where stories come from
image of performer from Shentai, a local moody adult carnival
Photo by Billy
One of my stories, Pseudocyesis, has been published this week on Storyglossia Issue 20. I wrote this story several years ago before I was pregnant, before William was born. When I workshopped this story at FAWC in 2005, my classmates asked, “Is this true; did you do this?”
Re-reading it now, it’s hard to imagine how I came up with the story’s fictional, fairly bizarre premise. I have to go back and reconstruct that time in my life. Billy and I had gone to Guatemala.Traveling had me thinking about displacement–how you tend to want to become a better version of yourself when you’re somewhere new.
Also, we met an American couple traveling with their two year old. I must have already been imagining motherhood; looking at them to see how a child might mark my own life.
And so, this unusual and (hopefully) evocative story was born from those things, and other things I can not pinpoint. It’s like knowing that your baby has your chin, your husband’s nose, but then there’s that brow—you can’t quite say where that brow came from. It’s from you, but its not yours exactly.
Check out this story if you get a chance and let me know what you think. It begins:
I know that the Spanish word embarazada means “pregnant”, but there I was, traveling alone through central Guatemala, balancing too many foreign words on the tip of my tongue. Those bare syllables sounded so familiar, like they should translate to mean “embarrassed”—which I was at the moment I uttered them. Anyway, I didn’t start off a liar.
To read more at Storyglossia click here or go to a PDF printable version here.
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Filed under photographs, writing | Comment (1)big boys
Photos by Billy
One year old William wants to be like the big boys–
In particular, like his new friend Isaac.
At the beach, he wills himself to take his first four steps in a row,
and he sings “I-zic, I-zic” just before he drifts off to sleep.
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Filed under family matters, photographs | Comment (0)father and son
William and Billy at the beach on father’s day
image by me
“oh, he’ll get darker”
Computer drawing by me
There was a Thai restaurant I frequented while I was pregnant. After Will was born, the twenty-something Thai-American hostess asked Billy about our brand new baby boy:
-How light is he? she ventured.
-Seven pounds, seven ounces, Billy answered earnestly.
-Oh, he’ll get darker, she proclaimed. Apparently she was talking about the color of our baby’s skin.
Every time we saw her over the next few months, her color-queries continued. Her dogged focus on lightness was impressive, surreal, and compelling in a way. Her perspective seemed to say something big about the world. It became an off-color joke between Billy and me.
-He’s so adorable, she’d coo. Has he gotten too much darker yet? It was as if she was divining Will’s dwindling prospects by his darkening skin. It reminded me of traveling; in Rio, in New Delhi, in DC—everywhere there are brown people jockeying for relative lightness.
One day while I was picking up take-out, this young lady talked with me for a few full minutes without her bringing up our boy’s color. But then, as I struggled at the door, she commented again on Will’s hue. She let a long sigh escape her mouth, and shook her head, resigned to what she saw as the tradgedy of it.
-Black is beautiful, baby, I wanted to say. Instead, I offered an ironic smile; I could see she meant no injury and, in a way, her words were gentle as water lapping; her sentiment inevitable and ancient as tides.
I pushed out the door and didn’t look back.
If you get a chance, check out Cathie’s fiction and prose at Bean Counter. I highly recommend her published short-shorts.
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Filed under drawings, family matters, the world we live in | Comments (4)in dah club
Will with his grandmother
Photo by my dad
Billy is wiser than I am. Befriend other mothers, he tells me again and again, Join a group. I am reluctant, as usual. All of my past joining experiences have been touchy at best. I tend to try to go it alone.
But as far as motherhood, Billy might be on to something. I’m not a card-carrying member of the C’ville Mommies club yet–but I am moving toward a communion with other moms. Like a secret society, we offer understated waves as our strollers pass. We smile commiseratively at each other’s balling toddlers in the line at the bank. We offer crackers and cubes of cheese to snot faced children at the sandbox.
“Say hi to little Joey, to Bobbie-Sue, over there,” we say to our own scowling children.
And it makes sense, because we are all, more or less, in the same surreal place. I have one new Mom friend, for example, who I’m constantly amazed and delighted by. An outing with her is like watching myself in the mirror:
You have ten Tupperwares of snacks in your bag, too! I say. Your sippy cup is also leaking in your purse! You can only meet for 20 minutes before nap time–but you still want to meet! Hooray! She offers a kind of emphatic allowance which acts as a soothing balm to my sometimes scattered behavior.
So in the coming weeks and months, I will continue offering up myself–a smile here, a wave there–to this informal club of mothers, where, in a way, I don’t need to explain a single thing.
This week I have an essay, “One Leg at a time”, up on Salomemagazine.com, a great site. Check it out there if you get a chance, or read it here.
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pen name
me and my son, Will
Photo by Billy
Someone asked if ‘Jocelyn’ is my pen name at Zoetrope Virtual Studios. This question prompted me to notice that most of the bloggers I read–like Chicken and Cheese to Binky at 24/7–use pseudonyms for themselves or loved ones. And here I am, my own truly named self.
Because of this, I probably am quicker to self-censure. And even if I used a nom de blog, I’d be nervous that someone would find me out. Billy talks about how privacy is a thing of the past, and at some level, I am aware that whatever I share here is public. So there is this dance of revealing and concealing intimate details of this year of writing and new motherhood
For me, I guess fiction is where I want to bare all, so to speak. In short stories I can explore the experience of my life without necessarily offering one true fact; I can walk around the truth, poke at it, and lay it down beside other contradicting truths.
That said, I still love reading real life confessions, and clever observations from all those anonymous bloggers out there.
Still, here I am,
fact and fiction.
You know my name.
Say what you will.
Speaking of true confessions, Billy found this gem; I offer it without judgment, but not for the faint of stomach: breast milk cheese!?!
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Filed under photographs, the world we live in, writing | Comments (3)cake
photo by my dad
photo by Bob
Yes we did get our son, Will, an over-the-top photo cake, and yes, Billy and I ate the eyes.
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Filed under writing | Comment (0)