"That's what you're wearing tonight?" Ethan asked me. It was the afternoon before his eighth-grade graduation and we'd run into each other in front of the pizza place on our block. I was on my lunch hour and he was wandering with a group of friends after having finished his half day of school.
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Last month's prompt invited readers to write a poem on the theme "Mother to Father."
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Recently a couple mom-friends joined me to see the beautifully-filmed new documentary, Babies (Thomas Balmès, 2010) and because of the company, I found myself thinking more about the film's moms than the babies, even though it's those babies that sweetly fill the screen. The film's focus is on the first year in the life of four kids: Hattie in San Francisco; Bayar in Mongolia; Mari in Tokyo; and Ponijao in Namibia. Spliced together from over 400 hours of film shot by a few fixed cameras in each location, without any commentary or dialogue beyond whatever conversation was picked up by those cameras (and without subtitles or dubbing for the three non-English speaking families), the film offers an interesting portrait of how kids in different parts of the world get their start in life.
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I can't get pregnant. We try and we try and we try but it does not take. It simply will not work. There are only a few days in every month when there is something to be done, and I love those days. There is a day when I can call the sperm bank and then two or three days when I can pee on an ovulation predictor and fight with Chris about how purple the line is, followed by one day when we can take the liquid nitrogen tank to the midwife so that she can thread a tiny catheter filled with thawed sperm through my cervix and into my uterus. That's it. After that, I must find something else to do.
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In a pinch, I could be characterized as a woman of obsessions -- obsessions I love to share... I have read everything Ayelet Waldman has ever written, and you really don't need to, though the Mommy-Track Mysteries were entertaining when I was at that stage of my maternal life. I return to the poems of Linda Gregg and Jack Gilbert again and again; take my word for it, you should check them out. Rock chick biographies and memoirs? Let's just say I could write the book.
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