I know it’s been awhile since the last time I posted. My apologies. It was my hope to monetize my Substack and to begin publishing at least 2-3 times per week. However I realized that I am a slow writer, and that I can’t feasibly maintain that level of production unless I have a certain number of subscribers. I am going to stop apologizing for being a slow writer. Recently, I decided that I need to prioritize my health and paying work and stop trying to meet imaginary demands. The more people who subscribe, the more I am able to publish. This means a lot of my posts will just be public. F*ck it. Most of the longer pieces that I have published took at least 30-50 hours of writing and revising to produce. I am in the midst of cleaning up a draft of my book for a new editor. I work a contract job or two. I also have a writing seminar with the Hurston/Wright Foundation during the last week of June, so I will be mostly on hiatus until mid-July. But I will be publishing excerpts from my book over the next few weeks.
You can’t say you’re smoking again, because when you were pregnant you promised that you were quit permanently. Then you had the baby and the blues hit you so hard that you went and bought a pack of Newport 100s. The cigarette butts are piling up outside, and you’re writing and writing but you can’t bring yourself to publish anything because nothing sounds good to you, not yet. Your children’s voices overlap around you, like wind chimes. You binge isekai anime and dream of being born into another world, where you will have some use. Your house would be attached to an athenaeum, and you would be buried in scrolls and children. Your husband would be a blacksmith, or a glassblower, and you would live near the sea.
You are anxious and afraid, and it’s fucking with you. You either can’t think, or you think too much. You make promises you intend to make good on, which are derailed by more work. Your labor is bodymind intensive, transcorporeal. You’re not afraid that you’re not a good mother. You’re afraid of not being productive. Other artists, writers mainly, seem to characterize children as an impediment to a career in writing. Someone asked Alice Walker if female artists should have children. She said: “They should have children—assuming this is of interest to them—but only one. Because with one you can move,” she said. “With more than one you’re a sitting duck.” Virginia Woolf argued that successful female writers have not been mothers and seemed to be miserable as a mother. Michael Chabon said “You lose a book for every child.” But you know the children are not the problem.
For some, work is the problem. Often writers are working day (or night) jobs. For others like yourself, poverty is the problem. You simply cannot keep up with the demands of your (imaginary?) audience. You are not at war with either of your two callings, art and motherhood. You are at war with the world and it’s neverending cycle of cannibalism. You disbelieve the notion of suffering made into art. Suffering prevents art. It stifles it. You feel vulnerable, edible. You feel like empty calories, if there is such a thing. The political philosopher Falguni Sheth interprets race as a cloak-and-dagger technology that legitimates violence and exclusion. Do you even exist if you don’t produce? Does it feel pain? Does it eat? You are food but you fear you might be indigestible. Waste.
Your mother was a teacher, and a single parent. You remember her stress. Even with a degree things were hard at first. She was a substitute teacher right after the divorce, in 1996 or 97. You remember her waiting for a call to come in, in the mornings while you helped get your sisters ready for school. You remember her selling Avon, and braiding hair on the weekends for extra cash. You remember the gas being out one winter, being huddled up together under thick blankets, shivering. Remember the bottle of White Zinfandel sitting next to her bed as she graded papers, after she finally received a position as a Spanish teacher, in a public high school. Remember her yelling and throwing things at you on a Saturday morning. You aren’t like that with your kids. Since you were a child you have been stoic. Your mother called you a dyke and grandmother called you “cold.” You smoke sometimes, and you write, instead of crying. Crying is for the weak, and your mother called you a punk when you sniveled. Sometimes you shrug your partner off when he reaches for you, and you feel bad because you need him. You pick up gigs.
You are hungry, hungrier than you usually are because, instead of being rooted within you, your baby is now drinking your blood, the sugary substance dribbling down her dimpled chin. Not a parasite; symbiotic holobionts. Organisms within organisms. Multitudinous. Entangled. Us are hungry. You’re amazed at the fact that no matter how hungry you are your body still produces milk in abundance. You panhandle online for groceries to feed your family (multitudes) and money to pay the bills that keep piling up no matter how hard you work. You participate as a questioner in the interviews for an admin position that you assisted in building. You feel that your inclusion is just a formality, that you don’t actually possess any real power, that you are replaceable. Your value lies in your blackness, and you know it. You are a token Negress, and you are vulnerable because you need the money, and the experience on paper. There is less chance that someone like you will say “no” to something, because being let go is something that simply cannot happen. It is starvation, staring you in the face. You, too, are a dependent.
White females are the queens of non-governmental organizations, and of savior projects. In the midst of the interviews, you note the financial backer’s comments about the thousands of dollars set aside for the program, available. Your supervisor contemplates hiring two more people, instead of one. “Fifty thousand, sixty thousand, whatever you need, “ the boss/backer says, her arms thrown out wide. When you voice your thoughts about whether or not some of the candidates will have time or energy to do the work, since they have other obligations, she says, “Fifty dollars an hour is a lot.” You counter: “It’s only five hours a week. A thousand dollars a month is barely my rent.” There is an uncomfortable silence.
They say “we” a lot. We are building this program. We will sometimes have to work longer hours than expected. They have been great about you taking time off for your pregnancy, and the schedule is flexible. Your immediate supervisor describes this program as her baby. Then you must be a wet nurse. You ask to meet privately with your supervisor after the meetings, to discuss your pay. “If the money is there,” you say, “Why not pay us more and only hire the one person we discussed?” Including herself in the “us,” she says, “Well, I don’t need the (extra) money.” You try to make clear your abilities, what you could do, would do, if you were being paid enough to cover your basic expenses. Especially if there’s money available to hire more than one extra person. But your supervisor says, “Let’s sleep on it,” and then never brings it up again. She hired just the one person. At subsequent meetings, you smile and pretend you have forgotten. You resolve to start counting your hours and limiting your energy, a daring practice. How dare you say no to anything offered to you? How dare you ask for more? Who are you?
You try to create new opportunities for yourself, like people continuously suggest. 22k followers equals privilege right? That’s what the girls said, that’s why they needed to get rid of you. You had too much privilege, too much voice for a “survival sex worker.” You and your partner are skipping meals. This works for now because you only have one big kid. Your other two kids are little, so you feel like you have time to get it together. You are a slow writer. You never run out of juice, but you are loathe to publish work that you feel is inadequate, and your desire for perfection, is slowing you down. In the interim, you start a series of lectures to help organize your ideas, to talk them out with someone other than your partner, and to pay the bills. You already tried to monetize your blog but you’re fighting a constant fog and can’t bring yourself to publish regularly, because your time and energy are limited by economic obligations. Maybe that’s why it doesn’t work out. Or maybe people don't care about your work anymore, says your insidious brain. Maybe your time has passed and people are put off by your discussions of race and sex and poverty. Maybe you remind them of their poverty or maybe you remind them of their inaction. Or maybe they heard all of the rumors about you on social media and they’re just here to spectate and judge and ridicule.
You are just trying to survive. Lying flat. But you are also trying to memorialize yourself in a world where people like you are not often remembered. You are one of those whom people endeavor to forget. If they cannot erase you in life, they will erase you in death. Maybe decades later someone whose work is not as good as yours will resurrect you for their own projects of self. They will dig up your ghosts and your demons. They will wash the piss and muck off your grave or memorial site. They will tell people that your work was prescient, genius even, and build college courses around you, putting your work alongside that of people who denigrated you, shamed you, or plagiarized you. Some will lay claim to you as a feminist. Others will swear you were a conservative. You might be claimed as a leftist socialist; or a regressive masculinist. You will be excavated, and entombed. They will call this “giving you your flowers.” But the flowers will belong to them, and you will have long withered away. They will continue to erase people like you in life, spitting on them, chewing them up like cud. And they, or their descendants, will pat themselves on the back when they exhume your body. Right now they snack on you, flaying you, destroying you joint by joint. Your ears are burning.
When you sleep your thoughts are like the crunch and pull of meaty insect corpses. In the day you wade through your emotions with your partner, peeling the layers back like eyelids. Rememories spilling over like water runs through a sieve. You speculate about whether it’s your hormones riding high, or low, imbalanced. Your last appointment at the OBGYN you asked the nurse-midwife about checking your TSH and your T4. She said, “Sorry, but we can’t do that because you are no longer our patient.” That’s right. The baby is outside of you now, and you are no longer their concern. You are in Georgia, a state where black women have managed to obtain a huge chunk of political representation but where black mothers are still dying in or within the first year of childbirth. It is the men’s fault, they say. Femicide.
You were pregnant before you got approved for Medicaid. They denied you at first because you put your partner on the case like a fool and they sent over paperwork with a denial because he is idle. Your partner is disabled. Because you didn’t receive your approval until you were in your second trimester, no family practitioner would take you. Call back when you’ve delivered, they all say. After you have the baby it takes you three or four months to find a family practitioner who takes your “brand” of Medicaid. During that time you slowly count down the pills that you have left, rationing them. You bleed twice a month and you are tired and your head hurts from allergies and stress and lack of food. But you keep writing because you don’t know how to do anything else, save drawing, and you haven’t drawn in ages because writing is what makes you money, quickly. Years ago you tried finding jobs like people said. You spent hours and hours applying. You rented a small apartment in the city, just you and your son, and then eventually you and your partner and your son. Your partner got work moving and driving trucks but it still was just barely enough. And your job search was not working out. While his status as a veteran carries weight in the job market, you are undegreed, and worthless. You apply at Family Dollar and McDonald’s and Target and FedEx and UPS and anywhere else that you can think of, and the rejections pile up where there isn’t dead silence.
You didn’t know what you would do once you got a job anyway, though, because your son is severely dyslexic and has ADHD-related behavioral problems and so you don’t want to send him to school because you’re afraid that it will damage him. You’re afraid that people will pathologize him, that he will be judged against children who are faster than him, good children who can sit down and pay attention and focus. You’re afraid that he will get bad grades and detention, that it will make him leap right into the maw of the unforgiving jaws of the world. Your decision to continue homeschooling in the face of abject poverty is looked upon with disdain. Other females lick their chops, their sharp teeth glistening. Shouldn’t you want better for you child? Your mother, a former teacher, says, “You don’t even have a degree.” Another notes that your son is “school-aged” and implies that you are using your son as an excuse to avoid securing gainful employment. The goal of pushing your son into school is to push you into work and to stop you from panhandling, which is one of your biggest sources of shame. Your need is repulsive.
Children are a luxury that you cannot afford—you can’t offer them anything but yourself, and what good is that? What are your scraps to a higher status parent’s economic smörgåsbord? Every child you have is evidence of living above your means, like eating out when you should be cooking at home. People fetishize planning as an extension of European rationality. Everything according to its place, which would place you, dark one, at the bottom. According to the math, with each child you have less and less to offer. More than two children points to decadence. You break your tooth on the comments of one of the black female administrators from a state program, who calls you and says, “He was very well-behaved here. The problem is likely related to the amount of time he spends with you.” You sit with the feeling that you are passing on your taint to him. A black mother cannot make a man. The world makes a man.
Even once you finally get your medication adjusted, things still only feel slightly left of blue. Your baby is thriving, but you feel withered. You wring your brain for meaning. Who is your work for? What makes it matter? Do you really have something special to offer, like your partner says, or is this all just some pipe dream, another thing that you are destined to fail at? You chase hyperproductivity. You read blog posts and articles searching for methods. Anything to overcome the weight of your own thoughts. You don’t wanna beg people to subscribe to your blog or to subscribe to your Patreon. You are afraid to see what you think other people see: idleness. Even in a supposedly secular country, you understand that idleness is a sin.
You look up articles about black mothers and postpartum depression. All say similar things. Black mothers experience postpartum depression and anxiety at disproportionate rates. The articles also say that black mothers do not receive the same levels of treatment as white women for their postpartum mental health issues. You figure a large part of it is that you (us) don’t feel comfortable reporting their depression and anxiety. Likely, us are afraid that reporting such feelings would render them “unfit.” Us are aware, on some level, that us carry the stigma of unfitness in our skin (melanin), clothing, and address. It is something that can be contracted, it is epigenetic. Us cannot share our feelings for fear that our children might be stolen, or that us might lose their source of income. Then there is the fact that doctors truly believe in some level that black people feel less pain than others. Y/our pain isn’t real to them. Any extra behavior might be explained as “drug-seeking.” This is why we cultivate stoicism.
The best thing to do is smile and fill out the questionnaire in the way that any healthy, sane person would. To nod and respond in the appropriate spaces and places as they repeat their generic information and hand you pamphlets. Wince at them taking notes as you explain, yet again, that you don’t know how often they “feed” because they are always with you (peasant). Y/ours is a different sort of knowledge, and knowledge that is unable to be quantified might as well be useless. They try, desperately, to convert you into math. “How many wet diapers a day do you think?” You have no idea. You are lucky your beige African-American family practitioner didn’t label you “non-compliant” in your medical file, when you asserted your preference for a CNM over an OBGYN. Strangely, although (white) women make up the majority in the profession, nurse-midwives are still required to have their practices supervised by OBGYNs in most states (colonies). Midwives are disenfranchised, and the primary way of obtaining any sort of legitimacy as a “middle-” is to get a degree, rather than taking the “rural” route and training as a certified practicing-midwife.
You had your first child at the age of twenty-two, in Wisconsin, with a Jewish certified nurse-midwife. When you entered the building she practiced out of for the first time, you and your then-partner saw the Jewish man who had denied you an apartment based on your non-marital status. “My wife wouldn’t like it, you understand,” he said. You were sad. The place was perfect, but you knew your then-partner wasn’t willing to lie and claim he was married to the likes of you. The Jewish man ducked behind the counter and all of you pretended not to recognize the other. The old woman was patient and kind and handled your then-partner’s misgivings about your decision to have an out-of-hospital birth very well. The two of you argue while you drive him to work. He tells you that you are a horrible, selfish mother, that you care more about your new age preferences than you do about his son, but you (multitudes) forged ahead. There is no “The Farm” for black mothers. There is you, watching a Ricki Lake documentary, reading The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding and Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth, alone in your room, while your then-partner drinks and mourns what he views as the end of his adolescence. He is adamant that you cannot deliver in his brothers home, where y’all live. Your midwife arranges to do some volunteer work for the birth center to knock down some of the cost, and he grimaces as he pays the leftover $800 fee. Why can’t you just do it in the hospital? He says. But your mind is made up, and you do that shit. You vomit twice in the midst of Commencement. You take off all your clothes in the heat. You drink water and sip broth. You pant and move. You tread water in a birth pool. Your son is born in the caul. He is small, runty. But he is healthy. Your gender genre changes: you are now Mother. After you deliver your son they ask to post your picture on the wall, to hopefully encourage more black mothers to come. You agree.
You are pregnant with your second child in the next state over, in Chicago, during the height of coronavirus panic. You are thirty, and you have been writing your book for three years. Your primary doctor at that time is the beige-toned African-American woman. You request to be referred to a CNM at the University of Chicago, which is within walking distance. She calls you by your first name and states, through gritted teeth, that you don’t know what you’re talking about, that she will only refer you to an OBGYN, period. You switch insurance just to get away from her.
You are at the OBGYN. The doctor mentions not letting you go “too long” due to your thyroid problems. She wants to schedule an induction. You decline. You explain to a nurse that you were denied a referral to a CNM. She puts in a personal call to a friend, a black female CNM at U of C, who gets you in. You thought you would give birth at home but you end up going to their birth center, an emergency. Your baby is in the NICU for three days. You bring your daughter to the University of Chicago for a well-child check-up. “Is your daughter’s father white?” the nice, East Asian nurse asks, smiling at your golden-skinned infant. “No,” you say, looking down and gripping the pen and clipboard. When you come into the doctor after giving birth to your third child, a thrice-dimpled copper-brown dreamgirl, the East Asian OBGYN with the surname Smith “compliments” you on your sling by comparing you to mothers she saw in “Africa,” where she did Peace Corps or some other colonial charity program. You push past all of this, because you can’t afford to lose anything else that you haven’t already lost. The Smith doctor warned you about telling people you gave birth to your third child “unassisted.”
You remember the feeling of the baby grinding against your pelvic bones. The small, nameless holobiont is helping, opening your bones, making a way. Multiple things are happening at once. She is trying to emerge correctly. You are swaying and moving on all fours, then in a squat, then holding onto something. The scene resembles an exorcism as you moan and groan and walk. She was sunny side up during the ultrasound at 38 weeks, and you sighed, commenting that she’d probably turn during the birth. “You still have time, she’ll probably turn before you go into labor, “ she replies. What do you know?
Yet here you both are, just like you thought, dancing, working to turn her around. You remind yourself to breathe. Just when you begin to have thoughts that you might die of exhaustion, the pain spikes. The story is never over. You announce it complete. You wake your partner at this point. Help is what gets you through the doubt. You are two little fish, swimming upstream. You lean into him, gripping his forearms, squatting to the floor, head lolling. At some point he beckons for you to get down on all fours so he can check you. He cannot measure centimeters, only the weight of your travail, and the time passed. He says that he can feel the little thing’s skull and laughs in anticipation. Breathe. You are coughing up mucus from your lower end, your lips widening, stretching. Your entire body heaves. You bear down, and the creature comes tumbling out into your partner’s waiting palms. Partus sequitur ventrem. That which is born follows the womb.
Did you die? No? Then you have accomplished. You cross the threshold. You become a portal for a new thing. When you initiate the project you will feel excited, then anxious. You will begin to feel trepidation upon hitting certain milestones. You will circle around your goal, pacing. At one point you will stop completely, convinced you have made a mistake. But there is no turning back. You have come too far. You must edit and revise until it is polished, and even then it will never feel complete. But you will have done something. It may not win awards, and you don’t care about (it) being wealthy, but you will have done it. Once you’ve done it once, you will do it again and again, and through each travail you will (hopefully) live. Sacrum encaustum. How privileged you are to be a common beast, pricking your fingers, pulling your teeth out, and biting your lips, clenching your thighs, spilling red ink. You have become an author three or more times. What luxury.