inkgrrl's inkblog

I seem to be doing nothing but reposting emails I’ve sent to people the last few days. I also reconnected with Jane, my friend Anne’s mother, who is one of the most fabulous women I’ve ever known and is an icon of motherly goddess goodness in an Auntie Mame kind of way. Growing up, she was one of the few people who totally got me, and even when she possibly (or probably) didn’t get me, I was always under the impression that she did, so the net effect to my self-esteem and sense of okayness was the same. And I really needed that. As do we all in those tender and raw teenage years when we haven’t quite begun to evolve out of the larval stage of potential humanness. Anyhoo, she’s one of my all-time favorite people and a wonderful point of light in my life that I don’t orbit closely enough to very often.

Once and again, I’m having all kinds of issues around growing up type stuff. Mind you, I’m in my early thirties, so according to most human societies, it’s kinda time… but one of the lessons I learned from my own mother is that it’s never to late to grow up some more, and we never stop growing up, meaning evolving and becoming more wonderful and compassionate shadow bohdisvattas and being kinder and more enlightened and willing to hold onto less of our fears as a means of defining ourselves.

That whole thing with getting pregnant that freaks me out is really just fear of various flavors. Anne was my last peer-group bastion of elite feminist womanhood who’s something close to the end of being ABD with a PhD in History or Women’s Studies or something combining those two that I need to get the details of, so I guess if she can get knocked up it must not be such a bad thing. But I was pregnant twice and neither time did it go well, and the first time I almost died (ectopic + macho + denial = critical blood loss) and even if the embryo attaches in the right place and they don’t have to slice it out of me and render me infertile, at the end I’ll still wind up in the hospital and there will be blood and pain and needles and possibly slicing and maybe extreme nausea ‘cuz I can’t tolerate 99 percent of the pain medication out there without ralphing and then I’ll have this little lump of admittedly wonderful flesh entirely dependent on my bruised and battered flesh for goddess knows how long and what if I get writer’s block ‘cuz I’m too exhausted to be creative? As if there will even be time anyway… well, there will be time. I operate best under extreme pressure.

Oy.

I’m currently desperately seeking examples of successful women writers who were and are also participating mothers. I know that to create and nurture another person is a major, hell, the biggest responsibility that any of us can ever have, and the folks who are good at it tend to put themselves and all their needs second to the child’s (note I said needs, not wants – the kid’s desire to play really loud in the house will ALWAYS be secondary to my need for my home to be as peaceful a place as possible) and I wonder if I’m still too selfish to give that much of myself to another person. On the other hand, I have a tendency to deal with my fear of falling from heights by jumping off things – but I don’t want to bring a kid into the world just because it scares me. What if I suck as a mom? What if I’m trying to write and the kid needs something and I snap and commit emotional frottage and give it a trauma that it needs 50 years of counseling to get over. My issues around my parents are the one-to-many things I’ve never dealt with in therapy… gee. I mean, it’s okay to have baggage – everybody’s got some, but that doesn’t mean we have to thwap others in the face with the Samsonite all the time. I really don’t want to take my own childhood traumas out on my kid. And no, I don’t believe that simply because I worry about it, I will therefore be a good mom. That’s what Freudian therapists make all their money off of – conflicting neuroses.

The flipside of the growing up and reproducing thing is my continuing formal education, or rather, lack thereof. I am currently two, count ‘em, two units away from the Linguistics degree (gotta rebel against something, right?) and the only way to complete that is to go back to my old thesis advisor and either pry my original source tapes out of the back of her closet where she probably stashed them unless her kid fed them to the dog, and redo all my analysis, or start over with an entirely new research project. On the bright side, I’m about 40 units away from an English degree, should I decide to go that way. Hmmm… and if I do English, or Ling, I could then go into an MFA program that squishes me into commercial literary fiction writer shape so that I can fast-track it to a couple of speaking engagements a year and then a Pulitzer, culminating after a sufficiently advanced body of work in a Nobel. Oh boy – it’s good to have fantasies.