(lol not a pregnancy announcement)
On my way out to Los Angeles on Friday I was reading To the Lighthouse (as I mentioned), during which I got hit with a terrible, but blessedly quick to pass, cold. Cut to me in the spare bedroom of my friend’s mother’s weekend cabin at Lake Arrowhead, lying there, wanting to die, ostensibly going to get into my pajamas before we all drank margaritas and watched WALL-E by the fire. My friend’s mom eventually came upstairs and put a blanket over me (she’s a real mom’s mom) and told me I didn’t have to come back down. Have kinder words e’er been spoken? And so there I was with little to no internet service, lying in the dark in a tiny twin bed, staring at my phone. Fortuitously (fortuitous in the way that if you are on vacation, in the mountains, in a sunny warm place, you start to think that everything really is going to be okay) I had the Emily Books book Nine Months, by Paula Bomer, waiting in an email. *cue angels of feminist vulnerabilty singing*
The premise of this book is a woman (a lapsed/frustrated painter / sort of frustrated/exhausted housewife / feminist cool mom woman type person) gets accidentally pregnant with her third child just as she was gratefully and gloriously exiting the baby-having phase of her life, and she basically freaks out about losing more of her life, debates having an abortion, and runs out on her family. And so from that I might not have to tell you that it is riveting, but it is. And I recommend you read it!
Long story short I am really enjoying it, and somewhat begrudgingly enjoying reading on my phone (I guess I begrudge this because I stare at my phone so much already? And feel like I am living in a Chris Ware comic. But ya know, it is convenient and I am most of the time already holding my phone in one of my hands anyway), and found this passage hilarious and perfect, considering I am at the same time reading (and worshipping) Virginia Woolf (you can bookmark things in your phone! Wow!):
And then there are the childless women who for some reason Sonia despises as well. The whiney, self-absorbed ones who remain perpetual children. Who still fucking blame it all on their mothers. Who have no idea. Who reads Virginia Woolf without smelling her forever-a-maiden status? Interior dialogue? Sounds great, if you don’t have kids, which thankfully keeps you from such self-absorption.
Ha! I mean: fair.
Oh, I also bookmarked this.
He’s home so late. It’s nine thirty. He looks ruined and Sonia feels very sorry for him. This job, sometimes, seems as if it’s sucking his very soul out. It seems like he goes to an office where they stick a vacuum cleaner on his chest and turn it on, without any nozzle, no, just the round metal pole, one of those kind of vacuum cleaners, where the body of it is attached to a long tubular thing, and they put it in right where his heart and soul is and suck out its very life essence.
Woo! I am really, really into this book. If you read a lot of mom blogs and are kind of obsessed but horrified all at the same time. And/or you just like really urgent, honest, funny writing: I think you will like it! And if neither of those apply to you, I am unsure what we have in common but thank you for reading.
