I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness

by Claire Vaye Watkins

Like I said, I’ve tried to tell it a bunch of times. Each try takes me further from whatever it is I’m after. I finish on an alien shore with a raft of needs, reminded once again that books heal people all the time, just not usually the people who write them.

My sister visits and asks how much a doula costs. Does a person really need one? No, I tell her, not if you have an older woman in your life who is helpful, trusted, up to date on the latest evidence-based best practices and shares your birth politics, someone who is not all judgmental, won’t project her insecurities onto you, is respectful of your boundaries and your beliefs and those of your spouse, carries no emotional baggage or unresolved tensions, no submerged resentment, no open wounds, no helicoptering, no neglect, no library of backhanded compliments, no bequeathed body issues, no treadmill of jealousy and ingratitude, no internalized misogyny, no gaslighting, no minimizing, no apology debt, no I’m sorry you feel that way, no I’m sorry you misunderstood me, no beauty must suffer, no don’t eat with your eyes, no I cut the ends off the roast because you did / I did it to fit the pan. “That’s a steal,” Lise says. “Seven-hundred and fifty dollars for the mother you wish you had.”

I am a banshee, but cannot get comfortable with being one, am always swinging from bansheeism to playacting sweetness and back. The truth is I cannot play nice and don’t want to, but want to want to, some days.

I can hear the whispers of my own future outbursts. I wiped your ass, I suctioned boogers from your nose, I caught your vomit in my cupped hands and it was hot! I pruned the tiny sleep dreads from your hair and blew stray eyelashes off your cheeks. I can feel the seeds of my resentment as I swallow them. When you couldn’t sleep I lay beside you with my nipple in your mouth. For hours I did this!

I was okay. If I stopped breastfeeding and started meds and kept going to therapy and called my sister every day and journaled and beed a lizard at hot yoga four or more nights a week and took a lover or two, I would be okay—would survive my child’s first winter, a sludgy era of despair, bewilderment, and rage passed in the palm of the mitten.

My mother lived by her own code, something like: you won’t see it all if you don’t trespass a little.

Another way is, She had her mother’s pain swimming in her blood and her mother’s and her mother’s and her mother’s and she was fat with it.

“The Oregon Trail Generation is us!” said Ty. “The generation that came of age along with the internet. Born in the eighties. Last of the analog natives. We had landlines and grew up to be digitally fluent. We played the Oregon Trail on Mac IIs in grade school and had cybersex on home PCs in middle school. Dial-up in high school, ethernet in college.”

“There’s no ‘making art’ and not making art,” he said. “There’s just living. Art is just practice for being alive.”

My problem is I can’t figure out how sorry to be for the way I’ve been. I’m either a little sorry, very sorry, or not at all sorry.

My problem was born in Las Vegas at University Medical Center on April 28, 1957. My problem was almost fifty. My problem taught me to drive stick shift, to buy two boxes of hair dye, for we had the same thick hair. My problem taught me the names of all my body parts and that I decided who could and could not touch them. My problem is I never got to say goodbye, or I was always saying goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye so the meaning absconded, as meaning does.

My problem is I have the thing where the wires in my brain are crossed and everything that’s supposed to be joyous is frightening and vice versa.

“I’m unhappy,” I said. “I know happiness is a scam, but . . . unhappiness is real.”