I think the toddler has stopped crying.
I say that I think he has stopped because he was sobbing just a minute ago, after being put down for a nap, and once he starts I can’t stop hearing it, even when the wails grow lackluster and gradually fade into silence. The sound—or rather, the memory of it— colonizes my head, lodging itself in a corner, thrumming with just enough persistence to make me doubt the honesty of my senses.
But it’s rare for the the toddler to fuss when I’ve put him in his crib, and when he does cry, as he did this afternoon, he typically falls asleep before too long. Hopefully that is the case today. Anyway, now you’ll feel a touch of suspense as you read this newsletter — will I be able to finish writing it? We’ll see! How fun!
As most of you know, I’ve generally been sending these newsletters after I have a new publication or two to share with you. Alas, I don’t have any additional RVC reading material for you today, although I hope I will soon. I’m still waiting for my Oscar Wilde essay to run, and I’ll be eager for people to read it when it does.
Today I’m writing in an effort to drag myself out of something Kate Zambreno refers to as “the vortex.” As she explains in her gorgeous new book, The Light Room, it’s a term invoked by one of her friends to describe stretches of time where the labor of caretaking becomes maximally and overwhelmingly encompassing. Perhaps your child is home sick, and like Zambreno, you’re caring for them while working multiple remote jobs. Perhaps you are sick too. Or perhaps, as is so often the case, there’s no acute stimulus, but instead a confluence of tiresome quotidian responsibilities and aggravations that erode a person’s energy until it’s impossible to think, only to react. During these days or weeks, time loses any consistency or logic. “I don’t understand anymore the texture of time,” writes Zambreno, describing how her older child has grown since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, “Is it solid or permeable?”
I am not exactly in the vortex envisioned by Zambreno and her friend. For one thing, I’m writing this newsletter. (Still! Let’s see if the toddler stays asleep.) I’m able to text with friends throughout the day. And this weekend, I’ll have the opportunity to do things besides change diapers and fix meals that my small, capricious gremlin may or may not consume, depending upon his present fancy.
Still, my weekdays are currently a bit isolating. I’m mostly at home by myself with the toddler, without access to a car or nearby train station (We could schlep to the bus and take that to the metro, but it’s not especially reliable, and the temperature is too hot to keep a small child outside indefinitely.) Anyway, the logistics of my situation are boring, even to me. They have, however, established some fraught conditions: I’m home alone with someone who mostly communicates with monosyllables and, when he deems it appropriate, petulant shrieks. Tiny hands fling books off shelves, rendering our small living space a bibliographic wasteland. And with the exception of nap-time, I am required to exist in a state of hyper-vigilance in an effort to ensure that the toddler does not devise some new way to imperil himself. The thing about toddlers, I’ve realized, is that they are both id-driven and largely devoid of self-preserving instincts. Oftentimes, the cumulative results are chaotic. They are also exhausting.
Maybe one could think about it as a kind of phenomenology of parenting. Not only must I pay attention to how my body moves through and interacts with space, I have to do the same for my child, anticipating where his little legs are taking him, or what object he’s about to pick up to inspect, or whether the item he popped into his mouth was actually a Cheerio, or or or—. Early into new motherhood, I experienced this phenomenon in such a comprehensive way that it basically constituted ego death. I recall standing in the shower, idly searching my cheek for a blemish until I realized that said blemish was on my infant’s face, not mine. Now that’s he’s almost twenty-one months and weaned, the toddler and I are not so inextricably enmeshed; I know where one of us ends and the other begins. But I must watch him so closely that it feels akin to inhabiting a second body, one I’m always trying to intuit and, above all, keep safe.
This is all to say that I’m feeling a bit blurry around the edges these days, as if I can’t quite locate myself in this caretaking landscape. Sometimes there’s a strange kind of pleasure in that. Here’s Zambreno again:
“I once read an essay by a writer who didn’t want to be a mother because she didn’t want to become a landscape, as she would with a baby on her, or so she had read it described elsewhere. She wanted to be a portrait, not a landscape. But the beauty so often of being not a portrait, but a landscape. Of just being part of the landscape. I feel it here too, sitting watching everyone in the park. A collective feeling. The self is a kite sometimes without a string, growing tinier and tinier, until sometimes it vanishes.”
I know that feeling well. I’ve experienced it as a mother, yes, but I’ve also experienced it at good parties with people I love, and with my family of origin when we gathered to spend time with my mother before she died. I’m not sure why I can’t access it now. Perhaps it’s tethered to a sense of professional precarity: What will become of me as a freelance writer if I melt into the landscape for too long? Who will remember me if I don’t impose myself on the world? I don’t want my creative life to be usurped by professional or monetary considerations, but as my friend Jamie Hood has lately written, that kind of purity feels like a privilege few of us can afford these days.
I’m veering into well-traveled territory: the fraught question of how to feel simultaneously satisfied with one’s writing and one’s mothering. But although the toddler is still (still!) sleeping, I don’t think I can tackle that today.
Instead, before signing off, I’ll briefly share what I’ve been reading lately.
I’ve already mentioned The Light Room, which is a tender, yet incisively attentive account of Zambreno’s experience of pandemic parenting, as well as a rigorous work of criticism that argues for the artistry of care work and the marvel in minute, domestic particulars. I’m grateful to have read it; it’s a text to which I know I’ll return.
I also recently finished K. Patrick’s Mrs. S, which is definitely the sexiest book about surveillance that I’ve ever read. I’m being cheeky, but really, it’s an extraordinary novel—about watching, about the infinite state of becoming, about loneliness, about the limits which prevent full knowledge of another person, or of oneself. And I read Anne Serre’s A Leopard-Skin Hat, which will be out from New Directions this fall. Serre is a new favorite of mine, a writer clearly interested in defamiliarizing novelistic conventions and who manages to be as tender as she is playful and interrogative. A Leopard-Skin Hat is largely focalized through the character of The Narrator, and this device so beautifully illuminates the human impulse to (re)write the people in our lives—to compensate for the limits of our knowledge (now that I think of it, the Serre and the Patrick complement each other in interesting ways).
I also highly recommend Hilary Leichter’s Terrace Story, which is out August 29 and is marvelous; Tezer Özlü’s Cold Nights of Childhood; which I think will especially appeal to readers of Sylvia Plath and Jean Rhys; Julia Fine’s Maddalena and the Dark, which is full of suspense and fleshy girl desire; and Brandon Taylor’s The Late Americans, which made me think of George Eliot in its renderings of idiosyncratic human experiences. And I’ll join the chorus of readers praising Nicole Chung’s sophomore memoir, A Living Remedy, which sees and depicts grief with clarity, elegance, and deep daughterly love.
The toddler still sleeps. Maybe I will too, for a bit. Thanks for spending this time with me, on the lip of the vortex.