Orr’s cat made kittens but they can’t see yet. There are as many as my fingers, all sleeping on top of each other all suckling. Fuzzy like the azuki bean mochi Baba brought only these you can’t eat. Like toys in my hand. Big as my hand. I can see them but they can’t me yet. Upstairs with Orr in Orr’s room after Michael leaves Isabelle comes. Wants to play, too. Orr in the bathroom and me looking at the footie cards Michael left me the shiny West Ham one the Alan Shearer one from when he had all his hair. Isabelle playing going Aww petting. She knows they aren’t toys I think bc she’s talking to them although we talk to toys also. She wants to play with to hold them so badly. To love them. Holding petting one like it’s her baby. It can’t see doesn’t have hair yet when it happens. I never see what they do with it, I think bury it in the garden up by the farm where they sheared the sheep. Lil sis crying when she sees it no longer seeing nor breathing so I say at least there are nine fingers left. Lil sis wants one but Mama says no bc my allergies.

I wanted to write everything Motherhood had made me feel.

Everything I’d said, and couldn’t say, on the pod.

But you can’t write everything.

Not if it was really gonna hit.

For it to really hit, you could only write a few things.

I wrote two things:

Motherhood was the book-baby Sheila birthed instead of her actual baby. The gift she bore for the world, for current and future humans, out of her body.

Sheila discovered this while writing it, or communicated this gradual discovery in the text itself. The realization, seemingly discovered mid-sentence, that ‘maybe this book was a prophylactic.’

Back at the spot, the mama was ziplocking up a bunch of stuff she wanted me to take back with me.

Two freezer bags of Yogi teas.

Sammie bags of deer-turd Tibetan medicine pellets.

Broccoli sprouts.

My skin, this entire stint, had been leaking out, reeking rotten-smelling. And according to Google search results for ‘weird smell eczema,’ prolonged antihistamine use weakened the liver, till eventually it couldn’t process toxins and so simply bled em outta your pores, resulting in a faint smell like ‘rotting meat or cheese.’

I’d been hitting the Claritins or Benadryls or Zyrtecs minimum twice daily since adopting Winnie that year three years ago.

Had become an antihistamine addict.

Strung out on em bennies bruh.

Plus sugar; sugar fed yeast which heightened the smell.

The blog ‘Skin Friend’ we found, their solution was:

Nix sugar.

Cut the Claritins.

Hit hella broccoli sprouts, the most alkalizing of all veggies.