Doubts

I don't know, Succotash.

I guess it doesn't matter how I feel about it, as we'll find out the score tomorrow. I do know that I'm sick of needles. I'm sick of being tired. I'd like to leave the house. I'd like to see art and see friends and go to restaurants and read and think and so far I haven't been able to do any of those things because I have been parked on the couch under an anvil of hormone fatigue.

That's a Looney Tunes reference, Succotash. If you ever come to exist, will you watch Looney Tunes? I loved them. Some of them are pretty racist, though. This is the problem with American culture - everything is racist. My father used to read to me at night when I was a child, which is super progressive for fathers in the 1970s, and he did it because he loved me, and he did all the voices. What's the problem? He was reading Uncle Remus stories. I'm here to tell you as someone who has taught them in a literature class that those stories are racist as fuck.

I can't believe I'm digressing on racism and swearing on my baby blog. Obviously I'm not cut out to be a mother. Right? I mean, come on. If I were cut out to be a mother, wouldn't I be one already? I'm old, Succotash. I'm so old I remember when TV remotes only had six buttons. And only my grandparents had cable. And telephones were objects that sat on the end table. I remember dial tones, Succotash. How in the hell would I even explain dial tones to you? Also everyone I went to high school with has middle and high school age kids now. Of course, for the most part they also don't have careers. I have a successful career. Technically. Of course has my editor sent me the revision notes yet? No.

She might be waiting to learn the beta results too. What does it mean that my life is such that my editor might learn I'm pregnant before my mother does? I have already been in a world where my editor calls on my birthday before my mother does.

There's a writer out there who's famous, who I have never read, because I bristle that his fiction is 1) called "My Struggle," which makes me think of Hitler, which makes me not want to read him, and 2) all about picayune details of his family life, which 3) if he were a woman would not be hailed as groundbreaking contemporary fiction but 4) would instead be marketed as women's fiction with a hazy photograph to two girls on a dock somewhere, leaning blonde braided heads together, possibly wearing galoshes. Just thinking about this author makes me angry, and I'm not usually one to begrudge another writer's success. But the only reason I'm bringing him up is because he's quoted in Publisher's Weekly this week saying not only that contemporary fiction is overrated (agreed, but I still this he's a pretentious ass for saying it) but also that any family with a writer in it is cursed.

I might be a terrible mother Succotash. I'm self absorbed, for one thing, and sometimes cold and withholding. Part of me will be relieved if it's negative tomorrow because I have hated putting my body through this, as I knew I would, which is why I put it off until the very last minute.

I have a tendency to put things off that I don't want to do, which is a human tendency I guess. But then I do it, I rush through the important parts, make mistakes, and then when it doesn't work, and I fail, I can reassure myself that I tried, but probably not as hard as I could. This is called self-sabotage, Succotash, and I've done it my entire life. But now it matters, because my self-sabotage has been you-sabotage. I put it off too long, I didn't want to do it, I wasn't ready, I was ambivalent, and now I'm rushing through everything at the last minute.

And it's not going to work.

I'm going to fail.

I'm sorry. It's a trap, being born. You have no control over who your parents are. I'd be better than some obviously bad ones - I'm loving, I'm patient (older mothers are, on average), I'd develop you and encourage you and I wouldn't use drugs or take off and go to Burning Man leaving you in the care of an underpaid immigrant nanny for a month and a half. People do that, you know. People are the worst. But I have substantial flaws, Succotash, and you and I are facing the consequences of those flaws today. Right now.

Together, or alone, it remains to be seen.