Freddy had taken Daisy to the ski slopes, and without them I slunk into my natural state of extreme laziness and lay in bed to read another bloody mystery by another up-and-coming Swede. At half past 2 my mother let herself in.

My mother and I have been on fragile ground lately, even more so than usual, and this is because of my pregnancy and my preoccupations with motherhood. In my dreams, I shake her by the shoulders for lacking a maternal and nurturing spirit. Last time she came over, she said You’re getting so big. Well yes, what do you expect was my reply. She reached out to touch my stomach, and I recoiled involuntarily.

She called from the kitchen and I and the heavy belly heaved ourselves off the bed and down the stairs. First she wanted to know if there was anything to eat–she was hungry–and then she asked to use the phone because she had forgotten her cell phone. Then she asked if she could borrow Freddy’s truck to move some bookcases from one house to the newer house she had bought in December.

I opened the pantry to get the spare key to the truck that is kept on a hook, and her eyes snooped along the kitchen counter until they found something disagreeable enough to berate me for. It was a Japanese woodblock print calendar she’d sent that I hadn’t removed from cellophane wrapping. Zulieka, why haven’t you hung this up? It’s a calendar. It’s almost February. (A whole twelfth of the pages are now wasted!)

I didn’t feel up to placating her or apologizing. I told her it was none of her business. She didn’t need to check up on whether I put her practical and thoughtful gifts to good use. You really don’t understand, do you, she said. It’s a fucking calendar, I yelled. It’s not as if a lot of thought went into it; it came with your buy-one-get-one-free coupon. I have a calendar on my iphone, a calendar on my computer, and Iliojuet sent me a calendar too.

She sat down on a kitchen stool with great sadness in her eyes. Here! I dropped the truck key into her hand and handed her the calendar. Maybe you know someone more deserving of this lovely calendar! Maybe I will come to your house unannounced and scream at you for not wearing the slippers I got you last Christmas!

I just really wanted her out of the house so that I could recoup and save some sanity for the rest of the day, but of course she would not leave. I went upstairs and slammed the bedroom door just like a thirteen year old, and she followed me up. I begged her to leave and come back another time when I was feeling better, but she would not listen. She continued her quiet, sad talking about me needing psychological counseling to work out my anger issues, about how she is sorry that I can’t be nice to her, about how she knows I must be very unhappy. At least she did not come into the bedroom. I sat on my bed and stuffed my index fingers into my ears, and read more of the mystery. I was very sweet to Freddy when he came home.

When it comes to being identified as an Asian woman, I am very thin-skinned, because it points out the disparity between how I see myself and what sort of impression I make on others. I don’t go through my day thinking that I am Asian, and in fact, other than having an intermittent craving for sushi, I never think about being part Japanese. I don’t consider “ethnicity” as something that sets me apart. I don’t feel that I have any of the stereotypical qualities–not delicacy, quietness, mystery (frequently cited by friends who have visited Japan: “You can’t tell what they are thinking”), graceful movements, care of small details, self-sacrifice for the family, or the ability to pack eighteen sweaters into a small carry-on.

When Professor McFitzpatrick took me for a walk down Beacon St. last summer, he pointed out all the white dudes with their Asian girlfriends teetering on heels to compensate for the height difference. “I’ve never noticed so many interracial couples before” he said. It hit like an icy snowball on the neck: he sees me as being like these women, and he sees himself as being part of an interracial couple. Then I took a look at myself wearing a short dress with ridiculously tall cork-heeled espadrilles, a bit underfed on more rice than protein, trying too hard probably, and although with the heels I was an inch taller than Professor McFitzpatrick, I might have passed for a slightly skanky almond-eyed mistress vying to trade sex for a green card. Geezus. A full notch lower than a Russian bride.

“So what’s the deal with being Irish then? Are you a type?,” I asked. “Do you break out in song, dance gigs, and mourn the loss of your bonny lass?” And so he did, right there on the sidewalk, break out in melody–it was a Grateful Dead song (I can’t tell you which). He belted it out, and I cowered in the same exact way I remember my mother cowering when my father would explode into song and dance.

He said later on that he identified with being Catholic more keenly than with being Irish, and blamed that for overwhelming feelings of shame and guilt, even though he wasn’t particularly religious.

I want to thank John Wood for mailing me “The Third Policeman”, and Nuumi who worked six years ago in a bookstore in was it Toronto? who sent “Sheep in a Jeep” and a poignant short story which, Oh God I’m so Sorry, I ripped to shreds in an evil fit of inflated bitchy glory (I remember that story, and I have images of the leaves in it in my head still), and Tony P. who sends missives that go down like cure-all hot toddys, and Phillip Markendoff who hung up on me in what I’m supposed to interpret as his disgust at my pathetic personality but who is he kidding, and SP whose musical and literary recommendations I have taken to heart, and that bicycling lawyer in Philadelphia, no Pittsburg, who shared my love for William Gass, and VJ who leaves comments, cheers VJ, and Dr. Hoyt who while in residence would email me emergency room stories, and the half-lost lovely Mormon girl with her disaster anecdotes, and the other Mormon girl who is this unbelievable shining orb of alive delight, and Ms. L. White who doesn’t need to do anything except just exist to deserve thanks, and the musician with the beautiful half-Japanese children, and Eddie Lin eating knuckles and such, and David who almost has me convinced that not everything that comes out of me is crap. This is crap, isn’t it, giving an Oscar speech as if I’ve achieved some great dead that ought to be shared with any human being that I’ve come in contact with for three seconds?

But that’s not how it is: I’m a beggar, and I’m thanking you for just making eye contact on the street. I remember you from seven years ago. I’ll stay for anyone who turns and looks before walking away. Yes, I’m that desperate.

Being seven months pregnant now, this is more difficult to accomplish. A man looks down five times a day to direct his hunka-hunka towards the cistern, and though I need not look, my parts are certainly felt in a big way, with each step up the stairs increasingly heavy, and the belly become a real structure that heaves up the boobs and pushes down into the pelvis. From an aesthetic point of view, I look ridiculous as a pregnant woman: I’m a curve-less straw with this amazingly spherical growth attached. It’s so round, and just like a ball, it gets kicked and thrown, but from within. There is some amazing, unpredictable footwork going on in there.

This time around I am not as enthralled about being occupied, and I have to raise some semblance of excitement by pretending that because 2012 is the Year of the Dragon, my baby boy is going to save the world. I didn’t have a real job when I had my daughter, and those first months were still stressful and difficult. I’m very much dreading lugging in a breast pump and taking twenty minute breaks to be sucked by a buzzing machine while the baby without his mother sucks instead on bottles and pacifiers and his thumb. So what if other mothers have to do this, and this is the new reality for women who have fought an uphill battle to be admitted into the workforce? I think it’s tragic.

There’s a verse in the slave’s lullaby that most people leave out:

Down in the meadow,
lies my poor little baby.
Bees and butterflies pickin’ at his eyes,
poor little thing is crying Mammy.

I would say a majority of American female artists, at least those whose work we know, did not have children. (I’m just saying this, without any real research. Who has time for research?) And yet the philosophical claim of women who have banked (as in ka-ching) on having a distinctly feminine output is that artwork by women has a different set of aesthetics by which merit can by judged than the usual, more conventional and historically entrenched standards of the males who have been accepted as standard museum or literary fare. If you have birds flying into vaginas in your painting, you can be a great female artist, even if a look at the work without any gender-based reference point reveals that it is a piece of crap, i.e. Georgia O’Keefe, Frida Kahlo and the recently deceased Helen Frankenthaler. Those three belong to what I think of as a dreary set of mustachioed, unsmiling crones, with quite ugly paintings. If you say what you really think of their work, you get stoned for being a misogynist. (Of the three, Frida was the most original.)

So there are famous male artists too, who by force of personality rather than talent have made it into the more rarified upper stratospheres of the art world, but I would hesitate to say that any of them are leaning on the “singularly male” point of view, or on what comes of seeing the world through the one-eyed member, as the crux of their style. Too many penises to compete with–it ceases to become a political statement, or even an interesting one.

Isn’t there any way to escape being a woman artist, a female poet, a woman writer, or a woman composer? The gender is imposed as if it is miraculous to be both a woman and anything else creative.

I found a lovely sounding Steinway at a local church that was donated several years ago by a generous parishioner (Santa, that’s what I want for Christmas.) The church was gracious enough to let me use the piano for some recordings and a couple of concerts for a low rate, so when they asked if I could accompany some of their Christmas gigs, I said sure. They mentioned that I would be playing for a group from “Levon Yardley” this afternoon, but I still hadn’t figured out who or what “Levon Yardley” was even after waiting for patients from the Levon Yardley House to be lifted or coaxed into the sanctuary.

The program started with Jingle Bells, which, sung by the two dozen or so adults with various mental disabilities, reached a feverish pitch of enthusiasm. Everyone was having a good time–the singers, the audience, the director. I thought I was going to have a good time too. Real holiday spirit.

I can’t get some of my students to sing during their lessons, they’re so afraid of the sound of their own voice. So being with people who jump right in and open up their throats is refreshing and heart warming.

But then, you know the “Glo-o-o-o-o-ooo-o-o-o-o-ooo-o-o-o-o-o-oooo-RIA” song? This refrain is everyone’s favorite part of the carol, and during performance the volume suddenly ramps up for the word “gloria”, far exceeding the attention given to the actual verses, which are dramatically and musically inconsequential. All breath is spent on the forever descending single vowel sound of “o”, after which, gasping for air, church-goers manage to spit out scantily “in excelsis deo”.

In this instance, no less passionate than a more traditional interpretation, the o’s of the glorias were howled in forty-three different keys (major, minor, and made-up) and went up and down and sideways, and none of the singers knew when to stop with them. There was no in excelsis deo to thwart the flood of brayed o’s.

I could do nothing to control myself. Don’t be too hard on me; you weren’t there to hear it. I put my head down to try to shield my face with my hair, and I really cried. My bowl full of baby was jiggling, my fingers were slipping and shaking, and there were three more verses.

I was tense as a child, getting stressed out over my mother’s unrelenting strings of criticisms, worried about keeping the daydreaming in check at school, worried that my father was going to die and leave me alone with the poisonous creature who birthed me. I must have started gritting my teeth at night at around age seven or eight, because it was after staying the night a friend’s house that the problem was first noticed.

During the years after having my braces removed and using a retainer, my parents had to buy new retainers every month because I would grind through them in my sleep. Since then I’ve sort of forgotten about the grinding, finding it mildly uncomfortable to wake up to aching jaws, and having gotten used to episodes of TMJ, but last week I managed to crack a molar wide open.

I could stick the tip of my tongue into the fissure–truly alarming. I hadn’t been to a dentist for four years, and I spent my Monday morning calling around to find a place that would take my insurance. I was able to schedule a cleaning on Tuesday morning, followed by filling work on Wednesday, and yes it did occur to me that there might be something amiss about a practice being able to offer me immediate attention, but then maybe my case was of especial concern.

Didn’t find the stains on the ceiling and the musty smell of the Dr. Laudanum’s practice very comforting. It made sense however when Trisha the receptionist greeted me in the way only people from small towns can master. We are all in this world together, you, and I, and my enormous breasts that are sitting on the desk, she said. We are not exactly professional in our bearing, and our threadbare carpet is from the 1980’s, but we will show you our love by arguing with your insurance company for hours to get your filling paid for (and that she did.)

The clinician who cleaned my teeth had palsy. This Dr. Laudanum, who has pictures of his two rather unattractive daughters on several walls, must be a very kind person, I thought, as I spat blood into the little sink. He has held onto this employee despite her debilitating handicap, and despite the fact that she is going to be responsible for a loss of clients. Once she was able to anchor her picks against the enamel of my teeth, she managed okay for a stretch of time before involuntary shaking would force the pick to scoot into my gums or lips.

The next morning I met the good doctor himself. He wore a golf shirt, was slight, and had a cough. A camera pointed in my mouth threw the image of the cracked tooth onto a large monitor. I felt a little sick. What the hell is wrong with me? I’m like one of those disturbed parrots that pull out their own feathers.

All fixed now, no other cavities. I think I will wait another 5 years for the follow-up visit.

Oh god, what a wonderful time of year this is. Sunday Kiki down the street called for the third time to remind me of her “Saffron Road” party, marketed as an eco-friendly version of the Tupperware parties of yore. Grapefruit-scented salt scrubs, bamboo utensils, glass bead bracelets made in Ghana; we all desperately need these things. She put videos of herself out on Youtube spraying the Saffron Road Lavender All-purpose Cleaner in her mouth to show how safe it is. It is only like $7.99, a small price to pay for saving the earth.

Last year Kiki sold me some Barefoot Books (another home sales enterprise). They are terribly written, with a kind of sheen on the pages that makes my mouth feel chalky, but after all I depend on her exclusively to babysit my daughter so there’s no diplomatic way to get out of buying this junk. Kiki was offering sangria and crackers with tapenade, and had spent the whole weekend cleaning her house with the lavender spray and appointing the Christmas tree with silver ornaments and white lights. A middle class on-the-fence conservative clutch of women (say they voted for Obama and believe in diversity but don’t actually have any black friends, and yes without exception they all drive SUVs no less than five years old although their brand of laundry detergent is safe for the environment) was in attendance. It’s safe to say no one wanted to there, but we all dropped at least 30 bucks in the spirit of…what? To think, I could have bought potatoes and a real red roast beef instead.

Because they seem to surface despite attempts to drown them.

My professor with Tourette’s syndrome or whatever it is that makes your head loll forward involuntarily, mail artificial hearts to the wrong country, blink rapidly when the conversation gets boring, and walk without bending at the knees, is out of the bag. You know me well enough now; isn’t he just my type? Ambitious, academic, Irish, a drinker, a smoker, taking drugs for ADHD during the day and sleeping pills at night while watching Star Trek: The Next Generation re-runs and Yankee games. (That’s a hint–he’s not a Bostonian.) Aren’t I just what he needs?

Where does he teach? He teaches at Harvard. I say this smugly, knowing it will hurt Freddy, who, if I let him be, would still be where I found him: renting a two bedroom house with three disabled cats and a gay pothead who filled said house with Sesame Street-themed knick knacks discovered at garage sales. Plastic statuettes of Bert and Ernie over the door jams, sticky with cat hair and dander, Elmo and Cookie monster hanging out under a ficus plant whose leaves are also fogged over with cat hair and cat dust. A velvet painting of Bert next to the front door, a Sesame Street lunch box on the kitchen counter blighted by both rust and mouse poop (remember, the cats are disabled.)

Was he drinking then? Yes. Every day? Yes. Was he painting then? No. Was he happier? Yes. Then I should have left him alone.

I’ve been boning up on early childhood psychology–even though I can say with a snarl that I’ve never taught more effed up kids than those whose parents were psychologists–because after volunteering at my daughter’s school, it’s clear that she is not quite normal, and is spacing out the same way I used to during most of the teacher-directed learning activities. She can’t listen to other people because she is totally self-absorbed and is paying attention to her own wildly divergent thoughts.

For me to have a daughter like this, who takes twenty minutes to brush her teeth if she actually remembers what she is doing there in front of the sink, is my own mother’s sweet revenge. I was too eager to develop in her a love of reading, and now that she is hooked, she stays up one hour, two hours, after her bedtime pulling books off her shelf, which results her being grouchy and tired the next day. We’ve already missed a couple of days of school because of her being overtired.

The most frustrating problem with all of this irregularity and lack of structure is that my work schedule is such that I never see her. I have 45 minutes with her in the morning during which I yell at her to get her clothes on, go pee, eat breakfast, drink her milk and stop staring at her spoon goddammit, brush her teeth, and then during the 15 minute drive to school we review her spelling words and count up in 5’s and 10’s.

When I come home around eight-thirty at night, I am mad with fatigue and hunger, and if she is not already in bed then I yell at Freddy for not having her in bed. On Saturdays I work from nine to three, so really my only time to work on improving her “executive functioning” (it’s the new catch phrase in childhood psychology) or the wirings of her pre-frontal cortex is on Sunday. The thing is, on Sundays, she has her soccer game and she has to catch up on a week’s worth of missed violin practice. She doesn’t have ADD, she has an absent mother.

Kids from affluent families, who have stay at home mothers or educated nannies, will have more structured and regular daily lives. They will have brilliantly developed pre-frontal cortexes which will allow them to make sound, responsible choices later in life. They will not have to work at a manufacturing plant from 2 am to closing, and they will not have teach piano to fifty kids six days a week, because they will realize, before choosing their career paths, that money is actually of vital significance. They will know how to find balance and happiness in their lives. They will not smoke, do drugs, have unprotected sex, beat up their spouses, and turn their sweet little kiddies into psychopaths. For the rest of us, it’s a crap shoot.

This idea that people use music or literature or art to escape is totally wrong. Convening with your senses is not an escape, it’s a return to the reality of being human. So much of this has to do with mortality, and really getting into the spirit of a work of art means exposing the corpse that is the inevitability of the birth–I think people are too afraid of that, and for that reason judge completely insipid, soulless pop tunes and pop art as the stuff that makes them feel happy and upbeat. It’s the treatment of emptiness as a design or joke, not to be taken seriously. It’s the waterproof coffin and the body pumped full of formaldehyde. It’s denial.

Well, you might as well know that I have been very busy these last few months getting into the baddest kind of pickles. I am all set to have a dragon baby in March. We can assume that Freddy is the father. I stopped seeing the therapist I found during the summer because I didn’t want to tell her about it. I didn’t need her to tell me that it was a really stupid idea to get pregnant in the midst of our quite violent fighting, an affair, an attempt to change careers, and an attempt to get a divorce. It was sick, so sick of us to expose our daughter to the psychotic drunken rages that we seem to be able to kindle with little effort. I felt like I was living with a monster. There’s nothing more disgusting to me than a man who takes pleasure in dominating a woman physically. And yet I wanted to test and see just how horrible he could become.

Drinking was a big part of it. “Oh, you think?” says the therapist. Says the friend. Says the mother. There was nothing in him, not one clear thought–he was just this shell filled with the kind of infantile anger we usually see in toddlers, who out of frustration from being unable to express themselves verbally, flail and wail with pointless might. It could have been merely pathetic, except that it was so dangerous.

We are seeing a counselor now together, and the last two weeks, to give the whole mess some light, have been miraculous. The drinking has stopped. I am sweeter. Dishes are getting done. I don’t know that our daughter will ever forgive us, but we certainly don’t deserve to be forgiven.