A Conversation, Overheard

Elder Girleen, thoughtfully, having just finished singing "Little Bunny Foo-Foo":  

What is a goon, anyway?

Younger Girleen, settling the question once and for all:  

I think a goon is a kind of frog.  

Working Jigsaws

A week ago I set on the left-hand corner of my desk a saucer — in the optimistic speckled pattern of Franciscan’s Starburst — filled with chips and slips and shards of china mottled still with red clay dirt, to remind me. Of what? Of something that china elicited from me; something that the sight of it laid out in my palm left on the tip of my tongue to want to say.

I am on the cusp of forty-four, my body has without me really noticing how or when become the sort of soft motherly body I despised my own mother for when I was fifteen, and lithe and taut and tan (it being 1979 after all), and she was the age I am now. Why not do sit-ups, I wondered, with the completely unconscious cruelty of youth. Why not buy some decent clothes? Why not take care of herself?

And now I know exactly why one wouldn’t. Because other people are being taken care off first, and once that’s been accomplished you might have other things on your mind besides your clothes. Because it’s more pleasant to purchase things for your lithe, taut beautiful offspring — how on earth did such heartbreaking loveliness emerge from the welter of your DNA? —than take inventory of your own battle-scarred body in some three-way mirror at Target, where the clothes are cheap but neither fit nor flatter in the less palatable part of the maxim you get what you pay for.

I am by no means the fashion-plate I once could have been, but in service of the merest ghost-wisp of memory that such a thing was once was possible, I walk. Sometimes alone, sometimes with a child in a stroller, sometimes with another mother. In summer I walk at six in the morning and in winter I walk at four in the afternoon when the temperature is highest and as I do I wonder how I ever forced myself to do so at the peak of the opposite season.

I used to walk wherever the mood took me, but now I have a particular route. I’ve measured it on Google Ped, I know it is a little over three miles. It takes me past dogs gotten loose and dragging chains I take back to their owners and seafoam spangles of safety-glass from the latest smash-and-grab of cars left recklessly with cell phones or their chargers in plain view. This time of year, it takes me past the holiday inflatables in every other yard, deflated: snow globes and santas on motorcycles and nativity scenes all melted into puddles on the brown-grassed yards like the remnants of The Wizard of Oz’s wicked witch.

This neighborhood, it gentrifies in fits and starts, and five long years ago, developers started buying up the kudzu-draped vacant lots between the 1920s bungalows and post-war Levittown-like starter homes (the last two seasons of overreaching prosperity this neighborhood knew) and constructing over-muscled craftsman homes, bulked up into two stories and three-car garages and all the other things we now believe we need that the bungalows they’re theoretically based upon never possessed. And some of them — I love an old house with cracked plaster as much as the next person, mind you — are lovely, what with porches you could raise a family on and solid doors with leaded fanlights.

Apparently, I’m not the only one who likes them; rumor has it that these houses are the ones the kick-in-the-door bandits make a beeline for because they’re not stupid either and new house equals ipod and flat-screen, and even with an alarm if you know what you’re doing you can be back out the bashed-in front door in 45 seconds flat.

But all that is neither here nor there.

There is a particular spec home on my route that paints the story you can follow in the newspapers these days but made more manageable, like a miniature painted onto ivory with a sable brush.

Before there was a house there, there was a vacant lot full of tossed tires. Located around the corner from the elementary school built in 2000 on — people say — a landfill.

I walked through summer and winter, through one child’s graduation out of the stroller (a season in which I gained some weight) and through the disappearance from my life of one simpatico walking partner and indow the welcome appearance of another, and during all that the house was not there and then suddenly … it was.

Crew after crew of Spanish-speaking labors swarmed over scaffolding and the red clay earth was broken open to pour the foundation. The view from the back yard was of a warehouse-turned-daycare-turned-abandoned-building and Section Eight housing but so what: the workers lugged in granite countertops and painted the exterior a particularly fetching shade of Bunglehouse Blue (you would know it when you saw it, it being as pervasive in exteriors these days as Martha Stewart Jade-ite green is for the inside walls of houses).

And then work stopped. Completely. The landscaping had not been started, or the sod that covers a multitude of sins unrolled; the house rose like the prow of a wrecked ship from sculptured piles of red dirt and a smattering of weeds that rattled against the bricks as the months went by.

Eventually, somebody figured out how to jimmy open the bottom story’s windows. One evening I saw a boy around eleven or twelve clamber out the upstairs window and scamper along the roof line (a call to 911 and a visit with the beat-cop ensued).

The windows were starred with broken glass, the weeds grew taller, and one morning when I pushed the stroller past, my eyes caught on a bit of china glinting in the dirt meant to some day become front yard. It was that same Martha Stewart Green, that arsenic-like color that a previous generation frantically painted over whenever they encountered it on a wall, that we now, as a generation, adore.

And there were more, and more, and more, once my eye adjusted to seeing them. A bit bearing still the tag-end of the manufacturer: …ango China….castle, PA. Another sporting a maker’s mark of crown. Crackled glaze and slabs of marble. An art nouveau pattern curving around the lip of a bit of bowl like an elegant glimpse of the neck of a woman in a black velvet evening gown. Heavy diner china with three lines of color banding the rim, suitable for Edward Hopper paintings. The cobalt blue milk of magnesia bottles.

I had found either treasure or the dump!

Lucky for me the neighborhood I live in gentrifies only in fits and starts and the sight of a woman poking around the front yard (and then side yard, and then back yard) of a half-constructed house apparently gives no one any pause.

I can be as crazy as I choose and in a neighborhood where the guy who has no teeth (who greets every single homeowner into the area for the past ten years with an unintelligible, slightly threatening request for ten bucks) spends hours strolling through the neighborhood using a beat-up walker without anyone noticing it as something out of the ordinary — nobody will chastise me for trespassing.

What on god's green earth will I do with all these bits of broken china?

But I love them all for what they might be pieces of: our past. The chinoiserie’d goldfish swimming across its broken universe of plate. The floral, fireworks-like explosion of painted blossom. Right now, I have in front of me a slice of plate that has, ensnared upon it it a tiny-bas-relief image of a swan. Black pin-point of eye, brown beak, tucked wings and all emerging from reeds painted the blackish green of Charleston-style shutters. 

The plate itself, if whole, would be quite ugly.

But how miraculous the piece is! As is the thought that out of anything I might have stumbled upon — this being garbage after all — I stumbled upon this! 

The swan is no bigger than my thumbnail, it glides serenely into the future, it endures.

All I Want For Christmas...

... is to be Judith Warner.  

If you don't have children, you probably don't bother to read her column.  If you do, chances are high you already read her column this morning.  

But... here's today's.  

OK, maybe she isn't completely in touch with the cultural zeitgeist (tho I think she is) but she's definitely got her finger on my maternal pulse these day.  

Peace out and Happy Days.  

Word of the Day

Abnegation.

A word I’ve never had the slightest opportunity to use. Denial, the dictionary has to say about it, particularly self-denial.

I have so little self-denial! a person might say coyly when presented with — particularly this time of year — a plate of goodies, just before they reconsider — oh, well, on second thought! — and reach a hand toward a particularly tempting bite.

Other than that usage — so blithe, so redolent of pop psychology — I can’t imagine a single way self-denial might be inserted into conversation: it’s a concept that’s been stripped of meaning, an act long ago fallen out of fashion.

I’m certainly not bemoaning that fact. To practice self-denial — what would be the point? What would it be for, other than …. I dunno. To prove a point? For one’s own good? You give up smoking, you turn down a rich piece of cake, you practice self-denial. Maybe you exchange all the old-style lightbulbs in your house and turn down the heat.

Our culture keeps the concept of self-denial firmly on a transactional level. You give something up — you get something in return. You cut the sugar from your diet, you are gifted with… (I suppose)… better health.   You simplify your life, you're blessed with... tranquility and peace.

So abnegation means self-denial, and there’s little point (who cares?) discussing it.

But then there’s the verb form of the word …

Four days ago, after I gave up on driving so aimlessly and at the same time so purposefully through the neighborhood with my freight of sleepless child and all my complicated baggage — of what I needed, of what she needed, of what should happen, of what was most important — the word self-abnegation all of a sudden seemed scrawled across my afternoon in bold, black, foot-high, maybe even flaming, letters.

To abnegate: To deny, renounce; to surrender, to relinquish.

So Latinate, so medieval! And the interesting thing about the definition is the way it changes our focus from the transactional nature of self-denial (at least as we see it these days, hair shirts having gone, also, out of fashion) to something much more difficult, and powerful: the struggle. If denying, renouncing, surrendering or relinquishing isn't the hardest frigging work you’ve ever engaged in then I sure don’t want your job, whatever it might be.

In parenthood, one’s will continuously butts up against something so much larger and stronger than it is — a life force? A universe? —  and there is something downright… religious about the — I don’t know what else to call it — self-abnegation that almost always is the lesson learned.  There is nothing concretely transactional about the self-abnegation of parenthood:  I mean, I can sacrifice my desires for my child's well-being until I'm blue in the face, but it's not ever ever ever going to get me back into a size 6 pair of jeans. 

This sort of sacrifice is dangerous stuff. This is poking at the dark heart of motherhood — here there be dragons! — with a particularly strong stick. This is mixing the theological (or the spiritual) with the everyday, and to do so is anathema (interestingly enough, another religious word) to the people and the culture we are these days.

Is the self-abnegation that is part and parcel of parenthood good or bad? I’m not saying ( I don’t know; I made a C in Existential Philosophy at UGA in 1983). It just is, as loathe as we are to acknowledge it.

A couple of other religiously-connotated words:

Fanaticism.
Fervor.

Oh, they’re not words connected to us, (even should we have a religious affiliation, these things being also these days somewhat out of vogue) but belong to other people’s lives, across oceans and far away.

But throw those sorts of words into the parenthood mix and what do you get?

A culture where parent participation is sometimes elevated to a byzantine art?  Where guilt can be paramount?  One where places exist where parents must undergo interviews to get their kids in preschool?  

Wow, that world's not oceans away from us ... it's right down the street, at least from the house I most often find myself living in! 

Any state of being that requires extremes from an individual ... may also pull forth extremes of behavior from within them as well. In short, if you expect a person to put hours and hours and hours of time every week into their childs' ... school... sport... whatever... maybe you're going to have to not just tolerate but embrace some fervor and fanaticism as well.       

Be on the Look Out

Could say:  needs must when the devil drives.  Could say:  desperate times call for desperate measures.  If I were a certain ethnicity and drove a certain sort of car, a BOLO* would surely have been issued for me by now, given the slow circuitous route I just took through the neighborhood and the way I made blocks, then doubled back and drove them again and then turned down the streets paralleling them for more than half an hour.

But I look neither young, nor hungry. I am a forty-three-year-old mom, Merrill-shod foot pressed against the brake (not the accelerator, the point being to drive slow), clad in low-rise jeans and a black fleece hoodie.  My vehicle's a VW Passat with an Obama sticker pasted to its back bumper; the back seat of my station wagon is full of car seats; the luggage compartment's full of strollers and shreds of children's artwork and wadded canvas grocery totes.  

12:30 p.m.  

I am backing the car slowly out of the driveway because we are losing Younger Girleen's nap and I have just realized that after today, it will be at least a month before I have a moment or two sans offspring** and the list of things that must be done — by me — that sits at my right hand is pages long right now, and without the nap, there will be no time for anything.

Fact:  when the nap is on the way out, the car can sometimes lull the reluctant to sleep. And this is my dirty little secret:  sometimes when the going gets tough, I throw the three-year-old into the car.   

12:45 p.m. 

Younger Girleen is strapped and cinched into her car seat, she is barefoot, she is deeply suspicious about my motivations.  Are we picking up her sister? she asks.  Are we going to Target?  Are we going home?  Are we going HOME? ARE WE GOING HOME?

When did I become this walking cliche?  When did I become a person who drives a black station wagon and even worse, if it's not tax-free weekend or Black Friday considers a trip to Target a recreational jaunt? Once I dated boys in bands and streaked my hair and did all sorts of wild things. 

But it happens to the best of us, real life.  

12:50 p.m.

The trees outside the windshield are elegant and austere.  It is 67 degrees.  Younger Girleen stares out the window.

12:52 p.m.

  

Her eyelids droop; I eagerly turn homeward.  

12:53 p.m.

 One more long block, one more street, surely that will do the trick!

When Elder Girleen gets home, a voice from the back seat pipes up, we will play Mac the Superhero.  

Whatever that might be! 

But if a slow drive can't lull the napless into sleeping it can lull the mother into peace.  

Does any of the stuff on that to-do list really matter?  The insurance forms to fill out, the phone calls to return, the packages to seal and label?  The writing that I once considered my best, my real, work?  The laundry to be shuffled from washer to dryer from dryer to pile on bed, from pile on bed to chest of drawers?  The cereal to be swept from the floor, the dishes to be rinsed?  The too-small red patent leather shoes become talisman to a three-year-old that must be hidden away while her eyes are closed so she won't hobble through the rest of life, a maiden with bound feet?

1: 07 p.m.

At a certain point, the knowledge that one looks absurd trumps desperation.  I pull back into the driveway; Younger Girleen is still awake.  I have made my peace with things.

1:23 p.m.  

Younger Girleen clambers up onto the sofa.  I'm going to sit here just a second, she says.

And then, God bless us everyone, she's just like that asleep.    

*BOLO:  Email Neighborhood Watch Group-ese for Be On The Look Out; smash and grabs are up and when you throw that into the mix, nobody's behavior looks particularly pretty.

**Thursday's the last day of school, but an orthodontist appointment in the far-north 'burbs and attendance at various school winter holiday functions precludes much being crossed off the to-do list tomorrow or the next day) 

The Pause that Refreshes

Given the status quo —  news feeds full of Ponzi schemes, bilked billions, punted auto industry bailouts, and thrown shoes; a midwinter sky the color of waxed paper, a personal, parental to-do list that's grown insupportably long (don't tell me you don't have one!) —  I figure there's no better way to start a Monday than with some escapism and a damn good story.  

There's one right here.    

Yeah, I know I've sung the praises of Five Chapters before, but geez louise I'm impressed by their fiction — and this week's serialization looks like an especially good one.  

Why I like Junk Stores

The Girleens are making Christmas presents this year, or rather, they're telling me yay!  that sounds like SO MUCH fun,  and hanging out for the few minutes it takes to get whatever project we're working on set up, and then wandering off to do something they find more engaging. 

There's probably somebody out there on the interwebs who'd be happy to point out that I might be doing lasting damage to my daughters' psyches by finishing up their projects without requiring huge amounts of engagement from them, but hey — we're operating under a bit of a time crunch here. Besides, I'm the same person who three days before Halloween was up to her elbows in pumpkin innards while the kids were busy doing cartwheels in the yard so what can you expect?  

All the weighty psychological damage I might be doing my kids aside, it's their Christmas "projects" that led me to the fabric store this morning.  

Ah, the fabric store!  We're not even talking the arts-n-crafts, hot-glue gun, plastic-flowers store, which is the third circle of hell, despite any middle-class aspirations it might have.  This is the fabric  store, located in a  shopping center that, though it may've once rode the crest of late-sixties prosperity now has an "arcade level" where homeless people sleep. 

The fabric store is flanked by Diaper Depot on one side and Family Dollar on the other.  The anchoring SUPER GIANT FOOD across the parking lot is vacant, though its motto (The name says it all!) is still scrawled across the windows.  The windows of Diaper Depot are filled with sealed cardboard boxes which I guess contain diapers; the store itself is also closed.  

And if you need a pick-me-up after shopping?  Starbucks wouldn't touch this shopping center with a ten foot pole.  Are you up for lunch instead at Piccadilly Cafeteria?  

The Fabric Store doesn't give a shit about branding or marketing or shopping as an "experience." It's a throwback to those days we hardly even remember anymore, when people shopped solely because they needed a particular necessity, not because the act of shopping massaged the seratonin levels in their brains.  

It's week two of Laid-off Life, and The Husband is diligently, and valiantly, sticking to a schedule of job-hunting, but this morning, I convinced him to take a few hours off to accompany me somewhere that Suburban Center (the shopping center's actual name) was on the way to, and if you want to make a recently-downsized male's head explode, take him to a Hancock Fabrics with linoleum flaking from the floors and waterstained ceiling tiles.

The fact that we ran into someone we knew there, and the three minutes I spent talking to her (learning that another dad in our social circle has been laid off, and yet another made it through a "first-round" Thanksgiving week but 70 of his co-workers did not) did absolutely nothing to mitigate how deeply distasteful The Husband found the whole experience. 

To cheer him up after we got our cotton batting, I suggested we stick our heads into the Estate-selling enterprise a few storefronts past the Fabric Store.   

Where we found this...

You can't tell by looking, but it's a Pictorial Map of the Literary Development of the United

 States, circa 1967, complete with the actual streets in New York City where writers lived and wrote mapped on it.  

And you know what?  Roughly half the authors on this — well, they didn't vanish without a trace, but let's put it this way:  read any Ruth Cross lately?

You might think this is depressing, but I actually found it uplifting to contemplate.  Kinda like staring out at the ocean or something.

Time goes by, the moon waxes and wanes. What matters now just might not matter a whole lot fifty years hence.  

Besides, check out that sixties sol-yellow and toothpaste greenish-blue.  

The future's so bright you gotta wear shades.  

News From the Front

At five-thirty this morning, the Husband fumbled for the silent alarm clock beside our bed and whispered urgently to me:  We've overslept!

The reality being that we hadn't, at all, that the alarm he was certain he'd heard was imaginary, but we're all a little on edge right now, and it stands to reason that he might feel anxious that he'd slept through the starting bell of yet another round.  

Fact Number 1.  The Husband walked into work a week ago to discover his job no longer existed.  Handed over his corporate cell phone; was handed the proverbial cardboard box to put his personal effects in, and that was that.  A small drama being played out all over the country this month; a chorus swelling in the background of the day-to-day that sings out this:  laid off.  

Fact Number 2.  He is not the first parent from Elder Girleen's class of fifteen kids to fall under the wheels of the corporate bus.

What do I know of recessions?  The first one that occurred in my lifetime meant nothing to me but lines at the gas pumps I walked past on my way to school and the president's cardigan-clad plea that we turn down our thermostats a few degrees.  

And the second?  Well, when you're hardly wet behind the ears and make minimum wage and survive off coffee and cigarettes and filched sugar packets from Wendy's, where the salad bar means all you can eat, how does a recession touch you?  It was nothing but a word, and besides, I was too busy applying to grad school to notice much, although now that I think about it, my longing to escape the real world for the ivory tower might have been considered pretty telling.  

But this time, I'm a card-carrying grown-up and find it hard to consider recession  just a word (which was how I got through last go-round, when I was just a few semesters past having failed economics and my only dependent was a siamese cat — hey!  light another cigarette!  strike up the band!).  

Last Wednesday, it was still just a word.  One we were worried about, yes, but in a fairly hypothetical sense.  Today it's tangible and real-to-the-touch.  Who knows what's going on with the guy who lays on the horn in traffic for what seems like no reason?  Who knows what's behind the fact that some mom drags her kids into school late?  It's hard times out there.  We've got to be gentle with each other.  

 

Fellow Georgians:

Don't forget to vote today.  

Slow Food, Slow Families, Slow Blogs ...

Just in case you thought I wasn't saying much these days because I was busy brining all-natural, free-range turkeys or lazing around eating bonbons or something, I am proud to direct your attention to:  

Blogging at a Snail's Pace

I knew there was a reason I hadn't been here for a while!  

Thank God we have various "slow" movements to give us permission to be .... normal. 

(Stay tuned for, the Slow Publication Movement, in which the fact that twelve years have elapsed since publication of a person's first book means not that they got married, had kids and withered on the career vine, but that they've been busy... savoring ... life.)  

Oh, yes... have a Happy (and Slow) Thanksgiving.  

If You Live in Georgia...

...it's not over yet.  

Jim Martin for Senate.  

Please — don't forget to vote in the run-off on December 2nd.  McCain, Palin and the rest of the gang will be down here in the next few weeks to shore up Chambliss's campaign.  Swinging by your polling place before or after work could make all the difference.  

If you live elsewhere: 

In 2002, Saxby Chambliss won a Georgia Senate seat by comparing his Democratic opponent (a Vietnam vet and double amputee who uses a wheelchair) to Osama bin Laden.  Please consider commemorating Veteran's Day today by donating to Jim Martin's campaign to unseat Chambliss.   

Weather Report: November 9, 2008

I admit it, I had grand plans.  In the final weeks before the election, when I'd developed a twitch in one eye due to obsessive  Huffington Post reading (and from the anxiety those daily emails from the Obama campaign were causing), I was going to get out with a camera and document what I think we all already knew, even then, no matter what the outcome was going to be, was history in the making... 

• ...the car pool line at Elder Girleen's elementary school, the row of mini vans and station wagons and compacts, most with Obama stickers pasted to their bumpers....
  
• 
  
• ...a jack o lantern carved with the already-so-recognizable Obama campaign logo, placed on a front porch next to a house with a McCain/Palin yard sign ...
  
• 
  
• ...the GO VOTE exhortation chalked in pastel on the sidewalk  half a block away ...
  
• 
  
• ... the early morning line our neighborhood's polling place had never witnessed before...
  
• 
  

So much has been written.   Judith Warner's New York Times column from last week, here, says much,  and so very eloquently.  

On Wednesday, November 5, I walked out my front door and was astounded to see that while I had my mind on other things, the leaves on the trees had miraculously, gloriously, shed the dull-green cast late summer gave them and turned gold.  I know we need rain like nobody's business, but the blue sky that's arched behind those trees this week, so cloudless, so saturated with color — it made me ache.  I don't think I've ever seen anything so hopeful.  

Yesterday, I drove interstate 20 in the early morning ... turned off it onto Highway 138 and began the drive to Athens, past Quick Trips that a month ago had no gas in their pumps, past blocky contemporary cemeteries where graves were brave with bouquets of plastic flowers.  Past a Baptist church where cut-apart and welded-back-together metal drum smokers had already been fired up and barbeque was in a couple of hours going to be sold.  Past a salvage yard that stretched out over acres, where the cars had been positioned nose to tail, starred of windshield, sporting crumpled bumpers. 

The first time I was able to vote, Ronald Reagan was elected president.  

The trees are at this moment such a brave lick of flame and color, and what if it really were morning in America, right now?

  

 

Snapshot from America

I admit it, I'm obsessed.  About what, you ask?  

Uhhh..."The Great Schlep."

Uhhh.... "That One." 

Uhhh... "Hockey Moms."  

Since when did hockey moms become such a large block of the mommy population?  I'm surprised that the Ultimate Mommy Stereotype  has gone from "soccer mom" (minivan, suburbs, middle-class, what-have-you...) to "hockey mom" (uhhh, what attributes go with that?I guess I'm not tapped in to this new cultural zeitgeist, seeing as I live down south and all)  without comment — but I'm sure I can google the words together and discover that it really hasn't. * 

And that is why I'm obsessed.  

Current Politics -- more engrossing than fiction.  

But on a more serious note: Last night, halfway through the presidential debate, I realized something.  As far as this neighborhood went, while the debate was going on, you could hear a pin drop.  There was not a single car on the road.  

—————

*See this.  Apparently "hockey mom" was parsed about a month ago.  I'm really not in tune with the cultural zeitgeist.  

The Lilies of the Field, They Toil Not, Neither Do They Spin

Hambidge Center for the Arts and Sciences Rabun Gap, GA 

Last day here. It seems like I’ve been here forever; it seems like I’ve been here no time at all. I seem to be so unable. Unable to hold both in my hands at the same time: my real world and the stillness, the expectancy, a place like this forces upon one. Here, one has to take things as they come. At home, I am mistress of my domain. I make things happen. I am the fulcrum that pries children into school, the net that flung out, snares them into sleep at the end of the day.

Of course I’m not any of that, really. But the message of modern motherhood is always that you can be, you must be, so sometimes… more than half the time… sometimes, I think I'm that important.

I arrived resistant. Maybe going away to write would be like looking into the abyss, I joked before I came and that was not much of a lie. Head full of things: the upcoming election, maternal guilt (a good mother wouldn’t leave her children for so long!), the price and availability of gas (the gas stations I saw on the way up into the mountains that were hung with plastic bags and caution tape seeming a bit Mad Maxish), daughterly guilt (a good daughter wouldn’t expect her 73-year-old mother to be able to get a three-year-old to school!), how much food there was left behind in the house, spousal guilt (a good wife, having found childcare for 10 days, would have spent that time second-honeymooning with her long-suffering husband!).

This is what I was given: a cabin, knotty pine walls, the smell of green Palmolive soap. The trees outside the window, straight, like a crowd gathered waiting to see what I’d do. The sound of a crow, and mist over the hills, cast out like a magician’s scarf.

There is a painter here: raised somewhere in Texas, she makes her home now in the desert. Her specialty is painting mist. Captured on residencies like this in black and white by old-fashioned 35 mm camera, color digital images, video cam. Surely she knows what metaphorical hay could be made from it all: an artist so singlemindedly preoccupied, with painting air?

She is very very good at what she does. And I've decided to view the way she drives down the gravel road here every morning on her quest to find clouds, as valiant, quixotic.

We do what we do, and that might be all there is to it. How much examination can any of this bear?

There are bees that hover in the fall sun above the purple flowers massed on the front lawn here, and hives in the field across the road, white and boxy, in rows like tombstones. The sound of one bee, what is it but the noise a body makes, doing what it must, going about its business? But the many! Their hum rises from the flowers like a orison cast toward heaven, and walking past makes me want to lie down on the grass until I understand everything bees have to say.

The leaves have begun changing in the time that I’ve been here.

Last night there was a screech owl in the trees that flanked the road between dining room and studios, but when I tipped my flashlight up toward boughs, it thought better of shrieking.

There is a creek across the road, and in an elbow of land, a fallen-into-nothing rounded stone springhouse.

Spill and rivulet, such a Georgia creek, poured like cream from a pitcher into flat, shallow expanse, the surface puckered with half-moons.

The bright vine that snakes up a particular tree I can see from my window is the one thing that, mornings, catches the sun first: is probably poison ivy.

There is gold beyond the green here when the sun comes up, a bird I’ve not seen before on the power wire that sags between studio and road. It is my last day here.

Of the Weekend, and Such

The Husband and I had an interesting "conversation" this morning during breakfast, though I say "conversation" in quotes because our exchange lasted approximately 30 seconds and was about as deep as a baby pool.  

— How often do you feel guilt? I asked him.

— About once a week.  Why?  How often do you feel guilt?

— Maybe four times a day?   

Setting aside any thoughts you might be having about how this mostly indicates my need for medication, guilt might be one of the differences between — I was going to say a man and a woman, but that's not specific enough — a mom and a dad.  

I feel slightly (not very but just a little) guilty that instead of going to Related Arts Curriculum Night at Elder Girleen's school next week, making dinner for the mother of one of Elder Girleen's classmates who just had a baby, attending a School Work Day, answering Michelle Obama's personal email message to me to man the phone banks, visiting Miss Nell next door (eighty years old and extremely lonely),  I am going off to the Hambidge Center for Artists, where, I imagine, for ten days I'll sleep, walk in the woods, read, research and — god willing — write 7-10 pages a day on my novel.  

But do I feel guilty enough not to go? Not just no, but hell, no.  

Tidbits I've gleaned from typing "Hambidge Center" into Google (or "The Google" as my mom referred to it the other day):  

That the vegetarian dinners the artists there gather for each week night are very very good.  

That it's possibly haunted.

That bear have been seen.  And mice.  (The former outside the studios, the latter inside).  

Though I know home will tug at me every moment I'm there, I'm also as excited as if I were going to Disneyworld.  Actually more so, since I'm extremely disinterested in ever setting foot in Disneyworld.

But because it would be helpful to my loved ones left at home* if before I go I get caught up on the laundry and stock the house with enough food to last a midwestern winter, this entry probably the last you'll hear from me for a few weeks.

But because reading columns in the New York Times by Judith Warner has lately turned my morning coffee-drinking into an even more delicious experience than it usually is , I leave you with her latest, here.  

What with the way politics hangs like a dark cloud on the horizon these days, we all need a reason to laugh.    

*Or because I think it would be helpful to my loved ones left at home.

Why I'm Not Allowed to Try My Hand at Fairy Tales

Once upon a time, there lived an old woman with her two lovely daughters, the eldest of these named Why; the younger, What's That.

The old woman, the equally old man who was her husband, and Why and What's That all lived together in in a large southern city out of reach of previous hurricanes but currently very gloomy, in a brown brick house surrounded by a picturesque picket fence intertwined with browning morning glory vines. 

Why ask why Why had been named as she had?  It suited her, just as What's That's name suited her sister, though now that What's That was three, she was growing out of her first name and into a new one — Look At Me Right Now, perhaps, or If Her Name's Why, Then My Name Will Be Why NOT.    

— Is God real?  Why asked one afternoon, elbows propped up on the table while she ate her after school snack.  She chewed pretzels thoughtfully.  — Who exactly is the Devil?  

The Devil, the old woman figured, must've been brought to Why's attention by someone in her class, because, though the conversations in the brick house rambled over many topics (— There's Barack Obama! What's That could exclaim when she saw the morning paper) the Devil was one that, surprisingly, had never before come up.  

Ummm, the old woman stuttered, stalling for time.  

— What does "lost their lives" mean?  How does anybody lose a life?

What's That contentedly rolled a Lightning McQueen matchbox car along the edge of the table-top, and the Old Woman knew that, though What's That appeared not to be listening, anything the Old Woman said could easily become a reason to wake up in the middle of the night (What's That being the sort of child who, on a recent camping trip, might wake up at three a.m. in a rented tent from REI to cry out It's dark.  I can't see my face!)  

The Old Woman also knew that the principal of Why's school had addressed the students on the anniversary of September 11th, and had probably chosen the phrase lost their lives carefully, so that any really hard questions wouldn't come until the children got home from school.

Yes, God is real, the old woman said carefully.  Lost their lives means died.  Carefully skating around the question about the Devil because she had no clue how to answer that.

I want more camel -loupe! interrupted What's That.   

Why are some people so bossy?  Why continued.  After we finish our snack will you take us to ride bikes? Why did you let me drink alcohol?

Alcohol? asked the Old Woman.  

At the Farmer's Market.  You said that watermelon drink had alcohol in it.  

Oh, said the Old Woman.  Caffine.  It had green tea in it.  Not alcohol!  

It was urban tea? said Why.  

Urban tea? repeated the Old Woman.  Oh, you mean Herbal Tea! 

Yeah, said Why.  She stood up from the table, still chewing pretzels.  Can we go ride bikes now?

 I don't know if there's time before dinner, said the old woman.  She looked at up at the clock on the wall, which said it was five minutes later than the clock on the stove, which said it was ten minutes earlier than the clock in the bedroom.  

Why, she realized, even time's elastic!  And for a second of it she felt blessed by this life that parenthood bestows upon one — so rich, nonsensical, and strange.   

Routes to Power

So... now that serving as president of your child's PTA is  being touted as a excellent qualification  for serving as Vice President of this country, it seems like as good a time as any to turn our attention to just that... the PTA.  

It's not like I'm an expert or anything.  Yeah, I'm a member of the PTA at Elder Girleen's school but that's mainly because all it required from us was writing a small check at the beginning of the school year.  I actually didn't know we had a choice in the matter:  I thought membership in the PTA was mandatory until this year, when I found out that 20% of the families at our school have chosen to opt out.  As far as I could tell, being a member of the PTA once your children hit elementary school was a prerequisite of motherhood:  you wear sensible shoes, you keep baby wipes in your handbag, you join the PTA.  No questions about it.  

Serving on the PTA in some official capacity, though... that's another thing all together.  A year on the board of Elder Girleen's preschool cured me of any impulses I might've had to volunteer for things like that,  so as far as the inner workings of the PTA goes, I'm about as clueless as the average Joe, who until Sarah Palin gave her past presidency of a school's PTA as a good reason to vote for the McCain/Palin ticket, never gave the PTA a second thought.  

I won't weigh in here the pros or cons of the organization itself (it's always existed, so it has to be worthwhile, right?) -- my interest is more in examining the idea of a position in the PTA as a route to power. 

And for me, the most interesting thing about examining the PTA in that light is just how non-threatening it sounds.  Hey, our moms were in the PTA.  Some of us might've even had moms who served as president of the PTA. It's as American as apple pie!  Whatever things the PTA actually undertakes, it also serves — and maybe this is its most important function? — as a very traditional, feminine way to have, or take, power.  Within its very codified structure, a woman can become very powerful... without neglecting her primary duties as mom (because it's for the children, even though they may be at home with a babysitter during PTA meetings).  Serving as president of the PTA has none of the negative (ie, unfeminine) connotations of ... what?  Community Organizer (sounds vaguely commie-pinko, doesn't it?)  Human Rights Activist?  (ditto).     

If I have little idea what the PTA really does, I have even less of one about what the PTA does at a national level.  But one thing I do know is that a PTA president is probably not making policy. 

When I next need to sit down across the table from a potential employer, will I mention the fact that I served on the board of my child's preschool and sat around conference tables at City Hall East attempting to win City functionaries over to the idea that our neighborhood deserved a park that served as more than a trash heap for malt liquor cans and a play structure that wasn't being partially held together with plastic security webbing?  You bet.  Because whether the outside world chooses to recognize it or not, it's work, and it's important work. And it's as difficult, or more so, than any job I received a paycheck for.  

Whatever genius thought up the McCain/Palin strategy of highlighting Palin's PTA presidency and status as hockey-mom is hoping women will focus on that and not much more.  Wondering what exactly those qualifications have to do with running a country makes you... what?  A sexist?  An elitist?  Someone denigrating women's work?

But here are the facts:  the larger picture doesn't really impact a PTA president.  Reasons a child might need reduced-price lunch, or a family might feel completely incapable of volunteering to organize a bake sale... or an auction... don't have to matter to a PTA president. They might matter to some of them, but they don't have to.   Heck, a PTA president doesn't even need to understand that children or families which such issues exist. 

 

I know, there are so many other scary things going on right now — but gosh, let's be sure to add that one to the list.  

Because I ... Just... Can't... Stop... Myself...

Just another reason why politics belongs on a blog about motherhood.  

Here.  

Now Is The Time, And We Are The Answer

Way back in the day, when Elder Girleen was still just a babe-in-arms, one of the things that ended up giving structure to the days I spent with her was taking daily morning walks through the neighborhood in the company of a few other moms (and the occasional dad) who had kids of stroller-sitting age.  The "Stroller Brigade," as we came to be known throughout the neighborhood, wasn't some official club; it wasn't an organization anyone had dreamed up. There was no board of directors, no officers, no fundraisers.

We were just a group of women whose main (and sometimes only) commonality was the fact that we had kids of roughly the same ages that we were staying home with.  We met every morning in the parking lot of a nearby church — sometimes there were 7 of us, sometimes 2. Sometimes no one showed up at all.  We walked for an hour  and mostly talked in the cautious pleasantries employed everywhere by moms:  where do you live?  how old are your kids?  Are you from here? 

Would we have met each other, pre-children?  Probably not.  

Now I know some of those folks and their kids much better but back then the main thing we had in common was our babies.  And that was — and can be — the most tenuous of bonds.

For our various reasons, we all needed those morning walks; we were wary of breaking those social bonds.  Thus, when we walked one morning way back in 2003 when Iraq was invaded, the fact did not even come up, nor did the politics surrounding it. 

That was probably as it should've been (how could we have kept rubbing shoulders every morning if we vehemently disagreed?).  What we had in common wasn't strong enough to overcome what we probably did not.  

But the time for such careful politesse is, I think, long past. At this moment, politics does  belong on the playground, around the water cooler, everywhere.   

All of which is a long preamble to the passionate and eloquent call-to-action I received from a friend today:

Hi-

I don't know about you but I am getting more and more scared as I watch the news.  There's never been a party quite like the Dems from snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, but even without any obvious missteps, with the best ticket I've seen in my life, and with Americans nearly unanimous in seeing deep deep flaws in how the past eight years have been handled, I can see that we might lose this one.  And the stakes have never been higher.  

So what to do?  Last weekend  I rounded up a bunch of friends, and used the Obama website and local listserves to take a caravan of cars to go canvass in nearby Bucks County, Pennsylvania.  It's one thing to read in the paper about disaffected white ethnic voters, or soldiers who return from Iraq telling stories of having to fight without enough body armor (or bullets!), but it's quite another thing to actually see those people face to face.  

Canvassing is not really that hard but it's not easy either.  The folks at the Bucks County field office were super-organized, and when we showed up they had packets with lists of doors to knock on, and good maps, and they got us trained and out the door pretty fast.  At first it feels embarrassing to knock on the door of total strangers (but then at first it must feel embarrassing to go trick or treating too, right, and somehow we got over that hump pretty easily).  After a couple of houses, you get in a rhythm.  I was lucky and went with a good friend, so we had the unexpected bonus of some mommy time in between houses, catching up on summer vacations, the beginning of school, and the delicate balance of survival as a working mom.  

The goal is to connect with people.  If they are hard and fast for McCain, then it's just "thank you, have a nice day."  For the undecideds, we asked them what issues were important to them, and then shared our thoughts about where the candidates stand on those.  We tried to move those leaning toward Obama into strong Obama voters, sought out strong Obama voters as prospective volunteers, and made sure that those who voted for Hillary were moving (or already moved) into the Obama camp.  Since my friend who accompanied me was a big Hillary supporter herself, she was sort of a "secret weapon" on the trail, talking about the commonalities in Obama's and Hillary's agendas.  

With eight adults and three children divided into four teams, we knocked on about 200 doors and earned probably 10 votes.  It takes effort, and energy, but ultimately nothing is more effective than showing up as a volunteer, being the heart and soul of a movement, demonstrating that you care enough about what this election stands for to get up off the couch and do something about it.  If you are religious, think of this as praying with your feet.  (Whether you are religious or not, think of this as stopping the scary slide toward becoming a theocracy!)  

If we lose, it's our fault for not doing enough — and we will get the goverment that we deserve.

So why am I writing?  *To encourage you to get involved.*  If you live in or near a swing state — Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Virginia are all really important but so are some others — then hit the trail.  It's so easy — just go to the Obama website, click on "states," then find a local field office and call them up.  They will be happy to hear from you and will give you everything you need to get started.  

*If you don't live near a fiend office, then hit the phones.*  I did this during the primary and while it was not as fun as going door to door, I did rack up several hundred phone calls for Obama.  Again, at first it feels scary to call total strangers, and we all hate telemarketers, but for the most part I found people to be surprisingly receptive to listing to the political enthusiasms of the disembodied voice of a total stranger.  

I'm exhausted too, and behind on my work, and the house is a mess, and I desperately need a pedicure.  But for the moment all that's on hold....

Ask yourself what you can do — and then get out and do it.  

Don't know about you, but after reading that, I'm signing off now to figure out how to get down Florida this weekend.  

Consider the Fig

It's not news to anyone:  spring's long long gone, not even a whisper of memory anymore.  The rabbit's-foot curves that were the leaves of the fig tree at the side of the house in April are now completely unclenched; as early as June they'd become hands with broad, spatulate fingers.  

I stand on tiptoe, push the leaves back with both hands, searching for fruit, greedy.

A cicada insists:  hot, hot, hot.   A mockingbird patrols the sag of the phone line.  Who would think it's September?  Not I,  trills the bird mockingly, over my head.  The figs I find weep milk and crystalline sugar.  They're purplish, ripe, completely unlovely.  Borne of plants put into the ground a generation ago, when this neighborhood was bars-on-the-windows and frugality handed down.  

Now we live in such plenty:  nobody eats them.  

Me, though, I might be a scavenger born and bred, the offspring of hippies who scoured their neighbors' Madison, Wisconsin lawns for dandelion greens, a copy of Stalking the Wild Asparagus open to the leafy greens chapter.  I've been known to ... well, let's put it this way: one summer, when Elder Girleen was still young enough to sit in a stroller, I filched handfuls from the back yard of a vacant house and carried them home in an emptied sippy cup.  And the boughs draped over our backyard privacy fence from the neighbor's yard:  if I can reach the drooping figs, I can consider them fair game.  

They're wonderful with goat cheese and arugula.  One summer I made them into ice cream.  I don't know when I started to like them.  When I was little, I equated them with the gardens of elderly women:  on a par with swept dirt yards , cracked tire planters, whitewashed trunks of pecan trees.  Inside the sorts of houses that fig trees belonged to, there were sure to be dirty kitchen drawers lined with yellow, curling shelf-paper.  Sure to be window sills displaying mason jars with screw-top lids full of miscellaneous screws, and balls made from old rubber bands saved for decades.  

In Texas, my grandmother had a fig tree in her yard.  We visited every summer; every morning I watched her breakfast on figs ripe from her tree, sliced and swimming in bowls of half-and-half.  I turned up my nose.  

But I would sit cross-legged in the dappled, rustling shade underneath the tree, reading  books I found in the old glass-front bookcases; musty-smelling books I never would have dreamed of reading at home, where I had access to friends, television, the library:  Anne of Green Gables, Return of the Native.   Whose names were inscribed on the end-papers of those books?  Ancestors, I supposed.  I didn't know them. 

Now, here I am, forty-three:  when I reach for the figs on the trees outside my dining room window, maybe all that history is still within my grasp.  I part the leaves, I reach for summer with both hands.  The Girleens like them with Greek yogurt and honey.  

We get two or three at a time.  They're certainly not anything you could live on, but when I check for ripe ones while the Girleens are at school I feel like ... like what?  A good provider?  Inside the house are lists to be made, emails to answer. I am procrastinating.  I am outside in the yard, picking figs.  

Lists.  I make them, I change them.  In two weeks, I leave for  a two-week residency here.  I did this sort of thing before,  but all that was in another life, one before children.  Now I have two kids, and I find that I'm preparing for being away from them (and it's not even two weeks, it's ten days) the way a mother bear eats berries in preparation for winter.  My lists — what time people have to be at school, how many snacks have to be packed to go with them, when they have to be picked up, when and where piano lessons are, the telephone numbers of neighborhood mothers whose help has been pro-offered and gratefully accepted — have become so elaborate:  I may have to give the Husband and the Grandmother, who is coming to stay, a Powerpoint presentation before I get in the car loaded up with files and research books and computer and printer and drive off to the mountains!  

For ten days, I will be responsible for no one but myself, and this feels both seductive and frightening.

I imagine that driving-away, and it feels like it's for so long, and to such a far-away place.  I remind myself it's not rocket-science, this mothering I spend so much of the day-to-day engaged in.    Everybody will be fine!  Children learn good things from seeing their mothers engaged in work. They learn good things from going to school with hair uncombed every once in a while (this being one of my predictions)! So what if they eat too much pizza for dinner!  

I will learn good things.  I will have the chance to replenish, to write, to rub shoulders, to talk shop.  

But if people can get along without you, then they can get along without you.  And that is complicated stuff.  

So what do I do to combat my anxieties?

I pick figs, as if that would be enough to keep anyone from being hungry.  The house is better stocked with food than it usually is, no matter that I've done it so far in advance my stockpile while be long-gone by the time I drive off.  I do load after load of laundry, as if that will keep people from running out of clean clothes two weeks from now.  

    

Because I Can't Think About Much of Anything Else Right Now...

The real state of the union.  

And a glimmer of hope.  

State of the Union: September 2, 2008

I don't remember if I read this somewhere, or if it's something someone told me, but here's a stat plucked from the ether:  the average blogger (as opposed to the superstar blogger, who makes money from their avocation) keeps a blog going for about six months. 

Who knows what a blogger's ability to keep a blog going for six months means (or, equally,  if it means anything).  Maybe it takes six months to get bored with yourself.  Or maybe it takes six months to run out of anything to say.   Or maybe it takes six months to use up the goodwill of any friends out there in cyberspace who might be checking in on a regular basis.

No, I'm not pulling the plug — though these days I post so infrequently maybe I should.  But the past few weeks, between getting kids to school, keeping carpool schedules straight in my head, helping Elder Girleen weather the slings and arrows of first grade's early days (It's hard! she's wailed once or twice) and assisting Younger Girleen as she navigates the rocky shoals of her newly nap-less state, I've found myself wondering.  Wondering not why? not what's the point? but just wondering. 

OK, maybe why? and what's the point? do play a part in whatever it is that I'm wondering.  

So much of my life never ends up here.  (And maybe that's a good thing, the editoral voice that's never very far from hand chides me.)  Maybe it shouldn't.   The self-professed slant of this was "mixing the water and oil of motherhood and writing" after all. 

But at this particular second, those parameters feel like a bit of a box.  

Maybe it's that motherhood epiphanies are few and far between as you shepherd a child through first grade — it's not kindergarten when everything's new; instead, it's just life.  Or maybe it's that a summer of such active parenting has led me to a fallow fall.  Or maybe there are certain motherhood junctures when one feels the strongest need to give voice:  when the baby is born, when the first one starts school, and now just isn't one of those times.    

Soon enough, I predict, Media Studies scholars will take as their research topics like that, and we'll all be the wiser. 

But in the meantime, what we've got going on around here is just life.  

This morning, Younger Girleen and I took my car to the shop, driving eight lanes of interstate to get there.  Early morning sun palmed the guy-wires supporting the cell towers arrayed along the right-hand shoulder of the road.  A guy in an Expedition, the name Magnolia snaked across one forearm, asked in gestures if I'd let him merge in front of me.  I complied.

One of the things that needed fixing in the car was the radio, which has been on the blink for months.  The mechanic changed a fuse and .... voila!     As we drove back through town, Atlanta suddenly looked like the setting of a movie.  A movie along the lines of The Wire, but a movie all the same.  

Everything looks good when you've got the right soundtrack.  

 

Food For Thought...

First grade.  Those first few weeks as the family transitions back into the school year schedule can be a killer.  Elder Girleen has bags under her eyes like she's been cramming for a final, but honest, Ms. M the First Grade Teacher, she's in bed by eight!  

Last night, though, I know she was up a little later:  I could hear her in her bedroom reading On the Banks of Plum Creek to herself for at least half an hour.  Reading a chapter book.  The second week of first grade.  I myself don't remember much about first grade besides the tedium of Sally, Dick and Jane and the morning nit-check (it being 1970 in small town Georgia after all).  

First grade is just not what it was back then in those primitive days; in fact, a couple of times it has already seemed to me like Elder Girleen's first grade is my first grade experience, completely inverted.  She can read like nobody's business already; I was grinding through books with little more two words on each page at that age.  But on the other hand, I was walking by myself to school.  Elder Girleen can't.  

Her school isn't within walking distance from our house, which makes things easier for me:  I don't have to face any hard choices about whether or not she should.  But every morning when I drive her there or carpool with the neighbor, I think about the way things used to be — the quarter bestowed upon me so I could stop for ice cream at the soda fountain at the pharmacy on the way home, the fact that once I walked all the way home from school backwards, and down one of Athens, Georgia's main artery streets, no less — and the way they are now, when letting a first grader play in the front yard of your house may be a fraught proposition.  

All this is a rich vein to mine.  And Leonore Skenazy, a New York City mom and New York Sun columnist does just that, here. In case you missed the uproar (as I had), Skenazy let her nine-year-old take the subway home from Bloomingdale's without a parental escort and then wrote about the experience for her column.  Two days later she was on the Today Show (this is much worse than ending up on the cover of "Bad Mommy Monthly").  

Not saying I agree with everything she says ... but it is food for thought.   

Here One Day, Gone the Next

Elsewhere in the world, it may  still be the dog days of summer, but not 'round here.  

Nope, your calendar's not wrong:  it's still just early days of August, when lawns unravel into little more than crabgrass and heat leaves everything limp.  The leaves of the kudzu and the poison ivy are glossy and lustrous twining up the trunks of the trees.  The crepe myrtles have littered the ground with brassy fuschia blossoms, stridently attempting to add some color to things.  Last week, when we walked from the car to the pool,  wilted fluff from mimosas spangled the pavement.  

But even as August does what August does best, we have The First Day of School, and today the Girleens, newly-backpacked and outfitted, are off at their respective schools (first grade and preschool) experiencing life without maternal intervention.  

The house is very quiet. 

 The temperatures may be inching up into the nineties, but all you have to do is walk a first grader into their school building, opening those heavy metal doors into the smell of fresh paint and freshly-waxed linoleum floor that says first-day-of-school like nothing else can, to feel fall's onset.  It's there, like an underglaze under the panorama of summer.  

There's crisper weather ahead.  You can taste it on the tip of your tongue. 

One Week, and Counting...

School starts here in the ATL in a week, so we're celebrating these last days before the school-year routine whips us into shape by doing things we usually don't ...

... like sleeping late...

... staying in pajamas until 11 a.m....

and

... going to the swimming pool every single day...

Because being Martha Stewart is definitely one of those things I'm not a regular basis, I feel required to commemorate  the Fresh Fig Tart with Rosemary Cornmeal Tart and Lemon Mascarpone Cheese  we made this weekend.

With figs from the tree we planted two springs ago.  

You gotta celebrate the end of summer with a flourish.

Nine Reasons I Love Summer

Pool Digressions, Part II

All the swimming we've been doing around here might not seem momentous, but let me tell you, here  at "Camp Fun Mom" (which isn't, according to Elder Girleen, all that fun, and where the mornings' schedule of activities isn't complete until she teases Younger Girleen until she roars like a small enraged lion) it's a huge deal, particularly since Younger Girleen spent much of the previous month unwilling to stick much more than a big toe in water.  She didn't even want to get in the bathtub!* 

During the month of June, getting Younger Girleen in the swimming pool at all required the sort of diplomatic skills needed to diffuse high-level tensions between warring nations; once she was in the water, the only thing that kept her there was a death-grip on the straps of my bathing suit that, though comforting to her, played hell on my my sense of modesty.  Because of all that, I was pretty sure that July's twice-a-week swimming lessons, signed up for in February before we discovered this new-found dislike of water, would be a blood bath.  

I kept these dark thoughts to myself and talked up swimming lessons like nobody's business.  Wow, I have mermaids for daughters!  The teachers (from Emory U's swim team) are so cool!  They have swimming in the Olympics! The Olympics will be on TV in three weeks!  We'll stay up to watch them! 

Even so, when we got to the pool the first day, I was prepared to have to peel Younger Girleen off my body. 

But the teachers stood in a line in front of the pool and called out the names of their students.  Younger Girleen heard hers...

... and trotted off, her hand confidingly nestled in her teacher's.

And that was that.  

And by the time I looked at the other end of the pool,   Elder Girleen was occupied with her class, doing the back stroke.  Doing the breast stroke, which I didn't tackle until probably age 10 or 11.  

And me?  A moment's work, and there I was, transformed, for thirty minutes at least, into the sort of mom I'd always noticed and often envied, but never imagined I could ever be:  she who sits under an umbrella with something icy to drink and reads while her offspring are occupied in the water.  

Of course, because such a thing had never happened before, I had nothing to read.  But by the next lesson, I was prepared, with a copy of this year's Best American Short Stories (the one edited by Stephen King), tucked into the enormous tote bag any trip to the pool requires these days.  

I found my chair shaded-by-umbrella, I got my something icy from the snack bar upstairs, I opened  Best American Short Stories  to the first page of the first story.  

A mom acquaintance strolled by.  

— What're you reading?  she asked.

I closed the book and turned it so she could see the cover. 

—  Grown-up reading!  she said admiringly.

I admitted I hadn't actually read more than the first sentence; she resumed her stroll. 

Elder Girleen's lesson was taking place at the near end of the pool.  I glanced up from my book, searching for a glimpse of her wet, sleek head.  She was hanging on the side, listening carefully to the instructor as he modeled proper form for the crawl.  He said something, she nodded, a broad white-toothed smile transformed her face.  

I bent my head to my book and read the second sentence of the first story.

I looked up and toward the other end of the pool.  Younger Girleen's class sat at the edge of the pool, feet dangling, as their instructor took them one by one into the water. Younger Girleen's turn came; her instructor stretched out her arms, without hesitation Younger Girleen jumped into them.  

I bent my head and reread the second sentence of the first story.  

How odd it felt, to be off-stage.  It wasn't a bad feeling, by any means, but it was an unfamiliar one.  To step back and see my children as themselves, to be able to observe them from a remove:  parents of children under the age of six or so are seldom given such opportunities. 

I looked up again.  Elder Girleen hung on the side of the pool, chatting to the girl beside her.  

I bent my head and reread the second sentence of the first story. 

At the other end of the pool, Younger Girleen was steering a kickboard through the water,  serious as some small tug boat.

I looked down at my book.  And closed it.  

I suppose some mothers have the knack — of using their time wisely.  Of compartmentalizing...of making use of every single spare second they've got to keep a more grown-up life afloat.

Some mothers have the knack, but apparently I'm not one of them. 

I know I spend a lot of time — probably too much time – on this blog hashing out the either/or of motherhood and work, the before and after of childlessness and parenthood.  For some folks, these aren't even categories that invite discussion.  They don't matter — or maybe those folks just gotten past those questions.  

Me, I'm still standing here in the shallow end,  wondering how to make sense of my life, now that I'm audience, stagehand, and sometimes, yes,  even bit performer shoring up the leads, all of us participating in such a beautiful, beautiful, mesmerizing show.

 *Are you afraid of going down the drain? asked Shortsighted Mama when we first started having this "situation." Oh yeah, said Shortsighted Mama's higher-IQ'd offspring, grasping that tow rope of explanation thrown out so handily, even though such a thought had never occurred to her before).  

Pool Digressions, Part I

— Writing about driving??? an astute reader might ask.  —This woman thinks she writes a lot about driving?  Geez, her last six or so posts talk about the swimming pool! Not to mention the fact that we've visited that tired old that-was-then (before children), this-is-now (after them) rumination before.  

The astute reader who pointed this out would be right, of course.  I could retort it's my blog and I'll repeat myself if I want to, but I've only got about two people reading this who come to this site of their own free will and not because they're searching for information on potty training by the signs. God knows, I don't want to alienate them.  Besides, I'm a little bugged by this pattern myself.  

Ah ha!  Therein lies the rub of blogs, or one of them at least. Off-the-cuff, written on-the-fly, or seemingly so, blogs might be most seductive in their immediacy.  They're not life by any means, but they're more like the verbal equivalent of some running video-cam left pointed at a room than any writing that came before them. 

We live in such a segmented world.  A television channel devoted only to science fiction? Another only to labor-and-delivery stories?  Who would've thought it? There are better examples (or at least more bizarre ones) out there, but you get the gist.

Though saying I've chosen "writing" and "motherhood" as my beat (with digressions now and then into nature writing) implies a bit more agency about the decision to start this blog than there actually was,  I am writing within certain (self-imposed) confines.  It's a little like writing a sonnet, or a  villanelle:  because of the structural rules, each bears a family resemblance to the next.  And because of the requirements of the form, a lot is whittled away.  

And in my case, what seems to be left once all that whittling has taken place seems to be ruminations about youth, and the swimming pool.   

But as we all know,  the first axiom trotted out in a writing class is always this:  write what you know. 

And right now — apologies to everyone reading this stuck in an overly-air conditioned office out there somewhere — if I know anything, I know the pool.  

Hot Town

I know, I know:  if I were a better person,  driving would probably come up less often in my writing, the way of the world currently being $4.19 gas and an environmental crisis and all.  

The reality is, we actually don't do that much driving.   We live south of Interstate 20, and out of loyalty to the 'hood, stubbornness and just plain perversity, I try to stay on the wrong side of those tracks as often as I can.   

When I set up the Girleens' swimming lessons for the summer, though, I was asleep at the switch, and now I'm spending a couple  a days a week for the month of July shuttling them back and forth to the swimming pool.

But I suspect that even if this were not the case, the act of driving would take up more space in my writing than it probably should, simply because driving becomes a meditative act when one spends much of their waking time with small children:  yes, the small children are also right there with you, strapped into their seats like tiny paratroopers, but they're just as lulled as the next person by tires on asphalt, the blur of view beyond the window, and the dreamy life-is-a-beautiful-art-movie  sensation caused by being in a car with the radio on.  

In the car, I seem to have time to think.  Apparently Elder Girleen does to, for the car is where, the other afternoon, she asked me the following:

Mommy, why is Prince Eric always unconscious in the Little Mermaid?

In the car, we pass the HAND CAR WASH, a cinderblock building  painted a shout of orange so brilliant, so orange, it practically breaks eardrums,   where an itinerant BBQ cook has set up a rickety, surely-not-condoned-by-the-health-department smoker; we wait out the light, we turn, the dangerous, alluring scent of well-cooked ribs pervades the car.  

I'm hungry, the girleens chorus.   

In the car, we listen to Let It Be as we inch through rush hour traffic, because music hath charms that soothes the savage beast, also six-year-olds and three-year-olds who've been swimming for hours on July afternoons who have just been chauffeured past the mouth-watering aroma of BBQ ribs a mother would never dream of letting them eat.  

Oh, the summer I was sixteen, when the ashy, head-spinning taste of my first filched cigarettes filled my mouth and time was immaterial, the summer I was sixteen, when we debated life's big questions, one of which was this:

Beatles?  

or

Stones?

I was a girl for Mick, through and through.  The Beatles?  Too hippy-dippy; they didn't have that necessary edge.  Sentimental, I thought, sappy ... and then I lit another cigarette and set the record player needle into the groove of my current fave Patti Smith album, Easter. 

And now here I am, forty-three, and the Rolling Stones mean naught to the girleens, though Wild Horses is a song that's gotten their approval. The Beatles are the band we listen to.  

And all those songs I thought so sentimental 25 years ago?  What a beautiful soundtrack they make as you travel through your life with kids in tow,  your youth waving goodbye in the rear-view mirror.  

Skirted-Suit Ballad; or Summer in the City

Summer hangs heavy.  

I don't mean it hangs heavy on our hands, for this summer Elder Girleen has embarked upon that magical, knobby-kneed, tanned, tangled, sunbleached time of her life when summer lasts only a second, is a whirlwind gust of fun perfumed with chlorine and hot asphalt, and some of that magic rubs off on everyone who comes in contact with her, even me.  

It's just...summer has its own weight,  like hot ripe fruit weighing down a bough.  The city has begun to wear its summer look, frayed around the edges, redolent of garbage.  

Driving back this morning from delivering Elder Girleen at circus camp,  I spotted a tattoo-clad hipster strolling through the 'hood, licking at a bright red popsicle.  At ten in the morning, no less!  Elderly ladies wait beneath black umbrellas at the bus stop.  Even the graffiti scrawled across the flanks of buildings seems to have gone limp in the heat.  

In such circumstances, what's a good mom to do but take her children to the pool?  

I could write a whole 'nother essay about the swimming pool as potential crucible for America's anxieties about race, gender and class, but I suspect it's been done better here.  Besides, years of motherhood have blunted my ability to handle such weighty topics.  

All the same, I have to admit that this summer I've gotten a probably inordinate amount of pleasure from the fact that we have yet to pay our way into a swimming pool.  The City of Atlanta pools offer "free swim" periods daily; generous friends with memberships have cheerfully allowed us to take advantage of them.

Like anywhere else where groups of people who usually don't rub shoulders find themselves in close proximity with one another, the pool can be a fascinating place:  what with its gangs of languid teenage girls who hug the edges of the pool like shimmering schools of fish, all those oiled up bodies littering the concrete (are they dead or are they sleeping?), and the stalking, whistle-bedecked presence of the lifeguards.  It was a stroke of genius that made writer Tom Perrotta set so much of his black-comedy of domestic life Little Children at the swimming pool. 

Last weekend we attended a birthday party held at a pool and here's a trick question:  how could you tell the mothers from the childless women?  Not necessarily by their bodies (some mothers, though I'm not one of them, have regained their pre-baby shapes); not necessarily by their position at the pool (frantically rubbing sunscreen on someone or prone with a paperback).  

No, you know the mommies by their swimsuits.  I would say that in this, the summer of 2008, in Atlanta, GA, the mommy who does not own a sporty little skirted swimsuit is an anomaly.  

Lands End may be to blame, seeing as they're the company that single-handedly convinced thirty and forty-something women that the sort of suit formerly seen only on women over sixty who come to the pool decked in swim caps clutching kickboards is a flattering and stylish fashion statement.  

And often they are.  Looking around at all the moms at the pool, I like to tell myself we resemble 1940s starlets confident of their allure despite their swimwear's conservative cut.

  

But then I think:  would I have been caught dead in a swim suit like this in my twenties?  

Last week, I also had the chance to take the Girleens to the pool I haunted as a teenager and college student:  the University of Georgia's outdoor pool.  Which is, in fact, now that I think about it, the pool where I learned to swim, the pool where I hung desperately onto the side and then flung myself across the pool's width  in a rudimentary crawl.  Later in life, I oiled my legs with Hawaiian Tropic, SPF 4 (ah, we were so young then, and so foolish!) at this pool, keeping my eye out for certain members of the opposite sex I knew would soon show up, who would, with the elaborate, diffident habits of their time and gender, stretch out faded towels next to me and ask as if they had no stake in the answer "you goin' to so-and-so's party tonight?"

Oh, the summers spent on some friends' porch, parsing out such conversations! (The boys never said "wanna go with me?" once it was established that one would be going to the party later, they hedged their bets by saying "maybe I'll see you there.") Oh, those summers, when the backyards of the rental houses we all lived in hummed with cicadas and expectations and our hope that something interesting happen, soon!

Back then, I laid out my towel at the far end of the pool, as far away from the faculty families with their splashing children as possible.  So it had always been at the university pool, from time immemorial, and so it was when I took my children there last week.  Families with children in the shallow end near the entrance, near the concession stand and the shady awning. The middle for the lap swimmers going about their serious business:  grad student t.a.s desirous of outracing time and age with a perfect back stroke, retired faculty made bouyant by all that recently-acquired leisure time.  The far end for all the indolent sorts who picked each other up, and cast each other off, all while they gossiped idly, stretching out their long long legs. 

How lucky I am, I realized as I walked my children to the pool's edge, to have had the sort of life where I can see this place again.  Even though now I'm at the near-end of it, in a skirted suit. 

I looked across the long blue expanse of pool from one end to the other, and then I jumped in, becoming, for a moment, weightless.