Yesterday after AJ woke up from his nap, he couldn�t stand up. We picked him up from his crib, set him down on his feet and his legs just crumpled like paper. This would have been a lot more disturbing if he weren�t so happy and energetic. He was scooting around the house on his butt all afternoon � �ooching,� he prefers to call it, a term hijacked from one of his favorite books about Lowly Worm. With the New Yorker�s article on �Jake Leg� freshly in mind (You can download a copy here if you haven�t seen it -- it�s fascinating), this made us very nervous. Although Jake Leg is obviously a completely impossible factor, seeing as AJ hasn�t been drinking moonshine recently. We called the pediatrician who told us to give him some aspirin and wait until morning. He was still unable to stand this morning so we hauled him into the doctor�s office, which incidentally was the only time today he has been walking normally. It�s very mysterious, but the consensus is that it�s not serious. He does have some nasty looking bruises on one leg. We think he may have dislocated his knee by getting it caught in the bars of his crib and that it popped back in by itself at some point. You�d think a crib would be about the safest place you could be.

I myself am less tragic, but am trying to recover from a day of anxiety and trying to decide whether I want to see the new film about Sylvia Plath. The New York Times used the word �Plathology� in the review headline Sunday. I�m sure it�s not original, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. The Times review addresses the way the mythology of Plath has forced us to take sides either with Plath or with Hughes in their marriage, �each seeing a monster where the other sees a victim,� as Times reviewer Charles McGrath puts it. He�s right. It�s hard to be ambivalent. But a large part of this seems to be due less to the characterization of Plath and Hughes� relationship as to the stereotypes that were forced on Plath � the bright-as-a-new-penny girl-next-door (the Mademoiselle internship), the brooding latent psychopath, the frustrated housewife and reluctant mother, the vengeful lover, the manipulative bitch. She was, of course, none of these things and all of them.

It seems to be hard for us to deal with complicated women.

I have a weird relationship with Plath. Like many angst-ridden teenaged girls, I both identified with her and, in very important ways, really didn�t. Like Plath, I came from a WASPy New England background. I went to the same college she did (although decades later) and lived in the building next door to hers while there. The Plath episode of Voices and Visions was filmed while I was there. Like Plath, I had aspirations of becoming a writer. I planned a career in journalism, did writing internships in the summers and wrote poetry prolifically, most of it awful. Every now and then I�d turn out something halfway decent and my junior year I won a poetry prize that had previously been won by Plath. I didn�t write another poem for more than a decade.

I know that sounds overly dramatic, and in a way it was. I suppose I should have recognized this as my own �Plathology,� an anxiety of accomplishment, or a fear of a lack thereof. But fundamentally I was a happy person and I always felt like a fraud in the poetry department, manufacturing traumas and injustices in order to have something to say. That was not the concept of poetry I had in mind. And so I concentrated on music, where the connections between one�s life and one�s art are more objective, at least from an audience�s perspective.

I�ve found myself thinking about Plath�s life more than her poetry these days, as I struggle against the conflict between my own preconceptions of what it means to be a mother and a wife on the one hand and what I know to be myself on the other. I do not have Plath�s history or demons. But at the same time, I can see how if one were already encumbered with difficulties, how these conflicts, particularly in the 1950s, could be more oppressive.

If I have to name monster and victim, I would have to put Hughes in the role of the first and Plath in the second. But it is an unfair distinction to be forced on them and us as their readers. I prefer complicated.

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