EVERYBODY TAKE A BOW
8 April, 2012
This time last week I was at a baby shower in Brooklyn with 12 other women one of them my stepdaughter and one, my best friend. The woman whose pregnancy we were celebrating is a woman I consider part of our family.
The room was full of love and hormones, dreams come true and perhaps some dashed. There were frittatas and grits and cupcakes and beautiful, thoughtful presents, but mainly there was joy and gratitude and support for this last minute pregnancy, the fruit of a long-held desire.
It was good to be in that room; to be amongst the sisterhood. I had a slight pang of sadness that my own 2 pregnancies had been unheralded by others, the first occurring shortly after my arrival in America, most of it spent in isolation during the winter and spring months on Fire Island where my then husband and I ran injured racehorses in the sea, morning and evening. The trace elements were thought to have healing properties. And so they did for the horses, many of them eventually returning to the racetrack. But those same elements held no trace of healing for my baby who would die two days before her due date. The element which most stays with me from those months is the bitter Atlantic wind, which turned my waist length hair into tinkling, icy chimes as I walked the winter beach in my Salvation Army fur coat.
Our second child was heralded by Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony playing on the doctor’s gramophone, which he had brought into the delivery room just for this occasion. We had just moved to an isolated house Upstate New York, so I had no sisters yet and, of course, no family on this side of the Atlantic.
It was around that time that I read A Journal Of Solitude, by May Sarton, and from that book I learned that a woman could live a solitary life and be fulfilled…an alien notion then for a woman of my generation, born at the end of WWII when the goal for a woman was still to marry well. My mother’s dream for me was that I’d become a secretary and marry my boss. I tried the first part and was thankfully fired. Little did I know I had already embarked on a solitary life, which for the next 26 years, while intermittently peopled with boyfriends and husbands, was, for the most part, the solitary quest for my identity. It was only once I got sober that I could finally inhabit myself and thus once inhabited could both attract and invite a man such as Joel to make a home that beats with 2 hearts.
Which is basically the state of pregnancy – a home that beats with 2 hearts. And, perhaps, it is why I believe women are at their core, the most solitary of creatures: there is no experience as solitary as that of housing a baby. If only this were something that society understood and supported, how different the arc of woman’s life might be.
The entire city is full of birth right now blossoming and blushing its every tree and shrub, the blossoms heady with scent and energy, pushing beyond themselves, discarding pretty petals to make way for the breath of leaves – the way we all, in our individual ways push forth, fall to the ground; the way we bravely die back, again and again, in order to let the sap rise once more, giving birth to our own temporary blossoms.
Yesterday we saw 2 works of art that captured the solitary nature of existence. The first, a movie: Kid With A Bike,” whose main character is a pre-teenage French boy, motherless and heartlessly rejected by his only parent who is truly a deadbeat dad. The boy’s sap rising like hot syrup, anger propelling him in two directions at once: toward the doomed search for a father he can’t have and miraculously, toward the loyalty and love of a surrogate mother who obviously needs him as much as he needs her.
The second work of art was 2 dance performances by the great French avant garde ballerina, Sylvie Guillem. The first, a pas de deux of almost heartbreaking articulation the movements describing the human arc of relationship: the longing, the rejection, the coming together and pulling apart, inviting in, pushing away, the desire for connection, the fear of loss of identity, the light pulsing like breath, the shadows beckoning intimacy.
In the last piece, Guillem portrays a geek of a woman, a gawky misfit who dares to leave her gray life and come into the spotlight; her movements swinging back and forth from comic awkwardness to brave eccentricity, with moments of brilliant daring and sublime achievement: moments obtainable only by being willing to experience the solitary nature of one’s own limelight. In the end she returns to the familiarity of her gray world and its gray people. But is it the end, or merely a respite?
