Year 5, Piece Forty-Four: 2. Red Orange
Fish and Fires. Bodies and Creation.
Circling. Circling. Like a fish in a tank. Like a koi in a pond. Things are pleasant here, but I am looping. And looping by design: piece after piece, week after week, series after series beginning all over again once it ends. What’s not by design is how each piece this year has started to become so damn vulnerable. I love it, I feel lit up and grateful to be doing it. I am also burnt out.
Can I admit that I am excited for Year 5 to almost be over?
Six pieces to go for this year, five of my own and then the final one by a blessed collaborator. Then I am done for a while with weekly personal essays. I’ll start the new maybe even scarier task of figuring out what’s next for this project. But I will step away from the kind of writing whose hours consume all of my free time, whether I am actually working on it or feeling guilty for not working on it. It takes every minute I can muster while my kids are doing something else, like right now when they are absorbed by the television (a rarity, I swear) and I’m supposedly cooking dinner.
I reached a new low the other morning. Or maybe a new high, depending how you look at it. I had managed to sneak off at 4:30am to sit down at the computer without waking anyone else up. I even had a thermos of tea that I had brewed for myself the night before. Then I wrote while I drank that tea, and eventually, inevitably, I had to pee.
The one toilet in this house is between the kids’ bedroom and the adults’ bedroom. The closer it gets to 6am, going to the bathroom risks waking everyone up and ending my time to write in peace. So that morning, I found an old 64oz plastic yogurt tub, and peed in it right there next to my computer.
I guess that’s sort of like poopsocking for online gamers, except for artist parents. I didn’t manage to bring a lid with me, so the bucket of pee just sat there wafting while I continued to write, a symbol of commitment or defiance or I don’t know what. Ingenuity? Shamelessness? Addiction? That this practice might be unsustainable?
But I need the regular sprint of it, or the marathon, as it were. I need the automated weekly deadlines. I worry that without deadlines I won’t have time to make art anymore because I won’t make that time. And I fear that if I don’t make that time, I will watch my artistic identity slip away. Caretaking makes individuality precarious, vulnerable to being overridden by whoever needs you in that moment. I want to be me so badly, I fight for it tenaciously and continuously even when I don’t know who exactly I am fighting for.
“I want to be understood,” was a phrase that tumbled out of my mouth in therapy recently. It tumbled only after first getting lodged in my chest, then stuck in my throat. Like my brain knew I was about to say it and felt so pathetic that it tried to pretend it wasn’t true. But it was. I didn’t want to say it, but it wanted to be said, and it came out like so many marbles. “I want to be understood.”
Doesn’t everyone though? Isn’t that some super basic human shit? Some teenage shit, even? The desire to be understood?
Like everything, that unmet desire probably starts in childhood, when your parents or caretakers don’t understand you. How could they possibly? You are a brand new human in a brand new world, and you are not them.
Being on the other side of it, I wonder at the ways I don’t understand my kids. I wonder at the ways I don’t want to understand them, just want them to put their toys away or just want them to wear a jacket because it’s 43 degrees outside. I don’t want to take the time to empathize with their struggle for control, I just want to get out the goddamn door.
And I know it’s not their job to, but it’s not like my kids understand me either.
They just want me for my body.
Lately my kids have been fighting over who gets to sit in my lap, who gets to cuddle with me, clawing and kicking each other away to get closer to me. I think the competition is a huge part of my commoditization: they each want me because the other one wants me. But they are also tiny people looking for comfort in an overstimulating, confusing world. To them I am safety, I am warmth, I am home.
If I am those things to them, then maybe that is who I am. Safety. Warmth. Home. But that’s not all of who I am, and it’s not even all of who I am to them. And I can certainly be those things to someone else and not be those things to myself. I can be home to them and a foreign country to myself. I can be a mother to them and not able to mother myself, not even sure how I feel about my own lived experience of my gender in relation to that word. I can be desperately lonely in some corners of my psyche and at the end of the day still desperately want to be left alone.
Every day of parenthood contains total bliss and utter frustration both. The highs are high and the lows are low and they come in rapid succession. And I wouldn’t change that, I guess. The world is still overstimulating and confusing for adults too, and their bodies also give me comfort, holding them, squeezing them, smelling them, brimming with their preciousness and how fleeting this time of physical intimacy might be. Loving them is not exactly a stand-in for loving myself, but it’s certainly interconnected.
Red is the body and Orange is creation, which makes Red Orange the Body and Creation. What you create by being in a body everyday just by being alive. And also what you create with your body. My body grew two new bodies. Those bodies became people who are separate from me but (for now) want to be close to my body because it brings them back to their own bodies. Centers them, reconnects them.
I want other people to understand me, but I also want to understand myself. Understand why I am still so afraid that motherhood might be holding me back. Understand why I am afraid that these things I created with my body are distractions from something else I need to create, instead of creations in and of themselves. Yet even if raising them is a creative act, even if I feel some sort of pride in their existence, that is not the same as them being my creation. I can co-create my relationship with them and I do everyday, but now that they are born I am not creating them. They are creating themselves.
If I’m honest, I think I still experience some trauma from having gotten pregnant accidentally. Perhaps that’s not something I am supposed to feel and certainly not something I am supposed to say out loud, especially not from my position in a (mostly) cisgendered and heterosexual-presenting married partnership. But it’s a jarring thing to live your life as your own body and to suddenly have that body become host to another different body. It happens to so many people in so many other more horrifying ways. Yet I am only in my own body, and trauma isn’t really rational. And I can still feel betrayed by my body generating another body without my mind’s consent while simultaneously appreciating its ability to do so, as well as appreciating and loving fiercely the person that it ultimately became (at birth, not conception).
Having been able to create other bodies with my own body is a tremendous gift, and despite any residual trauma, it is a gift I remind myself again and again not to take for granted. What happened to me despite my intentions otherwise is something that would be impossible for many people to do by accident. Conceiving often takes procedures and years and loss and so many dollars and so little health insurance.
Our country can do better in supporting conception journeys. In supporting every part of reproductive health, and health, period. But the nonlinear effort involved in procreation is perhaps just part of its mystery. It’s a biological function, it’s nature, and it can’t always be controlled. It’s like fire, another Red and Orange force. When you try to start a fire sometimes it just won’t spark, and when you try to put out a fire sometimes it just won’t be contained, taking down everything in its path.
Creativity is a force. You can guide it, but you can’t really harness it, not really. It’s not totally within your control. You can commit to a practice and set up favorable conditions, make sure you’ve got a piss bucket by your side. But you can’t make the art appear. If it does, you can put it out there, but you can’t control how it’s received or how it spreads. You can’t make anyone do anything, really. So what can you do?
Circle and circle. And maybe someday find a way to jump out.
Jump out of what? Your life? I don’t even know what this metaphor is referring to anymore, the one from the beginning, about the fish tank. I don’t want out; I like this tank. Mostly. If we’re thinking systemically, I guess I don’t like this tank, but I do like the people in it with me. Mostly. Except when we’re at a shoe store. If you want to keep loving your children, never take them to try on shoes at a shoe store.
What I mean by jumping out is that I want to not care. Not to care about what I do as if that determined who I am, not to care about what other people think of my work as if my work were me and their approval could make me valuable. It wasn’t true about my parents, it won’t be true about me for my kids, and it isn’t true about whatever audience I am building or not building.
I am swimming circles in this tank, and what I want most is to get out of my own way.