I just got a belated birthday present – Amazon vouchers. Oh boy, I’m like a kid in a sweet shop. What shall I buy? What shall I buy? Perhaps a biography of Assia Wevill – A Lover of Unreason or Diane Wood Middlebrook’s biography of Anne Sexton. I’m back into poetry having started reading Sexton’s Self-Portrait in Letters. Fascinating stuff. Poetry is her air. It is her sanity. I love it.

I might buy this: Inside the Chelsea Hotel. Or New York Noise, a book of art and music from 1978 to 88 in photographs.

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Is it totally unrealistic of me to be thinking of my novel? Is it naive of me… perhaps even delusional of me? to think I might be able to get some work done on it in the next few months? See, I can’t help but think about the fact I’ll be going back to work in October at the end of my maternity leave (boy, do I LOVE not being in work!!). After that, any chance I get outside of work hours I’ll want to spend with Violet. At the moment, though, my time is quite free. Obviously I still only get a few hours sleep and a lot of my time is spent rocking, feeding, calming… but I can use that time to at least re-engage myself with the novel. I can’t do that at work. Have to focus on, you know, work stuff. This lack of routine I have right now, this chaos, this tiredness and sense of drifting from day to night to day… it’s the perfect environment for me, for my writing. Ok so I’ll have to be prepared to stop whenever V needs me, but I can do that. An hour a day will be more than I have managed lately. And I no longer have that ‘pregnancy fog’ where it’s impossible to string a sentence together without pausing for thought half way through. New experiences have sparked off a whole other chain of creative thought. The hardest thing will be getting my mind back to that place it was in before V, so I can put myself, almost physically (as everything I write is part-biographical) into that non-mother role. 

R I P

J G Ballard

Breastfeeding and reading. I got it!

New issue of Sein und Werden, spring 2009, now online.

Cinematique

The wheel is perpetually turning and I’m running on empty but have never felt so full of energy. I’m surviving on 4 hrs sleep a night, at most, and I used to need 8 to 10 hours, plus cat naps. J is feeling the burn, and I wonder if childbirth releases some kind of hormone that keeps you going all day and most of the night. Violet doesn’t sleep much. She just has these marathon feeds that last for hours because she keeps nodding off. And she really does nod, like an H user, like she’s had her drug, her tally. She gets this look on her face, her eyes roll, her lips part and she throws back her head. She reminds me of Bernini’s ecstatic Saint Theresa.

Ms Violet Brewer, minutes after she was born…

So J and I went to the studio one day last week. We wanted to get a couple of ‘pregnancy’ shots in before it’s too late! These are not the finished pics. They are just the straightforward digi photos, before he sets to and prints them up in some weird and/or wacky fashion.

http://www.johnbrewerphotography.com/

Sometimes, most of the time, I feel like a parody of a pregnant woman. It’s a farce. A satire. All without words because words have currently been expunged, cleansed from my brain palate. Except today. Today I feel like writing. So, it’s like wearing a fat suit. I forget, when I try to squeeze past people, that I can no longer breathe in, make myself smaller like a cat oozing through a chink in a door. I have this hard lump like a sack of potatoes attached to my front that makes my ankles and my thighs ache. A friend said I looked like I was full term. I actually have six weeks to go. Six weeks, that’s no time at all for the sudden impact a third person is going to bring to this unit… It was pointed out to me by said friend that I was using my belly as a shelf to rest my cup of tea on. I hadn’t realized I was doing it. I’m making those groaning noises pregnant women and old people make when they struggle to raise themselves out of an armchair. I’m putting my hands to my aching back, sticking my belly out and saying ‘oh’ and ‘ah’ a lot. I’m like every other pregnant woman there ever was. When I’m sitting and I drop something to the floor, I pick it up with my feet if possible, because it’s easier than bending down. The midwife had a good feel and said the baby is a good size! I know that’s a good thing, for the baby, but please don’t let me have a ten pounder!! I dreamt that night I gave birth to a tiny thing that fit in the palm of my hand. It slipped out easy enough but everytime I put it in the pram it would slide down to the end and get tangled up in the blankets.

Sometimes it’s like a slap-stick comedy. The embarrassment. Last weekend, my bag of shopping split open, just about outside my front door, and the contents fell to the floor. I watched, unable to do anything, as the 3 litre bottle of cider I’d picked up for the fella rolled slowly away and came to a stop underneath a neighbours car. Fuck. I rang their doorbell, thinking, practicing what I was going to say. Thankfully they weren’t in. So I got down on my hands and knees and managed to poke it out from where it had come to rest behind the wheel. I should’ve had a fag in my mouth for comic effect. I was just thinking, please don’t let any of the neighbours be watching. This is so undignified. I had to laugh. I had to laugh so much. I suppose anything you might call dignity actually went away when I first started to swell. And I know, once I have a child, that it is never coming back!!

I totally love this picture. For some reason, it gives me goosebumps – Duculi by Charles Avery