Koyuki, a person with whom I am acquainted three dimensionally, writes about how the structure of her life has changed permanently now that she has a child. (The yoga class was enjoyable mayhem. I don’t think I got through a single asana without my child throwing someone else’s to the floor, screaming for a bola or a pelota, trying to announce to the teacher “thisisa…itisa…it’sa…goodie vela!,” or deciding that it was time to drape himself over me and try to nurse. (Woo! It was something like spring break on South Padre Island.) Afterward we walked around Harlem and I yearned quietly for fancy running shoes. We had a fine time. I instantly decided that, since I don’t work Fridays, I will bring the baby every week. And one of these Fridays I will. Nearly everyone I know who has a child describes a profound change in herself… I don’t know. I think I am more myself, the way I am after a big or particularly intense experience (and jesus, giving birth was certainly the most intense experience of my life), but I don’t feel either any sense of loss or at all like a new person. The structure of my life has changed a bit, but it hasn’t occurred to me to think even that has changed permanently. Some essential things are different now, but they don’t actually affect the structure of my life much. (e.g. I am temporarily afraid of dying because I can’t bear to imagine what my baby would do without me. Of course he’d survive, but even though much less intense than it was a year ago, his need for me is still so sprawling.) I’m still me. I’m still the same person I always was. I am deliriously, unspeakably happy to be A’s mother but when I identify myself, I would almost as soon define myself as someone’s mother as I would have defined myself as not-anyone’s-mother beforehand. I don’t feel diminished or ruined or triumphant or… really anything besides myself. My life and my person had a trajectory before the baby and the baby hastened some things (besides gravity’s claim on my body) and emphasized others, but didn’t change the trajectory much. I don’t know if that’s good or bad. Probably neither. Or a little of each… I can’t get enough of reading or talking to women who find it utterly different.

The León Ferrari and Mira Schendel show at the MOMA is pretty wonderful, though as usual I didn’t care for the MOMA chitchat. (Is it that I am getting older, more confident of my own readings, so I have less interest in being told what art means? Maybe. I like to talk and read ideas though. It can’t be only that.) The change in León Ferrari’s work in recent years is really interesting. It is suddenly fierce⁰¹ and unambiguous in a way that’s most interesting because of who is he and his years of beautifully cloudy previous work. And aside from the work (which prompted a sketchbook page full of frantic notes and secured a few flyaway ideas about type and handwriting I’ve had in the last year), the pictures of the two artists set beside one another, each with an edge of work in the frame, are pretty great. Like a black and white gender lesson, he with his pointy structure (haha!… ha!) and she with her knotted textile (which makes me think of Eva Hesse). The two of them are a good combination, their work not particularly related until you see it together. Also Mira Schendel was adorable.

The Whale Hunt. For once I’m not talking about Moby Dick (though it features in the story), which, based on the conversations I’ve recently overheard, has a cheerier ending than I recollect. Baby has seen me reading the Penguin paperback with the woodcut (is it? can’t recall) of the breeching whale on the front, and arrived at his valuation of the book accordingly. I had to fight him for it by the last few chapters. He would snatch it away from me and take it to his father who will discuss the tiny pingüino on the spine and the carro (!?) on the front and tell him nice stories about la ballena Moby and how his nose is higher than his eyes and everyone drank tea and lived happily ever after with the fishes, as I suppose a number is true, if you aren’t too literal about living or happily.