Plimpton

Abe is walking now, still raising his fists triumphantly for balance. He's a prodigious talker, too, so there is a sense of importance in everything we tell him now - only words that matter! Jonah is finally shedding his bad nervous habits (picking open sores until they re-bleed, chewing on already-chapped lips). I am only nursing three times a day, hoping to drop the naptime feed soon, then the bedtime one, and then say goodbye to nursing altogether. My cycle just started up again, after two years' hiatus (my body takes breastfeeding VERY seriously, it seems - same thing happened last time), so without that benefit - and with Abe so slappy and pinchy at times - it just seems silly to keep at it.

Which leaves me wondering what my next move is. A few months ago, I was sure I'd throw my energy into inventing a new baby product - one that every set of new parents in Brooklyn felt sure they couldn't do without, would have to buy new, and could never be recalled. I checked relevant books out of the library! I did a cursory patent search! I found the exact product I wanted to invent (but made for dogs)! Annnnnnnnnd, that idea went up on the dusty shelf. The shelf that has no end. The shelf holding the file box of my collected works of poetry. And prose. And my career trajectory as a librarian. And and and.

I am feeling restless. It's spring, after all, a time of renewal. I need a bit more than a hardboiled egg, though. I find myself thinking about George Plimpton - what accomplishment of his springs immediately to mind when you see his name? It's amusing, since it could be any one of a number of them. (Probably, since you weren't there, not including the time he spilled a Maker's Mark on Josh, in the darkness of a Paris Review reading held in the Brooklyn Bridge Anchorage, the summer before 9/11 shuttered that phenomenal space for good). I'd love to do that. Be that. Become known for any number of things, not just one thing.

Am I gearing up for a full-blown mid-life crisis come December? Perhaps. Yet I can also remember feeling just about this way when Jonah started walking, talking, and generally not needing me as an infant needs me. I can remember the first time I headed out for some alone time after leaving my job of a decade, Jonah with his favorite sitter, and it being a freezing cold, rainy day. That day, I felt I needed to do something that mattered. Like personal performance art, maybe, but for my consumption only. I took the train to Chinatown, and wandered through a flower market (it was around Chinese New Year), listening to an incongruous thing on my iPod: the Glenn Gould radio piece, The Idea of North, which I had heard about years before and had just purchased on CD. I crossed back into Brooklyn via bridge listening to the end of it.

I took a self-portrait with my cell phone that day, which I just discovered I didn't save. Too bad. I recall my eyes lost in my face, trying to smile but looking touched by madness. Wrapped in an unfamiliar solitude, suddenly adrift with time off I didn't quite know how to use, since the "work" I was to go back to was amorphous in the way that childcare sometimes seems.

I've been unemployed for so long (in the conventional sense) that my little bits of time off no longer feel like opportunities to "work." I wouldn't know what work I'd like to do. Yet at some point in the not so distant past, I was going to libraries, to sit and work on drafts of poems. Once or twice, I was even officially toting a laptop with me, and cooking magazines, working on a freelance project that paid for our weeklong summer beach rental.

But that was eons ago. Now I'm mired to the ankles in mental sludge. And it is time to pull my feet out of this muck, hose them down, and set to work finding my inner Plimpton. No matter how many drinks get spilled.

(Speaking of which, I'm organizing a drink with other moms on Mother's Day night. If I haven't already invited you, and you want to come, let me know.)