What's a military coup?
"Mami, ¿qué es un golpe de estado in English?
No sé.
Mami, ¿qué es en inglés?
Uhhh, (distractedly) a military coup.
What's a military coup?
I don't want you to know. "
What an unsatisfactory answer, for sure, but there are so many things that I don't want her to know. So many that she does and that I wish she didn't, I wish I could shield her from the world, I wish that bombs exploding over Baghdad were not in her repertoire of images, I wish that she never heard fighting words or angry epithets, I wish... I wish... I wish.
And still, I am paralyzed, and incapable of changing the world or myself:(, I can do nothing but pull the gauzy curtain over her eyes to make it all seem a little bit nicer than it is.
Meanwhile...
I am feeling a bit ill. It has been so long since I have been unwell, I am not quite sure if I can recognize the symptoms. I went to a birthday party downtown tonight, mi querido profe is turning 40. I wonder what my life will be like when I am forty. It seems so very far away, will I still be having these same ontological crises? Will it get easier to just be? Will I have realized any of my goals? Here's the crazy thought for tonight. When I turn 40, my baby will be getting ready to go off to college. That's nuts. I could start a whole new life and I would still be able to live it! Unfathomable. Problem is you can't run away from yourself. My dear friend Lucia, aka Diva, is 40 and having her first (and only, I imagine) baby in a few months. Her husband and she have been trying for several years but it only finally happened when we were staying with them in Anaheim. I had joked that Isabella was going to inspire her and they were going to finally get pregnant, and lo, it happened the second week we were staying there. Sometimes there are inexplicable phenomena in the world, and I have an uncanny knack for perceiving them? Maybe it was the suggestion itself that made the magic happen.
When the baby is born, I know that I will hold it and long for another baby. It is this sick twisted biological ache, and in all ways an impossibility, at times like these I will curse my womanhood. I will curse it and revel in it all the same. I think it is good that I have a child already because I don't think I would ever be ready to have children. I think that I need a wife. What? No not for the sex, although... nah. I need a wife only in the truly vile stereotypical form. Someone to cook and clean and humbly wait at home while I go off and have my adventures and do my work. I really do want to do my work. I see the professors and the men (mostly) have there happy little lives and families and the women are alone, for the most part. It seems absolutely unfair that in order to have a career it means they give up everything else. Oh, sure, you'll say, I am overgeneralizing. Of course I am, so what?
What I really want is for my inspiration to come back and to write again. I wish I could write and write and not worry about anything else. No, that would probably get old too. Romina is back from Venezuela, her honeymoon is over, and she looked so sad the other day. It was her birthday. She was 25. What do you do when the honeymoon is over? I never had one, so I don't know what the let down must feel like. Compound that with being alone in a country far from your own. But perhaps I am just projecting my own sadness onto her? I wanted to capture her in a portrait of words but I didn't. I could recall her image some day and bring it all back, but maybe the sadness won't be the same, and there will be nothing to say after all. Also, they are from the same town, they share a common language, a language of home, maybe that is what it is all about after all. I guess I will never know.
I need to take a break from telling stories, if only for my academic survival. There are only so many hours in the day and my work load has triplicated itself and at least I am doing one creative project. One should be enough, even if it isn't my *own* baby.
No sé.
Mami, ¿qué es en inglés?
Uhhh, (distractedly) a military coup.
What's a military coup?
I don't want you to know. "
What an unsatisfactory answer, for sure, but there are so many things that I don't want her to know. So many that she does and that I wish she didn't, I wish I could shield her from the world, I wish that bombs exploding over Baghdad were not in her repertoire of images, I wish that she never heard fighting words or angry epithets, I wish... I wish... I wish.
And still, I am paralyzed, and incapable of changing the world or myself:(, I can do nothing but pull the gauzy curtain over her eyes to make it all seem a little bit nicer than it is.
Meanwhile...
I am feeling a bit ill. It has been so long since I have been unwell, I am not quite sure if I can recognize the symptoms. I went to a birthday party downtown tonight, mi querido profe is turning 40. I wonder what my life will be like when I am forty. It seems so very far away, will I still be having these same ontological crises? Will it get easier to just be? Will I have realized any of my goals? Here's the crazy thought for tonight. When I turn 40, my baby will be getting ready to go off to college. That's nuts. I could start a whole new life and I would still be able to live it! Unfathomable. Problem is you can't run away from yourself. My dear friend Lucia, aka Diva, is 40 and having her first (and only, I imagine) baby in a few months. Her husband and she have been trying for several years but it only finally happened when we were staying with them in Anaheim. I had joked that Isabella was going to inspire her and they were going to finally get pregnant, and lo, it happened the second week we were staying there. Sometimes there are inexplicable phenomena in the world, and I have an uncanny knack for perceiving them? Maybe it was the suggestion itself that made the magic happen.
When the baby is born, I know that I will hold it and long for another baby. It is this sick twisted biological ache, and in all ways an impossibility, at times like these I will curse my womanhood. I will curse it and revel in it all the same. I think it is good that I have a child already because I don't think I would ever be ready to have children. I think that I need a wife. What? No not for the sex, although... nah. I need a wife only in the truly vile stereotypical form. Someone to cook and clean and humbly wait at home while I go off and have my adventures and do my work. I really do want to do my work. I see the professors and the men (mostly) have there happy little lives and families and the women are alone, for the most part. It seems absolutely unfair that in order to have a career it means they give up everything else. Oh, sure, you'll say, I am overgeneralizing. Of course I am, so what?
What I really want is for my inspiration to come back and to write again. I wish I could write and write and not worry about anything else. No, that would probably get old too. Romina is back from Venezuela, her honeymoon is over, and she looked so sad the other day. It was her birthday. She was 25. What do you do when the honeymoon is over? I never had one, so I don't know what the let down must feel like. Compound that with being alone in a country far from your own. But perhaps I am just projecting my own sadness onto her? I wanted to capture her in a portrait of words but I didn't. I could recall her image some day and bring it all back, but maybe the sadness won't be the same, and there will be nothing to say after all. Also, they are from the same town, they share a common language, a language of home, maybe that is what it is all about after all. I guess I will never know.
I need to take a break from telling stories, if only for my academic survival. There are only so many hours in the day and my work load has triplicated itself and at least I am doing one creative project. One should be enough, even if it isn't my *own* baby.
posted by ilana at 10:22 p.m.
0 Comments:
Publicar un comentario
<< Home