Rivka Galchen’s Restful Worship
It might be nice to pay tribute to the whims of some god other than publishing.
This week I noticed an interesting dynamic unfold within myself. Having spent most of last weekend working incessantly—and by “work” here I mean writing, or the research and reading related to writing—I awoke on Monday morning feeling emotionally and intellectually spent, hungry to indulge in other kinds of pleasures.
It was as if the writing—all the time spent inside my own head, talking with the chorus of my splintered self—somehow filled me with energy for other pursuits, charging me up not (as I often wish it would) for further writing, but instead for any and everything else. And so, for the early part of the week, any and everything else is exactly what I did.
I played tennis; I reviewed the weekend’s miseries and majesties with my mother over coffee; I planned and cooked several elaborate meals. I assembled the metal boxspring that I ordered weeks ago for the bedframe in our spare room, completing with immense satisfaction a task that I had intended to abandon to my fiancé’s less-urgent timeline, as part of one of the domestic labor standoffs that seem to sprout organically within our cohabitative life.
Like a pendulum that gathers momentum by swinging between opposing poles, the days of writing seemed to launch me to the other side of some inchoate fulfillment spectrum, where my pent-up energy unspooled itself into the myriad other activities that make up a life. If I were being honest, I might even admit that a part of me was scouring my surroundings for reasons not to write, because, as always, it had been difficult, and daunting, and by the intermittent end I still remained unsure of whether I had actually accomplished anything.
And so I am forced to confront my real fear about motherhood: not that it would cannibalize me but that I would make of it an altar for self-immolation, embracing its cascade of concomitant joys and duties as righteous reasons to avoid writing forever.
Not so with the domestic tasks—with all those items I spent Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday checking off the list stuck to our refrigerator. When I was single it was the same, I think—the cadence of motion and stasis, of productivity and ponderance, at least, feels familiar. Many a day in my memory of life before—as a single woman in L.A., in Chicago, in Italy—is filled with the buzz of tasking, of designing and then completing discrete, straightforward goals that have nothing to do with the sweeping, incomprehensible, iterative work of writing.
But now there is a witness, an involuntary beneficiary.
Look, I built the boxspring, I inform my fiancé when he logs off his work interface for lunch. I had to go to three different stores to find radicchio, I glower as he listlessly pushes my meal around his plate. You’re really going to call your sister now? I accuse pointedly, as I pore over wedding invitation proofs to check the spelling of names and the digits in zip codes.
If I am like a pendulum, then my fiancé has become a passenger on one of those Pirate Ship carnival rides. By Thursday morning I am picking a fight about how he doesn’t spend enough time plotting our life together, devising and assigning himself tasks that advance the shared enterprise of us.
And even as I begin, with this blogpost, to descend back into the writerly headspace, in which I am better able to let the laundry languish and wherein I routinely eat plain slices of cheese in lieu of making meals, I maintain that I am not entirely wrong about this: there is no doubt in my mind that I anticipate and perform myriad labor that benefits us both.
But it’s also true that I do this of my own accord, that I am prone to distraction and procrastination and that special brand of laziness that masquerades as busy-ness. And so I am forced, as I see my ping-pong nature reflected back at me in my future husband’s eyes, to confront my real fear about motherhood: not that it would cannibalize me but that I would make of it an altar for self-immolation, embracing its cascade of concomitant joys and duties as righteous reasons to avoid writing forever.
The problem isn’t and never has been motherhood itself. The problem has always been me—my fragile focus, so easily shattered; my delicate ambition, easily spooked but not as easily relinquished. Always, somehow, redirected.
Put more plainly, the fear is this: what if motherhood would be the best, most wonderful and rewarding distraction of all? What if I loved it so much that I felt justified in abandoning the blank page forever? Or, what’s worse—what if I treated its proliferation of tasks as an escape only to later resent my children, just as I found myself, after a few short days away from the page this week, resenting my fiancé?
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Rivka Galchen’s marvelous, uncategorizable Little Labors, which was written while her daughter was a baby, contains several passages that speak to the totality and transportiveness of early motherhood. For instance, at one point she compares her baby to an opiate, writing that:
“On many days I think of the baby as a drug. But what kind of drug? One day I decide that she is an opiate: she suffuses me with a profound sense of well-being, a sense not attached to any accomplishment or attribute, and that sense of well-being is so intoxicating that I find myself willing to let my life fall apart completely in continued pursuit of this feeling.”
This feeling of intoxication, of “well-being” divorced from “accomplishment or attribute,” tugs at my heart when I read it on the page. It sounds so blissful, so life-giving, like a surrender of self and struggle—a yielding to the felt reality of the present moment. It’s nothing like the satisfaction I derive from writing, and nor does it resemble the pride I take in a task accomplished. I imagine that it occupies, actually, a space on the spectrum of existence to which I have not yet been: the point at which the pendulum finally comes to rest.
Galchen revisits this theme of worship, of self-suffusion through voluntary fealty (which one of the book’s blurbs calls “the royalty of infants”) throughout the work, repeatedly referencing the ineffable appeal and authority of babies, who command such attention and care even while they seem, sometimes, to offer so little in return. She describes infants as “the only incontestable accessors to power,” pointing, as evidence, to the “way a baby, in a stroller, briefly resembles a fat potentate,” and finishing the thought by nodding to the release that comes with submission:
“Even as to see a baby raise its chubby hand—to bow down before that random emperor can feel very right.”
To bow before an emperor can be an abomination, a genuflection toward a circumscription of freedom. But it can also be a signal of allegiance, a way of committing oneself to a higher project.
When I read Rivka Galchen’s words, I long to suffuse myself into a higher purpose. To rest for a while at some center of gravity. Perhaps, I sense myself thinking, a child could be this center.
But then I remember that a pendulum at rest needs an external force to set it back in motion. How could I be sure I’d ever move again?