Analogue Books. Better yet, cartoneras. (via MobyLives)

Did I say something about a reconciliation date with the city? So, the date was going okay and I was starting to relax and make small talk when suddenly my date unzipped his pants, gazed off over my shoulder, and started wanking fervently. This is not Mark Doty’s fault. He set us up in good faith, but a not-at-all-metaphoric winner in the park where I was frolicking with my child started not-at-all-metaphorically masturbating right in front of us. Ugh, god, New York—go to your room until you can learn some manners.

I thought of this short story by Hannah Gersen, called “Fox Deceived” (What a fine title!) as I was reading a description of hxaro in the first part of Mothers and Others. Also the following:

Among higher primates, humans stand out for their chronic readiness to exchange small favors and give gifts. Donors often take the initiative, actually seeking opportunities and expending inordinate thought and effort to select “just the right gift…”

For some reason I feel really emotional as I read this book. I think it must be because of how important Mother Nature was to me in organizing the world. (A book the baby incidentally approves highly of. He lugs it out and coos over the “bee-bee” in the Mary Cassatt picture on the cover. I bet you like that one, Mister-ito. All that science giving baby primates leave to cling to their caregivers night and day.) Something about reproduction and family still makes me vibrate, though I am over the hormonal wash of tears that was pregnancy and the first six months after giving birth. For someone whose normal tears occur at intervals of years, it was disconcerting to find myself weeping nearly every day. It wasn’t sadness. It was emotion, biology, and hydraulics. One morning three days after the baby was born, V handed me a bowl of oatmeal. I gazed down at it for a moment and began to sob wetly. He was ecstatic. Right on cue! According to the astonishing but evidently valuable book he’d studied at length (Going so far as to read it on the train, which if you have seen the illustrations of undressed hippies doing things like giving birth, you would understand is really something, in almost any possible interpretation of the word something.), day three postpartum is designated for weeping. It’s hydraulics, he said, your milk is coming in. And indeed hydraulics it was.

Anyhow, the crying was strange but not particularly unpleasant. I have always sort of envied people who talk about having a good cry. (Though I’ve also always sort of despised people who liquefy on cue.) I can grit my teeth and screw up my face but nothing happens and normally when I do cry, it is awful. Much like vomiting, also fabled to make one feel better afterward. Just awful. To be avoided at any cost. (Did I just give something big away there? Was that like talking about a dream involving teeth and snakes? Whatever, I’m cool with snakes and teeth.) The reproductive related weeping, however, was different. The tears just soaked through normal life at intervals without washing any part of me away. After a while I realized I had to temporarily steer clear of normal media outlets as it was just too much for me. I have an idea (not very examined) that it is important for me to be a witness to even or especially things over which I have no power. It seems that it’s the least I can do to give a sliver of meaning to the lives of people who are suffering in some futile way. It felt very wrong to refuse to know about other people’s pain, but I just couldn’t manage it. It was somehow at odds with gestating my own human. Which made me cry of course… I cried over children’s books and babies and very old people and nearly any story about nearly any specific person, but I shed plenty of tears over more abstract thoughts as well. Once near the end of my pregnancy I was sitting in a privileged seat on a crowded train and thinking how much my feet hurt, and soon I started thinking about how an extra twenty five pounds or so is nothing and plenty of good and decent people in the world have to carry more than that up and down stairs every day of their lives and no one gives them a seat on the train for being fat and instead people make all sort of presumptuous judgments about them and all the time their feet must hurt so badly. And soon I was weeping steadily into my handbag.