33

the flower moon this past may in maine

I’m 14 weeks pregnant and have been gobsmacked by the experience, bowled over with joy and bed-bound with illness. I feel like I’m on a psychedelic trip—colors are brighter, the world is far stranger than I could have imagined. All I can do is surrender.

I’ve mostly been too sick to read or write, sometimes to even watch TV or listen to podcasts. It’s enough to schlep my body back and forth to work and give it my bare minimum, then lie in bed for hours and watch the light change out our bedroom window. To watch the birds and squirrels swing from the telephone wire draped between our apartment building and our neighbors’. Sometimes the moon dips down low enough for me to see but not always.

Who am I if I can’t read or write? Unmoored, ghoulish. But my creativity has been coming out in other ways, especially lately as I gain more energy. I’ve been cooking, scheming sewing projects, taking a ceramics class. Dreaming up how to decorate the “baby nook” in our bedroom. My tarot card for October is the Eight of Pentacles, the card of creative perseverance.

I turn 33 today. While hosting a reading series recently someone came up to me and said they’d just turned 23 and had been listening to my song a lot (iykyk). I told her I wrote it on my 23rd birthday. They said the song helped them navigate the existential turmoil of their age, their questioning of what to do with their life. I told them I was turning 33 soon and felt better than 23, more sure of myself, but not necessarily more anchored or clear about my life’s path. Astrologically, age 33 is the “Jesus year,” the year of your powers accumulating, of alchemizing the lessons you’ve learned in your youth into a new mature perspective. I don’t feel enlightened but I do feel at a threshold, on the brink of good or at least new things. I signed with two agents and we’re going to submit my completed manuscript to publishers in the next month. Our baby continues to grow steadily.

The night before we found out we were having a girl I dreamt I was wading through high water with my baby son. I kept trying to prop him up, afraid he would drown. But he was swimming on his own, miraculously, this little wriggling thing. Then he swam away from me. 

My grandmother was 33 when she had my father, her youngest son. My sister sent me a photo recently of my grandmother at work in a thread factory, wearing a starched white dress, standing next to another woman wearing an identical starched white dress, both of them surrounded by hundreds of spools of thread. My grandmother rests her hand on her pregnant belly. 

This photo, recently procured from a relative, is a revelation. Because as some of you may know, as I think and write about constantly, my grandmother threw away almost everything she owned in a bout of “madness” the year before she was forcibly relocated to a nursing home. All the photos of her as a girl and my dad and uncles as children, all her heirlooms from Ukraine, her needlepoint work, her entire history. I often have dreams of scrambling to pick up her loose possessions from her yard but her things keep toppling from my arms or being whisked away by the wind.

I’m tempted to attach the photo here—proof, finally, of her life. But it feels too private, too precious to share with strangers at this moment. I’ll be thinking of her though as I head to my job, where at least I get to sit and snack and check my personal email and go to the bathroom as much as I want. 

The last two books I read, in late July/ early August. A romance novel picked up on a lark from the Wildwood boardwalk & an autobiography written by a woman from Belfast, Maine in the '70s, picked up from a library booksale while I was at a residency in Monson, Maine.