sadreads #5: boredom and space
“Part of being pregnant is that you think about it so much that you’re seldom bored. Terrified often enough, but rarely bored.” Katherine Dunn, Geek Love
This letter will circle a few topics on my mind without really concluding on any, as I'm not a particularly lucid writer right now. I'm composing this on my phone while my eleven-week-old sleeps in my lap. By now if you follow me on social media, you know I've had a second baby; this one has stayed with me on earth, a fact about which I'm inexhaustibly happy. I kept the news of her off the internet until she arrived because I was afraid, and though I am still afraid, it is easier to live with the fear now when I can place my hand on her chest to feel it rising and falling.
I've heard that it's common enough to wake in the night with a start, and, while your heart races, shine the flashlight of your phone at your sleeping child, who is still there, sleeping in her basket. This fear is common, but I nevertheless feel like it's my fear. The feeling is a lonely little room full of crumpled scraps on which I've written the unsayable things I'm constantly thinking. I've crushed the papers so I can't read them, but I haven't thrown them away. Maybe the best I can hope for is that over time I will stop going in the room less and less.
I read Geek Love in early March before the baby was born. I read it on my e-reader, which is an embarrassing thing to have when your friends are all book people and when you don't want to give any more money to a massive corporation, but I generally use it with library books. At the time it meant I could easily bring my book with me to places like the gym, and not, like, get sweat on paper pages. (This was also, obviously, before the pandemic was declared such on March 11th.) Geek Love is a culty novel with a deeply weird premise -- a pair of circus parents start a family that's meant to be the genesis of a glorious lineage. They manipulate their children's genes in various ways (drugs etc) in order to ensure that they come out with a freakshow-worthy feature (flippers, albinism, being conjoined etc). The parents' pride about their children's talents cultivates a self confidence in them that allows them to live fully outside of societal expectations, and it goes off the rails from there. It's a book about family, and a book about what it means to be exceptional, and a book about carving space out for yourself in the world.
As a side note, did I ever tell you that my maternal grandparents met in the circus? My grandmother, very beautiful in her youth, was a magician's assistant, getting sawed in half and whatnot, and my grandfather was just a straight-up carnie, a rogue with a glass eye. They left the circus to start a family, and settled down to open and operate a neighborhood bar. This origin story is one that the artists in my family love; my uncle, their middle child and a stage actor and novelist, wrote it into his book, which was turned into a one-man show (my husband, who does not speak Finnish, patiently watched it with me on our last visit). Because of this family lore, I suppose I've always felt an affinity toward the idea of circus lineage, and though my own childhood involved nothing of the sort, my parents always cultivated a certain joy in the art of the hustle. Anyway, I digress.
The language of Geek Love is its best part -- the characters speak so colorfully that the book has its own lexicon, and it's a real pleasure to read even if you're weirded out by the premise. I encourage you to explore it for yourself if you haven't. But the line I quote above is plain. Plainness is universalizing; the line kept rattling around in my brain after I finished reading, somewhere around my thirty-fourth week of pregnancy. What did this character, with her family of performers, even know about boringness and boredom? And what did terror look like for her, in contrast? For me, the terror was built in by circumstance. I was more terrified than ever because I was heading toward birth and only had a negative outcome for comparison. Day after day the baby rolled around inside me like a beluga doing tricks for fish, and when she stopped for a minute, I worried and poked her until she moved again, grumpily, I imagined. And the bigger I got, the more I felt like a spectacle, especially at the gym, reading Geek Love and eking out sets of overhead presses while the men around me side-eyed my expanding frame. It's hard to say what made my heart race more, my dark thoughts or my physical effort. Olympia Binewski, the character who speaks the line, was right: it was not a boring time.
But the statement also makes me wonder if by contrast having a new live baby is supposed to be boring. It certainly is repetitive -- it's a combination of panic, heart-expanding love, and iteration in the design sense of the word, all executed exhaustedly. Olympia has to give her baby away, so she never gets to inhabit the numbing requirement to be totally present in the endless repetitive motions that your super-small new world needs from you. It's demanding, but is it dull? I genuinely don't know. I spend hours with the baby sleeping on me, or wondering why the baby isn't sleeping, or otherwise thinking about the concept of baby sleep. I log poops and naps into an app that then tells me when my baby should next fall asleep. When the baby goes down for her first stretch of night sleep, everything I do is on borrowed time until she wakes again; I weigh the temptation of watching more TV against getting sleep of my own, and sleep usually wins. Then it's a night feed, and I'm sitting up in the dark to burp her and hold her upright so the stomach acid doesn't creep up her immature digestive system. I squint at my phone to stay awake so she doesn't slouch out of my arms, building cart after cart in online shops to pass the minutes, never hitting checkout. When we're done being upright, then comes the anxious slow-motion juggle of placing the baby back into her bassinet without fully waking her. If I succeed, then as an afterthought I place my own head on the pillow until it's somehow dawn again, and she wakes to fart and smile.
But all the while, I never fully check out. I'm operating my body like a machine I know how to operate in my sleep, but I'm not asleep, I'm there in the room with a being who depends on me to execute a series of repeated moves exactly right, and the moves change a little every day. I described it to my husband the other day as a Groundhog Day-themed escape room. I know it's not going to be like this forever, but it amazes me how tiny my life is right now.
Smallness doesn't equal boringness, though. And even this shrinkage isn't exceptional, because everyone's lives shrank when the pandemic hit! I'm living tiny, and so what. I bet you are too. The character Olympia literally lives inside a cabinet in an RV. My great-grandmother had nine children (the circus gal among them), and she hid away with them in a potato cellar during the war. I would say she didn't have much space. I have a lot of space, I tell myself. My mind has a lot of space by comparison.
But I still circle the same thoughts; I have the same scary recurring dreams. We came down to NC so we could have more room, and I sit in the same chair day after day anyway.
Maybe to remember my own spaciousness, I need to hold the space for myself, as we are so fond of saying lately. Or maybe I need to stop thinking of space itself as coming at a premium (this is the part of me that's lived in NY for fourteen years). Or maybe I just shouldn't waste an entire room in my brain/heart for bits of terror paper. But I don't think I'm bored, and I don't think I will be for a long time.