Maggie Ink

If Babies Were on Tinder

November 15, 2014

Everest, 4 months

Palm Springs

Do you like piña coladas?

About Everest

Swipe right if you’re single and ready to mingle.

I’m a total night owl — sometimes I rock all night long! — and I’m not afraid to cry.

And cry. And cry.

I’ve got a comfy Italian ride and my own driver.

How I roll.

I also follow a dairy-exclusive diet (no exceptions!), and love hanging out at the gym.

Working on my six-pack.

I’m not interested in playing games, unless it’s peekaboo.

#YOLO

Most of all, I’m into keeping shit real.

Too real.

What a difference a year makes

October 26, 2014

One year ago, I was getting ready for a Halloween party when I decided to take a pregnancy test. The Husband and I were actively trying to conceive, and though I didn’t really think I was pregnant yet, I wanted to be certain I wasn’t drinking for two.

Then the word appeared. The word I had been hoping for. The word I never thought I’d see again, after trying for so long and experiencing so much loss.

PREGNANT.

I sat in the bathroom for several minutes. The Husband was still asleep in the bedroom, and nobody else in the world knew I was pregnant yet. Everything was about to change, and I wanted to cherish that quiet sliver of time when it was just us — just baby and me, together.

I rubbed my tummy and tried to imagine what was to come.

Little sea monkey.

One year later, a word on a pee stick has become a baby.

Real-life, actual baby.

It still messes with my head sometimes. One year and a lot of pizza later, there’s a wacky new person in the world and I now carry the title of “mommy.” WHAT? How did that happen? Magnets, how do they work?

Life, you crazy.

People ask me, “How’s motherhood?” and I don’t know how to respond, because there’s no compact answer. It’s good. And it’s strange. And it’s hard. And it has changed my life in multiple ways, and in deeply profound ways.

Life changer.

It’s challenging to shift your entire identity and give up your autonomy, even when it’s a choice you’ve made.

My shirts are now stained with milk and spit-up. The bags under my eyes are more like steamer trunks. I have serious conversations about poop. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and think, “Ugh! Will someone please quiet that screaming child?” before I remember I’m the mom. I’m responsible for this gremlin. I often fantasize about running off to a hotel for one solid night of sleep all by myself — just one night — but I know I’ll just wake up in a puddle of milk and have a lot of explaining to do to housekeeping.

But there are other things too.

Everest is so exquisite, with long eyelashes and chunky elbows and tiny, pink toes that look like salad shrimp, I have never seen anything so amazing. Not Angkor Wat. Not the sunrise from Machu Picchu. The other day I took the baby on a walk and he was so giggly that I couldn’t look away from his beautiful, rosy face, and I literally steered the stroller into a “No Parking” sign. Sometimes I wake up in the morning, and this fuzzy-headed baby is gazing at me from his bassinet, and I realize that every moment of my life was carving the path that led to this very moment, and I am grateful.

Hi, pretty.

I don’t want to say that my life is perfect and fulfilled now that I have a child, because don’t you hate it when people say that? You know that person is sticky and tired and elbow-deep in smelly diapers 14 times a day, and you wonder what the heck their life was like before if they are only now fulfilled.

But one year later, things are definitely different. Bigger. My world is more expansive now, and I like it this way.

It definitely hasn’t been easy — sometimes Everest wakes at 4 a.m. and is ready for the day, other times he screams purple for an hour for absolutely no reason I can discern — but the fact that I find it rewarding is proof of how much I adore this child.

Confessions of an Outlander addict

October 1, 2014

I will always remember this as the summer of big, life-changing things: I graduated with my Master of Fine Arts degree. I gave birth. And “Outlander” finally came to TV.

“Outlander” is a series of books by Diana Gabaldon, about World War II nurse who falls through a magical circle of stones, lands in 18th century Scotland and discovers passion with a rugged Highlander. You know, that ol’ boy-meets-time-traveling-girl story.

As you can tell from the description, this series is full of awesome. The time travel adds a science fiction element, but it’s not about weird robots or anything. It has enough history to make you feel virtuous. And it’s a bodice ripper — literally, bodices are ripped — but all the books have a simple, classic design, so there’s no naked Fabio on the cover to give away your secrets. (It’s the literary equivalent of those Adam & Eve packages that arrive wrapped in plain brown paper, so your mail carrier won’t find out you’ve ordered dildos.) It’s basically the best of every genre.

I’ve spent years waiting for this book to become a TV show (or movie — I’m not picky) and mentally casting the characters. YEARS. And it finally happened, thanks to the good people at Starz and my friend, Wendy, who lets me come to her house every week to watch it.

I purchased the first book in the series in 2010, when I was traveling around the world. I knew nothing about the story, only that Diana Gabaldon wrote freakishly long novels and that appealed to my backpacker’s budget. I had a great, big Kindle to fill and wanted the most pages for my buck.

“Outlander” quickly became my trusty travel companion. I was often lonely and sometimes bored, but “Outlander” always gave me a place to return.

In Bolivia, I spent some time volunteering at a monkey sanctuary. One of my fellow volunteers was, unfortunately, from Scotland. I mean, it’s terrific that he was Scottish. But it was unfortunate for him that he was forced to spend weeks listening to me yammer about Jacobite risings, Bonnie Prince Charlie, and Scottish time travel.

A lot of our conversations went like this:

ME: Have you ever fallen through the stones at Inverness?

HIM: Hmmm, let me think. No.

ME: Well, maybe you weren’t there on the right day.

HIM: I’ve never even been to Inverness.

ME: I don’t understand. Aren’t you Scottish?

Once some little Bolivian schoolgirls wanted to see my Kindle, and I showed them how to read books on the device. They squatted around me on the floor of a wooden house as I flicked from one page to another. Then a passage stood out, black and bold against the blue-grey light of the screen: “And I mean to hear ye groan like that again. And to moan and sob, even though you dinna wish to, for ye canna help it. I mean to make you sigh as though your heart would break, and scream with the wanting, and at last to cry out in my arms, and I shall know that I’ve served ye well.”

Oh my! I blushed furiously, even though the girls didn’t speak any English.

Cheeky Highlander

“Outlander” became my addiction. Every few weeks, whenever I reached a city with a decent wifi connection, I downloaded another book from the series. They sustained me throughout South America, every bit as much as chicha and salteñas.

In so many cold hostels, thousands of miles from home, dashing Highlander Jamie Fraser was by my side. While I rode in a rusted bus over dusty, pocked streets, jammed between sweaty farmers and clucking chickens, my mind was in the lush Scottish countryside. When a Bolivian woman peed on my backpack — no, “Outlander” did not help me with that. But afterward I did check into a real hotel with a bathtub, and I read “Outlander” while I soaked.

I read a lot during that backpacking year, and those books are now superimposed over my own experiences. It’s hard for me to think about the places I traveled without also remembering the characters and stories that joined me along the way. In the same way that an INXS song instantly transports me to my sophomore year homecoming dance, “Shantaram” takes me back to a steamy beach in Goa. Whenever I think about “The God of Small Things,” I’m once again curled under a filmy mosquito net in Rwanda. And Geoff Dyer doesn’t know it, but he joined me in a straw hut in rural Ethiopia. (I left him there too.)

I won’t say I’m the biggest “Outlander” fan out there or any kind of expert on the series. In fact, I’m not sure I retained even half the story — I realize now I must’ve done a lot of skimming in between the kilt-dropping scenes. But I’ll never forget how it felt to form a friendship with those books over sprawling months and endless roads. “Outlander” will always be intertwined with my South American memories, my coca fields forever filled with Scottish Highlanders. Those months were all monkeys and Machu Picchu and a time-traveling British nurse.

Now it’s part of my summer of big things too.

Writing Process Blog Tour 2014

September 17, 2014

My friend Maggie Thach was kind enough to tag me in the Writing Process Blog Tour. You can check out her answers to these very same questions on Jim Ruland’s blog.

Here we go:

What are you working on?

Well, I gave birth just two months ago. So there’s the writing I did before Everest was born, and then there’s what I’ve been doing lately, and the Grand Canyon sits in between. I can’t even see the other side from here.

Pre-baby: A memoir. Essays. The occasional short story.

Post-baby: Sleep. Grocery lists. Little bits of this and that. Finding things that rhyme with “Go to sleep.”

I’d like to say I’m working on more, but finding an hour of quiet, hands-free time now is like spotting a unicorn in the wild. During those rare, lovely moments when Everest is napping, I have a decision to make: Do I sleep? Do some housework? Should I chip away at the marketing work that gives me a paycheck? Or write something creative that might result in payment eventually?

Housework usually wins, since I need clean dishes and laundry and such. The marketing work is a close second, because money is good. The creative work suffers the most.

Honestly, I should sleep more. I should be sleeping right now. I am so tired.

Also he should sleep more.

Why do you write what you do?

My mom. I was a writer before my mom was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s Disease, but her disease added a deeper purpose and a sense of urgency to my writing. It also changed how I live my life. Knowing that the disease might be genetic, I made a conscious decision to experience more while I still could and capture those moments on the page — and that’s pretty much the whole story of my memoir.

Also because Alzheimer’s steals so much from a person, I wanted to give my mom the dignity of being remembered. This book is my way of maintaining her presence in the world. I didn’t want her to be like a Monet in the attic, something beautiful that is never seen again.

How does your work differ from the other works in the some area/genre?

My story is not quite a travel memoir and not quite a grief memoir. It’s something in between, and it’s different because it’s mine.

It was devastating to witness the degeneration of my mom — as each day moved forward, she was erased a little more — but it was also transformative for me. Watching her die helped me learn how to live. I didn’t want to put things off anymore. I had to see the world, love radically, and collect memories. And in the process, I wanted to honor my mom by living out her dreams.

So I spent one year backpacking to 18 countries around the world, hiking the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu, whitewater rafting down the Nile, praying at an ashram in India, tending to abused elephants in Thailand, volunteering at a monkey park in the jungles of Bolivia, fleeing the Arab Spring in Egypt. My trip was made mostly solo, and it involved quitting my longtime journalism career, losing all sense of security, and leaving my newlywed husband in California for the first year of our marriage. It also meant rediscovering home and what it means to be part of a family.

How does your writing process work?

I don’t have a process anymore. In the two months since Everest arrived, all red-faced and hollering, I’ve felt the itch to write but I haven’t had much luck actually doing it. Some of it is a time issue, since this kid is super needy and refuses to pull his own weight around here — but mostly I can’t string together coherent thoughts anymore. My brain is blurry, and my hormones are pinging around like crazy. So I’ve been keeping notes, lists and snippets of things on my iPhone, things to tackle later when the mom fog dissipates and my body returns to normal.

Also he is loud. Have I mentioned that? It’s hard to write when your ear drums are shattered.

Yep.

At first I felt guilty about not writing. Then I remembered an amazing conversation I had with Attica Locke, back when I was eleventy months pregnant and about to pop. She said to put the work on a shelf. Let it sit there for a few months, maybe more. Focus on taking care of my baby and taking care of myself. “The work will wait,” she said. “The baby won’t.”

So that’s where I reside now. I can only handle one thing at a time that is demanding to be fed. Right now it’s a human. Eventually it’ll be my book.

Continuing the blog tour: I tag Heather Scott Partington and Leigh Raper, both incredible writers and friends from my MFA program.

About Heather: Heather Scott Partington was raised in California’s central valley. She teaches high school English and lives in Elk Grove, California, with her husband and two kids. Her writing has appeared at The Rumpus, Bookslut, The Nervous Breakdown and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Heather holds an MFA in fiction from UC Riverside’s Palm Desert Campus.

About Leigh: Leigh Raper writes both fiction and non-fiction and sometimes posts on her blog about pop culture at leighraper.com. Her work has appeared at Spilt Infinitive and in the Best of Spilt Anthology and on The Coachella Review blog. She is slightly obsessed with television, rocks out to classic ’80s hair metal, and plays fetch with a wicked smart Labrador Retriever. She lives in the hamlet of Palisades, NY, on a rural postal route 12 miles north of New York City.

Baby’s cries explained

August 30, 2014

Crying is baby’s way of communicating. Baby’s eardrum-piercing, patience-testing way of communicating.

Experts say that parents get to know their child’s sounds, eventually distinguishing a hunger wail from a boredom cry. After a full six weeks getting to know my new baby, I can assure you this is true. I am now fluent in newborn — and this is the language my baby speaks.

The Wet Diaper

Sound: Sudden and distressed. The same sound I used to make when I’d wake up hungover and discover all the drunken texts I’d sent the night before.
Reason: Needs a new diaper for the 17th time today.

The Meh

Sound: Dismal sobs. The melancholy of a Morrissey song meets the sad mime in a snooty French film.
Reason: General malaise. Just felt like crying.

The Red Eye

Sound: Frustrated bleats. A sickly goat.
Reason: Eye is goopy and cannot open it. Or eyes are closed and forgot to open them, making the world a dark and scary place.

The Albatross (aka The Rime of the Ancient Momminer)

Sound: Squawks that grow incrementally louder and more forceful in their refusal to be ignored. Plus the burden of knowing that you are cursed and everyone in earshot hates you.
Reason: Wants to be held; needs to hang from your neck.

The Duran Duran

Sound: Raspy, panicked yips, like a rabid woodland creature. Hungry like the wolf.
Reason: Nipple NOW.

The Dick Cheney

Sound: Part movie villain cackle, part power saw.
Reason: No reason. Just wants to break you.

The End of the World as We Know It

Sound: Brassy and shrill. The wail of a fire engine that starts small and builds to a traffic-stopping scream.
Accompanied by: A purple face. Tiny fists of fury. Inconsolable rage.
Reason: It’s too cold. Now it’s too hot. The car seat strap is too snug. The sunbeam is too close. A sock fell off. Basically it’s the worst day ever.