Faith Ringgold, artists' books, suminagashi & irritability
On materiality, vomit, and the power of paper
It’s Wednesday, my writing day. My son wakens, his hair matted with orange vomit. I text his school. He will not be joining today. It’s the only sentence I will write. I have two feelings at once: relief from work, panic at my deadline.
We read books in bed, pick stones from the backyard area of soil I hope to turn into a garden bed. It’s nap time. He sleeps for forty minutes of his usual two hours. I pull him into my bed, and we doze together.
It’s Thursday, and I send my son to school with a runny nose. When he returns home, I put him down for a nap, a time when I could write. He naps for an hour, then awakes crying with terror. I pull him into my bed, and we doze together, curled like quotation marks. That’s as literary as Thursday gets.
I open my diary to record a dream and find my last entry from September:
There were moments this afternoon, after W napped for only an hour, when I laid down on the floor and felt so weary and sad. The endlessness of the day, the way I felt trapped, his whiplash moods. “That’s MY foot! Mama, mama, help me. NO, I DO IT.” I mean I really hated being a mother. I wanted to lie down and have it be over all ready, the entirety of my life.
Now he is three. In the time he puts on his pants and shoes and brings his plate to the counter after dinner, I rediscover myself standing there. Truly, my self, me, present again in greater measure. Hello, old friend. You’re no longer quite so despairing. But why are you so irritable?
Irritable all the time, I google. On Reddit, someone suggests a daily banana. I feel my inquiry would benefit from increased specificity. 40 year old woman irritable all the time. The menopause gates open before me. I remember the Mary Ruefle poem about fucking a doorknob and the cryalog she kept during menopause. I’m not ready to walk through.
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