that not-so-fresca feeling

Well, I gave Kathy’s prompt (“Fresca”) a try, and I almost liked what I wrote. I read up on Fresca soda online and learned that it was sweetened with cyclamates, which were banned in 1969, because studies in rats suggested that a human who consumed 350 cans of Fresca a day might have an increased risk of bladder cancer.

Corinthians 1 restaurant knows how to party.

I had this idea for a story about someone who’d grown up with a birth defect because her mother had been addicted to Fresca while pregnant. But because a Fresca addiction is so absurd, she tells everyone she’s a thalidomide baby. Then she meets a real thalidomide baby and gets in trouble.

I’m still sort of into that idea, but I didn’t like my story enough to post it. The tone has to be just right in a story like that. For a while now I’ve been interested in the idea of genuine tragedy that is the result of an absurd event. Like, what if you lost someone you loved because an actual anvil fell on them? What would you tell people? How would you process your real grief while acknowledging that you lived in a cartoon? I think this is part of a larger motif in my thinking, where I’m always weighing my own dumb animal emotions against my awareness of my place in some (imagined?) narrative.

D'oh!

So that’s the story I didn’t quite write. This is my last week of part-time maternity leave. Our amazing friend Mary is watching Dash three days a week; they chill out in her garden, Mary’s Boston terrier licks Dash’s toes, and last week Mary made cookies for us. In June, Dash will start daycare at a place I feel good about, although I doubt they’ll make us cookies.

I’m going to miss having so many daylight hours with Dash, for sure. I’m a little worried about just how exhausted I might be once I start working twice as much, given how exhausted I already am.

Will I ever write again? That right there is my insecurity shifting, from worrying that the identity of “mom” is beyond my grasp to worrying that “writer” is. The difference is that I have all this weird pathology about the former, and with the latter, I just have the very mundane problem that nearly all writers have, which is a lack of time to write and submit work. I’ll get through it. Probably.

I’m looking forward to having a routine. Our daily baby relay, in which Dash is the baton, is maddening at times. I’m proud of myself for becoming someone who can more or less roll with the punches, but I still long to not get punched for a while.

I’m looking forward to seeing my Homeboy coworkers more regularly. I’m looking forward to spending less time in clothes spotted with half-digested formula—although that’s a cliché I take a strange pride in. In a cautious way, I’m looking forward to simply enjoying the day-to-day of a life I’ve worked my ass off to inhabit (while acknowledging that working my ass off was just a small piece of the puzzle).

Here’s to the next phase. Picture me raising a can of Fresca.