Too Weird to Resist Writing About

Over the years, standing in line has apparently held me in good stead, professionally.  I once paid for Bruce Springsteen tickets by writing an article for the Athens, GA weekly paper about waiting line for Bruce Springsteen tickets (article headline:  Born to Stand in Line).   The essay I published a few years back in Brain, Child about waiting in line before preview night at one of intown Atlanta's most (in)famous consignment sales might be one of the more widely-read pieces of writing I've done.  

Given all that, how could I resist saying something about the sight I walked past this morning?  A row of family-type cars parked nose-to-tail along the curb in front of the neighborhood elementary school, hatchbacks tilted up to meet the dawn, minivan doors slid back to reveal welters of sleeping bags and water bottles and  fast food wrappers?  And on the sidewalk, a gathering of unshowered, tousle-headed parents (mostly dads) that eloquently expressed the middle-aged need for coffee?   

 Oh, the blessed ignorance of the childless! Once upon a time, back when I was in that state, the fact that the Georgia lottery funded preschool meant less than nothing to me.  My head was full of weighty matters (which convenience store sold the cheapest cigarettes; what restaurant served brunch at 4 p.m. in the afternoon).  I didn't even know the difference between daycare and preschool.  I didn't even know what preschool was, for God's sake.  I myself had gone to a single year of nursery school before kindergarten back in those dark late-sixties days when parents still occasionally spanked their kids and said "NO, STOP IT!" rather than "That's not okay." 

But I would say that the three topics most engrossing for groups of intown Atlanta parents who don't know each other all that well might be, as follows:

1. Intown real estate:  how much it costs, who's selling it, who's buying it, and whether the restaurant in the ground floor of the latest loft, "green-living" or "live/work" development is child friendly.
2. Sleep:  the parents' lack of it, their children's ability to go without it.
3. Preschools —where to send kids, why to send kids, and, most importantly, how one might to get into a state-funded preschool program the year before kindergarten.    

Why might this be important?  Well...because, thanks to the lottery, it's free? Well... because, if you've got an older child already attending elementary school, it would add years to your life if you only had to orchestrate one drop-off and pick-up a day?  Because, to paraphrase the sentiment from Field of Dreams,  the state of Georgia built it, so you might as well come?

I haven't ever had a dog in the state-funded preschool hunt (elder girleen didn't go, and younger girleen isn't at the age for it), but you can't live in intown Atlanta and not be aware of it.  When Elder Girleen was a baby, I remember a new friend mentioning that she'd gotten up at 4 in the morning to stand in line to sign her older son up for pre-k (as that year before kindergarten gets called) at the school a block away.  That was six years ago:  this year the line began to form at that particular elementary school four days in advance of pre-k registration.  And that's not even a record.  Last year the line started two days even earlier than that.  That's six nights, folks, of sleeping in your car.  Rumor is that this year a group of parents at that school has rented an RV for the duration.

All that happens north of Interstate 20.  South of that divide, in the part of Atlanta some people still consider the wrong side of the tracks, there was no pre-k line until last year.  Last year, it formed the night before.  This year, two nights before. At the rate we're going, nobody's gonna be able to call this the wrong side of the tracks much longer.  

As I type this, parents stand in front of the elementary school in our neighborhood, marking time.  22 hours to go.  Good Lord — I only waited for Springsteen tickets overnight!  The Dylan line in Austin  in 1990 was aided by a six-pack and flirtation.  At least somebody brought a guitar!

Rumor is that next year Atlanta Public Schools may finally distribute spaces in the state-funded pre-k program through a lottery.  Will that be fairer?  More sane?  Yes.  Nobody will miss the line.  But a part of intown Atlanta parenthood that has become more folkloric than any other will be gone.   I doff my hat to local color.     

 

Telling the Beads of the Spring Rosary

The watchword for today —  roses, roses, roses.  Twining up porch rails...espaliered against brick...tumbling over chainlink.

If spring were a teacup, right now roses would be spilling over its lip.  

So we're in the thick of things now; the thick of the spring.  Which means roses, and the frills of the irises, and a chorus of bird song before six in the morning.

We're in the thick of things now; the thick of the spring.  Which means a very full, maybe overfull dance card.  What did parents do before day planners?* Way back in those split-level ranch-style, suburban cul-de-sac days when kids rode bikes unattended while moms chatted over cocktails on the back patio (I know these days only from John Updike stories and Marilyn French's The Women's Room, so maybe they never existed?) did parents have to use lists and calendars to keep track of all their children's social and educational excursions? Not to mention all the meetings that we as parents are now expected to attend?  

The reason things get so complicated is that a lot of the things on our calendar for the next month or so are fun activities:  birthday parties, school field days, school picnics, recitals, art shows... and so on.  The difficulty lies in the fact that there are just so many of them!  

Which brings me to...

A couple of months ago, a blogging friend (a blog-friend? a friend I made via blogging and the internets) posted a call to arms regarding the overly-busy life of the modern family.

The problem with starting an intentional movement to slow things down (my friend is calling it the Slow Family Movement  — as in Slow Food Movement, not as in families that are witless, a cohort mine sometimes belongs to) is that the last thing you probably want to spend time on is holding meetings about it.  

But the idea of intentionally slowing things down is such a good one.  It deserves a manifesto, and bears thinking about, particularly during this particularly busy time of year.  

All that being said, I'm off to see what I might be able to excise from our dayplanner and to take a sip from the cup of spring.  

  

*my dayplanner calendar pages come from a company called Day Runner.  Is that kin to a rum runner, or to a 50-yard sprinter?

What We Did With Our Spring Break

The Crescent, Train Number 20, arcs through the east Alabama countryside as perfectly composed as Art, curved across the window like some giant rod and wheel cast it out.

The car we’re sitting in is positioned behind Dining Car and Lounge Car and wrapper-filled Coach Car bearing drowsy long-haul human freight from New Orleans to New York, but no matter where you sit, there's the constant melancholy of the whistle in the background like greek chorus... an atavistic sound as unnecessary to the life we usually lead as some urban warrior’s fear of snakes.

America is burning, burning, and this is what is left.

The sound of the wheels against rails is a rhythmic brush-brush, hypnotic as aces slapped on a table by old men whiling away, hours, days, their lives, by playing cards.

Up two seats and on the left, two mopes are staring at a movie on a portable dvd player without headphones, genre: shoot ‘em up. Above the sway and hum of travel, the soundtrack between Birmingham and Atlanta is gunfire and grunts.

America is burning, burning, and this is what is left.

Behind: four elderly women, Virginia-bound, who’d be in a sleeper except for the busted pipe and federally-subsidized inefficency that closed the car down. Their accents are — dunno… rich and leisurely as gumbo, chocolate, corn-studded Birmingham cheese grits? — and they point out things outside the window in a drawl almost extinct, one I recognize, with knowledge born of my childhood and almost as atavistic as any love of train whistles, as belonging to four white upper middle class matrons, carefully coiffed, genteel, whose husbands, all passed on, were doctors, lawyers, professional men, who had business at the courthouse of whatever town they’re from.

If you want to see into a nation’s heart, then ride the train.

Some pundits grieve that as a people we are unconnected to each other. Who knows the cause? The internet, the square of lawn around each suburban tract-mansion, the television you sit back and watch, and watch, and watch, (same size as the windows of the Crescent, formerly called the Southern Crescent) in spaces where no stranger ever walks with graceful train gait down an aisle to sit in the vacant seat beside you?

America is burning, is burning, and this is what is left.

The heart of our country, as seen from the Crescent windows, is strewn with garbage: a child’s football shoulder pads, plastic bottles bobbing in the liquid mud of each crossed river, metal drums clad with rust, trailers missing siding… burned tin sheds, including one where among the wreckage of the fallen beams hunkers the cab of an abandoned semi.

We have everything we need; we use up what will work for us and discard the rest, and it’s extraordinary that passenger trains still exist in this country because they are, in terms of time and cost efficiency, basically useless.

But I would tell a visitor to this country, or anyone native born who doesn’t need their vacation sugar-coated, to take the train.

All There Might Be To Say

This essay has apparently been bouncing around the momosphere for quite a while now, but I'd managed to remain unaware of it.  A friend sent it my way yesterday; in turn I put it here.  Why?

Because this might be the piece of writing I was frantically looking for six years ago this spring, when Elder Girleen was a babe-in-arms and I was certain there must be some kind of manual out there somewhere that would tell me what to do.<

Because this, I think, might be the best gift  you could give any brand-new mother.  

It's by Anna Quindlen, from her book of essays, here.

Pour another cuppa, sit down, read it... and maybe even weep:

All my babies are gone now. I say this not in sorrow but in disbelief.  I take great satisfaction in what I have today: three almost-adults, two taller than I am, one closing in fast. Three people who read the same books I do and have learned not to be afraid of disagreeing with me in their opinion of them, who sometimes tell vulgar jokes that make me laugh until I choke and cry, who need razor blades and shower gel and privacy, who want to keep their doors closed more than I like. Who, miraculously, go to the bathroom, zip up their jackets and move food from plate to mouth all by themselves. Like the trick soap I bought for the bathroom with a rubber ducky at its center, the baby is buried deep within each, barely discernible except through the unreliable haze of the past.

Everything in all the books I once poured over is finished for me now. Penelope Leach., T. Berry Brazelton., Dr. Spock. The ones on sibling rivalry and sleeping through the night and early-childhood education, all grown obsolete. Along with Goodnight Moon and Where the Wild Things Are, they are battered, spotted, well used. But I suspect that if you flipped the pages dust would rise like memories. What those books taught me, finally, and what the women on the playground taught me, and the well-meaning relations --what they taught me, was that they couldn't really teach me very much at all.

Raising children is presented at first as a true-false test, then becomes multiple choice, until finally, far along, you realize that it is an endless essay. No one knows anything. One child responds well to positive reinforcement, another can be managed only with a stern voice and a timeout. One child is toilet trained at 3, his sibling at 2. When my first child was born, parents were told to put baby to bed on his belly so that he would not choke on his own spit-up. By the time my last arrived, babies were put down on their backs because of research on sudden infant death syndrome. To a new parent this ever-shifting certainty is terrifying, and then soothing. Eventually you must learn to trust yourself. Eventually the research will follow. I remember 15 years ago poring over one of Dr. Brazelton's wonderful books on child development, in which he describes three different sorts of infants: average, quiet, and active. I was looking for a sub-quiet codicil for an 18-month old who did not walk. Was there something wrong with his fat little legs? Was there something wrong with his tiny little mind? Was he developmentally delayed, physically challenged? Was I insane? Last year he went to China. Next year he goes to college. He can talk just fine. He can walk, too.

Every part of raising children is humbling, too. Believe me, mistakes were made. They have all been enshrined in the 'Remember-When- Mom-Did ' Hall of Fame. The outbursts, the temper tantrums, the bad language, mine, not theirs. The times the baby fell off the bed. The times I arrived late for preschool pickup. The nightmare sleepover. The horrible summer camp. The day when the youngest came barreling out of the classroom with a 98 on her geography test, and I responded, 'What did you get wrong?'. (She insisted I include that.) The time I ordered food at the McDonald's drive-through speaker and then drove away without picking it up from the window. (They all insisted I include that.) I did not allow them to watch the Simpsons for the first two seasons. What was I thinking?

But the biggest mistake I made is the one that most of us make while doing this. I did not live in the moment enough. This is particularly clear now that the moment is gone, captured only in photographs. There is one picture of the three of them, sitting in the grass on a quilt in the shadow of the swing set on a summer day, ages 6, 4 and 1. And I wish I could remember what we ate, and what we talked about, and how they sounded, and how they looked when they slept that night.

I wish I had not been in such a hurry to get on to the next thing: dinner, bath, book, bed. I wish I had treasured the doing a little more and the getting it done a little less. Even today I'm not sure what worked and what didn't, what was me and what was simply life. When they were very small, I suppose I thought someday they would become who they were because of what I'd done. Now I suspect they simply grew into their true selves because they demanded in a thousand ways that I back off and let them be. The books said to be relaxed and I was often tense, matter-of-fact and I was sometimes over the top.

And look how it all turned out. I wound up with the three people I like best in the world who have done more than anyone to excavate my essential humanity. That's what the books never told me. I was bound and determined to learn from the experts. It just took me a while to figure out who the experts were.

What I Can See from Here (Stories at 6 a.m.)...

...The ornate southern-belle frills of the bank of white azaleas shoring up our yard....

...The light cast against miniblinds in the window of the house across the street that means that a five-year-old in the house slipped out of bed early and is watching cartoons...

...The long-haired walking dude, who patrols the neighborhood with walks before daylight, moving briskly past our house and in the direction of his own...

...garbage day here in the 'hood, when the empty boxes stacked up on the curb either once contained HD televisions or baby gear, a sight that leads straight to the assessment: GENTRIFICATION...

....another sixth birthday party invitation arrived in the virtual mailbox as we embark on an April during which possibly every child in Elder Girleen's class was born...*

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Spring, the thick of it, when you can reel off the names of things as they flower like telling a rosary —pear to cherry, azalea to dogwood, and now cascading over the rims of abandoned buildings as effervescent as champagne, the wisteria — and our front porch is liberally floured with pollen.  Birds sing up the sun with such zeal the world might as well be newborn. Younger Girleen's preschool is being wracked by the firestorm of controversy and complaint that shakes it every year about this time.*

And yesterday afternoon, I picked up the phone to call a friend at the hospital to schedule the brief visit to welcome her just-born, her first- born, son to the world.

Parents among the readership know the drill: the way you navigate the maze between the parking lot at Piedmont Hospital and Labor and Delivery, which seems deliberately designed to confuse when you're dazed by contractions and labor but a piece of cake once you've had done with all that yourself.  

The way you walk into the hospital room and set down the brightly-colored bag you brought with you, that instead of everything you wish you could tell a woman who just had a baby contains a t-shirt or a dress that will be worn once or twice.

The way you walk over to the sink set into one corner of the tiny room to wash your hands like a surgeon scrubbing up for surgery. 

And then, the way you turn towards the complicated slant of the hospital bed and say Beautiful, beautiful and then, could I hold him a minute?

But by the time I was able to make the phone call and schedule the visit, this friend, who is practical and wise beyond her years, had decided, after hours and hours of labor finally falling asleep with the baby in her arms just long enough for the hospital's photographer to walk into the room and wake her up, to go ahead and check out and head home.

So I missed the ritual hospital visit, but at least I was able to share in the just as important telling of the birth story usually spun out during that visit over the sleeping (or fussing) baby's head.  

Sorry for all the gory details she said when she got to end, which is of course that little human bean, extruded-looking and red-faced but beautiful all the same, strapped into the car seat beside her (they were driving home when I called). 

Why is it that so often we feel we have to apologize for what might be the most important stories we have to tell?  I used to be hip but now I'm just Mommy, a new mother mourned yesterday in an online neighborhood forum I happened to read.  

I remember being twenty-seven or so, unfettered, free, and I and another graduate student sat in a windowless room at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas reading slush for a literary magazine:  oh, that younger self that I once was, who saw things as so cruelly cut-and-dried!  When I cast my eyes over a story that included babies, or birth, or motherhood, my eyes tended to glaze over.  

Not gory at all, I want to say into the phone to my friend who just had a baby. I never get tired of this story. Tell me again.

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*What happened six years and nine months ago that led to this boomlet? Six years and eight months ago, the Towers fell, and as fitting as it would feel, narratively speaking, to explain all these April Birthdays with that fact, the math doesn't quite work.

**All the pillows and stuffed animals from Younger Girleen's classroom are in a black plastic garbage bag on the front seat of my car, newly washed and ready to take back to school, because of this firestorm, which this year involves squirrel encroachment on school territory (inside the water fountain???) along with more usual personnel wrangles and base and baseless discontent.

Coffee Break...

Although you may wonder if I've already been on an extended one, seeing how long it has been since my last update. What can I say? It's spring, the Girleens' dance cards are pretty full...

Thankfully there are others to take up the writerly slack. My dear friend J has a great story out here. Get the kids down for a nap, pour yourself a cup and check it out...