Fern: What are you thinking about right now?
Joe: You ask me that often. I happen to have what’s called Resting Greek Face. Google it. It’s a thing. Usually I’m thinking about what to make for supper. What are you thinking about right now?
Fern: You never ask me that . . .
Joe: That’s because you always tell me what you’re thinking. Sometimes in the middle of a movie we’re watching. Or when I’m drifting off to sleep.
Fern: I’m thinking now as we begin a column that writing gives me anxiety. Like before I sit down to write. I don’t know how unusual that is. For someone who thinks of herself as a writer. Don’t most writers love to write?
Joe: Not at all. I enjoy painting and cooking and playing poker more than writing. And this chit-chat back and forth is your idea. In fact, most of what goes on in our lives is your idea.
Fern: You’re easy to get along with.
Joe: So do you want to write about writing? Not politics, please.
Fern: Writing now about what’s going on in this country is fraught. Having opinions is fraught.
Joe: Fraught. That’s a very writerly word. Not many people use it. Why is writing “fraught?”
Fern: When I fall asleep, ideas float around in the dark. Especially now. At our age. And in these times. I mean sometimes before sleep, I think of people I wish were . . . you know . . . permanently silenced.
Joe: Permanently silenced? Why don’t you get back to the topic of writing?
Fern: Maybe I didn’t make writing important enough in my life. Forty-five years ago, when I was in still in my first marriage, working on my first book, I heard my daughter on the phone with a friend: “Oh, my mom can drive us and pick us up. She’s not doing anything. She’s upstairs writing.”
Joe: Family life is distracting. I don’t know how I ever finished my first novel – still unpublished in a drawer someplace in the basement. Back then I had a full-time job. Two little kids. A marriage that was ending.
Fern: For me, it wasn’t a question of putting family first. Which is not a bad thing. It was about putting anything ahead of writing: An invitation to lunch with a friend, a kitchen to clean, even grading student papers.
Joe: Grading papers? I’d much rather write!
Fern: Which is why I love so much what I’ve been doing recently.
Joe: Us writing together?
Fern: No. The babies!
Joe: Go ahead. No more discussion about writing. No politics.
Write about the babies. I’m going downstairs to paint!
Fern: You know, we’re going to need more walls.
Fern: Our next-door neighbors, Christa and Jessica have a five-year old daughter. One sunny day last Fall, our grandson was playing in their driveway, throwing water-balloons, running back to our house to get more. “Do you know that Quinn has two moms?” he asked on one of the return trips.
I said that I did. I began a didactic explanation: “Some kids have a mom and a dad, some kids have . . .
“Yeah, yeah,” he said, focused only that I continue filling up balloons.
Now Christa was pregnant again. IVF with the same sperm donor. With twins! More girls! The neighborhood was excited for them. A diaper drive filled their closet with disposable diapers.
My good friend and neighbor, Becky and I decided to give another gift: a couple of hours for baby-rocking.
We stopped over the day before Christa was scheduled to have the C-section. Becky took this photo. Belly decorations were by five-year old Quinn. (Which apparently didn’t come off easily in the operating room.)
The babies were born the last day of December. Two tiny, identical tax deductions.
Welcome to this flawed, complicated world, Dylan and Tolley!
Last week Becky and I traded off going to their house and a couple of times, we have wrapped the babies in blankets and taken them to mine, right next door.
Becky suggested that we switch off holding each baby. “So we get to know them both.” I can’t tell the difference. And sometimes neither can their frazzled moms.
Maybe baby-brain affects care-givers as well as new moms. But I do feel that holding babies has been better for my own mental health, more calming in this upsetting time, than the Lexipro I’ve been taking for depression.
Last week my daughter sent me an article from the New York Times: “When Your Only Job is to Cuddle.” The author, a woman who didn’t like hospitals because her husband had spent so much time in one, signed up as a baby cuddler. “As a way of being of use in our messy world. . . We were here for our own reasons — for the children we wanted or the children we lost. . . . To give back. Perhaps to regain trust in the power of small offerings or to heal a long ago hurt.”
As a writer, I could not have said it better. Yes, I thought, sitting in my peaceful living room, with tiny Tolley. Or maybe Dylan. Yes! Yes! Yes!
The Iowa Writers’ Collaborative
Have you explored the variety of writers, plus Letters from Iowans, in the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative? They are from around the state and contribute commentary and feature stories of interest to those who care about Iowa. Please pick five you’d like to support by becoming paid. It helps keep them going. Enjoy:
The best neighborhood Aunties. Thank you for baby cuddling, the joy it brings makes me so happy.
Our youngest son, Julian, came home one day in a funk. Mark was ready and asked if kids were making fun of him for having two dads. Julian replied "Dad, a lot of kids have two dads". Yeah, I hadn't thought of that--all the kids with divorced and remarried parents--like Fern & Joe.
I met a lesbian couple who adopted twin babies who were 6-8 months old and suffering from failure to thrive and only 5 pounts. They and their friends held the babies 24/7 for six months--and the babies were a normal weight. No one wanted the babies because they were "crack babies" and a fake study said parents were in for a lifetime of terror--and Dr. Charles Krauthammer wrote about it in the NY Times. As a doctor, he should have known science enough that you don't publicize a study of 20 babies done by a scam artist.
What was so horrible is that babies were just left to die because of the fake study. Here's a recap after 20 years: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1681748/