State of the Union, February 26, 2008

Elder Girleen's philosophy of life might be Get Down and Boogie (when it's not It's No Fair!) but Younger Girleen, who, though she looks much like her sister, is her own little person, swaggers through life like a pirate. 

I'm often dumbstruck with admiration at this  joie de vivre, but I also find the take-no-prisoners approach to life a little exhausting.  If no guns for hostages is the way you should approach toddler terrorists, despite our best intentions, the Husband and I may have lost the fight.  At the age of 2+, Elder Girleen was mercurial but easily distractible; Younger Girleen,  on the other hand, has never once in her short life forgotten anything once she set her mind to it.   

Right now she's finally settled down into a nap, and as I tiptoed out of her room after reading The Bears' Picnic for the umpteenth time I realized how quickly the earth spins on its axis and how fast the time goes.  Soon, no matter how strong my denial about the necessity of it is, she will have to sleep in a big girl bed.  The nap that's my daily reprieve has probably only a few short months before it's history.   (If I'm going to write the draft of a novel while my toddler naps I better get cracking.)    All this will happen whether I actively facilitate or not.  We are here right now, and soon we will be there. 

There is something very soothing about this.  One of the bonuses of having a second child is that it puts you firmly in your place, and I mean that in the best of possible senses.  With the first child, I earnestly read parenting books and thought it was all up to me.  With the second one, I understand that I'm not actually Master of the Universe.  This is humbling but liberating at the same time, and you're welcome to remind me that I thought so when I start going through the four stages of grief (Denial, Bargaining, Anger, Acceptance) over the loss of her nap, probably right about the time that school lets out for the summer.   

The Best Laid Plans...

Because of his strong hunter-gatherer DNA, over time (14 years of marriage), The Husband has become our family's primary grocery shopper, which is fine with me, since I was apparently standing behind the door when they handed out those genes. He takes the Girleens with him; bribes them with cookies and samples, and theoretically, I'm at home, using the hour and 20 or so minutes while the house is quiet to "work." Not folding laundry, paying bills or any of that, but actually writing.

I woke up with such high hopes this morning. A trenchant socio-political commentary (involving the Pledge of Allegiance, the TV show The Wire, and the latest Preschool Soap all wrapped up in one package!) to shape into blog-essay form, mainly so the header "Introducing the Mom Who Can Screw Up Cake-Mix Cupcakes" would disappear from the top of the blog. Or maybe just an hour spent in the company of the novel I've claimed to be starting for years now.

I have six years of parenting under my belt (and since I think you should be able to count each child separately, maybe I actually have nine years in the trenches) so I know the drill.

Never invest too much in your plans.

Yes, kids will get fevers of 103 while you're packing the car for vacation, babies will spit up on your party dress, a trip to the store may turn into a day spent in your pajamas. All this is especially true during those newborn days. I know all this.

But we are all fallible, human animals. I started the day with high hopes and, about 9:45 this morning, as I watched the Mack Truck of Elder Girleen's temper tantrum (Her clothes are not perfect, she doesn't look right, I don't do enough laundry, life, in general and specific, is a supremely frustrating experience) barrelling down the road expressly to crush those hopes, I could feel a tide of ... unmotherly.... feeling washing over me.

Such as: Christ, we're talking the desire for a tranquil morning just so's it'd be easy to transition into an intellectual space where I could get something done. Is that so much to ask? Is it? Is it? Huh?


The usual Motherhood Blog Narrative goes something like this: we mother bloggers admit to some failure, some lack, some hardship (I was going crazy... I was having a hard time with...I wanted to...). Then we muster our resources, pull ourselves up by our motherly bootstraps, and have some epiphany that makes not only us, but our readers, feel better.

But sometimes hard is just... hard. Sometimes there is no answer, so solution, no foolproof parenting technique to serve as a band-aid for what ails us.

I often swim in a cultural sea that doesn't like to admit this. Us Americans are can-do people! Or, to steal from Bob the Builder:  Can we fix it?  Yes, we can!  

But sometimes you just got to roll with the punches instead.  It's a gray, late winter morning in Atlanta, GA.  I've got some kids to take to the library.  It's all Grist for the Mill.  

Introducing the Mom Who Can Screw Up Cake-Mix Cupcakes

Here it is, 4:50 p.m. on Valentine's Day, and Elder Girleen is working off her sugar high at dance class. Younger Girleen, who missed her nap due to parental attendance at the class "valentine's dance-party" at the elementary school, is sleeping.

This time of day, Younger Girleen shouldn't be doing this, in fact, moms among the readership are thinking to themselves, Oh, she can't DO that. She must be woken IMMEDIATELY! the way viewers of a horror film groan when the heroine goes out jogging alone late at night. Doesn't she see the danger ahead? Don't I?

I say Damn the Torpedoes and let the baby sleep.

Comments I heard moms make today, Valentine's Day:

Oh, you MADE valentines!

Oh, you remembered the kids had to BRING valentines!

Oh, I need a nap.

I know in my heart of hearts that scissors out in the momosphere have been busy crafting beautiful things for Valentine's Day but because I seem to have become preoccupied with revealing the dings in every Pristine Surface, let me assure you that ours weren't in that category. They were nothing more than hearts cut out of cardstock, on which Elder Girleen had written her classmates' names, and they were lovely, they were fine.

At least until 7:12 last night. Which was when Elder Girleen realized that they would be terrible, awful, suitable only for throwing in the garbage — unless each and every one had a "poem" written on the back of it. The poem was

Roses are red,
violets are blue,
sugar is sweet,
and so are you.

I admired the sentiment and the creativity she was displaying but it was now 7:23. The bathwater was running, there are fifteen children in Elder Girleen's class, and above and beyond all that, she's in kindergarten, and any parent of a kindergartener knows just how laborious the writing process is: that poem wasn't even going to fit on the back of those valentines.

It took until about 8:30 to talk her down from the ledge of the building on that one (a family effort, Younger Girleen's contribution: "Sister, be HAPPY!")

Once both kids were really asleep, Husband and I had an hour-long discussion about Elder Girleen's recent trip to the dentist and the discovery that braces are an option for six-year-olds, then Younger Girleen woke up for an hour in the middle of the night, and then presto, chango! we're up and at 'em, and it's Valentine's Day.

Because I had spent the night before Valentine's Day contemplating Elder Girleen's need for braces before her permanent teeth come in rather than taking care of business, the first thing I had to do once the Husband and Elder Girleen had left for work and school was to make cupcakes for the "dance-party" Elder Girleen's class would be having in the afternoon.

Occasionally I have moments where I think to myself I am MOM, hear me roar!, and completely disregard the Rule of Threes, and this morning was one of them.

The Rule of Threes is simple: Multi-tasking is all well and good and two things can sometimes be accomplished at the same time. But three? Not humanly possible.

Younger Girleen was eating a late breakfast. I needed to make cupcakes. I needed to make some phone calls. We needed to be out the door in 45 minutes. Can everything that's supposed to happen, happen? Piece of cake (sorry -- cupcake)!

Organic Wild Puffs cereal on the floor
Child cries
Phone clenched between shoulder and ear,
Mom lugs standing mixer into kitchen

These were cake-mix cupcakes. I didn't have very high expectations for how they tasted: I just wanted them to look like cupcakes. NIce domed cupcake tops. Instead, what I pulled from the oven was 24 cupcakes kinda become one.

After surgery on them, we ended up with 12 fallen apart and in the garbage and 12 ready for the party, and we happily careened on with our day, which would end up including Younger Girleen flipping backwards out of a chair onto the concrete floor of a coffee shop, saving herself from concussion by biting her tongue instead; the double-mom tackle attempt semi-successful in that we stopped the force of her fall and avoided the emergency room and only spilled a water glass in the process, instead of two lattes, a plate of bagels and a plate of quiche.

And all that before we even got to the Kindergarten Class Dance-Party.

Which consisted of 15 kindergarteners who could care less whether cupcakes look like something out of Martha Stewart Living and just needed to wolf down some sugar before they could get down and boogie.

Which they did. Earlier in the day they'd decorated part of their classroom with a disco ball and black construction paper taped to the windows. One of their two teachers got "Who Let the Dogs Out" queued up on her ipod. The other turned off the light.

It was a kiddie rave, a kindergarten mosh pit, it was the future: and it was beautiful. Little Boy J, whose dance style included some interesting travolta-esque moves (me to his mom: does your husband dance like that? her: oh, yes, it has been known to happen). Little Boy j 2, who recently had his hair cut in a big boy hair cut, and who, when he played excellent air guitar, looked like nothing so much as a newly-buzz-cutted army recruit cutting loose on the dance floor in the bar on the base. Little Boy J3, who has got some crunkin' moves and in a few short years will break some hearts. Little Girl A, who pogos toward the ceiling like she's going touch heaven. Little Girls T and H and K and C, who are now dancing in a circle to Hannah Montana, and who run over to include Little Girl E, who is feeling shy.

Us grown-ups are all so scared we're going to screw things up. The mom who, when she said to me "oh, you made valentines!" and was thinking "and I didn't!" The mom who said "oh, you remembered to send valentines" and was thinking "and screw-up that I am, I FORGOT." Me, who made some ugly cupcakes and was late for everything and caused a scene in the coffee shop with my crying child.

I don't know how I managed it, but this post is a blending of both the Wry Jocularity School of Parenthood Writing and Maudlin Momhood Sentiment. Doesn't matter. Sometimes it's good to be reminded: You gotta dance like there's nobody watching.

The Stuff of Childhood/The Stuff of Motherhood

Maybe it's because I'm recently back from having spent a week engaged in work of the grown-up variety (so-called, at least; at first I wrote adult variety, which made it sound like I moonlight as an escort, which NOT the case), and in the process of that, I was able to hang out in environments free of childrens' brightly-colored plastic; or maybe it's because it's Chinese New Year, and apparently jettisoning clutter is a traditional New Year's activity — either way, I spent Saturday morning sifting through the STUFF in Elder Girleen's room.

Elder Girleen is a bit of a packrat, and being a bit of a packrat myself, I try to stay sympathetic to the sorts of things she chooses to hold onto (especially if they're rocks and other bits of natural history, though 20+ pieces of identical Georgia gravel eats a worm hole in my brain) and the Husband, who spends less time in the house with the clutter, is philosophically opposed to sneaking "her stuff" out of the house, feeling that 1. it's dishonest, and 2. how would we like it if somebody bigger than us did that to us?

I'm not saying he hasn't staked out the moral high ground, but let's just say Needs must when the Devil drives .

This post could careen off in a few different directions, like

1. What do you do with art projects when your children bring home at least three a day?

2. Ban the Goodie Bag (Or: Why does my Child Have Three Pairs of Plastic, Made-in-China Binoculars, None of Which Can Be Used to See Anything?)

3. How do ANY People with Children Manage to Have Neat Houses?

Instead:

I spent a hour of my Saturday morning sorting through baskets (Elder Girleen loves baskets, especially when they're full of random, unrelated objects) that contained:

...a green plastic finger that can be worn on top on one's own finger, which was bestowed upon Elder Girleen by her preschool teacher three years ago for Halloween...

... a single scrabble tile...

.... a piece of quartz still stained with red dirt...

... a plastic ring shaped like a bat...

... a marble...

... a dream catcher that came in the mail from some reservation-related charity as a "gift" they wanted me to send in money for...

... a single card from a Crazy Eight deck that came from the dollar bin at Target...

... a hot pink doll boot...

... a crumpled piece of paper...

As I did so, what I really found myself thinking was Is there any way to make ART out of all this stuff? Is there some visual artist out there who makes cool and beautiful art from childhood cast-offs? I imagined lovely sinous sculptures dotted here and there with flotsam and jetsam.

It seems such a shame just to throw it away.

Uhhhh.... Bingo.

Last few posts I've been thinking about writing, motherhood-variety, particularly blogs that either dance around the experiences therein or plunge right in. Why so many? Why is there now a book on the market that promises to help moms "discover that mothering provides endless material for writing at the same time that writing brings clarity and wisdom to mothering"?

Is it that there's a desire to craft something beautiful, something that expresses who we really are, from the disparate pieces laying around, pieces that society has often valued about as highly as those three pairs of plastic binoculars?

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle! Maybe the burgeoning Momosphere is in good part an attempt to spin gold from the domestic straw.

I admit it: I put those three pairs of binoculars back into the basket in Elder Girleen's closet.

Essay Topics

Discuss: Writing Motherhood is listed on Amazon as a book that helps women "discover that mothering provides endless material for writing at the same time that writing brings clarity and wisdom to mothering." True or False?

As an aside, customers who bought this book also bought:

Pen on Fire: A Busy Woman's Guide to Igniting the Writer Within
(which on first glance I read as A Busy Woman's Guide to Ignoring the Writer Within — I don't need a book for that one!)

Hannah Keeley's Total Mom Makeover

How to Become a Famous Writer Before You're Dead

Hannah's Art of Home: Managing Your Home Around Your Personality


If nothing else, we sure are earnest here at the beginning of the century.

Weather Reports

The sky today beyond the curve of window today is such a lovely ceramic blue, completely cloudless, but there's something stand-offish about its expanse all the same.

We are at the wintery heart of the year here, nothing like the wintery heart of the year out yonder where they really have winter, but all the same, it's time for the thaw. Time for the furled squirrel-ear of the pecan tree buds, and for life to feel practically translucent, vulnerable sap barely congealed into substance.

I recently undertook some work that involved a great deal of reading, in fact for a couple of weeks there I was awash in a sea of words. I cannot tell a lie: all those words were actually slopping over the gunwales. Hold Fast, I tell myself in times like these, that being the towrope sailors once had tattooed across their knuckles to remind them to cling tight to the rigging. Hold Fast — that being the tattoo I idly imagine I'll have, some day.

So many words. Here at the wintery heart of the year, I feel almost speechless in the face of them, in the face of all those bits and bytes that document what it means to be a parent at the beginning of the 21st century. Every bodily fluid, every sleepless night, every epiphany, has been essayed and storified and faceted and honed until it's not unreasonable to wonder if there's anything left to say.

On one level, this is simply an extended way for me to explain why so little blogging seems to get done around here these days; but on another, it might be a real, legitimate question.

These days, I primarily identify as a mother. Not as a writer, not as a Georgian, not as a... whatever. And I suppose that in the face of that, I fall prey to viewing writing and its attendant issues through the prism of motherhood. (To whit, toilet-training a child takes up more space in my brain that the complexities of starting a novel set in the mid-19th century). Does such an identification diminish or enlarge me? (And, to make that question more universal, you can replace writing with any of the creative arts, or with anything you considered jettisoning from the boat to keep it afloat during those early days with children).

Remember The Cult of True Womanhood read about in our college history texts? The Victorian ideal of the mother as the Angel in the House? I certainly wouldn't float the idea that many of us mother-types have become the Angel at the Computer, the work we chose to engage in shaped by social, political and self-imposed constraints.  (Especially since saintly behavior is not the name of the game here).  

Or: Is there a creative glass ceiling that seldom gets talked about? And is the blogosphere, allowing us all to be captain of our own ships, a way around that?

(Huge apologies to friend and fellow blogger B for hijacking her ocean metaphor).

Snippets

1. Been out of town and, since I bought books while gone, the nightstand pile threatens to overwhelm me (as does the laundry, the still-packed suitcase on the living room floor, the preschool emails that came in while I was gone, and the general trivality of life).

2. Obama is ahead by 50% in our precinct as of this incredibly early moment.

3. My story, The Artists Colony, is up and running, at fivechapters.com . I love the way Five Chapters serializes stories. Wouldn't it be great if such ideas revolutionized the always-moribund short story market? If people started reading stories at work the way they check blogs?

4. From the NYTimes review of a new book out (Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob, by Lee Siegal):

Siegal argues that the Internet invites people to 'carefully craft their privacy into a marketable, public style.'

Ah, yes, that Pristine Surface . Given my recent online pub, and the fact that a few people from that site may wander to this site, I should be using this space to wax eloquent about something.

Instead, you get this.

The Reveal

A few weekends back, a fellow mom and I headed out to see the new movie The Orphanage, as giddy as prisoners let out for the evening on a work-release program.

The Husband would rather have ground glass shoved in his eyeballs than willingly sit through any scary movie, especially one that involves children of any shape or form (though he can sit on the sofa eating a bowl of ice cream during one of CSI's lovely autopsy scenes), so it was a win-win situation for us all: he was thrilled to be putting the girleens to bed rather than accompanying me, the Girleens were thrilled to get to watch TV at night and I was thrilled to sit back and settle into a ghost story.

After seeing it, I would submit that it's not necessarily the presence of children in such narratives that ratchets things up a notch, but the presence of a mother or a mother-figure, whether she's the haunted or the one who does the haunting.

It turns out that I've been writing stories that dance around that idea for a while.

One of them appears here starting tomorrow. An installment a day, Monday-Friday! You know reading it's really what you want to be doing when you should be working!

(A NYTimes take on fivechapters.com, the site where "The Artists' Colony" appears, can be found here.)