Experiment: Living in a Cliche (Patreon)

Greetings, Mad Fictioneers!

It is the dregs of summer, which means it is sticky and hot and revolting out there, where the air clings to you like a nice guy who swears he totally just wants to be friends and the humidity doesn’t want to be friends at all, it wants to be inside you right now and maybe take you home for a super-intense dinner with its parents while you’re just trying to work, goddamit. I’ve never been much of a summer girl, and I certainly am not this year, when I havent been swimming except once in a hotel pool and I didn’t plant anything and there is a heatwave, seemingly, forever, and I am the size of a small asteroid.

So it’s the asteroid bit I want to talk about. This is going to be quite a meandering walk through the unkempt jungle paths of my mind, I warn you. Several people have mused recently that not everyone in the Lab is an aspiring writer, and they might like to read about other things from time to time, and as I am a writer and an artist YOU GOTTA KNOW HOW MUCH I WANT TO PLEASE PEOPLE BECAUSE I NEVER GOT ENOUGH APPROVAL AS A CHILD *HEAVY BREATHING, FORCED SMILE, FURIOUS TAP DANCING*

Ahem. So awkward.

Basically, I’m eight months pregnant and my brain closely resembles a particularly watery, unheated, pathetic puddle of spilled soup with bits of completely lame and uninspired and carrot oozing across the floor and also too much sodium and not enough FUCKING NOODLES. I AM NOODLELESS, DO YOU UNDERSTAND. It is hard to think about other things when you have this giant-ass belly bolted on to the front of you and you can’t do anything at all and also your cat is so obsessed with you you’ve genuinely suggested he start seeing other people because you need some personal space. So I want to write a bit about it, because honestly I cannot stand the judgmentally nurturing, essential pastel oiled, locally-sourced smug of the Greater Parental Internet and I feel completely alienated by their beatific smiles of contentment and perfectly matched children with their sparkling toxin-free organic crystal baby buttholes and really, truly, deeply inappropriately-messaged children’s clothing. Their feelings seem to have nothing in common with my feelings, their lives with my life, their concerns with mine. They mainly just seem to be really, really spiritually kin to sugar-free nonfat vanilla-flavored pudding and/or a gif of a fluffy bunny being fluffily proud of itself. Their major contribution to keeping it real appears to be informing new mothers, over and over, that they will inevitably have a bit of a shit during delivery, and to be quite honest that sounds like more of a problem for literally everyone in the room but me. 

But the fact is, do I have anything unique or interesting to say about pregnancy and impending motherhood? PROBABLY FUCKING NOT. It’s such a common experience. It’s THE common experience. Everything that can be said about it has been, many, many times over, and then said again, and then everyone rolled their eyes and wished nobody would talk about it anymore but then they DID talk about it more and literally three thousand years later mommy blogs ate Manhattan and we all hated ourselves forever.

Which is an awful lot like the old maxim about how all the stories have already been told and no one can add anything new to the corpus of literature because someone else has done it before and better, doesn’t it? It sounds a lot like trying to write about something universal without dipping into cliche, which is one of the great challenges of writing fiction of any kind, but especially genre fiction. It’s probably a good exercise to try—take whatever experience in your life is the most cliche, most likely to be montaged over in a movie, and if you can write about that engagingly, you’re doing better than most. Because no one wants to read about pregnancy--it’s gross and weird and offputting and no one cares about it unless it’s their own. Same goes with job interviews or working retail or how daddy never played catch with, apparently, the greater male population of planet earth. So if you can sell something no one wants to read about again, you can sell anything. And having a kid is one of those things that seems special to the person going through it, but is pretty routine to everyone else. Every new sensation is only new to you HA HA LADY YOU ARE NOT SPECIAL.

Plus, I was asked for weird gestational details by a writer at a con for horror/body-possession story and again, I cannot stress enough how much my well-being relies on satisfying the needs of others. So if you havent had kids, or are not currently in possession of a uterus, or are otherwise not currently occupied by another entity, this post is for you.

LET’S GET INTIMATE, WWE STYLE. 

I’ve met a lot of women who wanted children, but never really wanted to be pregnant. That part was just nine months they had to get through on the way to the baby action. 

Not me. I’ve often wavered on whether I thought I wanted children, whether I thought I had anything good to offer a child, whether any of it at all was anything like a workable plan, given how much my career and my freedom and my independence matter to me, but I always wanted to be pregnant. 

It’s the most science fictional thing I can do without leaving the house! What would it feel like? What would I feel? Would it be all mystical and connected af to mother earth or super gross and medical like alien possession? All of it fascinated me, and I’m the oldest of five, so I saw a lot of ladies being pregnant when I was growing up. It just seemed like a physical experience I couldn’t acquire any other way, a totally unique process that wouldn’t be or feel like anything else. I approached, and still approach it, in a kind of detached way, storing information for future use, watching yself from a distance, like an alien autopsy. I am aware that is not the most maternal sentence ever put to paper. Alas. We will all have to survive.

And I suppose it is those things. Unique. Medical. Not very mystical. For the most part, I have had an easy pregnancy, right up until the last month when I was diagnosed with gestational diabetes and now it just all sucks straight to hell and I’m only allowed to eat, like, sheafs of unprocessed wheat straight from the fields. 

I keep trying to feel what I’m supposed to feel. This grand connection to all other women, this essential femininity, this holistic spiritual mother earth ley lines astrological oneness with my baby and my womb and the universe and I just…don’t. I don’t feel that this is the greatest work of my life, or that I never understood love until now, or that only this year am I truly a woman. Maybe that will change when I have an actual smol human, but it hasn’t changed yet. I keep waiting for this to make me a different person and it doesn’t. Just a bigger one.

There are nights and days when I feel connected to the baby, but much of the time, I am perfectly aware that what I am connected to is an idea of a child, the child I have invented in my head because bellies don’t come with windows, and that connection is pretty similiar to how I feel about a book I’m planning before I’ve written any of the actual words, rather than something new and spectacular that makes the whole cosmos make sense. All I know about him is that he has a Y chromosome and it kind of looks like he has my nose. If he moves when we play Bowie or Broadway, if he doesn’t move for Beethoven, if he gets excited when he hears applause, if he seems to respond to my singing a particular lullaby, how much of that is him, in his tiny nascent personhood, and how much of it is me trying to impatiently read the rather gross biological tea leaves? There can only be an idea right now, and the love of that idea isn’t entirely fair to elevate over other kinds of love as so much writing about reproduction does. 

Does this make me a bad mother before I even give birth? Maybe. I have found the experience, rather than connective, to be profoundly isolating. It’s all I want to talk about, but no one wants to hear it except other mothers, who almost all want to tell me gleefully that it’s only going to get worse, or offer the most horrific medical details of their own births that I can possibly imagine, something that’s happened so many times that I am now actively afraid of labor in a way I never was before. This thing I am going through is mine alone, not because I want it that way, but because the conventions around pregnancy, the judgments, the opinions, the pre-assigned roles, are so limiting to everyone involved that finding real and grounded emotion in it is hard. Everyone is wearing plate armor made of shower invitations, or their own pain around the subject, which I have tried to navigate so carefully, as someone who wanted a child for so long, and didn’t think she would ever get to have one.

That all sounds a bit depressing and I’m very aware that the sudden difficulty of my third trimester is coloring how I feel right now. It’s not the size of my belly, it’s the ache in my bones, the total exhaustion, the strict reigmen to control my garbage-bag placenta that means I must spend every day in exactly the same series of activities at the same intervals just in order to maintain my baby’s blood sugar, the inability to think creatively through the swamp that is my brain and work while my body assembles a person, a future, a life, a series of hopes with a million beating veins to hold it together. (It’s so strange that my four limbs and stomach and brain and internal chemistry set just knows how to do that; I don’t need to press each fingernail in the correct order every day to make a thumb or anything, it just happens. And when I think about everything, god, everything that has happened over the last eight and a half months, I come back to that—the strangeness. So many things that seemed normal seem strange to me now. That there can possibly exist a person who is half me and half a man I met at a convention through a series of bizarre and unconnected events I could never have predicted, and that that’s how it’s supposed to work, that’s how it works for everyone, every person is bricked out of chance and love, or lust at least, half dreams and half fear, and it just seems impossible that this is how every life has come to be, even though I knew that it did, and more than ever I think, while I sit in a bath for the barest moment of pain relief, that it is my story, our story, that is making more of itself, and not the raw recombinatory geneticness of me that makes a nose like that.)

OH SO VERY FUNNY, CAT, WHAT COMEDY. Well, okay, it’s also wicked weird when he does his barrel rolls, which is all the time. I suppose I knew intellectually that a pregnant belly isn’t just one solid mass, it moves around. But I was NOT PREPARED for the Ridley Scott action of something clearly moving under my skin and I’ll tell you what, it does not look that much like the miracle of life so much as an alien plague. Everything the movies have taught me is that when my belly moves and something under the skin wobbles and protrudes, SHIT IS ABOUT TO GO DOWN AND THAT SHIT IS A XENOMORPH AT THE VERY LEAST. I certainly have no word for the morbid curiosity, joy at seeing that my baby is still alive today, and total instinctive revulsion I feel when I look at my jumping-bean belly. Perhaps coolvulsion. The whole process is just so very body horror, which is of course why body horror exists—your bones get soft and your esophagus won’t esophagus and that top part of the belly that everyone touches without permission isn’t really the baby so much as MY INTESTINES PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH MY DINNER I WILL FART IF YOU PET MY INTESTINES LET IT BE ON YOUR HEAD.

But when I’m not doing my very best Sir John of the Hurt impression, I’m struck, so often, in so many ways, by how differently people treat me. People despise women with children, but seem to love pregnant women. I’ve lived on this island for ten years without a single warm word from some people who now break into goofy grins and giggles when they see me. People are kind. They hold doors, they make eye contact, they help me out when they can, they ask about my baby and share things about their own. If I do not often feel a conneciton with greater humanity whilst swollen with child, they clearly do—in short, they act the way we would all prefer everyone to act. Gentle, nice, solicitous, interested, accomodating. And it makes me realize why all those women the internet loves to make fun of, the kind that begin every sentence with as a mother or who talk about their kids incessantly or act entitled because they have children…it makes me realize why they are the way that they are. Because for some of them, the only time they were ever treated as special and worthy and wonderful was when they were pregnant. The only time they felt that overwhelming social approval—and it feels a lot like the approval I get to feel when someone likes one of my books, so I’m here to tell you that’s a feeling most humans would be willing to chase to the ends of any earth—that powerful sense of belonging and rightness and beauty and just other goddamn human beings being human beings at you—was when they were pregnant; maybe when they had very small babies. It doesn’t last long. Your baby might scream on a plane and your toddler might break everything in the room, but the infant inside you might be the fucking messiah so everyone acts so grand at you. And when it goes away, and everyone goes back to being annoyed at you for existing, I would imagine that is awful. I would imagine that feels like losing something bright and something gold. And I would imagine that every time you hear someone say as a mother, they aren’t just shrews, they’re women reaching out for some thin shaft of the weird, lovely light that people shone on them for one minute, a million years ago, when they looked like an archetype for a moment.

These are the things I think about. I try to connect what I feel to what others feel. I try to fill in broken pieces of behaviors I never understood with what I am understanding now. I pay attention to everything happening to me, because I know I will use it later, and that feels like I am cold and calculating, it feels like my artist-self is not wholly in-tune and in the groove with the earth mother I’m supposed to be becoming. But it is what it is. I read about women dreading breastfeeding for a million valid reasons and…I simply don’t understand. Because isn’t that a totally unique physical experience worth chronicling, even if it’s hard or doesn’t work out? Isn’t that something totally new? I’m so aware that most mothers don’t think that way, that once again, and always in my life, I am an alien. That even when I cry because I couldn’t find any streams of KAth & Kim to watch or because Target had a Pride display, some part of me always stands outside the tears, knowing these feelings aren’t real, that they are hormonal, that they are in some very real sense not my feelings at all, and then a third part of me quietly notes that feeling down and tucks it away for future processing. But this is who I am and how I feel. So curious. So interested in whatever the grossest parts of this process will be. Especially because right now there is no baby, there is no input from this new person except ZOMG XENOMORPH, the process is everything.

Also, my breasts are a lot bigger, and that is unassailably awesome, A++ would get knocked up again. I’m not ashamed to tell you that. It kicks ass.

I’m always after the new experience, and this’ll probably only ever happen once for me, as I am an aged lady a-sitting on a gate. At 39, the internet is happy to inform me, I am dried up and ancient and it is wholly irresponsible of me to have a child at all. You see, that is how people act when they can’t see you, and your vulnerable belly, and your tired face, and your archetypal fulfillment. Like a bunch of screeching dicks. (Dicks who are happy to tell me I’m so shriveled with age that I won’t be able to play with my child, as I am obviously Queen Bavmorda, the crone. Kay. Good talk, Twitter. So lovely to talk to people who were thrilled to consume what I was clearly doing instead of having a kid for years upon years, and now feel entitled to tell me I waited to long and am too old. A POX ON ALL YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA.)

Ahem.

I did have a bit of a cry the other day thinking about how old I would be when my son is thirty or forty. But I’ve cried because he’ll grow up and go to college and not call as well, and I’m not even close to labor yet. I’ve cried because I never knew heartburn could be so horrible and last so long. Crying isn’t much of a barometer these days. But if there’s any new insight at all that’s come to me, it’s that as much as I have spent my career writing about the wounds of children, I do now know that parents, good parents at least, all have a matching wound, too, that this being who I will hold so tight and so often will one day think hugging me is weird and lame, and there will be a last time he falls asleep in my arms, and while I wait for all the first times, inside them is the tiny seed of the last times, and one cannot be had without the other, and both will hurt. 

And apparently everyone just walks around with that hurt and no one says a goddamned thing about it.

Of course, I didn’t have a child when I was young, so I have nothing to compare this to. Would it have been better, easier, smoother? Would the gestational diabetes that now rules my life and literally steals the taste from my food and the freedom from my days and the work from my hands, have failed to develop? Who knows. This is the child I am having, the pregnancy I am having—and is that not strange too, that only right now, out of these circumstances, is this particular child occuring? A month before or after and it would not be him. A husband before or after. A decade before. What a little chance all our existences hang on.

As I said in the beginning, I am afraid of the birth in a way I never thought I would be. Of that little chance my existence hangs on. It never worried me before a few months ago. Perhaps it’s that I’m a high-risk pregnancy now. Perhaps I have heard too much from other mothers. But I am afraid. I could die. Women still do. My son could die. Babies still do. Whatever happens, it is sure to hurt more than anything I can imagine right now, and I ran through a plate glass window when I was ten. Between me and all the parts of parenting that people say are easy and hard and exquisite and disgusting lies this great red and black day that I will only probably survive. This great agony, so easy for others to shrug off when theirs is done. This common experience that will not be common at all when I’m screaming through it, it will, again, be mine alone, and since I chose to live in this place at this time, I will have no one but the other half of this child to hold my hand and be afraid with me. It keeps me up at night. It keeps me from looking forward too much. Because maybe…maybe…maybe all my child will have of me is my books. And then that’s too awful to think about, so I try to look at stuffed animals and a particular bassinet I love, but my brain won’t let it go. The only time I felt relief from the red and the black was when I told my midwife, whose surname is, no joke, Heros, how frightened I was. She winked at me and said: “No one dies on my watch.” And for a moment, I relaxed.

The next week I was diagnosed, and I may not get to keep that midwife, that moment. Nobody at the high-risk clinic has winked at me. No one has told me it’s all going to be okay. Nobody there is called Heros. 

I’m aware, more and more, that part of what is making this seem so dark and so wide is that my dog is nearing the end. How far away it is I don’t know. My German Shepherd, Grimm, who has been with me longer than any man, can’t move her hindquarters at all anymore, and as of today hasn’t been able to move from one corner of the living room in well over 48 hours. Life is coming, and the best case scenario is that she will get to see a tiny slice of it before she goes. That’s the circle of life happening in my house, the old and the new, the dark and the light, the turning of tides and pages. She breathes so slowly now, this giant wolf who has been with me for fourteen years, my last connection to so many who are gone now. Who I carried home from West Virginia on my lap, curled and tiny and black as a comma. My son will not know her. He may get a handful of ear as he passes into this world. He may not. And it colors many things in these long summer days a darker shade.

So much fear and so much thought expended, and he isn’t even here yet. I have no idea who he will be. I never think of what he’ll do for a living, who he’ll love, all those adult things. Sometimes I wonder what his first word will be. I hope it starts with B. Both his father’s and mine did. I hope he will like me. I hope he will look like both of us. I hope he will be happy. Happy and elegant. A woman in Texas once told me that she has an aunt who never said she was doing well or poorly, if she was happy, she said she was elegant. How are you doing, Aunt June? Oh, I’m elegant, darling, just elegant. I wonder about those little things. What quirks he will have. What accent, what turns of phrase, what he will dance like, what his favorite animal will be. His favorite color. His favorite book. What his frown will look like. Oh, little starman, how are you going to shine?

God, I just want him to be happy. I just want to do better than my mother. Happy and a bit clever and a bit bold and a lot kind. It’s not so much to hope for. I am afraid to ask for more, as I know the ways of fairies and wishes. It is a cliche, of course it’s a cliche, cliches come from the commonest things. No one can escape cliche. You come round to it eventually, being one, perpretrating one, or many. The key is to steer into it. Just make one thing slightly different and let the rest ride. The rest is how others see themselves in the whole mess. You say something everyone has said: I want to do better than my mother. And then maybe you get away with something new.

The ultrasound tech says he has so much hair already. Well, his mother is practically Rapunzel, so there is that. Was always going to be that. 

In the end, this feels so exactly like writing a book. Even the incessant physical discomfort. The lack of sleep. The constant imagining how everything will turn out. The midnight inspiration. The preparation. The publicity. The incorporation of everything around you into this small new story. The terrifying hope. The way I know I will look back and barely be able to remember the pain and annoyance and difficulty of all this, it will seem like such a small amount of time and grief, when now it feels like it’s everything. The way I do not know what I will be or what the story will be on the other side of the cliffhanger. It even takes around the same length of time that composition and revision and copyediting takes. 

I am worldbuilding, after all. A whole world, for one little audience.