Wednesday, July 05, 2006

Post-partum

It’s my husband who used the term post-partum to describe my post-book slump and it’s true. I do have the odd moment of the baby blues but it passes, like a swift lonely little cloud. The book blues, however, have set in, complete with ominous clouds, lightning and thunder. Bummer.

This won’t become a baby blog, I promise, but I understand the temptation: I want to desperately to think again, to write again, but the book is off my desk now and the infant is a gobbler. Divine as she is, she does eat up my reading time most days. When I still had the book to finish, I was torn and distressed but that final push was focused and important and I could do it. I don’t have the stamina to invent or even really to enter deeply into the imaginative world of another.

Much television is being watched.

There are a million things that I want to write about and, in the middle of the night sitting up with the infant, I sit and think about what to say about HollabackNYC, the World Cup, how I feel like Lockhart (the Romantic-era reviewer not the Boston Pops conductor) when reading for the LBC, how finishing a book and giving birth are and aren’t alike but the tank is empty. It’s not just the book of course: the cumulative effect of three months without much sleep make my life and my brain function more interrupted than Virginia Woolf ever imagined. I can’t even be bothered to get the hyperlinks for these things…

On a day like today, when it’s horribly humid and the infant is only happy when she’s in the front carrier, plastered to my chest, I think that perhaps I can try to write standing up, putting the laptop on the mantle. Perhaps I can assemble some of these scattered thoughts into a complete one. The thought of composing upright immediately reminds me of Hemingway and I think, yes, “just like Hemingway!” and feel a moment of hopeful ambition, which, just as quickly, is clearly completely absurd and hilarious. I doubt Hemingway spent hours wearing a BabyBjorn…

3 comments:

genevieve said...

Hey, you're allowed a lull in the pace here and there. A book, a toddler and a baby. Fantastic effort!!
I must email you for the publication details sometime, Anne - I want to request it for a library here, so I can read it (assuming that as an academic title it's fairly expensive?) It's been great to read along as everything comes together for you.

Sarahlynn said...

Beautifully said! (And I feel incredible sympathy with your emotions, if not empathy. I feel that way after so many life events. And motherhood hasn't changed it one bit, just made it harder to plug through, what with lack of time for Self.)

Anonymous said...

Love the image of Hemmingway sporting the Baby Bjorn. Thanks for the smile.