OleopteneA blog for Mara Collins

Hide and Seek

February 12th, 2009

The thing about not blogging? Is that it seems to add a layer of unwanted meaning to everything I am not saying.

Phone call with Jenny on her birthday and she answered some question of mine with silence, and that became the running joke of the phone call, as in, now I will list all the ways you bother me: (insert just the right amount of silence, and we both start laughing at the same time). We fantasize going on some silent retreat together, but if we cannot do that, we can call each other and not say a thing. Silence is okay when there is someone laughing on the other end.

Not so much when I start wondering what is being concealed.

Some silence is waiting out the soap opera in my head because it gets so three-hankie melodramatic and a couple of hours later I have made myself laugh again. I think this is one of the price tags of Raven traveling, just not having a reality check, someone to say “Nope, pretty sure that elongated bump you’re feeling in your chest is a rib and not a tumor, and I have no reason to believe you’ll be dead before any of your children have even graduated from high school.” Which yeah, maybe saying out loud, instead of stewing in silence, might be, well, useful.

Another silence is taking on the wrong book on a vulnerable day; I re-started Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born and there in the first chapters where she has bits of her journal from early motherhood, wondering that, as a writer, she’s not a ‘natural mother,’ I do the thing where half of me is “yes, me too!” and half of me is “wait, I love my children, love being with them, and I think I am good at it, does that make me less of a feminist/writer/person with any ambition at all?” and I know that’s exactly the point/not the point, that she spends the rest of the book trying not to define women by reproductive status, separating the institution of motherhood from the state of motherhood. But today, I wasn’t coping well with motherhood or with writing. I had an extra hour of Rainer being at school because he gets lunch on Wednesdays, and I promised myself I wouldn’t waste a blessed moment of relief from motherly responsibility, no, I’d go out to the studio and work on revising stuff, undistracted by internet or the many surfaces in my house wanting vacuuming. Only: out in the studio I couldn’t stand the written stuff I had to revise, and I paced, and I noticed things out there needing vacuuming, and by the time I had to pick up Rainer I hadn’t just vacuumed, I was busy scrubbing the toilet. Which convinces me that the problem is not about not having time to myself, but running away from myself, going silent when I finally get the time.

The thing I keep getting clobbered with, though, is how monstrous things get with the not-saying of them. The day before Raven leaves for four days I don’t want to be reproachful or shrewish or unsupportive or ungrateful, and all the things I don’t want to say are causing me to bite back “But I am really going to MISS you” and how scared I am sometimes about being able to keep it all together when he’s gone, and of course it doesn’t sound so monstrous now, like it did in my head, but I was running around slamming things and not being somebody anybody would be likely to miss, but would rather be relieved to get away from, and it takes me, I am so slow, three days before I can sort out properly what it was I really needed to say.

And this is the thing about having the blog, I guess. Because it’s there, thoughts get sorted into appropriate for blogging about or not. I cannot just forget about it, pretend it’s not there. I try to do the sorting on a basis of “if this is something I struggle with, somebody reading might also struggle with it, and then breaking the silence doesn’t help just me.” Even if I wonder when I run into someone in my real life who also is someone who reads this stuff if it’s giving a strange picture of who I am (especially in February! February is historically difficult) (also, please note, it’s easier to put down the struggles than the triumphs because God forbid I should sound gloating or like I actually have anything Figured Out.) But even, lying here alone, before hitting the “send to weblog” button, not knowing that whatever small audience this has hasn’t given up in disgust, I know that silence is my enemy.

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