Learning to Drive: And Other Life Stories by Pollitt Katha

Author:Pollitt, Katha [Pollitt, Katha]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781588368133
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2008-09-08T16:00:00+00:00

Looking back, I can see that I became depressed. It wasn’t baby blues, or, as we now medicalize it, postpartum depression. It was loneliness. In the way that we prepare for ourselves the bed we most don’t want to lie in, I had put myself in exactly the position I had spent my life avoiding: I went from being a writer who worked at home to being a stay-at-home wife. My husband was a conscientious father, but he worked long hours and wrote a book on the weekends. My friends, who had had their babies earlier, were back at work. Instead of spending time with people I knew and liked, I had playdates with neighbors. I had always felt guilty about not writing enough; now I felt guilty about hiring a sitter so that I could sit at my desk not writing at all. It didn’t really matter, though, that I wasn’t getting anything accomplished, because I had nothing to say. Interestingly, no one asked me anymore what I was working on. Once a woman gives birth it’s considered impolite, as if you’re implying that having a baby isn’t enough.

Had anyone inquired that first year, I had my answer ready: I read the New York Times every day. If I die tomorrow, you can put that on my tombstone. As soon as Cendra took Sophie out for a walk, instead of dashing to my study and getting to work, like the stalwart mother-writers I admired, Margaret Drabble and Harriet Beecher Stowe and Sylvia Plath—well, okay, bad example—I sank into that thick gray soup of processed verbiage like an exhausted insomniac drifting, finally, into drugged slumber. I read the unsigned editorials about sewage treatment and the Japanese trade deficit, the obituaries of aged grandparents named Ida and Sidney (mourned by daughters Linda and Barbara and grandchildren Arielle, Jeremy, and Zack), the “Metropolitan Diary,” with its familiar returning characters: the wisecracking taxi driver, the gallant doorman, the cheerful homeless guy. I read the real-estate section to measure our apartment’s decline in value and the book review to measure my own decline in value. I read the fashion pages to reassure myself that even if I could lose my pregnancy weight there were no clothes in existence that I could remotely imagine myself wearing except the clothes I already had. I read everything but the travel section. Because what would have been the point of that?

It’s not entirely true that I wrote nothing at all. I wrote dozens, possibly even hundreds of drafts of one poem. It was called “White Curtains,” and I was never able to make it come right. It started out well enough: White curtains wafting and stirring at my bedroom window / in the clear sunlight at the beginning of spring. Well, maybe take out “wafting” words like “wafting” were definitely part of the problem. But the poem’s real difficulty, of which “wafting” was only a symptom, was the ungraspable nature of its subject. Something about the way life

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