22 weeks. Feeling the boy move and kick is the first time I feel safe enough to bond. You never get back the innocence of the first pregnancy, but I am starting to connect to this.
My sister relapsed over Thanksgiving and my mother had to clean out her bedroom of empty crack vials, needles, and vinegar bottles. My greatest fear is that my sister will not survive to meet my son.
12 weeks. Size of a plum.
I always thought that even if I couldn’t be pretty, at least my hair would be. Cutting my hair is a declaration that I love my face, for everything it is and is not.
I have taken to using this as a diary of my young and supposedly fertile years.
Starting a new routine of swimming in the afternoons. After work, I change into my bathing suit (or what Rowan deliciously calls a “baby suit”) and swim about 15 laps in the local pool. It is harder than any other exercise I’ve ever done, and I feel completely embarrassed by how out of breath it leaves me.
I was reading an interview with Helen Mirren and she described the twenties as “the hardest age”: you are at your physical peak, your most beautiful and yet you are simultaneously hit with the most unbearable of insecurities.
I have been studying for the nursing school entrance exam. Spending afternoons going over cell biology basics and the digestive system. Inexplicably, the circulatory system is unbearable to study. I am filled with a profound and strange sense of dread while reading about valves and arteries. I hold my sternum and copy notes, feeling sick. Nothing else presents this problem.
Hot and humid lately. Experimenting with lucid dreaming.
My period came and I drove home from a friend’s house and started to cry. I remembered the first period after, and how it came with such a sense of relief and a harbinger of good health. And how every period since then has been produced at least some amount of sadness.
“For we live with those retrievals from childhood that coalesce and echo throughout our lives, the way shattered pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope reappear in new forms and are songlike in their refrains and rhymes, making up a single monologue. We live permanently in the recurrence of our own stories, whatever story we tell.”
-Michael Ondaatje, Divisadero
It was my birthday yesterday and we went out to Barbara’s house in Creekside. She is friends mostly with Ian’s parents, but increasingly I consider her a friend of our own. She lost her husband a few weeks ago. They had been married only a short time, and had built a house together in their courtship, before he was diagnosed with cancer. What happened is so sad, but it is a marvel to see her strength and fortitude in this. She is a marvel.
We spent the night on her land, setting up a tent near the platform her husband wanted to build a temple on. In the morning, we ate breakfast with her and talked about what we want to be when we grow up.
A good birthday. I feel very safe and strong.
When I found out I was pregnant, I saw it as a punishment for carelessness, arrogance that I could control my fertility. When I lost the pregnancy, I felt that it was punishment for my ambivalence.
A woman I know got pregnant 3 weeks after I did. I am consciously avoiding seeing her and have been for months. If I saw her, it would be unbearable.
Driving my sister’s car with her music in it. Her empty Newport boxes and server’s aprons. The sticker that says “ONE SHOW AT A TIME”. She’s in the hospital after trying to kill herself, after another relapse. I haven’t spoken to her yet, but this intimacy of space is breaking my heart. Oh my baby sister. How unknowable you can be.
INTERVIEWER
You have said that writing is a hostile act; I have always wanted to ask you why.
JOAN DIDION
It’s hostile in that you’re trying to make somebody see something the way you see it, trying to impose your idea, your picture. It’s hostile to try to wrench around someone else’s mind that way. Quite often you want to tell somebody your dream, your nightmare. Well, nobody wants to hear about someone else’s dream, good or bad; nobody wants to walk around with it. The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream.
