The day after my husband and I were supposed to have unprotected sex I sat alone by a dam in northern Maine, watching water surge through holes in a stone blockade, trying to imagine a baby ripping through my body. I thought that’s what I wanted—to transmute into a rabid river.  

But sitting there, outside a hotel, the night before a ten-day artist residency, the whole evening mine to write and read and flop around in the expanse of my boredom, I felt giddy. Like I’d gotten away with something. 

* 

Check-in for the residency wasn’t until two, but I arrived in town around one. I wanted to wrench every morsel out of the experience. For that hour, I drove back and forth down the town’s tiny main street, looping its post office, general store, antique store, and clapboard church with peeling white paint. I imbued these ordinary buildings with mythic qualities, praying they’d be the setting for my personal and creative becoming.  

I needed out of my life, or at least out of my low-paying job as a spec on the nonprofit sector. I was tired of all the spreadsheets and emails and phone calls. I was tired of squabbling with my supervisor for days off. I needed to stretch out, to know my true size. The week before I’d double-underlined a passage in Audre Lorde’s Zami: “I knew what it was like to be haunted by the ghost of a self one wished to be, but only half-sensed.” 

* 

Since I was the first to arrive, I got the first pick of studios. I chose the only room with a view of the lake, mountains in the distance—a view so startling, so postcard-gorgeous, that I just stood and stared out the window for several minutes, shivering with joy, trying to recover from the whiplash of my changed circumstances. As part of my fellowship I was also given free housing, free meals, and a stipend. My only job, for the next ten days, was to write.  

I carried in my box of books, stack of looseleaf paper, pencil case, tarot cards, typewriter, gluten-free cookies, and computer, arranging them on the desk and provided bookshelf. Then I sat, put my cheek on the desk’s wooden surface, and stretched out my arms the length of my wingspan. Mine, all mine.  

* 

At 2am the first night I felt the familiar kick of a cramp in my lower abdomen. I rushed to the bathroom, passing clots of blood into the white toilet bowl. Disappointment, relief. For months, I’d teetered between these two feelings. The blood, my period, emphasized my childlessness—or was it my status as an artist, my body still my own?  

Sylvia Plath, after reading Virigina Woolf’s The Waves and brimming with her own ambition, wrote and underlined in her journal, “No children until I have done it.” It, I imagine, being a literary career, public recognition, and personal creative satisfaction. Yet, two years later—having not yet published a book—she wrote about her eagerness to have a child. She wrote that pregnancy, birth, and motherhood were the “Great Experience” of a woman’s life. She was desperate to get pregnant and devastated by the months of her and Ted’s unsuccessful attempts. She longed to be an “Earth Mother,” and felt that in the face of this ideal, her intellectualism and career were “ash.”  

* 

The second day of my residency I drew the blinds in my studio and stripped. I propped my phone against a tissue box on my desk, set the self-timer, and stood straight against a white wall, naked except for my black socks. I photographed my body from the front and back. 

I sat at my desk for several minutes after, phone face down. Two years previously I’d worked as an artist’s model for a day in an atelier school, posing with my hip popped under hot lights, trying not to faint as a classroom of mostly men studied my naked body. Afterwards I peeked at their paintings, offended they’d depicted the truth of my curves. My belly.  

When I looked at the photos on my phone, I saw a woman standing with her arms stiff at her sides, shoulders foisted back. Faint smile on her lips. Her silver ring glimmering in the dim light. Hair in a messy bun. Breasts full, their skin stark white—a much lighter shade than her arms and face. Right nipple higher than the left. Long torso. Shadows in the grooves above her hip bones suggesting a slight outward protrusion of her belly. Cute brown dot of a birthmark above her belly button. Black triangle of bush between two solid thighs. Ass slightly dimpled, and on its right side, where the fat connects to the thigh, the line not a delicately curved “u” shape but wiggly, like a whimpering mouth.  

I liked this woman’s body. I wanted it to stay as it was. 

* 

In the mornings, in my studio overlooking the lake, I drank burnt coffee from the town general store. I wrote about how the lake water changed shape hourly, like clouds. I wrote about the four other writers, all women, and how I could hear them in their adjacent studios, shuffling papers, running their fingers across keyboards. How surely they were getting more done than me.  

Mostly I read or researched. I clicked through images of Louise Bourgeois’s pregnant women. She painted hundreds of them. Not specific women, but bodies, enlarged breasts, rounded bellies with babies curled inside. She used red gauche, mixed with extra water; the bodies are blurry, gestural, like memory or myth, like blots of blood.  

She painted these images over and over, as if trying to figure something out.  

* 

I’d brought a stack of books with me about motherhood, books I’d been thinking of as “birthverse.” But instead of reading them I re-read Jesus’ Son. 

The men in Jesus’ Son take everything—every pill, every drink, every fuck. They don’t save the birthday opium for their birthday. They hitchhike, they drive all night, they sleep outside in the rain. They stare at clouds that look like “great grey brains.” They experience small moments—a kiss, a glance, a high—that enable them to limn the unconscious, the chthonic.  

I read the book after dinner in the country house where I slept, from a bed so small it could have been an 18th century poet’s. I was dazzled by Johnson’s prose, and by his characters’ bravado. Yet it got exhausting, the way the women in Jesus’ Son were reviled. They stank. They were “torn-up trollops,” beaten with extension cords by their husbands. They were caricatures of sex workers, their makeup smeared. They were mothers, given a single sentence. Or they were mothers, disappeared: “He started driving along faster and faster, with a look of glory on his face. ‘We killed the mother and saved the children,’ he said.”  

* 

For years I’d begged my husband Francis to have a baby with me. I’d felt the stirrings in my body around 26, a propulsion toward those soft-skinned creatures when I passed them in strollers on the street, a yearning akin to desire. My breasts ached.  

There was something else to my yearning: I wanted to win. I felt proud that Francis and I had found each other at twenty, that I was ahead of my peers in terms of life milestones. Find a life partner, check. And if we got married and had a child before thirty, I told myself, I could rest easy that my life was on the right path.  

No matter that I was broke, touring the country with my band, singing into a microphone at midnight in smokey bars, living in a squirrel-infested apartment upstairs from an alcoholic veteran who’d sometimes corner me to tell me he loved me, his whiskey breath hot on my cheek. I wore stained clothes.  

What did I want from motherhood, other than satisfying its magmic pull? What were Francis’s hesitations? We went to therapy and read books. We discussed what parenthood could mean for us, as a couple. How could we afford it in jobs that didn’t have paid parental leave, in a country without free healthcare or affordable housing? How would we have time for our art?  

* 

The residents ate dinner together at a long table in the common room of the writing studios, its large windows overlooking the lake. Some brought wine to share. We talked about our insomnia and the strangest places we’d shit over the course of our lives. We talked about the boring podcasts we binged to quell our anxiety and the worst ways we’d made money. We talked about entropy and long-dead philosophers. I was entirely attuned to our volleying conversation. We were ages 32 (me) to 79 but we were aligned, none of us famous or saved from financial precarity. All of us continuing to ask ourselves how to make art sustainably.  

One day at dinner a painter told us an elaborate story about how he almost died after being bitten by a viper while hiking in Italy. The doctor told him his chances of survival were “not likely.” He happened to be studying St. Francis at the time, the patron saint of snakes, poets, and vagabonds, revered by mystics and academic outliers like Simone Weil. He pointed to the snake tattoo on my forearm, asking me the story behind it. I shrugged, embarrassed to not have anything more to say than I just thought it looked cool.  

I thought of my own Francis, my husband Francis, and his similarly irreverent tattoos. I wished we were the type of people who regularly got to eat dinner while overlooking a lake. Who had languorous summer evenings with no work in sight. Who hiked Italy. I knew, if we were those people, it’d be easier to have a baby. 

* 

We’d decided to start trying to conceive in May, before I left for the residency. That March, I had a motherhood nightmare. A night mère.  

Francis and I were on a ship that was over-crowded with bewildered parents and screaming children; it dragged under our weight, unable to outpace an oncoming tsunami. Over a loudspeaker someone commanded that all parents, and those considering parenthood, go to the deck. We were ordered to open doors on the floor of the deck that led to slides connected to the ocean. We were ordered to drop our bodies down them.  

* 

The word “nightmare” comes from the Old English word “mare,” a female demon that torments people in their sleep. 

From March through May I barely slept. At night I lay awake, limbs twitching, my breathing shallow and strained. By 2am I gave up and wandered into the kitchen to make tea and toast then binge-watch Golden Girls. When I did sleep I dreamt of being submerged in deep water, and I awoke still stirring in those dark uninhabitable depths.  

I’d stare at Francis’s sleeping face, rageful and resentful of his peace. I wanted to shake him, I wanted him to join me on my wretched island. He’d wake later and rub my head, saying, It’s ok honey. Once I slapped his arm away.  

I googled, how to calm the nervous system. I ordered every herbal tea, every adaptogen. I quit most of my creative projects and I stopped seeing friends. One night, just as the art center where I worked was closing, a man wandered in. I was so underslept he seemed like an apparition. He told me about his inventions, his patents pending. He looked me in the eye and said, Girl, you’ve got pastel energy. I had no idea who I was.  

I considered checking myself into a mental hospital in order to have a valid reason to rest. But I’d read enough 20th century literature by women to know those places only made things worse. Instead, I told Francis I was not ready to have a baby. I bought weed gummies. And I slept.  

* 

Louise Bourgeois, mother to three grown children, on the eve of her 80th birthday: “The feminists took me as a role model, a mother. It bothers me. I am not interested in being a mother. I am still a girl trying to understand myself.” 

* 

A week into the residency I sat in an adirondack chair on a deck outside my studio. I watched the lake pulse and the trees rock in the wind. Even the dark clouds rolling in were pleasant, nostalgic. I remembered childhood summer storms at the local pool club; we were allowed to swim in the rain as long as we didn’t hear thunder or see lightning. Lying on my back in mucoid chlorinated water, with cool raindrops palpitating my face, remains one of my favorite sensations, even if I haven’t experienced it in over twenty years.  

I couldn’t lose myself in the pleasures of the moment—I ached anticipating its ending.  

One day in college, us scholarship students were forced to have lunch with our scholarship’s namesake. We ate in the dining hall next to students whose financial status enabled them to forgo these awkward formal meetings and eat lunch with only each other. I envied their laughter, their ease, as I sat across from an old woman in a pantsuit, afraid to say the wrong thing. She told me her daughter, too, was a writer. Her daughter worked as an archivist, but she got to spend a whole month each year at a writing residency, and wasn’t that amazing? I thought, Just a month? That’s horrible. Now I had just ten days. 

Birds warned each other of the incoming storm, cawing and frantically flapping their wings. The lake frothed and jumped. It started to downpour. My instinct was to run inside, but I stayed, letting the raindrops pool into puddles on my bare thighs, letting them drip down my neck and breasts.  

* 

Fantasy: it’s late spring and I’m picnicking on an old quilt by a lake with my baby daughter. Time is slow, pre-industrial. I’m wearing something long and white and cotton. I lazily gnaw on crusty bread as I read and my daughter sleeps. When she wakes I pop a blueberry in her mouth and she puckers delightedly. Sometimes Francis is with me, and I lie back with my head on his stomach, our daughter with her head on mine. But often it’s just me and her, our love so submersive, so complete, that I don’t even need art. I can stop the exhaustive striving, the painful rejections, the financial precarity, the unsatisfied ambition. I can rest.  

* 

Sometimes I look at Francis and I am ravenous. I want to have his baby. Call it biological imperative or social conditioning, the feeling is mystical, all-consuming, and wildly erotic. I wonder if this is reason enough to get pregnant, my desire. 

* 

I often ate lunch with the other writers on a picnic bench outside our studio building, the wind rippling the lakewater, the mid-May sun warming our skin. One day a few local boys fished off a nearby dock, shouting as they reeled in their catches, photographing each other as they held their wriggling fish. It turned my stomach, imagining the fish slowly suffocating. I hadn’t eaten fish or meat for over a decade, but I found that considering motherhood made me especially attuned to the sacredness and vulnerability of all creatures, to their souls. 

I told the other writers how I was thinking about whether or not I wanted to have a child. One writer, almost 80, said, Best decision I ever made. Another, mid-sixties, eyes shining, said, Never regretted it for a second. But the world they decided to become mothers in was so different. Housing was affordable, middle-class families could survive on one salary. It seemed like women mostly had children then without thinking about it. Maybe they still did.  

The only other mother at the table was in her late 30s and had three young children. She didn’t say anything.  

I told myself I had more interesting conversations with the motherless artists at the residency, their studios next door. They spoke about how they’d like to leave their legacy through their paintings or sculptures. One had spent years surfing in the Dominican Republic and was planning a trip to Antarctica. One talked about failed utopias and foraging plants to make natural dyes. 

But the mothers offered me enticing book recommendations. They knew the tree next to the house I was staying in was an apple tree, pointing to its blossoms. They cared for their children and pets and gardens while navigating insurmountable loss, writing all the while. They went to residencies. 

After lunch we went swimming, my first time that season. I slid into the lake’s icy waters. The rocks were mossy under my bare feet. My breaths became quick and sharp in the cold. I requested the writers count to three so I’d have the courage to dunk my head underwater. I dropped down into a soundless below. 

* 

One night after dinner, a few of us sat at a picnic table behind the town bar. Shortly into our conversation, a man slinked over to our table. Without asking, he plopped down. He flashed a sleazy grin and called us “ladies.” I thought, Here we go again. But I was also here to have experiences, to engage with my environment. 

What did it mean to make art in this town in Maine? I’d been asking myself some form of this question since my last residency the year previously. It was a famous residency in a mansion, on grounds usually gated from the public. Our rooms were cleaned by housekeepers, all our meals were cooked for us. I used to live in its surrounding town and make a miniscule salary as an office worker, where I, and most of the staff, had second jobs. Two of my former co-workers happened to work at the residency on Tuesday and Thursday nights as waitstaff. They served me.  

I worried what the cushy, almost fantastical environment of an artist residency did to my art. It buoyed my confidence to be treated so well—it was transformative, actually—but I missed the things that made me who I was: my books, my husband, my cat, my friends. I wanted to write from my life, from my everyday and amidst relationships, dishes, and exhaustion. Perhaps from motherhood. I rejected the notion that mansions were superior to my kitchen table. 

* 

A few days before the end of my residency, one of my favorite writers emailed me her feedback on the manuscript I’d been working on for over four years. I’d hired her to edit it, deciding this was the final step I’d take before finally pitching agents and trying to publish my book. 

She wrote me something I’d wanted to hear but didn’t dare expect: she called my book “brilliant” and “thrilling.” She said she couldn’t stop reading, and that she wanted to help me.  

I felt wild, crazed with ambition, with my desire to stalk my creativity and my intelligence to their tale ends. My mouth salivated. It was erotic, my own rumbling. I didn’t want to give up the feeling; I wanted to stay in Maine indefinitely. My dayjob was a violence, but so was poverty. What to do?  

I thought of Simone Weil, principled, disciplined, and undeterrable in her goals. In Waiting for God, Weil writes that any person “can penetrate to the kingdom of truth reserved for genius, if only [s]he longs for truth and perpetually concentrates all h[er] attention upon its attainment.”  

I would keep writing. 

I sat at my desk and stared at the lake in the rain. Its surface looked like hammered tin. Mist hid the horizon line; it was a screen to another world. I decided I’d find out what lay on the other side.  

* 

On our last night at the residency, after dinner, we all walked over to the bar. We meant to siphon everything we could off each other. But it was myself I wanted to say goodbye to most, who I was in Maine. So I waved to everyone as the sun set over the lake. 

Back in my studio I put my head on my desk and sobbed. I was lovesick to be leaving myself, like I was leaving a summer fling. I was leaving the self who’d sat on the porch until the surrounding houses turned off their lights. Who’d listened to the hollow splashing of a single person nightswimming, and to loon calls sounded like wolves howling.  

A few days earlier in a Finnish dance hall an old woman gripped my hand and pulled me along to polka, shouting One two three hop! On the hop! we each lifted one of our knees—it didn’t seem to matter which one. Her bare feet made satisfying slapping sounds against the wood floor. Her palm was cool and soft. 

In the hall I couldn’t stop watching a mother, not much older than me, try to wrangle her six young children. She held a baby; it pulled her hair. Her eyelids drooped. My projection of her life was my worst nightmare: disappearing through the care of others. But for one dance, she handed the baby to someone else. She gripped her husband’s hand. And I couldn’t catch her in the crowd, she moved too fluidly—a flash of black shirt and pink skin, a long streak of light.