Drinking from the Motherhood Cup

Way back in those early days when I only had one child and that child was a babe-in-arms and my house seldom rang with conversations along the lines of

Elder Girleen: P, you're bothering me! You're in TIME OUT

Younger Girleen: Arghhhh! You Poopy Head! Moommmeee, A says I'm in TIME OUT.

I'd observe families that contained elementary school-aged children with the internal equivalent of slackjawed wonder. Not because I was wondering how on earth they managed but more because they might as well have been aliens from another planet. There I was, fretting about sleep and how many dirty diapers my kid had, attending playgroups where folks debated types of diapers and the dangerous outgassing caused by miniblinds hung in a nursery — and in the very same universe these folks were attending soccer games every single Saturday morning of their lives, being Girl Scout leaders, explaining to kindergarteners what drugs were (think about how hard that actually is), carpooling, baking things for bake sales.

They were brash, they were loud, and occasionally they had our sedate little family of three over for dinner, when they carried on heated discussions about politics at the same time as a three-year-old created an extremely hands-on art installation out of his mashed potatoes and a seven-year-old had the sort of very verbal crisis that is caused by being six or seven and having a brain that is way too big and moves way too fast for the emotional wellbeing of anyone within a ten mile radius.

This morning I was up at the crack of dawn putting a pot roast in the crockpot (the way I cook with a crockpot doesn't really lessen my labor, it just moves it to another time, say, 6:25 in the morning); as I write this people are dropping off eggs for the neighborhood egg hunt tomorrow, which I somehow became the organizer for ("And I ask — how did I get here? This is not my beautiful house; this is not my beautiful wife...") and I've just realized that the neighborhood egg hunt, which used to consist of about seven kids, may be extremely successful this year, so much so that the older kids of which there used to be NONE in our neighborhood may run roughshod over the tiny toddling one-year-olds whose parents are imagining this egg hunt as a lovely spring photo opp. I've also realized that one of those bulls in the china shop will probably be my own offspring.

One of the most overused platitudes around would have to be that annoying old chestnut before you judge a (wo)man, walk a mile in their moccasins but sayings become old chestnuts because they're especially apt, right?

I can't think of a single place where more shoe-trading goes on than Parenthood World. If I said this strange and wonderful place I find myself in now had heightened my ability to empathize I would sound like a saint or something, and that I most definitely am not. But because of it, the thread of my life has been more tightly woven into the fabric I only know to call community.

It's a beautiful tapestry, isn't it?

Luck, Variety Bad

Seen while walking with Younger Girleen this morning: house, For Sale sign in front yard; car parked at the curb being hitched to tow truck by Repo Man; homeowner standing on front porch watching with paperwork clutched in one hand.

Pure Luck

"Hang on to me, baby, and let's hope that the roof stays on."
— Brownsville Girl, Bob Dylan

Spring in this neck of the woods tends towards the effusive, the overblown. All the time I spent further west, I grieved over missing it each and every year: the tender green of Bradford pears as they begin to leaf out after an excess of blossoms, the gaudy yellow cascade of forsythia, the Ikebana-like branches of flowering quince, flesh pink and thorny. The smell of earth warming and air thick with humidity. Spring can be practically unmanageable around here, and last Friday's storm is nothing if not evidence of that.

This week, lots of Bradford pears, practically just minutes past their flowering, are either splintered or stacked up on curbs: they may be pretty but they're weak, and tend to give up the ghost during rough weather. Not more than spitting distance from our house, chain link is still hung with insulation blown there by the wind, and the air is full of the bite and roar of chain saws. The Weather Channel... I heard one construction worker say to the other as I drove slowly yesterday morning, window rolled down, through Cabbagetown, the neighborhood that lies between ours and Younger Girleen's preschool. Overhead, the sky's a lovely ceramic blue, and later on, when I short-cut back through the neighborhood three blocks further east, there's not a single shred of evidence that anything untoward even happened. I mean, there are mattresses stacked up on the curb but that's because somebody got evicted a week or so before, not because of any kind of weather.

And what were we doing when the storm hit? Elder Girleen was at a sleepover at a friend's house, Younger Girleen was sleeping, and the Husband and I were sitting in front of the living room window, having the following debate, having just seen a crawl at the bottom of the television screen announcing a tornado warning:

There's nothing about a storm on the radio...
Maybe it's a mistake?
Fulton's a big county... maybe it means North Fulton?
Is that a plane?
That's not a plane...
I think that's wind...

I may be Texas-born, but I grew up here: I ought to know enough to head for the basement during a tornado warning. But I was in my nightgown and the basement's nowhere you want to hang out unless you're in a haz-mat suit; it happened fast; we didn't know.

Luck. A small word, overused. "That was lucky." "Good luck!" But there's nothing like driving down a street to see one house, serene, unscathed, and that the two flanking it and across the street are now sprouting hundred-year-old oak trees from their roof lines to make you think about the thin divide between things: good luck, bad luck, there's just a few short blocks between the two, a few tricks of the wind.

Weather Report: March 15, 2008

Our neighborhood missed the brunt of last night's storm by a hair -- we are FINE; in fact we remained oblivious of the damage a 1/2 mile north of us until this morning.

A Picture's Worth 1000 Words...

But because I'm a writer, I'll include the 1000 words.

This past weekend I was in Austin* — although not for SXSW, which means I am either less cool or more cool that SXSW-attenders — you can be the judge. (Just don't tell me what you decide.)

I was there for a reunion of writers who have held residencies at the Dobie-Paisano Ranch in the 40 years since the program's inception. Over the course of the weekend I had the chance to wear Ropers, hike in the cedar and caliche scrubland I love, eat Mexican food and talk writing. (Is it clear from that how often the Lone Star State tries its best to convince me that Texas and Heaven are comparable locales?)

During the course of the reunion, I also was given a commemorative mug printed with a photograph of the Paisano property.

Interesting thing is, three years ago The Husband's mother gifted us with a coffee mug probably from the same source (Shutterfly) which sports a picture of our little family of four, sleep-deprived and not quite photogenic, that was taken soon after Younger Girleen was born.

Now, when I pour my morning coffee I can take my pick:

Parenthood ...
or...
The Writing Life...

I have drunk from both this morning.

*The number of times I've been in Austin in the past few months may lead folks to believe I have a secretly interesting life: Not True.

The Written Word

Yo! The Spring 2008 issue of Brain, Child Magazine is on the stands. Lots of nifty stuff to read, including my story "Little Man." This is a great magazine and I'm really pleased to have a story there.

If you live in Atlanta, you can purchase Brain, Child at Borders, Charis Books and, I believe, Sevananda. If you live in Austin, they didn't have it in stock at BookPeople yesterday morning* but ask them to start carrying it! You can probably pick up a copy at Borders.

If you're keeping track, "The Artists Colony," published last month on the Five Chapters site, is the opening story in a collection of linked stories called Domestic Fictions. "Little Man" is the second one, so some of the same characters are lurking about.


*Read between those lines and you can figure out why I haven't had much to say for myself lately (ie, I was out of town). It's good to be back.

Cooperation/Corporation, Continued

Spring has sprung here in the 'hood. Painting crews are blasting conjunto music while they scrape and prep houses in a repainting ritual that seems to take place every spring. The lenten roses, green belles of the early spring ball, are laden with demure blossoms. The Bradford pear trees are a confectionary of exploded cotton batting.

And just as there has been every single spring for the past five years, controversy is reaching a boiling point at the cooperative preschool where we've thrown in our lot.

Cooperative preschools — or for that matter, Montessori preschools, Waldorf preschools, Reggio Emilia-method based preschools, and state-funded preschools— were not something I was aware of, pre-children (I actually don’t have enough fingers or toes to count up all the things I knew nothing of, pre-children). To tell you the truth, I didn't put a whole lot of thought into exactly what you did with kids once you had them. I knew they went to kindergarten at five, but other than that.... who knew?

Now that I've got six years of parenthood under my belt, I've come to appreciate the cooperative approach to preschool education (and maybe that will be blog fodder on a slow day), but in the beginning I made the decision to enroll Elder Girleen there when she was 1 1/2 based solely on this: the cooperative preschool was close to our house, I was attracted to its flexible schedul, she and I both needed some breathing space from each other, and I'd seen the children enrolled there as they marched (or rather strolled and rode on shoulders) in the annual free-spirited neighborhood parade.

They looked happy. In fact, they were happy — they are. Under the nurturing guidance of a cadre of teachers, a hardworking preschool director and all those fellow parents who “own” a cooperative preschool and pitch in when the building floods or someone has a baby or a child’s nose needs wiped, my daughters have blossomed into a sharp, inquisitive, polite (mostly), poised little people.

Sounds lovely, doesn't it? But at the same time, that annual free-spirited neighborhood festival, now one of Atlanta's biggest events, is sponsored by Red Hook Beer, and the preschool (now just Younger Girleen's school) might just as easily be described as a loose consortium of small fractious countries, each with its own nuclear warhead and fingers itchy to start hostilities. In short, things change in five years. Or maybe it's just that the Pristine Surface is always, no matter where you find it, in good part about spin.

Last year I was on the board of directors at the preschool. Quasi-political, following — roughly, chaotically — the same Roberts Rules of Order that theoretically instill parliamentary procedure into everything from neighborhood meetings to … well, uhh … preschool board meetings; equal parts tedium, political brinkmanship and occasionally, heartwarming cooperation, the board of the preschool and the time I spent serving on it dragged me, kicking and screaming, to a level of social and political engagement that, before I had children, I mostly chose to observe from the sidelines.

Maybe because of that fact, this year my role can be best described as that of a mostly disinterested bystander. Not for me, board meetings that last for three hours where life-affecting details such as whether or not the child-drawn figure that serves as the school's logo "looks lonely" at the top of the school letterhead are discussed. Not for me, those sidelong looks and huddles of two or three board members on the playground as the latest board powerplay or malfeasance is dissected. You might even say that I find myself watching this year's controversy build the way you might watch a car crash — o, that spectacular fishtail! o, the crumpled bumper! somebody call 911!

Past springs, preschool controversies have involved everything from teacher hirings and firings to the possible dissolution of classes for certain ages of children. The specifics of this year's controversy don't really matter. The globals, though, as I read them, involve where you stand on the following statement:

Our organization is a non-profit educational institution, not a for-profit corporation with shareholders, etc.

This year, my motto as far as my preschool duties has been to tell myself yo! you can't expect a sorority to behave like a commune, and even though this is about as inane as saying it is what it is, I've drawn a lot of comfort from it. People at the preschool generally mean well. I'm not so sure I would've wanted a commune anyway -- we all know what happened to most of those idealistic sixties utopias.

Apparently, though, while I'm busy mouthing platitudes and keeping my head in the sand, the firestorm has been raging. I bumped into the poor soul who took my place on the board at the playground and she had a wild look in her eye. "The emails!" she cried. "One came down that said 'we're trying to run this place like a corporation.' She took a deep breath. "A corporation! The first time I read that one, I read cooperation. That's what it really is, right?"

Cooperation/Corporation. Ah, you wondered how I was going to pull this one off!

The answer is: I'm afraid I can't pull it off at all. The serial nature of the medium has made me realize I'm on thin ice, narrative-wise: this one is just too hard for me to tackle. In blog form. Without a Ph.D. in Political Science. Or Philosophy. Or a bigger, less-mommified brain.

But I guess the point I might be trying for is this: As I stood there at Elder Girleen's school while the Pledge was being recited, it dawned on my that we might all have some idealized vision of democracy, and the United States, lodged in our DNA. One vote, one voice! Our ancestors did mostly wash up on these shores believing this to be the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, after all.

So there we are, standing on that bedrock. But we live our day-to-day lives swimming (and sometimes drowning) in a sea of capitalist impulses. That's why, when the parents charged with making decisions about a cooperative preschool get going, they start borrowing ideas from the corporate world. It's not like they've been working on kibbutzim their whole lives! Where else are they going to get ideas from?

This is a big question. Maybe the BIGGEST question. But I think lots of folks are starting to ask it; that maybe the desire to find the answer to that is in the ether these days.

Apologies for the sociopolitical content of the last few days (we're done now, I promise).

Howdy to all the folks in Texas who are in the political spotlight today.

Cooperation/Corporation

Part One

Mornings when I take Elder Girleen to school, I usually hang around for fifteen minutes for Morning Meeting, a daily occurrence that involves 360 drowsy kids with sleep still in their eyes sitting criss-cross applesauce on the floor of the auditorium for a couple of announcements, a song or two and a factual snippet (such as: what exactly is leap day, what is a primary election, did you know that George Washington Carver invented over 400 things to do with sweet potatoes?).  



They also scramble up off the floor for the Pledge of Allegiance, as do all the teachers and any parent-types who've stuck around.  

I certainly don't think of myself as the patriotic type.  I don't go to baseball games.  In fact, before Elder Girleen started kindergarten I probably hadn't said the Pledge of Allegiance since I was in elementary school.    



But, just as you never forget how to ride a bike, you never forget how the Pledge goes.  The hand folded earnestly across the heart!  Those words:  and liberty and justice for all. 



On one hand, it seems so anachronistic, so quaint.  But on the other, because of who everyone standing there in that circa 1929 auditorium is (an American) and probably because we all stood in similar settings saying the same words when we were the same impressionable age that Elder Girleen is now (6), I find that I have an emotional reaction to their meaning.  



And liberty and justice for all.  For the few short moments it takes to say them, I believe.

Are they true or false?  Wiser heads than mine are debating that as we speak, and have been doing so ever since they were written.  Because of my status as mom,* I'm not going to weigh in on the actual veracity of those words, though I certainly have my own opinion about it.

Some of my first political memories:  my mother weeping during the six o'clock news as wives of soldiers missing in Vietnam were interviewed; my confusion between the IRA (who were particularly active right then) and the IRS (who upset my father); adult discussions about assassinations; the way the airing of the Watergate  hearings meant there were no cartoons to be watched on TV.  Given all that, it would be easy to say I turned out cynical about our country's political underpinnings. 

But peel back the callused skin of every adult American and you might find a child who once stood hand-over-heart and said and liberty and justice for all and believed it.  

We tend to forget that as we age.  These are skeptical times; they might even be the end times, for all we know.  But I would submit that under our cynicism the desire at least to believe in the idea of democracy is practically encoded in our DNA.

   

*Though motherhood can be a deeply political act, I find that in the day to day of motherhood, talking politics is generally frowned upon:  I mean, how can you force yourself to go to a particular play group every week if you know the moms you're having coffee with LOVE Mike Huckabee?  I was with a group of moms I knew socially every morning during the week the Iraq War started — did it come up?  Not just no, but hell, no.  

Part Two

Currently, the husband and I are obsessed with the TV show The Wire.  We won't even get into the fact that the pop-culture cognoscenti were first watching, and raving about, The Wire all of five years ago.  We don't have cable around here and besides, five years ago we were too sleep-deprived to follow complex story lines along the  lines of The Wire's. Anyway, now the show's on DVD so we can watch it every single night.  This is lovely from a narrative point of view, sort of like having a long novel that never ends to look forward to every night, but it also colors one's world view.

The Wire takes a sprawling Dickensian look at life in urban America, and it confirms many of my most-cherished observations about the way the world works: more than half the time the time the good guys are on the take; doing the "right thing" tends to get people screwed; self-interest, power, politics and greed might be the forces that really shape American society.* The framework in The Wire is politics and public safety, but you could just as easily apply its tropes to any institution in American society: white-collar corporations, community organizations, even -- dare I say it with a straight face? -- cooperative preschools.

But how can those two ideologies — that of the starry-eyed child saying the Pledge of Allegiance who believes democracy is something to be championed and that of the grizzled cynic, who believes that the Will to Power greases the wheels of industry and politics — exist in my body simultaneously?

Bingo. Cooperation and Corporation. The two conflicting impulses that define American behavior.

*For an interesting take on The Wire, click here.