Blurred in the background.

Juliana and I swelled up, last year, in time. Our daughters were born the same month. We shared a midwife, and I was secretly apprehensive that we would go into labor on the same day, and the midwife would miss my birth. We’ve shared a few play dates and dinners since our daughters were born. The girls have aged enough at this point to acknowledge one another’s presence long enough to take each other’s things. I’m not sure we should call this playing. But we do.

Since I’ve know Juliana she’s talked about leaving. The first thing I knew about her was that she was moving to North Carolina. And for this reason, I’ve been a not very wonderful, half-committed friend.   Living in a transient space like Bloomington, I tend to warm up most to those who buy houses and plant asparagus. I don’t care for the feeling of being left.

Juliana is leaving. And she is leaving to do a lot of the things I say I would love to: to build a yurt in the woods and write her demons away and her pleasures into being. I haven’t figured out how she manages to write at all with a child the same age as mine, but its what she’s got planned for the year, and I can’t help but be envious of the way she sees possibility in her approaching time.

Juliana is also someone I respect for her commitment to writing in community, something I tried once, but felt disheartened by and have not done again. She attends and leads workshops in town, and sets up writing prompts in her public journal to encourage her more distant writing community together. Just now, she has posted a self-portraiture prompt at her journal.

I’ve always been both too proud and too puzzled to do much with writing prompts and I almost snubbed my nose to this too.  But I got to thinking about how many photographs I’ve taken this year in which I am a prop, a balance. Here a child leans against my leg, here I hold her at her waist. You can see my arm in this one. It feels indicative of my year. My body has become secondary to hers, acknowledged only for the fragmented ways it maintains her: It feeds a child, holds a child, puts a child to sleep, cleans, dries, guides, protects, changes a child.

I wonder what an intentional movement from the blurred background to the center of a photograph would do for my sense of self.  I wonder what making time to reflect on a body, a little less small and round, and a little more my own, would allow me to discover.

I am afraid to find either a poor unnecessary pride or a violent shame. Or worse than both, perhaps, nothing at all of the self that was before her.  This project, if I’m honest, is a crying out. The sort of call you make to mountains, waiting for an echo. And I wait for this: I need a reconfirmation, be it only a hallow reverberation of the hullabaloo I make,  that something about the self I knew before was not forced to be forever buried now that someone else’s needs dictate mine.

And so, I’ll be taking this snapshot project up. I’ve impregnating the undertaking with a little too much planned self discovery. And I’m apprehensive for reasons it seems, a little different than the other women who are also committing to self-photograph. They seem afraid of their beauty value, I am afraid that the photographs will be a sham, an imposter’s depiction of a re-centered self. Because what I am really after is not the image, but the centering.

Papers unread, unwritten: a lament.

In a bit of a rage, I deleted the paper I had spent the day on. Because it wasn’t what I wanted. I was too messy with it, and going nowhere that I cared to go. Which I suppose, are the words that could sum up my grad school experience in general.

I am a semester shy of finishing my PhD coursework, and feel like I have little to show for it. I have no cohesive sense of what I’ve done, am doing, will do.

Except that I have deleted, am deleting, outlines and paper upstarts – forever  unfinished.  I could (alright, I do) blame the muddled, un-slept and distracted frame of living that motherhood demands. And perhaps the season, can be blamed a bit too.

There’s something about spring, opening itself, that drives me a little sane and distracted again each year.  It reminds me that the things I accept as restorative in the winter- the nettling out of thick ideas, nestled in the deep tucks of down blankets- are sweated and stale by the green standards of springtime. And just the idea of today’s paper, unwritten, leaves me listless.  And starting over again.

I began graduate school with the intention of getting a degree that would allow me to teach and inspire others to think for themselves about things that mattered in the world, and I still see that goal as valuable. But it is hard for me to reconcile the research and writing that is required of me with my love of teaching and learning. I am expected to constantly bend my interests to fit the framework of someone else’s, bend them, until I no longer recognize myself in them.  I know this is not an uncommon story. But I am seeking the uncommon, and find myself stuck here, bewildered by and continually summoned into the logic of a way of knowing that I have never felt at home in, but need to keep writing into.

A point I should clarify: I do not mean that I place my hope in seeking the obscure, when I say that I would like to seek the uncommon. It seems like this may be the “way out” of the uncommon for many impressive scholars and colleagues, but I seek something distant from this, as I wither and weary from the time devoted to un-applied or un-applicable knowledge.  And they must too: it seems to leave so many of them smart but gaunt, with no time to be a part of or understand the practicalities of the living world. I do not know how, or if, they seek to nurture community and relationships or to take part in any great doing. I am bewildered by the constant hypothesizing about politics and ideas that could demand ones action and advocacy, but fails to. And when all the archaic drivel and fluff stands in the way of parenting and loving and friending and teaching well, it is hard for me not to grow bitter about what we’re all doing. Or to try something different and disconnected, anyway, when I can.

And right now, I can’t. The last month of the semester does not seem to be a time that I can live or act on any separatist dreams. So I lament for a minute, before sinking again into blankets and starting over, tap-tapping the keyboard, in unfortunate indifference to spring.