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.