Maybe Baby

I finished Joan Didon’s wonderful memoir last night, tears rolled down my cheeks and dammed in the crook beneath my chin for the entire last chapter. Her writing is so lyrical, yet her disorientation is spoken so clearly. Her sadness leaden but she does not cave to pure sentimental recall of her 40 year marriage, not that I would have minded that. I thought about my own short marriage in comparison, but a decade is a decade and living even a year without Greg seems unimaginable. She speaks particularly about the rituals built up in a marriage that don’t die with the partner, that same urge to deliver news about the most mundane things, consult about dinner plans, that first embrace when you get into bed. I once heard that marriage provides the only true witness to your life and the importance of it, with the loss of one partner does the other’s life diminish also. Didon speaks of feeling invisible after her husband died, perhaps because her witness was no longer there.

I have to admit I was glad to finish it, her writing transported me into her ‘mudgy’ as she calls it head, and I was too often confronted with questions of what I would do with the same loss. The true nature of grief seems a process of accepting the death of someone you love and then noticing moment by moment their absence within them.

My mind has not only been occupied with death but birth, Greg and I have decided to start a family and have been ‘trying’ to have a baby. After years of ‘trying’ not to have a baby, this reversal is strange and largely out of my control. The waiting game between periods is excruciating, the information on ovulation and conception conflicting, the guessing and gauging obsessive (as in, am I feeling a little nauseous or did I just eat too much). We have just started so I am sure after a few months of ‘trying’ I will find a rhythm with it, and hopefully not lose my mind in the process, when did I become such a control freak! It’s a huge transition that we take so for granted. One day your you and your husband and the next your you, a little creature inside of you and your husband (keep in mind having a little creature inside of you is the subject of quite scary sci fi films). Then your you, your husband and a new little person who is half you and half him (again quite a scary subject of sci fi films). Mary Kelly is a artist who has constructed a work about the over night (literally) transition of being a women, wife and daughter to being a mother and being expected to respond to that naturally. I find it funny that we make such a big deal out of home loans, new jobs, moving states and yet are expected to take so lightly the conception of a child.

It’s the uncertainty which has me off balance, having to live life ‘normally’ even though at any given moment, my whole way of life will change. As I run my fingers over the gold embossed quote on the back of Didon’s book, I notice it is unsettlingly true even though it refers to death and not life, “Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it end.” (Joan Didon), I guess at the end of the day it’s a fine line.