Today has not been terrible. I think that sun has really helped. I love winter. But I always struggle with depression in the midst of it. And my gut health gets really awful usually. This winter I didn't have many gut health problems but I think that was because I was pregnant. Obviously I was quite unwell because of that anyways and also for a good month after my eye surgery. The depression though, that was even worse this year. For obvious reasons. And is still just awful. I cry every day. I spiral into debilitating anxiety every day. Sometimes multiple times a day. It's been three months or so but it doesn't seem to let up. Anyways, I sunbathed on the fire escape this morning for the first time since we moved here and it was wonderful. But I also may be feeling a tad better because we could maybe be pregnant. I'm trying not to let myself think that but it also makes me feel so much better to think it. But also terrified and shitty.
I was listening to a podcast today (That's my phone slung in a little bag on my belt loop because...no pockets! and I had bunches of laundry and vacuuming I had to do today. The people in the laundry mat thought I was a bit touched. Which I am...) and a pelvic physical therapist said that by 8 weeks a woman's body is 50-70% physiologically ready to have a baby. That's crazy! My baby died at 8 weeks but I didn't find out till 12 weeks and my body kept growing and preparing to support her. In fact, that's why I had to have an emergency surgery because my uterus was so large compared to her size there was a huge risk of hemorrhaging... and that did happen, in fact, a week or so after the surgery. But the doctor lady's point was that it takes an incredibly long amount of time for a woman's body to recover from being so prepared for giving birth... physically let alone mentally.  

I slept/laid in far too late today... and I've forgotten my meth for a few days so I was room bound with anxiety at the fact that our roommate had the day off and was opting to stay home all day. So I hated myself a bit. This week I've worked some... with the kids. But I also randomly had an impromptu job interview at the coffee shop down the street. I was very very good. And walked out thinking I had the job then was terrified at that idea. However, I haven't heard back from them and it's been three or four days so apparently I didn't need to worry. The upper picture is what I actually did all day. The lower picture shows the promise of what I could have done. Put on my sunglasses, slung my jacket over my shoulders and roamed. But I would have been just as sad either way.

An inordinate amount of time was spent splitting hairs today while my mind fought to get free from the night's nightmares. And it was cold... so so cold. Finally I got the gumption to walk to get coffee but it was no warmer outside so I went to this weird little cafe half a block away, walking only in the sunlight. I tried to sit on a little wood bench overlooking the baseball diamond and the Manhattan Bridge but as I sat down the sun disappeared behind a cloud. And my coffee was too hot to hold long for warmth so I had to shift from hand to hand and the temperature fluctuations were just too much. I wanted to stay and watch the man in the frayed denim jacket trying to hot wire a motorcycle. But I had to bolt home again. Then I made fennel lace cookies for Jesse. That helped warm the kitchen a bit. I listened to the radio and wrote a bit about the phantom smell of death in our bedroom. I heard about a new website/app that lets you listen to the radio around the world and across centuries. I'm listening to the Ukraine in the 1970s while I'm typing this. I tried to figure out my next embroidery scene--the charcoal sketches turned out kind of nice in and of themselves. Maybe someday I'll be able to come up with my own and not just jam together Arthur Ransome drawings. I think I need to go shower to warm up. Jesse and I are babysitting another Australian kid tonight.

A solidly nothingly day today. I puttered till I got hungry. Boiled seven eggs... so I could stash some away in the fridge for the boys. Then I did yoga. And I smelled popping corn. Not only smelled, I heard loud poppings too. Now there was no one else in the apartment. So I should have been scared, but I was excited. I used to love popcorn. Then crashing down, I realized I was popping eggs, not corn. And that is not a positive thing. I tried half of one, and spat it out.  I threw seven burnt and imploded eggs away. I put three more eggs in the pot and covered them in fresh water. This time I set a timer. By now my hunger had slunk, sulking away. So I turned the burner off and let the eggs sit till the hunger had got over itself.

Listening to: Neil Gaiman read poems and Amanda Palmer sing love ditties to houses and him.

"The afternoon sun was hot on Martha's back, but not steadily so: she had become conscious of a pattern varying in impact some minutes ago, at the start of a telephone conversation that seemed as if it might very well go on for hours yet...
The window was two yards behind her, and it had a greenish "folkweave' curtain whose edge, or rather, the shadow of whose edge, chanced to strike Martha's shoulder and her hip. At first had chanced--Martha was now carefully maintaining an exact position. Areas of flesh glowed with chill, or tingled with it: behind heat, behind cold, was an interior glow, as if they were the same. Heat burned through the glass on the blade and buttock; the cool of the shadow burned too. But there was not only contrast between hot heat and hot chill (cold cold and hot cold?); there were subsidiary minor lines, felt as strokes of tepid sensation, where the shadow of the window frame cut diagonally." -the first page or so of Landlocked by Doris Lessing

Sometimes one or two of the leaves on one of my plants wave about. The window can be closed and none of the other plants stir at all.  So that's probably a new level of nothingness. Literally watching my plants grow. Also I've never been into plants till now.

"I remember when my daughter was that age... she's eighteen now."

"It goes so fast!!"

"Is she your first?"

"She looks just like you!"

"She must look like her dad...?"

Fourteen years ago I would quickly explain..."Oh no! I'm just their nanny... and, yes, they do look like their dad?" Fourteen years ago these questions and statements were aimed at me, a very young looking thirteen year old summer nanny. Let's not even start on how they thought I could have two, sometimes four kids aged four and under at thirteen.

Fourteen years later, I'm still a nanny, fielding these questions again... for the thousandth time. Only now my answers are, or could be, different. In reality, the best reply to these nosy, questionably well meaning, undoubtably unintelligent questions, is the stare you see above. Thankfully the baby I had two months ago had a nearly as a good bitch face as I do... because, let's be honest, she did look weirdly similar to me. Behind her stare the thoughts are, probably, "get your weird old fingers away from my face. How is that an acceptable behavior???"

Behind mine:

"You have no idea how fast."

"No, my first baby is dead."

Two days before I started nannying this particular baby, my own baby's heartbeat wasn't there. For the next two or three weeks I spent every day with a baby.

I looked like a mother, I acted like a mother, I am a mother. I am not her mother. To any other woman who's baby had died, I would be a trigger. I walked up and down Greenwich Village for days, this stranger baby gazing adoringly at me from her pram. We got coffee together. She liked sitting in the warmth of the coffee shop. We shopped for diapers and new baby food pouches for her to try. We trudged through the snow, sat on benches and coo-ed at each other while I knit. A blanket for my dead baby.

While strangers only saw her hard stare, she couldn't take her eyes off me. Because you see, I'm an amazing nanny. I don't know what I think about people having a calling but if I have one it's to always be around babies. I make them laugh by a flick of my eyebrow. A stroke on their knee and their bodies sink onto mine. I'm not the high energy, ball throwing, kick ass kind of extrovert some people feel they need to hire so their babies get properly stimulated. But I am really really good.

She was a very easy baby. Although, I think this is true of most healthy babies. Ninety percent of the time she was fussing she simply required eye contact. As soon as our eyes locked her breathing slowed down, her cries were replaced with babbles, her eyes narrowed into smiles, her little stomach softened. And every time this happened my eyes overflowed with tears. Babies love the color black... that was my only explanation as to why my tears always made her laugh. I know the exact path my tears take down my face, traced in mascara. I think every morning I thought that if I did my eye make-up it would make me less likely to cry?

Every time she melted at my eyes it was like my baby died again. My little hawk. Death is scary. She was scared and dying inside me and I had no idea. All she needed was my eyes on hers and I couldn't see. I didn't know. She was so tiny. So so tiny. I stroked and talked to her and she couldn't feel or hear. She never saw my eyes. I never saw hers.

My days with this stranger baby fell into a dreary pattern: Me watching her cry, her watching me cry. Me watching her poo, her watching me poo. Or hemorrhage. Me watching her eat, her watching me eat. She laughed and smiled. And sometimes I did too.

A few weeks later a friend of her parent's from Sweden came to take over, mercifully. By that time I was the baby's best friend. She utterly and completely adored me. A few weeks of her life is a massive percentage and we had been inseparable (as she perceived it). I didn't hate her. I haven't seen her since.