It's the middle of the night. I woke up to Ossie and then couldn't go back to sleep--the bedroom is too cold and we don't have any proper blankets (all the clean ones given over to ma & pa Jeff--sucks not having a bloody working washer nor time to go the laundry mat). I've been sleeping with a robe as my cover. Not very effective.

I woke up, too, thinking about that feminist critical theory person Luce Irigaray, author of This Sex Which Is Not One (right? I think.) I think I actually finally get it, now. She's the one who writes about how women & men write differently because of our biological differences. Women are less hierarchical than men, more relational. She goes on and on about the difference between male and female orgasms and also between the sex organs but what I'm thinking now is how men, biologically, never really have to share themselves. This sounds so obnoxious (I know), but look: pregnancy and birth have made me know that I am not a singular individual. I am multiple and there is this whole human creature who has shared my body and who still shares my body. What am I trying to say here? That it requires a more fractured (not the right word, but it's the middle of the night and I haven't been sleeping well in about a year and well, fuck it) point of view. Women have, through biology & culture, raised to see multiple perspectives and to not value one over the other, necessarily. I was thinking about the difference between Dorothy Wordsworth�s Thoughts on My Sickbed & her more famous brother�s Tintern Abbey--poems with essentially the same subject matter but so different!

I completely adore Jeff, but I think, too, about how he still is essentially the same person that he was before Ossie. He still has the same concerns, thinks about the same things. He is focused on Ossie, to be sure (and he rocks as a parent), but he is also focused on himself in a way that I cannot imagine. That makes him sound self-absorbed, which he is not. To be clear: he spends much of his waking hours trying to make life better for me and he�s awesome and I adore him, etc. etc. This isn�t really about that. It�s about the fact that he can go sleep in another room if he needs to or that he can be gone for hours at a time without great planning and a breast pump. He is physically the same as he was one year ago and I am completely not. I think I�m not getting the idea that I had down properly. Ah well. It�s late and I had best hie myself back to the bed where my sleeping baby is.

It�s interesting, though, how much more angry I am since I got myself knocked up. Pregnancy & motherhood = rage machine. Also, I am much more of a rabid feminist. I was pretty damned rabid before, but now! Watch out! I will get you Samual Alito!

Baby calls. Bye.