The Brilliant Natasha Wimmer in the Granta Sex issue on translating Bolaño.

All those other weeds, I delight in and eat, but I can’t warm up to the fiendish Japanese Knotweed.

“The first look at 178 different microbes that live in or on the human body shows that more than 90 percent of their genetic sequences were unknown and raise questions about how scientists classify species among micro-organisms.” Wow. The Human Microbiome Project.

~

In the shady playground across the street the other mothers, who are mostly from Mexico, call me Señora when we chat; so I do the same, but it feels very formal, anachronistic in a way that heightens the feeling of alienation I always get from playgrounds. It makes me feel like the platinum blond, high heeled mother in the Dick and Jane books I learned to read by, calling the other mothers Mrs. Soandso, until we’ve had cocktails together.

I like talking to other women in the playground though because it distracts me from that dead feeling that sometimes overwhelms me for moments at a time there.⁰¹ The playground is so separated from the rest of life, so powerfully removed from adulthood and all the threads that twine back into the fabric of culture and influence. It’s a nothing place for nobodies. It blanks the voices of its inhabitants. It’s the only place I ever feel like I’m babysitting again.

I am the oldest of eight. I babysat a lot when I was a teenager, and worked at a preschool in college. Even though I genuinely loved some of my little babysittees (and genuinely loathed others, something I recall with alarm when I watch Aure throw a fit for his sitter), the sensation of pure drudgery and isolation was forceful enough to make me rethink my assumptions about what my adult life might look like. For a long time I thought I never wanted a child. Then, of course, I got old enough to realize that another person’s childhood is a very short time, one small adventure. But there’s something about the remoteness of the playground that makes me feel numb and lost again.

I have a standing childcare problem on Fridays and one day recently when I couldn’t manage to cobble anything together, I took Aure to the movies to see Babies. (Beautifully shot, poorly edited. The first movie I have seen since he was born.) He enjoyed it very much and we have reenacted various scenes together again and again. The Namibian babies were the heroes of the film because they carried things on their heads and wore the least clothing. The Namibian mothers also seemed to have the least distance between their work and their mother-ness. The babies and children participated in the work the women did and cared for one another. The baby’s mother was rarely depicted alone. The Mongolian mother’s work was also evident. She had to corral and milk various beasts and stomp around with tall boots on all day long. She was very much alone though, so the baby spent a good amount of time quietly tied to the bed post or harassed by his brother. When he got a bit older, he hung out pantless with the livestock with more obvious enjoyment. The mother’s interactions with the baby were both loving and frustrated. There was no hint as to what the Japanese and American parents did for a living or who there were aside from parents. It’s manifestly impossible to combine office work and childcare, so the only shots of the parents showed them unconnected to anything except the weird ghetto of baby food and sing-along songs.

A friend, the mother of a toddler, once said in an exhausted rage, Fuck the idea of a community of mothers, I just want to be part of a community.