Motherdanger #1 - Under The Pale Desert Light
New Column Alert:
Motherdanger: Mythologies of simultaneous creation and destruction. Every single new thing also has loss that’s embedded inside. Untangle the two but also don’t get rid of one or the other. Accepting guest essay on each particular prompt for subsequent installments. Send work to me. Alternately, write it and share it wherever you want and please credit Art Monster for sending the prompt. OR just send me the link so I can read it. Or just write it in your journal and don’t tell anyone else but preferably not that very last option.
Today’s Prompt Self Generated Through AI Assisted Journaling - meaning I gave [insert bot name] a draft and it told me to stay in one image for a lot longer. This is the image I chose from a longer more boring theoretical essay that included words like “feminism.” And “time.” And another draft of my daughter’s birth story which I will probably be rewritting for the rest of eternity or until the last day of my life.
Prompt: Write a new fairy tale, where time gets spun into more time and then more time after that. What got made from that moment, the one in the desert when you gathered yourself up in the night and got to see all of the stars. The way that courage had come from Fancy Nancy and her curly hair. Like when she found the shell on the beach and called out for you (it’s abalone!) And then it really was.
Once I was in the desert with O., that crazy place where houses sit on uninhabitable land, and then big stretches of earth have one road running through it. It was the pandemic and it was around when the people dressed up in their ridiculous outfits and smashed up the capital and threatened others with both childhood menace and also real guns. I read about it the next day on my tiny phone, sitting in the huge living room that wasn’t mine. It was so beautiful, especially a deck which had a screened in porch and from that space the pink soft light went everywhere, inside and outside, like there was no in between.
In the bedroom there was a picture on the wall that O noticed and it hung in front of the bed. It was of something that reminded us both of Fancy Nancy and how she had camped out in the backyard under the stars. Her hair is curly and O’s is curly and the both have that great bounce and also bravado. Fancy Nancy doesn’t let anyone bring her down and god damn and so shouldn’t you.
Let’s go outside, O said, and it was dark out and I was scared of what might be out there. We went out there anyway and fuck if the sky wasn’t incredible. We could see everything. All of the dippers and all of the milky ways and just everything. It was so clear that I couldn’t believe my own eyes. We stayed only one minute and then went back inside and I could never really let that moment matter as much as it should have, or I did and it’s just hard to let that moment matter as much as it does.
People warn you all about this. I think about her preschool teacher who reminded us about how delightful is to bring parts of books to life for our kids. She asked us to try it and I did with that book about Crayons. The one where some have bad attitudes. Let’s ask our own crayons, I said, and then the total delight in O’s eyes at that suggestion. I also think about how in Palm Springs, the next day, I dragged us into the desert at night, when I was also afraid and how we waited for the sun to go down and then the road got quiet but we couldn’t see anything after that because it was cloudy.
And also how from the hot tub when we arrived I had my first full belly laugh in such a long time, when she had jumped into my lap when the jets turned on by surprise. And she was shocked that I laughed and I was so sad that she had maybe not heard it before. And also how the next day in the desert we walked for too long and I only realized what I’d done when we were smack in the middle. The trail was dusty and all the same color and the boulders became shapes like stomachs everywhere. And as the day began to turn into late day, with her on my back, I wondered if I’d taken on more than I could carry.
Being a mother is incredible in ways I never expected and terrible in every single way that I had been warned. Every time I think of this story I think - it’s right there, its right in your face. And also I get it, it’s hard to see. With those idiots everywhere and so much violence and the endless noise about who is owed what. But nobody tells you about the wonder and how to stay in it. That’s might be impossible to do but also it's impossible to me that my daughter came out of my body. It all started with something that is so hard to believe.
This morning I felt O.’s breath on my face and I thought this is as miraculous as all of the stars, all of the galaxies or worlds put together. Which does not help me manage my feelings about wanting to know everything about every one of them now. I guess I can only teach her how to feel her own breath in her own body and that’s all that anyone ever has to do for themselves. But that would mean I’d have to learn my own lesson.