The truth is that you’re afraid to write. Too frightened to find that the fire has dwindled, sputtered to a dull kindling after nearly a year stuck in someone else’s mind.
You’ve been behind yourself, sunken to a space within which you’re neither woman nor girl nor maiden nor mother–just some new tangled thing.
Each day feels fine, manageable. You glow with pride at 10:00 PM when you turn out the lights and the sparkle of the city illuminates a clean room: Clorox’ed kitchen table, gentle purr of the dishwasher, cat wrung into a contented twist on the sofa, a soft belly exposed. All a reminder that you have made a safe space, a space in which innocent things can stretch their limbs and explore their edges. This, you manage, is what it could mean to mother. To create space. To hold space. To tidy space, to fix space, to fill a space with food and calm and candlelight.
You read books; you try not to focus on the endless scroll of advice; you turn off your phone. The more you read the more curious you become; the curiouser you become the more you trust the inner guide; the inner guide is still establishing herself. It’s a solo journey, it’s a lonely path. It’s questioning and revising and revisiting and becoming something to someone but you can’t tell what. You watch and modify and adjust and find a comfortable position. Prop your elbow onto a pillow so as to better hold the heavy head, the head that finds rest and solace in your arms, your arms that ache with the growing body, the body growing with nourishment, nourished with food delivered to your door (a small mercy), and milk that comes from some endless well, milk that drains your body of energy, creates energy so that a new thing can grow.
Love is not the right word. It’s worry and obsession and ferocious appetite. It’s not warm, it’s scalding. You try to hold it and it bursts forth from your hands, not meant to sit still, wriggles and squirms to the floor, crawls away with determination, looks back to find the safety of your gaze, smiles, satisfied, continues on to the thing it knows it shouldn’t touch. Here you watch: You will never be able to control it, or your feelings, or the world that surrounds this small world, the world that is determined to break in through the cracks in the windows and fill the space with doubt and anxiety, always something new to do and become and somewhere to be, someplace for your mind to wander, drilling endlessly for your attention, a sacred resource.
You’re determined to stay present; you soak up each slow minute, watch with an anthropologist’s eye so you can catch the moments of transformation, but they allude you. (“One cannot write about the soul,” Virginia Woolf warned. “Looked at, it vanishes.”) He changes without your permission or knowing, just suddenly something else, and you wonder – well, what then of me? I must, also, have changed in some way. Where did the mother of the newborn go? Or the one swollen and full of tiny limbs and bones?
In this way, you suppose, you are constantly consuming yourself, absorbing yourself through this black hole inside; making space to become everything you might ever need to be; a midnight through which life passes so as to continue on.