Artist's Date #9: Go see a baby
once i had hair + a poem for p
P’s hair has always been long which makes sense if you think about her now two decades of parenting. She has maintained, throughout all of the difficulties, a kind of solid assurance that it is worth every moment, every sacrifice. And that even the years and years and YEARS of no joy, are worth it once you start seeing your children succeed in becoming themselves in the world. She has been there for every part of their lives, through all of their challenges. She has never cut them off. She tells me this as we sit on a concrete bench, still wet from the previous night’s rain. I lay out my sweatshirt and pat on it and insist that she sit there and feel the water creep through my jeans. But it was worth it to me to hear her whole truth.
That is why she has had another child after she’s already had three - the oldest 22 and the youngest, now four months. Because she has that long of a game.
I had sent her a poem before I arrived. Something about being her cat and how I would playfully unravel her yarn of difficulty. But it was she that gave me the gift.
Have a nice haircut she said, when I left.
At R’s on Sunset I sat in the chair, in front of the mirror, in the salon that is so often empty, at least when I go, which might be the off hours. First thing on Monday, last thing on Saturday, but 6:30pm is a great time for a haircut, if you’re asking me now. Because it gets you ready to sit at a bar by yourself in the night, just to see what happens. This time, I showed R a bunch of photos, many of them like the one above, but different takes on it: as if to say do something like this, and HE DID, HE DELIVERED. Every time I leave him, I feel more and more like myself, which as a friend of mine reflected, is a tricky statement. Who is it that makes the self anyway? Am I becoming the image?
I’ve always had a bit of a feeling of protection around these things, a little reticence that I should have to show my insides on my outsides. [I] had a whole theory: ever since September 11th we’ve had to accept that our private lives are not our own and any and all intrusions, including demanding that we make our sexual preferences known - and not in pronouns but just in the general culture of identity politics - has somewhat dissolved our right to a personal life. I am surprise by this statement. It’s is strangely conservative for those that know me well. But also, I thought it held truth and I applied it to motherhood, which, in my option, deserved both a hardness and a softness and I resented having to show how hard that it was.
That’s what was happening in my brain. But in my body the opposite was happening. I lost a lot of the feminine touches that had come more easily to me while pregnant - the long hair, the long dresses, the long amounts of time I went without seeing others. I felt more and more like a bad ass for parenting so well, and at the same time felt annoyed that people couldn’t SEE that about me. Maybe that was my bad? Maybe I wasn’t showing them.
I think I was also worried - that maybe if I looked tough that people wouldn’t help me - but I have found that the opposite is true:
In the grocery story, this weekend, a man went out of his way to get me ketchup. Who even respects someone who puts ketchup on their eggs, to begin with?! But no, all I had done was take a tiny glimpse around and he ran right over, like came out of the blue, to help me with a condiment that was no longer available — to ask if, when he gave me one serving, whether I needed another.
At the rental car drop off a woman carried my bag.
I love your haircut, she said.
I love your dress, I returned
You look very stylish with your hair, said Olive, once she noticed the change.
Hey man, said the barista who quickly apologized and blamed my “rugged good looks”.
RUGGED GOOD LOOKS! Ain’t that a hoot!
So much is surprising about middle age, about motherhood, about the combination of the two. I hope I’m in new territory and as hard as it is and as beautiful as it is that both deserve equal attention.
I see now that I’ve written little about the baby. He was soft. He was squishy. He smelled good over my shoulder and he cooed and I wanted to hold him forever. This is how it feels when you hold one after you’ve had one and yours is at home.
[This was the poem]
Soon, I will go visit P, who has a new baby. I hope she talks at me. I hope she unloads all the things on her mind that it unravels in front of us that my presence pulls it out like a ball of yarn, unwinding, the big knot of it getting smaller and smaller, a kitten’s toy.
I hope to make her burden a plaything, so small and insignificant as to make it disappear. I hope when I leave it will be tiny, like a mouse, in the corner by a hole with some cheese. I hope she grows big and fat again in my absence.
I hope it remembers that quiet room where we met, where we breathed, each in and each out like its own dance; separate from our bodies but moving in rhythm. Again, the smell, the sweat, like ocean, like men’s morning soap - all of it everything and also like nothing, like no time has passed.