guess i was afraid of getting stuck up there. i would stop and lean against the dining room table during contractions. they weren't really painful at this point, but the pressure was mounting and i had to breathe through them.

the lay midwife happened to call for my mother and jon talked to her. he gave me the phone and i had to tell her to hang on for a contraction. i leaned against the table and once i could talk again said, "okay," then told her when it was over. she said it was about 45 seconds long. i didn't know what to tell her, but she recommended that we call my mother back home. i stopped for another contraction and handed the phone off to jon because it was more work than the last. she told him they were three minutes apart. he got off the phone and paged my mom, then called the photographer, our friend sarah who was going to be there to help out and our other parents to tell them i'd started labor. my sisters, natalie and lilllian, got up and became pretty excited. they made me cinnamon toast and got me gatorade. my step-father, jim, was out feeding the animals.

i sat on the floor between the wall and the dining room table. during contractions would get up on my hands and knees and moan. i had been having irregular contractions for a week and was already dilated to three, but these contractions were more in my lower back. the pressure on my low back was becoming more painful and everything was becoming gradually and evenly more intense.

my mom got back at about 9:30 - an hour and a half after she'd left. she got my sisters to start setting up the birth pool and listened to the baby. she recommended that i get out from between the wall and the bench and go into the living room. she said to try out the bean bag chair. i labored there for a while, moaning through contractions, starting to seriously lose my head.

everyone arrived between 11 and 12:30. jan started taking pictures and sarah jumped in to do counter-pressure on my back. i got on the birth ball, leaning on jon with sarah pressing hard on my low back. mom put on the norah jones cd, which was really nice and burnt a sage incense wand. i smelled it when she first lit it – i could smell the sulfur of the match and asked what it was, but sarah and jon didn’t know what i was talking about because they couldn’t smell it all the way in the kitchen.

mom brought me a rosie the riveter shirt to wear instead of the nightgown i’d had on. natalie, lilly, and sarah kept cool washcloths for my head. natty filled up the bathroom sink with water and ice and several washcloths so they didn’t have to take the same one away to re-wet it every time. i remember she was proud of her innovation.

this is where my memory of the order of things starts to get hazy. i was in such a haze – completely in laborland. i moaned and wailed through the contractions. i tried to find positions that were comfortable and completely used jon and sarah physically to rely on to support me when i couldn’t support myself and massage me to relieve the pain. during contractions i struggled to get my torso higher to let my uterus move the boulder in my belly lower.

the norah jones cd ended and some classical music came on that was from the olympic games and i said, “what the hell is this music?” mom stopped the cd and said, “i know what she wants to hear.” and i knew that she did. she went and found her al green box set, put all four disks in the cd player and hit shuffle. i know that the music played the rest of the labor, but i have no recollection of hearing it.

they told jim to boil water for the swimming pool since we were out of hot water, which made him really excited because it was just like in the movies. i finally let my mom check me and i was dilated to 4 cm. jon and i walked around some, stopping in the kitchen for a contraction. i stood and rocked a bit, but it was harder to relieve the back pain while i was standing.

i got in the pool for a little while, which did help the back pain at first. in fact, as i was getting in, my contractions let up for a couple of minutes. at first i relished the relief, but then i started to worry that things were stalling. just then, the contractions came back full force. i went to the bathroom then came back to the pool. my mother said that my father had called. i remember thinking that i should respond to this or call him back or something, but was completely unable to do so. he called periodically throughout the day and kept my step-mother and step-siblings up to speed. they seemed to think that it took a very long time for the baby to come, but to me it went by quickly.

pressure was building inside of me and i felt a strong urge to poop. jon and i went into the bathroom. i insisted that it was just jon because i didn’t want everyone watching me poop. everyone else took a break and ate sushi that jim had brought home from his errands. jan told me later that tuesday said, “i love this part. i know she feels terrible, but it means the baby’s almost here.”

the contractions were nonstop at this point, though because of the back pain they had never been clearly defined anyway. i told jon that i felt like i wanted to crawl out of my skin. during contractions i would lean my full weight on him and make him pull on my lower back with his hands from where he sat in front of me, all while he was squatting down on his haunches. i asked him if he wanted a towel to sit on, but he declined.

my mom came in to check me, which i didn’t want her to do, but she assured me that i was close enough that it wouldn’t hurt quite as badly as before. she said i was 7 to 8 centimeters. i think that i sort of began to push there in the bathroom, but it was more because i kept thinking i needed to poop than about getting the baby out. he was moving down the birth canal, but it all felt like pain to me.

we went back to the living room, which i didn’t think i could do. i got on my hands and knees on the bean bag chair again, this time with the birth ball to lean on to help me lift my torso up higher. i think they grabbed the ball in desperation as i growled about not being high enough. i started feeling incredibly nauseous and someone brought a bowl for me to vomit in. i threw up several times and totally lost my head. the contractions were building to a crescendo and i couldn’t do anything. i was totally and uncontrollably in my body. i kept struggling to get my torso higher to allow my uterus the room to stretch, to open and push down unobstructed by my insides. i couldn’t support my own weight and started to fall asleep between contractions. everything was a panicked rush of struggling to get higher, vomiting and desperately searching for a more comfortable positioning. it was a little like being drunk to the point of sickness, falling asleep on a bathroom floor between vomiting… occasionally i'd scream as loud as i could, though it wasn’t a b-movie horror flick scream, but a deep-throated howling. i was flailing my whole body uncontrollably as i couldn’t support my weight and couldn’t stand the pain i was in.

they put me back in the pool, now completely naked (though i don’t know when exactly that happened) and i felt nauseous and flailed some more. someone said as i was getting in the pool that i was close and was bringing my baby, trying to remind me that there was a purpose to my agony and reassuring me that everything was right, but i said, “i don’t want a baby, i want an epidural.” my mom said that she had the midwife’s epidural ( the pool) and put me in the water. i said that i couldn’t do it and thought to myself how i really didn’t want to anymore. everything my body did was trying to find a way out of the situation. all my movements were frantic and uncontrolled. i kept saying i couldn’t do it, even though i knew that i had to. even as i thrashed around in the water, it occurred to me how much worse it would have been if we had gone to our appointment with the backup ob that morning and had had to go in for an induction on monday and i’d had to have the baby in the hospital. i was glad that i hadn’t been given pitocin and wasn’t stranded in a hospital bed. i couldn’t imagine how much worse a pitocin drip would have been.

mom and tuesday tried to listen to the heart rate with the doppler, but couldn’t get a good listen because of the water and my thrashing. they were able to hear that the heart rate was dropping during contractions which i was now definitely pushing through. someone asked if i was pushing, though i think they just said it out loud, not directly to me, but i couldn’t answer anyway. they tried to get me to calm down and to breathe. they had jon breathing slow and deep, in through the nose and out through the mouth for me to mimic, but all i could do was hyperventilate. i guess because of the dip in the heart rate, they wanted me to breathe deeply and slowly down to the baby to give him oxygen, so tuesday got the oxygen out and put the mask on me. jon kept breathing slow and loud and i held onto him, trying to breathe with him, but still breathing too fast and moaning and screaming and pushing. considering the feeling of it all now, i can only think that i was opening up with a capital O. i was being forced open by giant hands – pushing me open, squeezing me open, prying me open from the inside out, making room for the boulder to come out. i didn’t feel like i was going to be split in two – i felt a surging, pushing, Opening.

finally, they pulled me out of the pool (though i was there less than 15 minutes) and put me back on the bean bag, this time on my side to deliver. while in the pool, i had reached down to try to feel the head, and i did feel it, but it didn’t feel hard, it felt like a piece of fruit or a water balloon – taut, but soft. on the bean bag, i was laying on my side on top of my left arm. sarah had to hold my right leg up and i yelled at her to hold it better and higher. i pushed during every contraction and natty got a mirror for me to see the head come out. mom asked if i wanted jon to come catch the baby or stay with me by my head. i’m not sure if i actually answered, but i did tighten my arm around his neck.

tuesday described the pressure i was feeling and said that i would feel a stinging sensation from the pressure of the head, which i didn’t until it was fully crowning. they told me to push hard during contractions and they started to see the head come out. it came out then went back in a little bit through a few contractions, then tuesday said that it had stopped going back in, so i pushed as hard as i could for as long as i could, grunting and screaming. i caught a glimpse of jim in the doorway between the living room and the dining room – he was jumping up and down, clapping his hands, then he’d leave and then come back and do it again. i looked at the head in the mirror that tuesday was holding and reached down to feel it. it crowned and i felt it as it came out completely – it was a sensation unlike any other and one i could not describe with words. it hurt, but i could also feel the head moving through the birth canal and what that was like – the tissue moving against tissue, the boulder becoming two parts and releasing. the head came out and turned – sarah said that he opened his eyes and looked up. his hand was up by his head and my mother pressed to keep it from flipping up and tearing me – it was probably what caused all my back pain.

another contraction came and i pushed as hard as i could so the whole of his body slid out – first one shoulder then the other then the whole body. i pushed like a champion. he started screaming right away. they grabbed him up and placed him on my chest and i said, "it's a baby!" i kept saying over and over, “oh my god, oh my god.” then i asked what was wrong with his face, because it took me a second to see that he wasn’t just squished, but that something was wrong. my mom said, “she has a cleft, but it can be fixed.” i wanted to see what gender he was, especially since mom had said “she”. somehow we got the towel off to see that he was a boy and i think i said, “i told you” to my mother since i’d had a dream that he was a boy even though she kept calling the baby “she”. then mom untangled him from his umbilical cord (it was wrapped around his shoulder) and i was able to get my arm out from underneath me. i held him and he screamed. mom had jon cut the cord when it stopped pulsing. then jon took him and wrapped him in heated blankets.

my mom noticed that i had a peri-urethral tear, but said i didn’t need any stitches. i didn’t feel it happen at all. tuesday wanted me to push the placenta out, but i didn’t want to because i was afraid of the pain. she said it wouldn’t hurt like the baby did, so i pushed it out. she was right, it didn’t hurt as bad. aleksander manuel wlasiuk-martinez was born august 16, 2002 at about 3:05 pm, though no one thought to look at the clock the moment he was born because we were all so caught up in the moment. the first time someone noticed the time, it was 3:12 and i’d already delivered the placenta. i had inadvertently pushed for 30 minutes, then intentionally pushed for another 35 minutes.

i shook and my teeth chattered. jim brought me warm blankets from the dryer. i went to the bathroom, then came back and held him, both of us all wrapped up in blankets. my sisters brought me long soccer socks that went up to my thighs to keep me warm. tuesday gave me some homeopathic remedy for the shaking, and within fifteen minutes it had stopped. i had to be careful about how i moved, but i felt a lot better.

i took a quick shower after he calmed down, then held aleksander the rest of the evening on the couch. i was brought a glass of champagne and food. i tried to breastfeed all evening, but aleksander couldn’t get much. my mom called the pediatrician right after he was born to see if we needed to bring him to the hospital. the doctor told mom to try to look at the extent of the cleft. she also said the hospital was the worst place for him because of the germs, and called us in a prescription for special cleft nursers. my mom found me an electric pump to rent. jim went to his radio show, which he hadn't prepared for at all even though it was a special 25th anniversary of elvis presley’s death edition. my mom did a prenatal visit for tuesday who was pregnant with her fifth child, then cleaned the whole house. my dad and jon's mom came to visit. my friend amanda stopped by. she was most impressed that my toes were painted. our family friend martha came by and told us about joaquin phoenix being born with a cleft. interestingly, we had gone to see signs with joaquin phoenix and mel gibson the night before. i remembered staring at the scar on his lip the whole movie wondering what it was from.


aleksander manuel wlasiuk-martinez; august 16, 2002; 7 lbs. 0 oz.; 19.5 inches

i wish i were happier, hipper, freer, braver, bolder, friendlier, younger, wealthier, smarter, older, nicer, cuter, sexier, fitter, stronger, cleaner, messier, wiser, more awake, more active, more creative, more talented, more beautiful, more interesting, more exciting, more fun, more patient, more willing, more able, more caring, more careful, more gentle, more flexible; a better mother, wife, lover, friend, companion, artist, writer, housekeeper, woman, person, life form.

sometimes i hate everything. i have to pee right now. my son is sleeping with my husband on the bed. he's been grumpy today, but i don't think he's sick and i don't think he's getting any teeth. we went on a long walk to buy mayonaise and cinnamon swirl bread at great harvest. we saw that up close the houses need fresher paint. there were bluebells blooming in all the yards. and crocus and dafodils. one house was using a moose antler as a doorstop for their storm door. four blocks down from higgins, i realized that baby boy had dropped his bead ring. so we turned around. he was sleeping. we retraced our steps until we found the bead ring on a picket of a fence. there was an old man there with his grand-daughter cleaning out the yard. they said they found it on the sidewalk. we said thank you and took evans back home instead of beckwith. the street names are stamped into the concrete on the corners in this neighborhood. on all the corners on evans, it's spelled "evens". i thought about writing the city to find out why, but decided that since some of the corners had been replaced, it's probably been long enough that nobody knows or remembers. maybe i'm just being lazy. i had a fight this morning with my friend matt. i don't want to talk about it. i've been reading guerilla learning by grace lewellyn and i'm considering homeschooling alex when he gets older. i think i might be okay at it, but i have to learn to relax about his development. then i saw a baby who i think is younger than alex crawling and that whole being mindful about him developing at his own rate went out the window. sometimes i hate everything.

i am terribly lonely. my husband is away all day at school, teaching, learning and then once home he is away all night reading, researching. my son is wonderful, but cannot speak let alone fill the void in my day where adult interaction should be. i have not met and befriended anyone here in my new town. i've met other mothers, but have been unable to feel a connection with any one of them. i am so bored with all of this. i love my son and love the opportunity to stay home with him, but there's a limit to how much of this i can handle. my sanity may be fast escaping. that is an exaggeration, but most certainly points in the direction of the truth of the sensation. i create staring eyes in my head and sense immense disparities in experience between myself and the older mommies. actually, i think i sense those disparities between myself and everyone these days. maybe i've just become way too attuned to them. sometimes it's the age difference, or an imbalance in intellectual endeavors (be it my education or theirs). other times its parenting styles, or some other fundamental value that's not in sync. when i'm feeling especially lonely, however, it always seems to come back to my son's cleft. i remember talking to a woman from my prenatal yoga class a few days after alex's birth and asking her how her birth went. she told me about the birth and the subsequent time with the baby and how perfect it all was. her biggest problem was that she'd eaten lots of broccoli and caused her daughter gas. i couldn't believe it. i'd had a great birth with no problems, but my son was born with a defect and couldn't breastfeed and hearing about some other person's perfect life just made my skin crawl. and when i'm feeling like i just can't make any friends in this town, i remember that instance. i see women out with their babies and think of trying to make friends, but then remember that we've got a surgery coming up and i just don't have the time to invest in making friends. or i get really ridiculously down and start feeling all this jealousy. sometimes i just don't understand why i couldn't have a perfect baby (not that alex isn't perfect - he's wonderful, but a defect's a defect and i don't want him to have to go through this crap). because there are so many of them around. it seems so easy to have a perfect baby. i see them all the time. and i know that every kid has their own things that they'll have to deal with - be it allergies or trouble in school or not fitting in, or whatever. i also know that we have it great compared to what's possible. i guess i just haven't gotten to the point where i can just accept how much alex enriches my life and not be pissed off for him and for myself about the years of struggle that lay ahead. that is what i come back to again and again - that i'm really pissed off about this. i'm jealous of other women, i feel like all of this is so unjust, unfair, miserable...

the son in surgery. on tuesday the twelfth, my son went into surgery to have his lip repaired. they took him away as i fussed to keep him happy, and he at the last moment, crying anyway. my husband was hurting there, in anticipation, afraid, but i kept calm and kept everything going as it should, too obsessed with the task of making my son happy for a few seconds to bother to consider fear. but they took him away and we waited for hours, even as i was exhausted from very little sleep, i sat and talked to my mother about liz hurley's birth and she read to me from hope's edge and i drank coffee and looked anxiously at the waiting room door each time movement was made across the room. the surgery took an hour-and-a-half longer than anticipated, though we were assured that nothing was wrong. but i waited and with darting eyes, watched. finally the anesthesiologist came out and gestured for us to follow him back to the recovery room where my son was screaming as the nurses moved hands over him and the surgeon gave me his first tooth in a jar, extracted from his palate where it served no purpose severed from bone. and i started crying as they handed him to me and i didn't recognize his face and he acted so terribly terribly upset. i said to him, "i'm so sorry, i'm so sorry..." over and over, and cried, dropping tears onto his body. his eyes and cheeks were unfamiliar from the swelling and his lip and nose were for once connected properly to his face, so i didn't know who it was that they had handed me. his cries were unfamiliar from a sore throat acquired from being intubated. two shots of morphine didn't do the trick, but eventually he calmed down anyway. upstairs in the peds ward, he didn't wake up but to be bothered by nurses checking his vitals for a day and-a-half. he had trouble breathing from the swelling and the coedine and they had to affix a nipple with the tip cut off as an airway. the doctor estimated a one to two day stay. we were there four days and three nights.

i went away and had a baby. well, really i didn't go anywhere. but i was pregnant and now i'm not anymore. now i have a son and it is the most important thing i have ever done. he was born with a cleft lip and palate and that makes things harder. especially now because i moved away from my family so my husband could go to grad school and i'm suddenly a stay-at-home mom dealing with a post-partum body and little to no sleep for more than two months now, two thousand miles away from everything i know. but i am in love with my son more than i have ever been in love with anyone. and that makes me a better person. i swear it does.

maybe i will get back to blogging when i can. maybe it will provide the necessary me time and the release that i need sometimes. maybe i'll leave this here until it disappears. but i thought i'd let the world know that i still exist. if you cared to know.

i am not aching for understanding as perhaps i once was, when i was younger, full of the need for attention. i do not long for the eyes of some other to come evaluate my being. i write here for no other reason but to write. perhaps somehow to share insights or fears, or merely to offer up the commonality of existence and understanding of one's self, or at least the common search for that so hidden in our own brains and typing fingers, yet so exposed by that very continuation of our existence. i do not stretch my fingertips so fiber-optically for your entertainment, or for your enjoyment. i do so for whatever reason - perhaps i myself do not understand. i write because it is in me to write. i write of myself and all the aching detail that includes in brain and in heart because that is what i know and that is what must be gotten out. why expose it here, in false ink on virtual pages? fuck if i know. i am a journalist of my own life. some people somewhere once enjoyed seeing the words that i so carefully or not extracted from this head and placed onto pages, and it seemed thus appropriate to continue with the providing of it. and i leave here for three months merely because i don't know what the hell else to do. i have so little of the passionate left inside of me and everything i read or see scares me half to death for the thing growing deep in my belly. i am huddling within myself, perhaps cowering. and my hormones and all their changes are making me tired all the time. i am too tired to think honestly about what i feel. and i have a life and a future and a husband outside of the web that deserves whatever emotional insight i can offer so much more than the three people who on occasion glance at this page. i need all my strength for my life just now, and i don't have anything left over to talk about. i could stand here and tell you, if you cared, how terrifying the world is just now - how everyday the news scares me so much i cannot spend the time to think on it - how all the changes happening to me and without me and inside of me are confusing and terrifying in their own right. i do not know just now how exactly to view myself and my life as everything is changing slowly and suddenly. i am indeed terribly self-indulgent, spending all this time thinking of myself, writing of myself, posting myself on the internet. but as i said before, i write because i have to and i write about myself because it is the one thing i am constantly dealing with and the one thing i am at all good at articulating. i always thought, somewhere deep inside, that if we all spent more time contemplating ourselves and our actions - particularly outside the realm of religion or psychoanalysis - that we'd maybe come to deeper understandings of ourselves and our actions and how precisely they affect everything in the world around us. i am trying very hard with all of this contemplation and blathering nonsense that i type in furious monologues onto the computer screen to come to some state of thoughtfullness, wherein i might be more gentle with myself and others; wherein i might know how to be more fully human and somehow serene; wherein i might achieve a peace with the world unguarded by human arrogance; wherein i might come to have my actions more correctly reflect my intentions. i am trying to perfect myself, and i arrogantly thought that perhaps a few people might gain something from my experience and my journey.

there are moments when i feel happy and alive and well. then there are moments where my heart feels heavy with the sorrow of nothingness and i can do nothing but fear my future. i am incapable of articulating that which i feel. i do not have the language for the weight on my thoughts, that thorn in my side. i do not know how to identify, change it, extract it. i can only sit back and wait patiently for the moment to pass or cry and fall asleep. i am no longer lonely with my self, stuck here. i keep myself busy then grow weary and sleep. irrational fears creep in then subside once i've voiced them, float away to wherever thoughts go when they die, become ghosts, still existing yet without importance or weight. i've lost touch with that thing inside me, that worm wriggling, that soul, life, love. i forget it's there yet do not. i am weary from worry. and yet for the first time in my life i cannot worry. i cannot worry about what will happen when i labor. i do not worry about the outcome of the birth. i merely understand the possibilities and allow them to exist outside my brain where they belong. and yet there are other anxieties. they come from nowhere, spring up like ghouls. i am haunted by my own thoughts. they neither stick nor disappear, but float around my brain in undefined shapes, fluttering occasionally to grab my attention without ever fully revealing themselves. i am trapped by smoke and mirrors in my own head. there is an inability to say what it is for the shape is never certain or defined. i am merely saddened, then empowered. then i merely exist, feeding on myself, the thing in my belly holding up my life, supporting it by making my life it's slave. and all these terrible things that come out of my head are stuck here, always, floating and swimming in brain fluid or in amniotic fluid and swallowing me and not letting me drown in the process. and though this has the look of horror written all inside it, i am generally happy, contented though uncomfortable and wallow only when these things attack me - and they do so without warning. perhaps as things of this nature always have. crippling fear and unsubsiding sadness. then moments again of calm and of blue skies. i am myself indefinable, uncertain, unknown, random, expressed by the unseen.

taking a sabbatical from the internet. please pardon my absence.

fear creeps in. as surely it must do, that which is not sure, uncertain, born of confusion and doubt comes and overtakes the brain for seconds at night, while reading. how is it that i let it? why must i eat away at myself, my insides full of all the emptiness i sense, crashing uncertainty into uncertainty and building into a nothingness in me, an absence of me, of action and how to be. for it is always the same question that i am asking and staring at self in mirrors, doubting it, wondering which failure comes quicker and how will i let my life be eaten alive by my life, the things i must do? it is not the mundane that i fear consuming me, but rather it is the mundane i rely on when i cannot rely on my dreams. and how will i be able, when the time comes, to cope with everything my life has become and all i must do - the squeezing of soul out of soul - and how can i muster love and sureness in the face of all that i've never been or done? when others tell me i am capable because i am stubborn, because all of us are capable, i do not believe them. i do not trust that which i cannot see. i am afraid, terribly so. i do not know how to force myself into shadows. i do not know how to become that which i adore, ultimately, but am uninformed of, do not necessarily recognize by sight. i do not know how to overcome myself to become myself, that shadow indeed, that pedestalled and glorious monument of myself in the future, its arms wide open and its face smiling. i am not that me. i am deathly afraid of that me. i know not how to overcome the obstacle of myself to become fully myself and to sell myself after to strangers. in truth i am not motivated enough. i am too lazy. i lay here on my back all day with stomach churning, wishing merely for it to stop and yet not taking the walk that was recommended and having trouble swallowing that which will attempt a calming. and instead of using my time of nothingness, and of misery in order to sit still here in front of the computer, concocting my future and my dreams into words on the page, typing my fears away, i sit still in bed, waiting for the moment to end. but nausea lasts longer than a contraction. i'm working on over a week here. and so too, i do not want for that to occupy the thoughts on the page, so why not just avoid writing altogether? why not simply never work towards that which i most want/fear? why not become merely a shell of myself, incapable and undesirable, mothering and nursing and crying all day long? i will instead huddle in corners, fear everything, be nothing and amount to very little. i will live the life of my title character, created from past and present and friends and smoke, and eat each sleeping pill one by one, stomach filling and spinning wildly, upset by convictions finally mustered for the worst possible task, and die miserably and self-righteously and selfishly and all that. i will instead hate myself not for not doing what i want, but for accomplishing the very opposite, the destruction of myself, the tearing down of all ambition, and the swallowing whole of hope. what beautiful pictures i paint, polar opposites of one another, and i, believing neither to be really attainable, sit in-between straddling dreams of one and the fear of another (or perhaps dreams of another and fear of one), walking nowhere, achieving nothing, and endlessly bitching about it all.

there are only two things that i think about all day: the baby and art. and yet here, i've nothing at all to say about the latter, as it is the baby that occupies my dreams and upsets my stomach. it is the baby that is becoming, ever-so-slowly, yet surely indeed, an overwhelming force in my life, something to consume everything that came before it. all we talk about is the baby and its names and its things that it will need. we call everyone we know to tell them of our news. i take prenatal vitamins and eat six times a day. we read books about the baby and keep a journal about the baby. we know its size and the shape it should be taking. sometimes i talk to the baby, though it has no ears. all my flesh becomes tender and my dreams are taken over by the baby, by my belly, by labor and nursing. i dreamt that i was nursing the cat. i dreamt that i went into labor and spent three hours filling out paperwork. i dreamt about shopping for clothes for the baby. the only thing that i have actually bought for the baby to date, is a halloween costume in the shape of a chicken. my mother thinks this says something about me as a weirdo, or me as a person, though i'm not sure precisely what. jon runs my diet so that i eat beans and lots of dairy and raw vegetables and fruit. we differentiate between good fat (nuts) and bad fat (beef). we check salad dressings and other condiments for sugar and sodium content. at the grocery, we buy low sodium, fat-free, organic soups in cans and ginger ale to calm my stomach. i wash my hands every time i play with the cats. i lay down on the floor carefully, to avoid injury to anything. i wear sensible shoes everywhere i go. i carry bottled water and sunflower seeds in the car for a snack. we looked at the baby section in the store the other day just to window shop. we looked at swings and car seats and plush toys and onesies and receiving blankets. jon was confused as to why everything was pastel. we laughed at the baby clothes encrusted with pro and college football insignia. we examined diaper bags and changing table pads. we saw babies in strollers and babies in shopping carts. every time the phone rings, i talk about the baby. every christmas card that comes says something about the baby. so instead of my life taking on the shape of the writer, with me writing furiously and hysterically, my life has taken on the shape of the pregnant woman. mi es embarazada. i am hysterically and fervently considering the welfare, the future, the present of my baby. it is all that there is here, just now: baby, baby, baby, baby, baby. i am not, however, particularly upset about this. i must simply find a way to return to normal. i must figure out how to become accustomed to myself as the pregnant woman without defining myself as such, without limiting myself to the title.

jon and i are reading great writers and at the same instant, reading about great writers, and we are finding that it is impossible, yet not, to be in their company, and yet here is jon telling me that i should write everyday when i get up in the morning and make it my full time occupation, so that i can hope to achieve, one day, the company of steinbeck (the aforementioned great writer that jon is reading about), with all his honesty he was reaching for, and evidently found, and then with salinger (my dear favorite) with all his mystery, and again too, honesty. how else do you describe a clarity of emotion in literature? salinger is truly amazing in his achievements. the great american writer among us, it's surely true. certainly of the latter half of the twentieth century at least. his achievements - like i said, clarity of emotion in literature, yet without the bogging down of a literary style. there is an absence of modesty, yet an absence of arrogance as well. there is a straightforwardness, a directness about the literature not weighted down with literature. and surely i cannot ever hope to achieve these heights - my honesty is me only. there is no clue into a childhood or out of it here, merely a mentioning repeatedly of the problems of the artist as such and the striving for and the reaching to of greatness, of some hallmark of achievement. there is no mention made, however, of the path, merely the struggle itself. and shouldn't i, the artist, be trying to articulate the path, the paragon of being human? isn't that the ultimate goal? does there need to be an ultimate goal at all? am i not a supporter of the hallmark of storytelling? haven't i always believed in the straight story, as it may be, with it's tiny twists and turns and the absence of arrogance, the straight story more valuable than a encyclopedia of anecdotes, but a story - just a simple, straightforward story. i believe in these stories. i am an advocate of these stories. it's just i've no idea of how to tell them. i know not what the story is. i have no method of pounding it out when i do not see the future in the eyes of these characters, when i have not lived a life filled at all with much of anything, let alone something worth writing home about. what haunts me? the process of my journey haunts me. the journey itself. the end of this journey. i've been frightened of death all my life. how can i write about that? what is there in it? no, don't answer, i'm sure i'll find it on my own and as i make mention of the tiny things that plague me, i'm certain i'll find my own answers hidden in the questions, just as i may have already done. if you ask the correct questions, in the correct, accidental order, you'll find your answers hidden inside yourself. it's almost always true. certainly in matters of the heart, or matters of the obvious, as the case may be. i find it to be true all the time. once i start talking about something, out loud or on paper - once i start to articulate the problem of my heart, the confusion of my brain - everything suddenly clears and i find in my explanations the truth that was hidden from me, i usually articulate exactly what i wanted to know, without needing any input at all. which again brings us to psychology and why it is a crock of shit - because if we just laid on couches in our own living rooms and talked out loud about our problems, we'd probably eventually find all the answers we ever searched for right in the creases of our tongue and the forming of our lips. psychologists merely usher this process along by asking those correct questions in the correct order. all of the answers to your confusion lay behind the mask of the obvious, the costume of the apparent. you are responsible for your own unburying, just as i am responsible for my own greatness.

painting yesterday was about archaeology and psychology. the concept of digging through one's soul to find oneself. where did i bury me? which ghosts of my former selves come back to haunt me? and i find words suddenly pouring out of my paintbrush and they are asking questions and pointing out the varying aspects of how we think of ourselves - ghosts of yourself, yourself of yourself, paleontologists of yourself, then graveyards and death wishes and brain traps and everything spinning and forming the abstract notion of time suspended in the head - of whatever it is i deemed it to be and now having created this concept out of imagery with these hands and the choosing of colors. and i realize how dark my imagery is while i am so happy, so inexplicably so, so unfathomably so, yet true nonetheless - and i am wondering where it all comes from, and as i'm wondering, i'm recording the process and it's only coming to me in snitches of verbal imagery about pterodactyls buried beneath the earth and in my head there may very well be graveyards. in my head there may very well be graveyards - and that is the concept i am reaching for and trying here and failing to explain. which is perhaps why paintings deserve no words. which is why psychology is such a ridiculous profession because it's all filled up with guesswork about the abstract and the cyclical. perhaps only mathematicians could ever say anything truly interesting about the brain and of course if you're an artist you'll always believe that they've gotten it all wrong. so suddenly, here, on the page, zha seems to be as completely off his rocker as i may now sound to you, dear reader, for he thinks he can map it all in some sense or at least attempt the explanation that i am failing so rapidly to merely preface. most days, it is the concept of me as an artist that i address, and very rarely if ever, the art. yet today, it is the art and i am finding with extraordinary rapidity, that i should perhaps stick to my former subject, regardless of how you may tire of it, because i am much better at expounding upon the turns in my head about myself than i am about that which comes from me because honestly, i do not know from where it comes, i am unaware of why i pick the colors i pick when i am painting or sometimes where the poetry is coming from, each line, fragment, watercolor... i can only say that there is a process that occurs between me and the page, wherein a dialogue goes on and the white of a canvas tells me where to uncover the brushstroke, and the ugliness that was there is wiped clear with color. with language and with color, texture, visual metaphor, there is an element of the dreams that i have, or images of what the figures themselves would do, and i throw them in the mix with no explanation and leave the audience to get a sense of a scene rather than to tell them directly everything i intended. i believe that art is for the audience; that it is the audience who should accept or decline an artist's invitation into dreams, and that when delving in whole-heartedly (as when reading a novel or staring, unblinking at a painting), it is the audience's dreams that will be reflected. that is not to say that it is the audience that i am thinking of when i am working, but it is the audience who ultimately handles the work in the landscape of their minds and hearts, and thus, it is always theirs for the having.

blink of an eye. my universe changes by seconds and i am stuck, wrapped in and warped by my confusion, seas of possibility outstretched and contracted again. my body alters and morphs itself, aching, abdomen coursing across muscles and thighs sore and again confused by their ache. my head gets fuzzy. i am out buying books and health food and i am restricted now from everything. and all of this is more than pleasing and more than fabulous because that thing inside, growing, is mine and filled with and created by my love. seven-and-a-half months from now, i will be a mother. and i am thrilled by this endeavor. i am ecstatic by this twist in the story of my life. and suddenly, i am no longer planning my life, it is no longer held suspended in the abstract notions of what the future will look like and how i want things to grow or be in my house or out of it. suddenly, my life has planned me and my life is now being lived by me and will from now on be that thing that i do and not some concept hung in my head by starlight. suddenly it is a waste of time to think here, "what will it all look like?" "what will it all be?" no. now it is. and now i have things to do and responsibility is claiming me by the throat and i am going willingly. now i will do what i have to do to engineer my dreams, because without my hand directing the traffic of my life, like god reaching through clouds, it will not go in the way that i had hoped and the dreams will not take the shape of their making. instead i will get stuck and grow fat with the laziness of destiny-making. i must do that which i want and love if for no other reason than to not be one of those people who wishes they had pursued their artistic dreams instead of becoming merely a mom. i will not regret my life or my motherhood. i cannot let that happen. i cannot let that be the example i lead by. i must instead utilize this opportunity to see through the eyes of my child and be myself the child i once was, only now with the responsible mom in me clinging to my side. i must take chances now for me and the life we've created (even if it is just a fetus, non-viable outside the womb). i must now do what i dream and become me as i am, me as my potential embodied. i must read the tao to understand my life as it is, and grow by leaps and by bounds. everything i've ever wanted is now coming to me at moments in my history when i was most certain of how my future would look merely because of the convictions of my statements. i am ready for my future and to be me as i am now. i am no longer waiting for anything.

sitting on the painting in the cemetery eating sushi. overlooking the city and questioning everything anyone's ever said about me and feeling, once, now able to write, yet having not written. now taking a vacation. me and my husband drinking beer and playing video games. it is not quite the image of me committed to writing as i'd held, but we are now just resting in preparation. and strangely enough, i can say, for one brief moment perhaps, but surely nonetheless - i am happy. i cannot explain it - perhaps it is the friends in the park with the sushi overlooking downtown who give me strength and give me the courage to hold tight in my fist and to run with far into my future and my dreams of me in it or just my dreams of me as they might be sometimes. it is my friends who push me to "engineer my dreams". my friends who force me to believe if however briefly, that i am capable of all that i imagine. that i am capable of being me fully embodied, that i may be now in fact me to my fullest, me embodied, me bottled in me. me as me, as nothing less than all of my potential. i am a package of anna kiss. i dreamt last night of celebrities and telling them "hi, you may have heard of me, i'm anna kiss - would you like my autograph?" they thought it was funny. i'm not sure if i was only kidding or if i'd expected them to reply in the affirmative, that yes, i am anna kiss, and wow, aren't they impressed. my sleeping dreams are as ridiculous as my waking ones.

that once pedestalled comes to me now as putty, unsure and unwilling to go forward or backwards and leaving me to interpret spaces between sentences in not-so late night e-mails. the familiar exists in both the brain and the heartache, the arrogance once so claimed as surely nothing bigger than mere pride, the confidence - now comes, and it is realized that it is tiny, it is fruitless and made up entirely of the empty - that arrogance is combined of confusion and self-loathing and it is claimed to merely go on. and i have seen this in you before, i thought, surely, we must be the same and i am so much of nothing, and here you come to me and it is true. we are filled of the same eyes and the same hands and the same ambition and constant disappointment sprung out of fear. how does one jump off cliffs exactly? how does one commit oneself fully to the starving and the dying role of the artist and terrorize one's brain to extract the comment, the image, the glimpse of heaven embodied in a snail shell? and the question looms at each intersection of what is true and what is merely inevitable and how does one associate oneself with the fame one seeks while simultaneously realizing and holding tight to one's heart the truth that we know - that it too is empty and all filled up with confusion and self-loathing. even that which we seek is corrupted and where, then do we fit in, where do the van goghs and the basquiats fit in? we now hold them in history. they are only valuable in their absence. and it is their insanity by which we measure their genius. and somehow, that feels familiar. so, the question, again, how do we objectively judge ourselves and know of ourselves our ability to create and for it to be meaningful and to not drink ourselves to death in the process? where has the passion to go on existed without the company of misery? is it then possible to commit this brain to that objective beyond all illusions and pretenses and beyond the necessity for clothing or cars, beyond the necessity of love and of some semblance of stability, beyond oneself, one's recognizable self (clothed too, in counterfeited personality, yet with some reasonable depiction of normalcy), beyond all that one knows is the world existed, this reality, to fully envelope oneself in what is potentially, and with some measure of probability, assuredly fatal? is it reasonable to venture into the unknown and live to tell about it? and, to the point, is that your question? or is your statement merely that it is terribly frightening, it is unbelievable and you hate and adore everything and nothing and long, with every fiber, to experience it as both, for the later purpose of extraction to fling, to float, to place onto the page or onto the blank canvas. life is lonely. we want to exist in our worlds and to not exist in our worlds. we want to prove something to ourselves, to prove something to the world - that we are comprised wholly of the insatiable and the magnificent, the creator damned to his own life. and yet i feel that i am missing the point entirely because my words are incapable of cupping this idea in them, of conveying the point of the story and the outcome of the misery of the creative energy of worlds destroyed and built again. your brain as babylon. and so too, your heart. it is an essential aspect of the balance of the universe - that you, capable of such dizzying highs, are brought, here to your spiraling lows where everyone you know is a stranger to you and every word they utter, a lie. here, now, you've touched insanity, how then to escape and be again what you love? no. how then to make use of it for it is inescapable? perhaps. where did you go? what self was it that was not you? here, you feel again yourself, though it is comprised of everything terrible about you. and left is no initiative to accomplish anything. which direction do you turn? which way, which path, which dharma is yours? what precisely are you intended to do, because nothing at all is fulfilling, so wouldn't it then be simpler for someone to tell you? wouldn't everything be easier if you had a patron who demanded of you, whip in hand, to paint all day? wouldn't your role as an artist then be clear? how does one become everything one desires precisely when, in one's head, one is not at all anything like what one desires most to be? remarkably, one is stupid and terrible and worthless, not at all the greatness embodied by one's dream. i am then a walking paradox. i would like very much to own a quiet cabin in the city, where i might feel at home finally, my surroundings built to be like me, the structure formed for it's precise purpose, holding an expressive quality that describes what it's intended to house: an irony. i am a contradiction. i want nothing more than to be a housewife with children climbing all over me. i would like no less than to be a great artist, to be the writer i may or may not be capable of. my words are phenomenally powerful for saying nothing. i alternate between, and at times, exist simultaneously with the notions that i am tremendous and i am damned. i am always busy building myself up and tearing myself down again. i should be hanged for betraying myself. and so often the words escape me to tell you, to say to you, as i cannot say to myself, how beautiful your work, if you would only work, how phenomenal your photograph, how incredible that phrase, and each sits, quietly in the museum in my head, bathed in moonlight and dedicated in your image to the canals of history. i am a fan if no one cares, or if you do not even care, and sometimes i know that you think the same of me, that you are the reflection of me without the constant doubt and without the paralysis. so then, why is it that you are left incapable? you cannot leave me with the belief in hand, hanging, confused, stunned expressions on my face that all is lost because you have changed your mind and gone irrepairably insane, and i might lose you to it. you cannot tell me you love me and trust me in silent sentences and not go forward with what i associate you to be. if you do not soon return to the habit of "fuck everything", then i will not be able to accomplish it myself. i need inspiration inside of me from outside of me in order, that i might do, that which i dream - the jumping off of cliffs and the abandoning of compromise. i am here, and poised with recklessness, now on my count, you go first.

seconds tick by as i read the excerpt of michael chabon's book on amazon, and i am waiting, desperately waiting, to plunge myself into this world, to be what i want most, and to be done with this with which i am exhausted. i am waiting to return here and to see my life before me as something other than a series of deadlines and a continuum of futility. i am waiting to comment on it, to have something to say about my own existence, to have observed something of note in my day, to have felt as though i have learned something worth the reiterating or worth the application of to my life. i would like to see something stunning, here, in the world, and to feel it in my chest. i would like to not feel so useless and counterproductive. i would like for my fingers to have something better to do than to write papers on subjects i find mildly interesting at best and typically, merely trivial. i would like that rather than memorizing slides of art in a dark room, that i go to view art. i would rather participate in art. i would rather have art in my life from the perspective of an artist, where the analysis is about the soul rather than about the allegory. i would rather not formulate sentences precisely to get the best possible intent of out the most possible words to increase the length of the page. i would rather be writing from my heart than from my ego. i would rather learn about and formulate how to be that which i dream than to scribble as quickly as a professor can speak, postulations on the nature of learning or dreaming or being. i am ready and waiting for my life to begin to be again my life. i am ready to take again the helm and to exert some control over my own destiny. i am learning as i go. i am done with learning the path that i might one day view it.

i am paralyzed to create by the necessity to study. i am required to be writing papers instead of poems and on three by five note cards rather than in my journal. i must study for exams rather than create studies for paintings. i am very much looking forward to next week. in a matter of days i will be able, finally, to concentrate on that which perhaps i've been procrastinating and that which perhaps i am a little fearful of committing to, but it will be required by the threat of my own guilt to focus and to commit myself to a life of being, finally, myself, the writer, this person, writing. in a matter of days my new occupation, my new full-time job will be to write. my new station in life will be to explain in words that which i am and that which i've created and how it all happens, each day, every night, all over. my new persona, will be a writer, staying up late and thinking constantly about my characters and what their motivations are, will be, have been in the past. i must spend all of my time now plotting and replotting the path of point a to point b and possibly back. my new office will be in front of the computer or outside on sunny days drinking hot liquids (because it should get cold at some point soon, i'm assuming) and writing furiously, writing manically, writing fervently, writing infinitely, writing perfectly, writing absurdly, writing squiggly, writing sheepishly, writing impressively, writing impassively, writing murderously, writing egotistically, writing narcotically, writing eagerly, writing zealously, writing enthusiastically, writing creepily, writing suspiciously, writing wrongly, writing rightly, writing justifiably, writing writing writing writing writing!!!