The sage has come into flower, that mealy blue that is unlike any other blue flower in the garden.
My birthday coincided with the beginning of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and one of my friends brought along an apple and honey challah all plaited and darkly glossy on top, her grandmother’s recipe. We were all milling around eating, talking, arguing and laughing like mad things, when I noticed my neighbour D looking shyly at the oversized ginormous dog out of the corner of his eye and realised he is deathly afraid of big dogs. Not that he would ever say so and I should have paid more attention before now. Great Danes are gentle friendly oafs and I am more worried about my small dogs nipping someone in their girly excitement, but certain fears are not altogether rational and need to be respected. I slid my hand under the big dog’s collar and saw D relax and feel safe enough to eat a cup cake. The giant black dog just rolled his eyes at me in amazement as if he was playing Groucho Marx in The Three Stooges and yawned. How’s life, schweetie-pie?
Never again shall I use a word like h*y*p*n*o*domme on a public blog. How inexcusably naive I am in the ways of the Internet! Now I have been spammed by dozens of porn seekers and disappointed fetishists. Serves you right, schweetie-pie.
I’ve been reading all about babies on blogs this last week. Owen had his second birthday and Earthenwitch settled down with her new daughter and her other little daughter. Any day now Rachel is going to update us on her pregnancy. It makes me feel all warm and fuzzy and maternal for a childless/childfree woman. Perhaps because I brought up my younger sisters and brothers while my mother sat out on the verandah nursing endless gins and tonics, the idea of having children didn’t appeal to me as an adult. Perhaps I had some idea I was going to follow my poor mother down that long dismal path and would not make a good mother. So all my enjoyment of children has been from a [safe] distance.
When I was about to have an urgent radical hysterectomy back in 2007 and nurses were wheeling me towards the operating theatre groggy with pre-meds, a nurse came up and showed me a newborn baby, holding out the bundle out to me, her face beaming. I was about to lose my unused womb and the sight of that tiny crumpled pink face gave me a strange feeling I couldn’t name. Not loss exactly, not regret exactly, but something that made the world hollow for a moment. As if I was in the echo chamber of my own past, looking down a dim tunnel back to the turning point on some sunlit day when I decided I would never have children.
Clarice Lispector on the artist Paul Klee: “Were I to spend too much time looking at Landscape with Yellow Birds, I should never be able to turn back. Courage and cowardice are in constant play. I am terrified by this vision which could be irremediable and perhaps even a vision of freedom. The habit of looking through prison bars, the comfort of holding on to the bars with both hands, while looking.”
My blog ended up being a repository of comments about a certain AA group in San Francisco because of a few choice words I have used over the years (AA & iPod). Blogging is always surprising, isn’t it?
You never know who will do what with the words you write, so true. I’ve given up trying to get money-grubbing rehab advertisement sites to stop pinching bits of my blog to use in their marketing or linking to me with the implication I graduated from their centre. Completely unscrupulous.
What in hell was that nurse thinking?
Well, she wasn’t thinking at all. She was just excited about a new-born baby — presumably the mother was unconscious after a caesarean, and the nurse probably knew the theatre was booked for a hysterectomy but didn’t think through that at all. Most cruelty is unconscious, isn’t it?
I thought the same thing about children. In fact, my wife and I thought our combined genetics would be like Russian roulette when it came to alcoholism and depression. I once had a professor friend tell me that we needed to have children because we were both brilliant and beautiful. Not a good reason in my opinion.
Not a good reason at all — the best reason is to want children and feel you are ready to have children. But the presence or absence of maternal feelings is not a rational business and many of us have some deep ambivalence –
The only time I am ever, ever physically intimidating is when I am walking my big black dog. It cracks me up every time someone crosses the street to avoid me.
Wow, if only we could reverse some of our earlier decisions.
Further deponent sayeth not.