More Jarvis

My band was on Fearless Music – a NY-based national TV program that showcases different musical acts each week – a couple months ago, and the full version of the song we performed is now available on YouTube.

No Solid Ground…

… It’s fake believe
All you can see
Is really there…

The French say, “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose” – The more things change, the more they stay the same. I’m sitting here on my bed in the apartment I grew up in for the first time in about three years, finally home again after a graduation, a couple jobs, and a flight across the world. I’ve already fallen into a comfortable routine after a few hours of being home, spending most of my time with my family yet strangely apart and distant in my bedroom while everyone else is either in front of a television set or a computer screen.

And that’s the way it has been since I moved away, coming home only during breaks in the school year. My bedroom, which I used to share with my older sister, is now a repository for my brother’s books, cardboard boxes of unidentified possessions, and other odds and ends that don’t belong elsewhere in the house. My closet, which used to store what I used to think was style from the 80s and 90s (think stretchy light wash jeans, oversized shirts and throw in a Hellblazer t-shirt I stole from my brother), has now made space for my mother’s clothes. My sister’s old books and CDs that she never took with her to the United States when she left in 2001, still sit on their shelves. Many of the musty, dogeared titles seem to belong to a certain time that we’ve now passed.

And still, even though we don’t live here anymore, my mother keeps some of our stuffed animals around the room. Mousie (mouse), Fritzie (bear), Winnie (wombat) – we were really into naming our toys when we were kids – and assorted Winnie The Pooh plushes from a time when McDonald’s in Singapore was giving them out with Value Meals. My Tori Amos poster is still stuck to the wall with what must now be pretty ancient Blu-Tack. This scattered patchwork of my things and things that aren’t mine, grown-ups’ artifacts and stuffed animals as old as I am, just doesn’t make the room smell the way it used to when I was much littler.

In some ways, the nostalgia is nice. It’s fun to poke through old drawers – As a child I was intrigued by boxes and the top drawer of my side (the left side) of my sister and my shared desk holds three different boxes each containing little treasures from my childhood – buttons, pins, barrettes, old plastic earrings, and even a picture of the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus – a relic from when I thought I might be Catholic.

Poking around, reading old notes, and flipping through old photographs make me realize how much has changed in the ten years I’ve left home. It seems almost unkind to say I’ve outgrown this place here, because it is, after all, home. But I have, and it isn’t really my room anymore. In some ways I’m also a little melancholic about the way I feel some of my memories are slipping from me, and I don’t fully remember what this bedroom used to be like.

I’ve just arrived in Singapore, but I already miss New York City so much. I feel almost guilty for my attachment to my apartment in Bushwick. But this is the first time I’ve returned to Singapore without the existence of a transitory dorm room, with all its restrictions on being owned with pictures, paint and personality, waiting for me on the other side of the journey. This time, I do have a home and an adopted city that I’ve chosen for reasons more than cheap rent or proximity to campus, and I intend to stay for a while.

So when I came in there
A million lines tried to reach me
And what I’ve seen out there
Too many words misleading

Birth Is Never As Hard As The Guilting

When I was in high school I read a Japanese manga called “Maison Ikkoku“. Most of it is pretty memorable but there is one phrase, a supposed Japanese idiom or some kind of blessing, that I recall pretty often: Birth is never as hard as the waiting.

Birth is never as hard as the waiting. As if birth is the terminus of gestation and that is it, when in reality the first cry that wails from a mother’s uterus marks the beginning of a tumultuous relationship between self and child. Birth is never as hard as the waiting. As if everyone is able to have the luxury of making the “right” choice, or is able to pace up and down a metaphorical waiting room for nine months, and walk through the aftermath. As if birth was and has to be the inevitable outcome.

We are born into rupture and trauma, into shit, blood and amniotic fluid. When we’re born we give our mothers trauma and rupture, we begin to dispense blood, shit and piss. Our parasitism doesn’t end when we’ve popped out of the womb and begin to breathe for ourselves – we only get more demanding, vocal and unwieldy. I don’t deny that pregnancy and giving birth is a beautiful thing – I was in the room holding my sister’s legs apart when my niece was born – but I’ve seen what can happen after, and the reality of what demons can grip you terrifies me.

In another life, I wanted to have children, in every sense of what that conventionality meant. I imagined nursing, dressing boo-boos and baking cookies. Mothering. But I’ve come to believe that I was just naively in love at the time, and trusted what other people told me from observing my behavior, that I would make a good mother. I was a smug 22 year-old, and already ensconced in a false sense of worldliness. When my niece was born, I expected an automatic maternal instinct to kick in, already revved to maximum but I found myself still disturbingly (to myself) not sufficiently moved in the way I had hoped it would feel. To not have those amped up maternal feelings despite being in the room when she was born makes me feel guilty in a way I feel I cannot adequately express to anyone.

My sister recently made the observation that when we were children growing up (and yet in 2009 still not fully grown!) we never played at house, or pretended to be mommies with our dolls. It’s true we were never terribly domestic little girls. We ran a radio show and we wrote our own jingles for ads. We had a TV show about crafting, usually with recycled cardboard and scissors. Our Barbies played in a band called “The Blue Oceans” and we had a female drummer who played overturned yogurt containers while Ken and Luke Skywalker (from my brother’s Star Wars figurine collection) stood looking pretty.

We never played at being mommies. That, I know, doesn’t condemn us to being inadequate parents, or bad mothers for our children, real or potential. But I wonder if that makes us inadequate and hurtful for ourselves because we might be trying too hard to be like the girls for whom this all came much more naturally. Of course we have a choice to not be parents, to not go through it all but sometimes that choice is clouded by a “what if” or an “I don’t know”. I can’t deny that I still wonder if someday I’d be a good parent even if for now I’m fairly certain I don’t want to have children or cannot imagine them fitting in my life.

It is the lingering “I don’t know” and “what if” that make thinking about the eventuality of that choice so much more difficult, especially with their implications on one’s “natural” womanhood – breasts, ovaries, uterus and the supposed innate desire to breed. Even if there is no timeline, and no responsibility to anyone else, the guilt that I’m not completely a woman because I feel little compulsion (and in fact much heightened fear) for breeding and its aftermath, sit patiently inside me.

And so I just wait.