grist for the mill

The Times They Are A Changin'

2009-04-24T12:12:00.002-04:00

I'm moving. Not me, really, but this blog. To

http://katherinelhester.wordpress.com/.

See you.

Linkage

2009-04-17T08:12:00.006-04:00

Yeah, I know that lately this has been little more than links that send you elsewhere, but I've always liked collages, so let's just say that this is some newly-honed mosaic style of blog writing (rather than the cheating shorthand that it is).

This week's story in the New Yorker, though, Chris Adrian's "A Tiny Feast" — is so lovely I can't help myself.

There are of course plenty of lovely stories out there (most of them desperately seeking homes, but that's whole 'nother topic) but the subtitle of this blog is "mixing the oil and writing" after all.

Way back in the very first entry posted here, I opined:

We all behave as if the choice about how to talk about parenthood is easy, lies either in sentimentality or its inverse, some wry jocularity. I have to believe that the truth is more complicated than that, that it resides elsewhere, spreads and deepens, shifts and shimmers; watery enough to both sustain and drown.

Adrian's story attacks this question, and I, for one, am left speechless before it.

Took the Words Right Out of My Mouth

2009-04-14T07:50:00.003-04:00

Because, after all, a single parenting book title is worth god knows how many thousand words:

Your Seven Year Old: Life in a Minor Key

Coffee Break for the Day

2009-04-01T14:49:00.002-04:00

It takes me a while (a week?) to get around to it some times, but Judith Warner's latest in the TImes is very nice.

SOMEBODY'S got to do it....

2009-04-01T10:17:00.006-04:00

A couple of weeks back, when my mom spent the weekend in the hospital, once things calmed down and we all settled into a hospital routine of sorts, I went off to run some errands for my folks. One of which was to buy groceries so their refrigerator would be full once she got home, because what else am I but a mom myself, and that's the sort of things that moms do — make sure people are fed and clothed and have clean faces.

While I was standing in the check-out lane, I picked up a Martha Stewart Living and tossed it on the conveyer belt, figuring it would give my mom something to read while she was convalescing. I'm not actually all that sure she wants to flip through Martha Stewart Living, but it seemed better than People, at least.

And the magazine did do what I'd hoped, and distracted her. Especially the section on April Fool's tricks that a person (meaning 'a mother') could play on one's family, which gave the two of us fodder for at least fifteen minutes of conversation.

When Martha Stewart tackles April Fool's Day, she does it as only Martha can: one of her proposed "tricks" (which was bee-you-tifully photographed, let me tell you) was to fry up quail eggs one by one and place them gently on tiny cocktail toasts which then could be served for breakfast on April 1.

Quail eggs?

Lady, you do know that Rome is burning out there, don't you?

But.

One of her other suggestions just happened to contain materials that I... just happened... to have on hand: milk and gelatin.
And the basic idea was to make a sort of milk jello and serve it in glasses for breakfast April Fool's morning.

What was I going to be out if I went down this path? A packet of gelatin purchased in 2003 and a cup of milk. And so, dear Reader, I presented my loving family with three glasses of "milk" this morning.

We usually don't drink milk with breakfast.

The Husband looked at his, bemused. Why did you give me a glass of milk? he asked, as if it were a vodka tonic or something equally unusual and forbidden.

The girleens, oh the girleens, they did exactly what they usually do when presented with a glass of milk — and ignored theirs.

Breakfast was winding down, the glasses sat untouched.

Have a sip of milk before you go get dressed, I urged Elder Girleen (knowing Younger Girleen was even much less likely to reach for hers).

She reached; she lifted the glass.

It's solid! she cried.

And then my long-suffering family turned and stared at me, their mother, the silly one, such a complete April Fool.

Weather Report: March 25, 2009

2009-03-25T16:52:00.008-04:00

The tree guys under contract to Georgia Power have been out for the past week or so, trolling the streets of the neighborhood with their bucket trucks; their orange flags and cones; they are paring branches to keep the power lines taut and unsnapped — too late for the "blizzard" three weeks ago but just in time for another growing season.

A few nights back some strolling pranksters spray-painted the word "riot" beneath the sign they set out that warns: men working.

On the cusp right now, and the leaves are little more than a pale green haze haloing the tree limbs; so tender.

Every year, our neighbor Blue House Joy requests a driveway’s-worth of cast-off chaff straight from the chipper for her garden and its beds. And in service of that exchange, what a hour ago was part and parcel of the scrim between us and the sky has been turned into a six-foot pile of mulch, newly dumped and steaming gently at the bottom of her driveway.

All that's left — mere wood; it's had the life crushed from it; possesses a manure-like smell. Wisps of steam slip from it as if it were a live thing, a bulked big-shouldered cow standing patient for the farmer outside some Midwestern barn at twilight, breath visible and rising from its nostrils.

The denuded trees are black in the rain, grieving their rended selves, and I am walking past, fidgeting sorrows like coins worn by long handling in my pocket — I do not do enough, or well, or have enough time; I am aging, gaining, tiring, I have worries and gray hair, I have not turned out to be the person my younger self expected. This is the currency the middle-aged sometimes carry with them; how exactly do we spend it?

When I was eleven, I watched an older cousin, tawny-haired and tan, change into her swimsuit during a family trip to the beach and thought: I will never reach the place where she is. Meaning: grown. Thought: well, maybe it's breasts that do it.

When I was a senior in high school, I thought maybe college would make me an adult. In college, I felt sure it would come with the 9-to-5. Once there, I thought surely it came falling in love. Once there, I figured it had to be a side-effect of marriage. Once married, I decided it was kids that would do it once and for all.

But now, maybe, I really know: it's parking in the hospital lot when one's parent has been admitted inside that takes you closer to grown than anything else that's come before.

The regional hospital that's become, as they age, my parents' own, reminds me that I live in Georgia. Itl succors anyone in need from the surrounding little towns; there are cars with plates from five counties in the lots. A guy in overalls outside the sliding entrance doors, talking on his cellphone, and let me tell you, he's no hipster who pulled them on ironically this morning.

There are three generations holding vigils in the waiting rooms: brothers, sisters, wives and husbands; children; grandchildren; two women holding newborns about the same age — are the two mothers sisters? cousins? Are the two-identically cashew-curled babies cousins themselves, and how many times removed would that make them? One of the woman is already noticeably pregnant again; I flip through old Better Homes and Gardens and try to do the math.

The heart floor is always busy, as is the new wing for babies. We should all get jobs in health care!

All over the hospital there are families dodging bullets, or taking them, and people talking seriously on their cell phones.

My mother was discharged, with admonishments to slow down; the dogwoods began to unfurl their creamy white blossoms;
the mulch pile at the end of the neighbor’s driveway steams, so wispy and quick, like something alive.

Coffee Break

2009-03-24T07:49:00.000-04:00

This site made me laugh. Especially myth number eight.

Life, and How to Live it?

2009-03-16T09:01:00.010-04:00

Way back at the dawn of time, when I was a newly-minted mother of one, a One who in her short miraculous life had decided, at least as I perceived it, to shun sleep as if it were her greatest enemy, I did what the average 21st century mom usually does when her life throws her a curve ball she can't catch, and hied myself over to the Google. And there, prostrate before The Great Oz of the present-day, I posed this question:

Infant sleep?

Oh, the Google, it aims to please! It took me hither and yon, from Babywise to the Ferber Method, but the only place it took me that did me a lick of good was... The Berkeley Parents Network.

As the Husband points out, we live nowhere near Berkeley. The Berkeley Parents Network recommendations for earthy- crunchy pediatricians and simpatico playgroups can't help me a whit. But the section of the site labelled ADVICE... well, that's another story.

Seven years later, I still occasionally find myself trolling the Advice section of the Berkeley Parents Network. And not necessarily because it has answers. I visit it simply because it has the QUESTIONS.

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

The petitioners to the Berkeley Parents Network Advice section, all — as I imagine them — wan, sleep-deprived, milk-stained mothers, ask every question you can't imagine the serene, sleek-haired mothers of your actual acquaintance ever having. Does your child walk only on her tiptoes? Light fires? Smear bodily fluids on the walls? Did having a child make you depressed? Eager to never have sex again? Unable to take care of life's most basic functions? The women (and men) who end up on the BPN Advice Forum have been there. Are you worried about Developmental Milestones, or whether an academic career is compatible with being a mom? Don't worry, on the Berkeley Parents Network you are not alone. There is no problem so great that some other mom has not already had it, and this is a very very good thing to know.

For quite some time, Younger Girleen has had a "situation" that has caused us all, parents and child both, some distress. We've talked to her pediatrician; it shall resolve itself, I know. But last week, I was feeling, well, lonely in this situation.

There is page after page of "advice" regarding this particular situation on the site... this, however, is the tidbit, I decided to read aloud to the Husband:

Our wise and wonderful pediatrician, now retired, said this: ''Ok, I think he's a little young, but try this. Go buy a family of dolls, a toy toilet, and some brown clay. Make a little turd out of the clay & initiate a game with him, with you playing the boy, him playing the mom or dad. At some point, after the game is really going strong, have the toy boy say 'Mommy I have to go poo. No I don't want to go poo'. Then watch him. If this works as it should, you may gain some insight into what is causing him to withhold.'' WELL, we got the dolls & the toilet, made the little turd out of clay, & got the game going. When I (as toy boy) said ''Mommy I need to poo. No I don't want to go poo,'' My son said, frantically, MOMMY I HAVE TO GO POO! He ran off to the bathroom & did a big one & was never constipated again. It was extraordinary. We never even got to brandish the clay turd. Whatever was in his mind about poop & pain must have been safer for him to view from the distance of play, he worked it out on the spot & has been an appreciative pooper ever since. He's 17 now.

What did the Husband do upon hearing this? He sighed heavily. He rolled his eyes. He said: Keep me out of this. If you want to put on your earthshoes and rub your crystals, that's fine, but... keep me out of this.

So I did.

I will just say that Younger Girleen's response to all this was ... quizzical bemusement.

————————————————

All that of course is water under the bridge. But last night, I was somewhere, attempting to engage in adult-type life and an acquaintance asked me this:

So, getting any writing done?

Lady, lady, I felt like saying, we're way down in the trenches here. I'm making beds and role-playing with dolls in the time I used to spend on that.

The Written Word

2009-03-13T14:26:00.003-04:00

Recently received notification that my story "Little Man," which appeared in Brain, Child Magazine this time last year, is one of three finalists for the 2008 Texas Institute of Letters Kay Cattarulla Award for Best Short Story. It's in good company, and I'm quite chuffed that it's there.

Signs of Spring

2009-03-05T12:49:00.003-05:00

60 degrees today, and bits and pieces of the snow men sculpted five days ago during our winter wallop list toward the muddy lawn like much-licked popsicles: winter's last gasp, already on its death-rattle exhale.*

Me, I'm ready.

I know I've waxed rhapsodic about the southern spring before, but then again, constancy, thou art a jewel! I love spring in its leave-taking, when it is perched upon the high-dive that launches it on its spectacular swan-dive into summer; I love it in its full April effulgence, when the trees are spun-sugar confections and roots extend through moist earth with a minute snare-brush whisper — we are alive — but maybe I love it most right now, when everything trembles on the cusp.

Everything?

The transitory moment before the heavens part and rain starts sluicing down, when the clouds are oiled and heaped high and greenish and the wind begins to rise; the blink-and-it's-gone pause between day and twilight, when the air you walk the dog through is so pink-tinged you long to linger in its embrace; the bit of day before the sun peeks over the housetops, chill and formal, full of birdsong — there is much to be said for the bits of time that lie in the spaces in between.

Spring is here, but not really, not yet. The trees are still just angular constructions, festooned with last-year's nests, in disrepair; there's still snow in the birdbath.

But at the same time, a pale rosy haze hovers above the bare branched dogwoods: next month's buds. The peonies that never bothered to bloom last year have already let red ropy foliage emerge from the ground. And once more, as we always do, we begin again; we hope.

Yesterday, two bluebirds lit on the scrub in the park a good portion of the neighborhood avoids. Today, a hawk, perched on the phone pole.

*Possibly hurried there by Elder Girleen's single swift well-placed kick on the way to the car before school — oh to be young enough to enjoy the beauty in destruction!

Weather Report: March 2, 2009

2009-03-02T12:43:00.003-05:00

Southerner that I am, I don’t have the proper words for snow. Sugar snow, corn snow, powder: here in Atlanta we don’t know nothin’ about those: we just have little snow, otherwise known as dirty snow. People who actually have more than a passing acquaintance with the cold white stuff would scoff; wouldn’t even call what we get around here snow at all. But yesterday’s "storm," which began about 11 in the morning and lasted, off-and-on, until supper time, was such a lovely one —feathery, snow-globe-upended flakes, a cold swirl-and-dance to land on the tip of the tongue, the eyelashes, superlative for packing into snow balls. It left six inches behind in places (not south of I-20, as much as we hoped it might), contained thunder; muffled the city for a bit.

Somewhere there are children who make snowmen that aren’t muddy brown and studded with bits of pine straw collected on the initial roll of ball through snow, but I’m not sure the experience they have is half as magical as it is for a southern child, who longs for snowfall all year long, experiences it once, if at all, and never ever has to attend school once it commences, since around here flurries constitute a “winter wallop” that leaves the streets empty of people to do what they have to but full of those engaging in what they want instead (get coffee, have a late breakfast).

Yesterday we had our annual snow, and embraced it with glee, because if it’s only going to snow for six hours, it doesn’t matter too terribly much that you lack gloves (me, because I lost one a year ago and figured I could hedge my bets and go without for an entire year), have never owned a suitable scarf (both girleens) or don’t possess a waterproof winter coat (ditto). Not for us the burn-out that comes with having to scrape ice from windshields every morning for months! Not for us, the ritual of getting suited up in padded snowsuits only to have to strip them off for a last-minute bathroom trip before even getting out the door!

Today, of course, all of yesterday’s cold austere beauty has become a few scabrous patches of dirty ice left below the trees, but all the same school’s been cancelled.

Because it’s not actually snowing anymore and there’s nothing left to play in, the Girleens are mostly just bemused, though game to stay home. But I — although looked at objectively a snow day for me now is by no means a day off — embraced the news with the same joy I did back in those old bad days when snow day meant no classes for me at the University of Georgia and lollygagging in a bed covered with raggedy quilts in a rundown apartment until mid-afternoon when all that was required of me was leisurely afternoon stroll downtown to see who was out which coffee shops and bars were open.

In the southern locales I've so far lived out my life, snow is not... extraordinary, but at the same time it is so out-of-the-ordinary that it becomes so. When it snows, the matter-of-fact dailiness of my life is dusted with magic, transformed. I see a little better; I step a little more carefully, my eyes for once on exactly where I'm going.

I tend toward the ambitious in terms of resolutions, can come up with a baker's dozen, as I did a month ago, here.

But it would be enough; to treat each day like a snow day, an unexpected party, and rejoice.

SNOW!

2009-03-01T17:32:00.005-05:00

Dreadful Alliteration

2009-02-23T08:11:00.001-05:00

Family of four felled by flu.

IN OUR TIMES

2009-02-15T11:05:00.002-05:00

This is a long one... by Stephanie Ramage in Atl's The Sunday Paper...

City Hall, are you listening?

Grant Park, Ormewood Park, East Atlanta and Inman Park have a crime problem. And it’s not imaginary.

By Stephanie Ramage

It looks as though the tiny house with tarpaper showing through its walls and a roof grown shaggy with torn tiles has vomited up a flea market.

Furniture, old lamps, liquor bottles, potted plants and remnants of carpet take up nearly every available inch of space in the few feet packed between the street and the place where a black man named Lorenzo Beck blends in with everything else.

His presence is betrayed by the movement of his hand as he tinkers with something on the porch.

The yard, whatever it may look like, is his life’s work.

“I’m a collector,” he says as my intern and I gingerly step around some pots and across a few concrete blocks to introduce ourselves.

I explain that we've dropped in because there has been quite a bit of speculation lately regarding whether there is a crime problem in the city’s southeastern corner, a swath from Grant Park to East Atlanta, and if, perhaps, residents have overreacted to the slaying in January of bartender John Henderson at nearby bar and eatery the Standard.

Atlanta Police Chief Richard Pennington has insisted that residents are overreacting, and Mayor Shirley Franklin claims the city is safer than it has been in decades.

I've come to ask Beck what he thinks.

He says he has lived here in Grant Park for 40 years. He moved into this house with his family when he was a teenager, and crime has always been bad off-and-on. Some times are worse than others.

“But in the last two or three months, it has done got worse. I mean sho nuff worse,” he says, adding that a few weeks ago, only four blocks away, he was mugged and beaten up by three guys. He fiddles with the tire gage clipped to the pocket of his blue work shirt and shakes his head as he remembers it.

At the neatly renovated house next door, Scott MacFarland is just on his way out. He moved to Grant Park seven years ago, and he agrees with Beck that crime in the area goes in cycles.

“It’s usually worse in the summer,” he says. “I always feel like, right around August, ‘What’s going on here?’ Then school starts again and things calm down. You get comfortable, I guess, with the routine of it. And then something will happen like the shooting at the Standard.”

He squints up the street from under his baseball cap.

“That changed things,” he says. “He had given them the money, but they killed him anyway. You want to believe it’s the economy, but that was such a violent act, that’s not just poverty, that’s something else. It’s really disturbing.”

Not long ago, MacFarland’s own home fell prey to an attempted burglary.

“Lorenzo,” he says, motioning to Beck, “scared them off. Everyone I know here has had some kind of run-in with crime.”

According to the Atlanta Police Department’s figures, I remind him, violent crime across the city is down.

“The numbers don’t help you sleep better at night,” he says. “What matters is your own experience of it and knowing friends and neighbors who have experienced it and are talking about moving. The numbers don’t matter. Let’s say you have six people die in one year, and the next year only five die. You can say that’s an improvement, but you’ve still had five people die.”

He’s not frightened, he says, but his wife is afraid. They keep in touch during the day to be safe, but he doesn’t think that qualifies for what APD Chief Pennington has described as an out-of-proportion response to crime.

MacFarland says he believes that the neighborhood outcry is the result of having more empowered people in the area than was the case in the past—people who are less afraid of calling the police and who are more likely to go to the City Council to demand better public safety.

He and Beck pose for a photo and we talk about the APD’s shortage of about 400 officers. On a night when nobody calls in sick or is out for other reasons, there may be 10 or fewer officers patrolling any one of the city’s six zones.

Beck says that he doesn’t feel comfortable with the police.

Not long ago, when the kids at the school across the street were out for recess, their ball went over the fence and rolled down the hill. Beck had no sooner retrieved it and tossed it back over the fence, he says, than an APD cruiser pulled up and two officers began questioning him about the contents of a shopping bag on his premises. It was the bag, says Beck, where he keeps his shaving items.

“I couldn’t get my mind together to talk to them,” he says. “And if you do try to report something, they are so mean and nasty to you it’s like you’ve done something wrong.”

Beck didn’t report the beating he endured a few weeks ago to the police. And he’s not alone.

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ 2007 National Crime Victimization Survey, which is based on interviews with victims, more than half of all violent crimes surveyed—including robbery, rape and aggravated assault—are not reported to police. So if there are a lot of police-wary residents like Beck in a given area, crime stats from the APD, the source used by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in its Feb. 8 story, “Though Atlanta Crime is Up, Violence Overstated,” would not give an accurate account of crime.

Also, as researchers have been pointing out for decades, police departments can classify crimes according to their own tastes or needs.

As early as 1974, in an article titled “Getting the Crime Rate Down: Political Pressure and Crime Reporting,” David Seidman at Princeton University and Michael Couzens at the University of California at Berkeley deduced that even small changes in police administrative procedures can produce big changes in crime rates. They also noted that police departments under political pressure to make a city look safer than it actually is have plenty of leeway to do so through classifying crime. The police decide what will be considered a crime and how the crime should be described—as a larceny or a robbery, for example.

“Sometimes,” writes Seidman and Couzens, “this description is reviewed at another point in the police hierarchy,” and changes are made accordingly.

A few doors down from MacFarland, Mike Fitzgerald is renovating his home. He has lived in Grant Park for 12 years and, unlike Beck, he feels more comfortable with the police around.

“They’ve reinstated the mounted patrols, I think,” he says. “And that helps. It makes you feel better to see them.”

He doesn’t think there’s been a rise in violent crime, but he’s heard about more carjackings.

“I think what’s got people on edge is the guns and the groups of perpetrators,” he says. “If you’ve got gangs with guns now, that’s a problem. The guy at the Standard, they didn’t have to kill him to get what they wanted. And they didn’t kill him just because they didn’t want any witnesses because, after all, they left the girl who was working with him alive. So, why did they kill him? You just have to think that the person who did it was some kind of weird animal.”

CRACK HOUSE WHACK-A-MOLE

The next day, I return to Grant Park, this time with Lou Arcangeli, a former deputy chief of police at the APD who teaches criminal justice at Georgia State University.

We schlep up the hill that curves away from Cherokee Avenue, to where a woman in a business-y skirt and blouse, her arms full, is unlocking the door of a house with thoroughly barred windows.

Her name is Malinda Teel, and she has lived here for 30 years. She’s never been a victim of crime, although she’s heard about neighbors whose cars have been broken into. She simply takes precautions.

“We’ve always had a dog, we don’t park on the street,” she says. “We don’t own a big-screen TV, but if we did it wouldn’t be shining out into the street. We’ve got really good locks on the doors. The backyard is fenced in. We go out every night and walk the dog and we do not feel afraid. There might be a spike in crime every now and then when somebody gets out of jail, but I am a little surprised about how vehement the reaction has been to the bartender being killed.”

As Arcangeli and I drive east on Glenwood Avenue to Ormewood Park, the frequency of For Sale signs increases. I turn down a side street where a young man with a shaved head is working on the edge of a driveway. A tattoo of the infinity symbol slithers on his white upper arm as he slowly swings a trimmer.

His name is Stephen Sheldon, and he and his wife have lived here for three years.
“There were three to four identified crack houses in the neighborhood,” he says, “and this kid who did a break-in here came from the one across the street. We got rid of that one.”

Arcangeli asks him how he managed that.

“We called the police. We called and called and called over and over again and we got it shut down,” he says. “Then, of course, the crack house just moved around the corner, but at least it’s not across the street anymore.”

Sheldon suspects that one reason for the persistent crack houses and the random crime around them is a lack of awareness. He notices things on the street, but not everyone does. “I hate to be an a**hole about it,” he says, “but some of the older people, really the middle-aged people, are just not paying attention.”

CRIME BY THE NUMBERS

A little further on, East Atlanta huddles around its small business district.

Like Grant Park and Ormewood Park, it is a chock-a-block area of economic diversity. Carefully restored bungalows share hedges with tenements that are little more than shacks. From 2007 to 2008, the area saw a 14 percent increase in violent crime, despite a decrease in much of the rest of the city.

I turn down McWilliams Street, and Arcangeli stays in the car to make a phone call as I knock on doors along a stretch of rundown houses.

As I step into one driveway, a group of guys on the porch shout a stream of profanity and threaten to kick my ass or shoot me if I come one step closer. I say I’m a reporter, but either they don’t hear me or they don’t care. It becomes apparent that they think I am a government worker of some sort because they yell “Get out the goddamn yard unless you goin’ bring me my f**kin’ $1,000 tax refund the gover’ment ’spose to be givin’ ever’body! Where’s my goddamn check, bitch? I want my f**kin’ money!”

I return to the car.

We drive a couple of blocks west, where a woman who looks to be in her 40s is out for a brisk walk. I wave and ask her if she feels safe here. She says yes. Then another woman, with a baby in a sling and a dog on a leash, approaches us and tells her, “We’re forming a neighborhood watch and I thought you might want to be a part of it.”

The woman, who introduces herself as Elaine Wright, replies that she does. The two women admit they only know each other by sight, though Wright’s lived here for six years. They exchange phone numbers and Wright explains to me that last fall, she and her neighbors managed to get a crack house shut down. She points to the house where it used to be.

“We called the cops over and over again,” she says. “My husband took pictures of all the traffic in and out and we finally got it shut down.”

Now the inhabitants of the crack house have moved to another house in the neighborhood, right up the street. It’s the same scenario presented by Ormewood Park’s Sheldon—a game of criminal justice Whack-a-Mole.

Arcangeli and I drive by the new location of the crack house. An elderly woman totters up the steps.

Arcangeli details a phenomenon familiar to criminologists called “cloaking.” In it, unemployed younger family members move in with a grandmother or grandfather who’s glad to have the company, but the young people then use the older relative’s home as a crack house. The legitimate flip side of this phenomenon, where young unemployed relatives move in with grandparents, can be a positive development, because it does provide greater safety for the elderly and gives the kids more stability. The only way to tell the difference is by watching the activity.

Traveling north on Moreland Avenue from East Atlanta, one soon enters the Little 5 Points/Inman Park area.

When the AJC published “Though Atlanta Crime is Up, Violence Overstated,” Inman Park resident John Hines focused on the tables of crime stats at the bottom of the article. In an e-mail written in reference to the article, he states that the APD stats as analyzed by the AJC seem to indicate “that violent crime is sharply up in Inman Park from an already bad year in 2007 although it is down for Atlanta citywide…”

In Inman Park, the “numbers show a 19 percent increase in violent crime...from 2007 to 2008, and a 30 percent increase from 2006 to 2008 … violent crime increased very sharply in the fourth quarter of 2008, from an average of 2.5 per month in the four preceding quarters to an average of 10 per month in Q4…” (East Lake/Kirkwood, from 2007 to 2008, experienced the biggest jump in violent crime of any neighborhood: 53 percent.)

The numbers are less important, though, than how Mayor Franklin and Chief Pennington respond to them.

According toTom R. Tyler, author of “Policing in Black and White: Ethnic Group Differences in Trust and Confidence in the Police,” an article published in Police Quarterly in 2005, the APD has an opportunity to help the community, whether it solves violent crimes like the slaying at the Standard or not.

“People get very upset when they feel that their concerns are not heard or are not being addressed, and that’s true whether they are white or African-American,” says Tyler, a professor of psychology at New York University. “One thing the police can do is make a big effort to share information with people. They might not be able to solve the case, but they can restore trust.”

And having confidence in the police department is important in determining more than merely the perception of crime, says Stephen Raudenbush, a sociologist at the University of Chicago who has researched neighborhoods and violent crime.

“Past evidence suggests that when neighbors distrust the police, crime will tend to thrive." SP

The Third of Three Valentines...

2009-02-15T07:37:00.004-05:00

Every mom needs...

a friend to take walks with

a friend to shop with

a friend to have lunch with

friends who have no kids, to keep her real

friends who have older children, so she'll remember not to sweat the small stuff

friends who have younger children, so she can re-experience those early days in all their messy glory

friends to talk shop with, whether that shop is of the motherhood variety, or of the career pursuasion

Happy Valentine's Day (better a day late than never) to all the women who make up my life.

The Second of Three Valentines

2009-02-13T12:12:00.007-05:00

This morning, I threaded my way through traffic to the dentists' office, completely on my own, no offspring with me; sat myself down in the hygienist's chair only to discover that it had been over a year and a half since I last showed up there. Apparently taking your children to the dentist religiously, slavishly, punctually to the dentist every 5.9 months does not, through some interesting osmosis, translate into clean teeth for Mom.

Just in case you thought otherwise.

Hygienist Sarah remedied that state of affairs and was even quite nice about it, conceding that I was in pretty good shape, all things considered (or rather, my teeth were).

That taken care of, I heighed myself back into traffic, tuning into AM 1690 ("The Voice of the Arts") for the drive home.

AM 1690 used to be AirAmerica, and then it wasn't, and then I stopped listening to it while I was driving, and then recently I found it again in a Come-to-Jesus moment occasioned by the fact that as I was fiddling with the car radio, they played "I'm Working for the Man,"

(Oh, well, I'm picking em up and I'm laying em down
I believe he's gonna work me into the ground
I pull to the left, I heave to the right
I oughta kill him but it wouldn't be right
Roy Orbison, 1970)

and since then, whenever I end up at the 1690 end of the dial, the dj's playing a song by the Rondells or a rousing rendition of "Roumania, Roumania or something else that makes a perfect soundtrack for the movie-of-life.

Today being Friday, the song was "Roumania, Roumania, (they play it every Friday at a certain time) and the fact that the album it's from is called From Avenue A to the Great White Way: Yiddish and American Popular Songs 1914-1950 tells you everything you need to know: klezmer music makes the six-lane stretch of Interstate 75/85 through downtown Atlanta downright cinemagraphic.

Previous posts long ago made it clear just how often I depend on the car radio for moments that transcend the mundane.

This morning, the sky was all wisps of blue and cotton batting. Laid out underneath it was the ornate strutwork of the city; the skyscrapers built the past few years already become such a stairstepping bar graph — charting what exactly?

Oh Atlanta, real honest-to-god cities laugh at your pretensions, wouldn't even bother to call you a city at all. But I love the way your commuter trains trundle and clank, over asphalt that comes together and parts and merges, a clotted molten river, particularly during morning and afternoon drive-time.

Here in this sprawling southern city, life is mostly flicker and ebb we prefer to remain sealed off from in our cars: slag-heap and shanty, weeds and tattered plastic bags, even the elegant Tilt-A-Whirl of the buildings downtown and their chill, translucent spires, the looping trajectory of headlights sinuous around them like some welder’s arc-light.

Years ago, before children, I worked for a while in a law office downtown and took MARTA to get there. Every morning, the doors of the train parted and I stepped forward, hobbled by high heels and skirt. On the train, I swayed, half-asleep, always facing forward, moving toward employment I had to have but didn’t much like.

But once, an elderly man slipped back through the train’s automatic doors to rescue the glove dropped by a crying child onto the platform. Once, the car I stepped into was so still and hushed that it felt almost holy, seemed as full of silence as the pause and pulse of breath, drawn in, before a choir starts singing.

Oh, how did it happen, that I could feel so much for a particular city? That it could become home?

The First of Three Valentines

2009-02-13T12:06:00.005-05:00

Man o man, I wish I'd written this — Judith Warner's column for today from the NYTimes.

I might, in fact, have a bit of a crush on the woman who can write like this.

Not Women's Work, not Men's Work, just... Work

2009-02-10T06:04:00.009-05:00

Last night I sat and watched President Obama's press conference — feeling such a moment of awe and pride during that measured second when he settled himself at the podium before he began: we did that, America, we did, for a moment we transcended who we usually are and became something so much larger — and then I sat down at the computer and emailed my senators, Isakson and Chambliss, asking them in no uncertain terms to vote for the economic stimulus plan.

Will it do any good?

If by "good" we're asking if those two will vote for the plan, probably not.

Does that mean I shouldn't have bothered?

Asking that does as little good as wondering about trees that fall in forests and who hears them, and whether they might make a sound as they come crashing to the ground.

Spring Fever

2009-02-09T09:37:00.004-05:00

It shouldn't have arrived yet, but it has, though maybe it'll abandon us again before the month's done: Spring. It comes, bearing gifts, and crocus (croci?) to nestle in the still-wintery beds. The mockingbirds are, this morning, rejoicing: the sap is running in the maple that graces the lefthand corner of our yard.

It seems absurd to sit here in front of this screen in the face of this shy excess.

I cut my teeth on spring, varietal Georgian. In fact, if spring in this neck of the woods were, truly, a varietal (not that I know jack about wine), it would have to be a prosecco or that Portuguese sort known as Vinho Verde.

Spring in the bit of earth I call home is a green wine, effervescent, astringent. It goes down easy. There are always things to be done, but me, I'm off to take a heady early-morning sip.

Reading Lists, Redux

2009-02-06T12:00:00.004-05:00

This time last year, I was more than happy to take up blog-space (and bore my friends and relations) by documenting what books sat on the nightstand, hungry to be read* — and my good intentions regarding them.

Resolutions are made to be broken. Lists are made to be lost. I would say about a third of those books actually got read. I But lately I've been squirreling away a whole new stack as if I'm expecting some late-winter blizzard to keep me house-bound for months.

But I shall read them all this year, each and every one of them, I swear:

The Feast of Love Charles Baxter

Lark and Termite Jayne Anne Phillipps

Last Night at the Lobster Stewart O'Nan

The 351 Books of Irma Arcuri David Bajo

Jarhead Anthony Swofford

Operation Homecoming:

Iraq, Afghanistan and the Home

Front, in the Words of U.S.

Troops and Their Families Andrew Carroll, editor

Chemistry and

In Our Times

2009-02-02T07:56:00.003-05:00

This morning, during breakfast, during that brief eye of the hurricane between squabbles over who gets to hold which cereal box, the spillage of orange juice and shouts from the male half of the parenting duo of "come on! come on!", Elder Girleen posed the following question to her younger sister:

Hey, P, what do you want to be when you grow up?

If the face of a three-and-a-half year old can exhibit complete and utter disdain, Younger Girleen's did at that moment.

I DON'T WANT TO GROW UP, she replied and that settled the question.

This may be the most sensible answer to this question that I've ever heard; in fact, as I multi-tasked between feeding myself, feeding others, drinking coffee, sneaking a look at yesterday's NY Times Book Review, making nutritious lunches to be schlepped to school and emptying the dishwasher, I doffed my hat to her.

I'm sure that if I sat down and devoted three hours to thinking about it, I probably could set some laudable goals a la Your Best Year Yet, mentioned last post, and I must admit that the thought of doing so appeals to the adult section of my brain, the same side that couldn't stop itself from picking up a copy of The Mom's Day Planner! at a stationary store the other day.*

I started making lists when I was a freshman in college, and the fact that the Husband can get through his life without doing so blows my tiny mind (practically the first thing out of my mouth when he received the employment boot was maybe you should make a list...)**

I will teach myself to play the guitar; I will double the size of the garden; I will finish the novel; I will be a better mom/daughter/spouse/neighbor; I will resume my role as community gadfly until the City, distressed or not, breaks ground on the playground promised our neighborhood; I will make more money; I will sell myself better; I will paint the house; I will...

I've run out of breath.

But there is something, also, to be said, for being completely at home in the skin you inhabit right this minute.

Ours is a culture seduced by transformation (and by success, but that's another story),*** and I'm a sucker for the modern fairy tales (What Not to Wear, where Cinderella becomes a princess every single time; Super Nanny, where the dysfunctional family becomes a sane one in just four days...) as much as the next girl, but this year, I think I'd rather take a page from Younger Girleen's book.

Here's to being no one other than the person you are, right this second.

*Did she buy it; did she not? Only the Shadow knows!

** Of course, those freshman in college lists were practically elegant haikus:

quit smoking

write

finish reading Moby Dick for AmLit

*** The fact that transformation often involves spending money bears thinking about: how much of our lust for transformation has to do with keeping consumer spending levels up?

Weather Report: January 28, 2009

2009-01-28T14:21:00.002-05:00

The new year, and most of the first month of it has already been swallowed up. By what exactly? And just how did we get here so fast? Younger Girleen has a brand-new Louise Brooks-style haircut, Elder Girleen commemorated her 7th birthday with waffles for dinner last night and, last weekend, a "movie party" with the girls in her first grade class (for the first time I rejoiced that there are 14 boys in her class, leaving only six girls to feed pizza to). The Husband is still sans job, though taking a page from the laconic cowboy model of manhood, has by sheer force of will, strongarmed lots of irons into the fire.*

And me, I’m just a week or so back from another winter’s worth of contract work reading lots and lots and lots and lots of short stories, during which I deduced that the current literary short story template includes:

twins as protagonists**;

cell phones set on nightstands the way cigarettes were once set in ashtrays, that vibrate sleeping couples — one of whom’s a cheater — awake;

elderly parents who must be cared for;

cold, hard sex between people who care for each other not a whit.

Oh, and Graphic Novels.

And here in Atanta? It’s cold, cold, too cold, and a pale wintery sky. A new president; a new year; and I have from the library conjured up for myself a book — Your Best Year Yet!

Because it would be nice, wouldn’t it, for 2009 to be that? But there is so little time, and is what there is of it worth expending on worksheets and assessments, on contemplating what I might’ve accomplished this past year, and how I limited myself as I worked toward it?

Nah, no time for any of that. Sorry I've been gone so long.

*The assumption being that the saying refers to a cowboy who has his hands full at branding time, not a Victorian housemaid ironing lots of petticoats.

**If you are 23 now you were born in 1986, and given all the older mothers running around by then, chances are quite high that you know a lot of twins

A Conversation, Overheard

2008-12-30T07:42:00.002-05:00

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

2008-12-23T11:34:00.002-05:00

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...

2008-12-23T07:59:00.002-05:00

... 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

2008-12-21T08:35:00.007-05:00

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

2008-12-16T13:33:00.008-05:00

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

2008-12-15T12:39:00.001-05:00

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

2008-12-11T15:08:00.011-05:00

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

2008-12-10T08:31:00.008-05:00

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:

2008-12-02T08:30:00.001-05:00

Don't forget to vote today.

Slow Food, Slow Families, Slow Blogs ...

2008-11-27T07:31:00.005-05:00

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...

2008-11-11T08:06:00.008-05:00

...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

2008-11-09T06:33:00.007-05:00

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

2008-10-08T09:36:00.005-04:00

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

2008-10-03T08:50:00.005-04:00

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

2008-09-19T08:58:00.006-04:00

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

2008-09-17T12:55:00.011-04:00

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

2008-09-17T09:29:00.003-04:00

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...

2008-09-16T08:20:00.003-04:00

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

Here.

Now Is The Time, And We Are The Answer

2008-09-09T09:44:00.009-04:00

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

2008-09-08T13:17:00.011-04:00

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...

2008-09-05T07:48:00.004-04:00

The real state of the union.

And a glimmer of hope.

State of the Union: September 2, 2008

2008-09-02T12:23:00.005-04:00

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...

2008-08-25T10:26:00.002-04:00

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

2008-08-11T11:02:00.010-04:00

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...

2008-08-03T12:03:00.009-04:00

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

2008-07-23T11:43:00.002-04:00

Pool Digressions, Part II

2008-07-18T07:44:00.012-04:00

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

2008-07-18T06:51:00.008-04:00

— 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

2008-07-16T15:09:00.005-04:00

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?

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

2008-06-20T10:34:00.005-04:00

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.

Of Summer, and Of Reading

2008-06-09T08:25:00.005-04:00

The end of the school year is in some ways such a celebratory conflagration: end-of-the-year picnics heaped upon final committee meetings heaped upon final school projects heaped upon recitals, all set alight by the frantic desire of a mom who works at home during naps and spaces in the school day to get a few final things done.

This year, our May went up in a beautiful blaze, as quickly as dried wood and tinder, and then we hightailed it to the beach.

It's glorious to have such a clean break between a family's "on" season and its "off," to plunge into summer and its laborious applications of sunscreen and bug spray as quickly as you dash from the skillet-hot sand at the beach into the first slap of opaque salty water.

The only drawback I can think of is that if you have your week away at the beginning of the summer you're longing for another by its end.

But that is the most minor of complaints. We're back in Atlanta now, the gardenia bush rooted six years ago from a twig cut from the one that perfumes the front yard of the house where I grew up is a riotous overly-fragrant excess of blossoms, the pom-poms of the hydrangeas droop in the heat as big and round and blue as dinner plates.

One of the things summer sometimes, happily gives me is some time for reading, and the day before we left for the beach I grabbed a novel I'd heard about from the new releases shelf at the library. Called The Ten-Year Nap, by Meg Wolitzer, it takes as its territory the New York stomping-grounds of the urban mom; the "nap" the title refers to is one the protagonist is — maybe — waking up from after having spent ten years as a stay-at-home parent.

It's a smooth read, perfect for summer. Because it "has something to say" about the perennial stay-at-home/working parent debate, its characters can at times feel like chess pieces moved around a board in service of the author's larger game, but the observations about parenthood are so spot on it's hard to mind that the author might be working toward a particular conclusion.

A snippet, when a character realizes her husband has to work hard at listening as she recounts her day:

He couldn't help it that he was only partly compelled by the world she had fashioned over the past ten years since she had left work and Mason had been born. That world could be absorbing yet was also pulled along by a current of tedium, and everybody knew it.

Children had a lot to do with it; they were the most fascinating part of it all, but mostly only to their parents or, depending on the particular aspect, sometimes only to their mothers or only to their fathers. You stayed around your children as long as you could, inhaling the ambient gold shavings of their childhood, and at the last minute you tried to see them off into life and hoped that the little piece of time you'd given them was enough to prevent them from one day feeling lonely and afraid and hopeless. You wouldn't know the outcome for a long time.

School's Out for Summer

2008-05-30T09:11:00.002-04:00

When we're not busy with swimming lessons, being fun-mommy-for-the-summer and singing Alice Cooper lyrics, maybe we'll blog.

Maybe. Keep coming by, though, and we'll do our best.

Uhhh, and the Prefix "Pre" Means What?

2008-05-21T09:55:00.007-04:00

(or, from the "no comment" department:)

Preschool Readiness

Prepare your preschooler for the upcoming year. After an exciting summer, this class is a fun yet structured way to insure that your child transitions to his/her preschool environment with ease. This class will use a variety of school-related activities such as circle time, music and movement, and arts and crafts to help your child prepare for the structure and demands of preschool. Skills addressed will include appropriate classroom behavior, attention, fine motor skill development and peer interaction. Get your preschooler geared up for the upcoming year by teaching him/her the necessary skills for preschool success!

Ages 2.5 - early 4

Price - 240$ per child

My Transformation into a Pod Person is Now Complete

2008-05-19T10:11:00.006-04:00

One of the great sadnesses in Elder Girleen's life, in fact, her largest cross to bear, is that we possess neither a satellite dish or cable TV, which means we don't get the Disney Channel. Since we don't have the Disney Channel, she can't watch Hannah Montana. Two years ago I'd never even heard of Hannah Montana, and I'm still not entirely clear on all the details, but I think you can watch Hannah Montana on the Disney Channel. I'm not sure.

Hannah Montana is often mentioned in the same breath as High School Musical, but Elder Girleen tells me they are different phenomena. I know that my ignorance in these matters is about the same as if, thirty years ago, my own mother had turned to me and asked if the B-52s and Devo were the same band. While she put air quotes around the word band, so that I'd know that she considered what I was listening to music only in the loosest sense of the word.

Actually it's not exactly the same, because I cared about this sort of thing when I was thirteen, and Elder Girleen is... six.

But Hannah Montana is the bomb, as anybody reading this already knows. At Elder Girleen's elementary school, which — multicultural, scruffy, arty —can sometimes resemble the school in the movie Fame, kids are welcome to sign up to perform at the school-wide Morning Meeting after announcements and the Pledge of Allegiance (after their offering has been vetted by the principal, of course), and about a week ago, Elder Girleen came home and announced that she and several friends would be performing today and her dad and I had better be there.

We won't even go into the fact that I have a hard time grasping that my elder daughter, who, as far as I'm concerned, was still in diapers just yesterday, now has an entire social life that I know nothing about. (They practiced this? They've arranged for music? But they can't even feed themselves!)

The main thing is that this morning, Elder Girleen and three friends climbed up on the stage in the auditorium in their school and when they announced that they were going to sing a Hannah Montana song, the entire student body groaned appreciatively with one voice, as if those four six-year-old girls had just gotten up there and announced that they were going to give away free ice cream.

That's the power of Miley Cyrus. The librarian took the CD they handed her, found the track they wanted, and away they went. They'd even made up choreography. Or maybe they hadn't, maybe they were mimicking choreography one of them saw on the Disney Channel, but since we don't have the Disney Channel, I don't know that, and let me tell you, a choreographed dance is that much more meaningful to a parent if you think your own child came up with the moves.

The song they sang was "This is the Life," which until the moment they opened up their mouths, I would have considered a prime throw-away bit of bubble gum pop.

The chorus goes like this:

This is the life! Hold on tight!

And this is the dream

It's all I need!

You never know where you'll find it

And I'm gonna take my time, yeah

I'm still getting it right

This is the life

Elder Girleen stood up on the stage and sang her heart out, and what was pablum magically became profound, at least for about two minutes.

This is the life.

Hold on tight.

Weather Reports: Spring and Siblings

2008-05-12T09:58:00.005-04:00

Mid-May. How did we get here so fast? The trees to be seen from the curve of the window arabesque-and-reverse in the cold front, or what passes for one this time of year, blown in last night. Newly-leaved; as graceful as girls in spring dresses.

Mid-May. The blackberries fingering the ditches are laden with knot-like white blossoms.

Mid-May. A couple of weeks ago I retrieved from the attic and unpacked the box labelled Clothes: Age 3, so that Younger Girleen would have shorts and skirts and sundresses for the summer. Sitting on the floor of her room unfolding them was like thumbing through a photograph album: oh, the dress Elder Girleen was wearing the night she had her first S'more, that week we spent at the beach...the skirt that arrived in the mail from Godmother M... When Elder Girleen was three, she might as well have been seven: I had no frame of reference but younger: three-years-old and she seemed grown-up, enormous.

At the same age, Younger Girleen is still a baby. So little! We carry her around like she's a newborn. Those hand-me-down clothes seem so diminutive, so "cute."*

I was an older sibling myself, and I found my parents' laxness regarding my younger brother such a bitter pill to swallow! I mean, the first PG movie I got to see in the theatre was The Bad News Bears — I was probably eleven. My brother, a mere 8 1/2 at the time: what was the first PG movie he ever saw? Bad News Bears. I undertook a careful accounting and the results were clear: he got to be the baby but at the same exact time he got all the perks that should have gone only to me, being older. No fair!

Yesterday, I was putting away clean laundry and discovered a stash, a cache, at the back of Elder Girleen's underwear drawer. There, carefully tucked at the back, were at least half of the 3T skirts and shirts I'd unpacked for Younger Girleen two weeks ago.

But these are too little for you, I pointed out to Elder Girleen (secretly impressed by the extent of her subterfuge).

But I LOVE them, she said. They were my baby clothes.

I thought of the way teams retire jerseys in commemoration. They were yours, I agreed and closed the drawer, letting them stay there, an homage to her younger self.

*I would say that girl's clothes reach the pinnacle of cuteness at size 3T.

Days, of the Motherhood Variety

2008-05-09T10:16:00.004-04:00

Sometimes it's easy for me to forget that a blog is a narrative construct as much as any other form of writing that might come down the pike, that it's as shaped and whittled in certain directions as personal essay or short fiction. To keep a blog may not be art, but it certainly is craft ... and once you start crafting something, you snip and darn and leave things on the cutting room floor.

But in service of keeping it real, I submit the following "stuff" that's ended up on my cutting room floor lately

The Husband, having started a new job, now leaves the house at 7 a.m. and returns to it at 7 p.m. This is not abnormal, this is, in fact, life-and-how-we-live-it for most of America; but I am reeling from our family's new math: if he sleeps the requisite eight hours, and spends an hour getting ready in the morning, that leaves three hours for him to live the rest of his life in. And as his home life consists of less, mine consists of more: more racing kids to schools, more emptying and loading the dishwasher, more errand running, more guilt, more feeling like I seldom converse with anyone over six. This sounds like kvetching and it is, and wrinkles in the family schedule always iron themselves out, but it's struck me that most people would not consider this "quality time." And this is all the time that most American families have got. (And our family is blessedly middle-class. Where does that leave single parents, those taking care of aging parents themselves, the blue-collar?)

Younger Girleen has been laid low by another bout with some sort of toddler ick.

That means she's napping right now; that also means that she was up at one a.m., three a.m., four a.m., five a.m., and five forty-five a.m. She went to sleep at 6:20, but by then it was only 25 minutes until Elder Girleen had to get up, so I just gave up.
More power to all those folks out there using the internet to figure out how and when to potty-train by the signs: starting on an auspicious date has given us mishaps just about everywhere you can think of (and if you want to feel sorry for yourself, being on hands and knees cleaning up human feces gives you the perfect venue, let me tell you).

In the midst of a week where most of my business ended up on the cutting room floor so to speak, being neither pretty nor finely-crafted nor literary nor interesting (instead it was just Life, warts (or poop) and all, I took a break for a few minutes and checked a friend's blog, which led me to click a link, which led me to learn about a book called The Mother's Guide to Self-Renewal.

My Mother's Day gift to myself is going to be to look at the downloadable fourth chapter. And I dunno... if you're down in the trenches scrubbing the floor this week, this might help.

Sometimes "online" connectivity is like a visit to a really good thrift store: when you least expect it, you find a shirt that fits you perfect, and it only cost a quarter!

Topics of Pressing Interest

2008-05-05T10:00:00.003-04:00

By revealing the following, I may run the risk of alienating my tiny readership so completely that none of you ever visit again — although I suppose if you're still with me by this point, you're probably in this for the long haul — but because this blog is in part about the elevation of trivia to high art, I can't help myself.

SoI have a confession to make. The technological wonders of the internet allow me to "see" exactly what search string leads people to end up on my blog.

Don't worry — who exactly you are, I have no idea, unless you choose to comment. But if you arrived here by happenstance, by typing words into Google or whatever search engine you favor, I can be privy to those search words.

The necessary aside at this point would have to be that at least 99.9 of the people who end up visiting this blog because of a google search click away from it in less time that it takes to type this sentence.

So what is the most burning reference question facing the world today? It's not "mom sex," though the number of folks with that on their minds would astound you.

It's potty training by the signs.

Celebrating the esoteric, one click at a time. You gotta hand it to the innernets.

One for the Mommy Olympics, or: Too Much Information

2008-05-03T10:54:00.004-04:00

It's a parenting truism to say that every and each child in the world is unique, but it's a truism along the lines of people saying "wow, you're life is really going to change," when your bulging belly first begins to reveal that you are pregnant with your first child. Simple statements both,right? No — they contain worlds of complexity. You think your world's going to change? You can't even imagine. No child is like any other? Why do you think in generations past unskilled, less patient parents than we are sometimes resorted to telling their offspring: you're no child of mine?

Elder Girleen and Younger Girleen bear a family resemblance to each other both emotionally and physically, but in a lot of ways they're as different as night and day, and discovering these differences has been a joyful part of the parenthood journey. When Elder Girleen gets stressed, she gets revv'd up. When Younger Girleen gets stressed, she falls asleep. See? Every child is different.

But before Younger Girleen's arrival in our lives, my main experience with dealing with the after effects of certain sorts of stomach-related accidents consisted only of owning a cat prone to hairballs. There's probably a nicer way to put this, but I can't think of it right now: Younger Girleen is affectionately known around our house as "Our Little Puker." Vomit down the cleavage is a necessary part of motherhood, and I'm happy to say it's not as scarring as you might think.

On Thursday, as sort of a cherry on top of a sundae of a tough week, Younger Girleen started throwing up all over the back seat of my car while we were stuck in what seemed at the time to be THE WORST ATLANTA TRAFFIC EVER. We inched forward, she puked, we inched forward, she puked.

The car is her favorite place to engage in this behavior, and first time it ever happened the mopping-up operations almost broke me. The car seat, the buckles, the sister's car seat, the back of the front seat, the mother, the child! All over the only new car (now no longer new) I will probably ever own in my life! And then, the ordeal of putting the car seat cover and buckles back into the car seat frame once they were clean. It took me almost an hour.

I realize I've just told you more than you ever had any interest in knowing about my life. I may have just relegated Younger Girleen to years of therapy on down the road. But to who else can I broadcast my pride over the mastery of a new skill but you?

I pulled off the road, stripped a three-year-old, wiped and redressed her with aplomb. And just now, I put the complication of a Britax car seat cover and its parachute-like array of buckles back together in about 2 minutes tops. And as I did so, I wondered why did this ever seem hard?

The feeling of satisfaction was kin to the sort you have when you realize your exercise regimen has taken you from walking one mile to running five. Or from lifting hand-weights to benchpressing ... whatever... amount.

I may not be able to benchpress my body weight but I'm a dab hand at the messy side of motherhood, and that must be good for something, right?

Too Weird to Resist Writing About

2008-04-30T09:45:00.010-04:00

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:

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.
Sleep: the parents' lack of it, their children's ability to go without it.
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

2008-04-25T10:00:00.004-04:00

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

2008-04-15T13:10:00.005-04:00

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

2008-04-03T08:26:00.009-04:00

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.)...

2008-04-02T06:30:00.015-04:00

...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...*

————————————————————————————

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.

----------------------------------

*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...

2008-04-01T13:44:00.005-04:00

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...

Drinking from the Motherhood Cup

2008-03-21T09:34:00.004-04:00

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

2008-03-19T10:07:00.002-04:00

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

2008-03-18T06:05:00.005-04:00

"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

2008-03-15T11:53:00.003-04:00

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...

2008-03-11T13:54:00.004-04:00

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

2008-03-10T10:30:00.004-04:00

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

2008-03-03T08:41:00.011-05:00

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

2008-03-03T06:06:00.017-05:00

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.

State of the Union, February 26, 2008

2008-02-26T12:34:00.003-05:00

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...

2008-02-23T11:46:00.004-05:00

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

2008-02-14T16:49:00.011-05:00

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

2008-02-10T06:43:00.000-05:00

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

2008-02-09T08:01:00.000-05:00

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

2008-02-08T10:16:00.001-05:00

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

2008-02-05T08:25:00.000-05:00

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

2008-02-03T08:23:00.000-05:00

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.)

Ways in which Parenthood Changed Me (The Beginning of a List)

2008-01-29T06:32:00.000-05:00

1. Dear God in Heaven, not only did I write a paragraph with three exclamation points in it, I allowed the world to see that paragraph.

2. I sometimes get an inordinate amount of pleasure from waking up at 5:30 in the morning (particularly if I'm waking up to read the paper or drink coffee, not if it's because someone under four feet tall is standing right next to the bed, breathing noisily until I wake up).

And Now We are (Almost) Six...

2008-01-26T08:02:00.000-05:00

As of this time tomorrow we can tally up six years of life for Elder Girleen! Six years of parenthood for the Husband and myself! Almost three years of sisterhood for Younger Girleen! The world spins on its axis, time moves inexorably forward. Life is good.

When Elder Girleen turned one, I started a ritual, which was to write her a birthday letter every year. This makes me sound like I have my shit together a lot better than I actually do, in fact, it almost makes me sound like one of those uber-moms you read about in magazines or crafty blogs who do beautiful and meaningful things for and with their kids while the rest of us are down in the weeds wiping snot-nosed faces and wondering what happened to our youths (or putting together homemade valentines all alone while the kids who were supposed to benefit from the project pull the cat's tail out of boredom).

So just in case you're forming that kind of opinion about me from reading this, just remember that this too is a narrative, and think upon the pristine surface it displays.

Most years, I read over the birthday letter I've just written and cringe, because it sounds so silly. But with time, everything acquires a lovely patina. And because of that, and because virtual space has become such a good way to document and save and organize things, I was tempted to use this space as the piece of paper this year's letter is written on.

But then, on second thought...

What you write to your first born and what you write for posterity and what you write for a blog are all very different things. Right now I"m doing some freelance work that involves reading a lot of personal essays or manifestos or ... I'm not sure what you'd call them... (and I won't be any less vague than that) and — talk about the Wry Jocularity School of Parenthood Writing!!!

Maybe it's not just parenthood that lends itself to such a genre: all the essays I'm reading right now are pretty wry and jocular. And there's a time and a place for that, but .... you got to be careful about these things.

I'm sure there are many social, political, and aesthetic reasons why Wry Jocularity (I know I'm just as guilty of it as the next mom, so I"m not throwing stones!) has become such a cultural shorthand, but I think I'd have to put the "internets" at the top of the list as a factor.

Anything written for online consumption is, rather overtly or not, addressed to some collective but nebulous "we." And just as you'd probably narrate a story differently for a group of people gathered within earshot at a cocktail party than you would for your best friend, narrative undergoes a seachange once it becomes blog fodder.

This is not necessarily bad. I love the various blogs I visit or stumble upon and I'm finding that having one myself has jump-started my creative life in a lot of ways.

But the heartfelt letter addressed to one person, the short stories... I hope they won't become the babies thrown out with the bathwater as we move toward spending more and more of our lives online.

Reading Lists

2008-01-25T08:44:00.003-05:00

Well, some of the things on the bedside table this past November got read (particularly the ones that had the name Maisie in the title, a la Maisie Goes Camping) but most of them did not, but rather than beat ourselves up about that, we've just collected a whole new stack:

Women's Diaries of the Westward Journey
Schlissel

The Turn of the Screw
James

Restless Spirits, Ghost Stories by American Women
Lundie, ed.

Beloved
Morrison

The King in the Tree
Millhauser

The Light of the Home: an Intimate View of the Lives of Women in Victorian America

Haunting the House of Fiction: Feminist Perspectives on Ghost Stories by American Women

Women's Voices from the Western Frontier
Butruille

The Evolution of a State
Smithwick

Nothing like a list to make you feel like you're getting things done, even if you aren't. This almost looks like the reading list for a course, and maybe it is: let's call it the-novel-I-SHALL-draft-by-the-end-of-2008 course and hope that sets a fire under me.

Right now, though, we're in the weeds.* A "freelance job" for the next few weeks, a WHOLE Kindergarten class Birthday Party for a six-year-old, tomorrow; family in town.

I'll keep you posted.

*I only worked one restaurant because of my huge fear of dropping loaded trays of food (instead I worked in libraries and as a house cleaner) but I love restaurant slang.

On the Threshold...

2008-01-25T05:57:00.001-05:00

Probably the only thing duller than watching paint dry is reading the blog of a person who has been watching paint dry, so most of you will be relieved to know that the lid has been tapped back down on the cannister of "Linen White" paint I keep stashed in the basement.

But the ability to squeeze blood from turnips might be one of the names of the blog game* so we're not quite done with housepaint yet.

In fact, now that I think about it, an ability to squeeze blood from turnips — in other words, extract nourishment from unlikely sources — might be one of the names of the motherhood game.

Slowly, slowly, the woodwork of this house gets painted. Usually by me, usually while a child is napping. We moved into this house this time of year three winters ago, when I was hugely pregnant with Younger Girleen (hugely, because even though I was only seven months pregnant at the time she was a second child and I had basically looked pregnant since before I was pregnant). That year I supervised painting rather than taking brush in hand: we did the Girleens' rooms because there's no way to spin a room with faux-painted brown walls to a three-and-a-half-year-old who has just had to move out of the house she's known since birth and is about to get a new sibling, to boot.

Next, I think I painted the door to Younger Girleen's closet during that early sleepless fugue right after she was born simply because the way it was zebra-striped with the woodwork's 1920s era brown varnish and every subsequent decades' layer of paint was really offending my addled aesthetic sense.

Last summer, I painted the sun porch that's become the writing/art/junk room because of the probably deluded sentiment that if a mother must share "her room of her own" it should at least be nicely painted.

I made it through two rooms this year, a bedroom and the hallway. Or, to be more precise, I painted a portion of the woodwork in the bedroom: I lost interest before I got to the trim that would require moving the bed.

The hallway, though — I persevered. How many times a day do I walk up and down that hallway? It runs almost the length of the house. Ten doors open off it, as if this house were a boarding house, or a old-fashioned hospital or something from a fairy tale.

Lap lap goes the brush, up and down. There's something meditative about painting. Painting doors is hard, but not too hard: you have to think about it while you do it, but you can keep other thoughts going at the same time — you're using two very different portions of your brain.

Lap lap strokes the brush. Up and down. All this painting has always been done by hand. Eighty years worth! Who painted it in the 30s? Was it the woman of the house?

Lap lap strokes the brush. Who thought it would be a good idea, several decades ago, to paint the woodwork in this hallway coagulated-blood red?

I used one of the Husband's worn out t-shirts to put polish to the tarnished rosettes of the keyholes and through the oily toxic smell of Brasso, the dignified glint of brass appeared.

So many doors! So many faceted glass door knobs — a miracle they stayed unbroken through the years when this house was someplace with blood-red woodwork busily being gouged ... by what? Motorcycles being dragged down the hall? Indifference? Wild parties?

I painted doors, I tightened knobs and brass plates, and tested the seal of newly-covered door into its jamb.

I usually never think about that second when I pass through a door, my hand lightly on the knob. My mind is always on the room I just left or the one I'm moving into.

Lap lap strokes the brush. This year maybe a good resolution would be to focus on the doorways.

*Good God, how's that for a train wreck of cliches?

State of the Union: January 22, 2008

2008-01-22T09:15:00.000-05:00

Snow, snow, glorious snow! Feathery, quarter-sized flakes, perfect for packing into snowballs. Now it's just cold and my thin blood's resisting getting out in the weather, business-as-usual. My hat's off to Minnesota moms who deal with the hats-and-mitten dance daily for months.

Yes, the snow was three days ago and is entirely gone now, but this is the south, after all: it'll take a week for us to get back to normal.

Don't Look At This One Unless You're a Mom

2008-01-17T09:11:00.000-05:00

There's a website for everything.

The Pristine Surface

2008-01-16T09:50:00.001-05:00

This morning I for some reason brushed my hair a little more attentively than usual and discovered that the crown of my head was highlighted with streaks of white latex paint.

I wasn't entirely surprised this had happened: every year right about this time, I become preoccupied with house-painting.

I suspect I develop this preoccupation because it's winter and because both girls have just been home from school for two weeks, and I've been spending a lot of time in the house — time that just happens to be mostly spent playing Candy Land and the Dora Memory Game for hours. Now, I like playing Candy Land just as much as the next mom, but you know, sometimes your mind... wanders. You stare off into space. And since I'm usually sitting on the floor while this is going on it's really easy to start noticing the way that all the woodwork in the house is covered with fingerprints, crayon, dog nose smears from the owners two before us, floor stain from the sloppy job the owners before us did of refinishing only one third of the floors in the house, etc. It's only a matter of time before I pick up a brush.

But the thing about painting is... once you paint the woodwork, it highlights how grubby the walls are. And if you start down that obsessive path (which I have not, not yet), then you notice how shabby everything that furnishes the room is. Oh yeah, and all those brass door knobs! They'd look tons better without dingy paint (in layers: from that 1940s-era, arsenic-like green, to pink, to gray to white) all over them.

Oh, the concept of the pristine surface! Say what we might, it can suck us all in!

The woodwork in our house is as covered with "dings" as the door panels of somebody's mistreated beater car. As I slap the refreshing coat of latex atop it, I think to myself that if I really want to do the job right, I should be sanding first. I should be slathering on spackle. I should...

What does this have to do with anything?

Two days ago, I frittered away my single free hour online uncovering what'd become of former college chums, in the process demoralizing myself with thoughts of how successful they were and how little they had aged.

I love the technological advances the internet has given us, and no way do I want to turn the clock back. But it's so easy for me to forget that what the internet is best at is selling... whether what it's selling is a thing, a person or a place.

That pristine surface: I suppose if you googled me, I might even seem to have one.

So... in the service of full disclosure...

That was not white paint. It was gray hair.

Static (of the Internal Sort)

2008-01-14T12:05:00.000-05:00

Saturday morning I took the Girleens + an additional child to the park and the weather was pretty warm, the sky boundlessly blue and, because it was Saturday, I'd lingered over my coffee, which always gives my day a rosy glow. All these things combined, along with the fact that I was willing to engage the kids (one of whom was mopey) in a rousing game of Follow the Leader, convinced me for about 7.3 minutes that I was ... if not a wonderful mother, a pretty damned nice one.

In the service of that Follow the Leader Game, I slid down the slide on my stomach and now have slide burns on both elbows and seem to have done something to an important muscle in my back.

This is why adults are not supposed to PLAY with kids.

Yesterday was balmy but today is colder, and the forecast is for sleet by Wednesday: as the weather changes, so does my vision of myself as quality caregiver. This morning I sloshed coffee down the front of my nightgown while I was fixing Younger Girleen's lunch (an act which made me bear more than a passing resemblance to a wino with a Thunderbird-stained front). Elder Girleen happily headed off to school with .... marshmallow... in her hair and Younger Girleen's hair didn't even get combed. (Although in my own defense I have to say that because Younger Girleen's hair is kinda curly, leaving it uncombed is not such a big deal).

And me? I admit it: I spent the one free hour I had this morning Googling college roommates I've lost touch with. I don't know what possessed me, but there you go. I won't bore you with the a list of the legion of things people I once knew have done: let's just say being a guest at the White House is in there (I submit this to show their fame, not because I really want to go to the White House), along with being on TV. Every single one of them looks exactly the way they did twenty-four years ago.

Sometimes the World Wide Web is the Devil's right hand.

Static and Grit

2008-01-11T09:34:00.000-05:00

A pale January sky today, stitched up with vapor trails, but it's not just that that tells me we're settled into winter and, because the season's so short in this neck of the woods, at the same time teetering on the cusp of spring.

Lady Liberty is back.

And I was so pleased to see her on the corner yesterday in front of Liberty Tax Service— or rather him, since yesterday's Lady Liberty was a guy with dreads clad in his paid-by-the-hour work attire of the tax season of patina'd copper green gown and foam rubber liberty crown — that I realized that with time, ANYTHING is possible. I have begun having great feelings of affection for Atlanta.

Extraordinary! All it took was TEN years. Before that, the places I chose to live were always college towns: let's call them Disneyland for Hipsters I and Disneyland for Hipsters II. Better bookstores, better public services, better dressed baristas in the coffee shops. How on earth could Atlanta hold a candle to that?

My relationship with Atlanta was pretty similar to that of two people in an arranged marriage: it made sense as far as the business of my life went (ie, it possessed the job for the Husband that allowed us to escape my childhood bedroom, where we'd been living for the past six months) but love it I did not.

For years, my motto as far as living here went was close your eyes and think of England.*

But more and more frequently, I open my eyes and look around at the Atlanta I live in, down at its heels, corrupt and urban, full of grit and static, and realize that, though my feelings for it don't match the passion of first love and I would never dream of defending it over someplace really nice, like say, Austin, I'm glad I live here.

If I lived elsewhere, I would measure the arrival of spring by the emergence of the daffodils' blunt green bayonet blades. Here I have the arrival of Lady Liberty, who will stand on that corner from now until April 15.

The first year we lived here, an inflatable Lady Liberty head was tethered to the top of Liberty Tax Service, a sight as post-apocalyptic as the listing statue on the beach in Planet of the Apes. Now we've just got Lady Liberty, who works from 8 in the morning until 8 at night, who stands on the same corner where a few years back two very large prostitutes stood soliciting business while we ate dinner in the brand-new pizza place across the street and watched them through the plate glass window. Lady Liberty, who is sometimes old, sometimes young, sometimes male, sometimes female, sometimes black and sometimes white, but is always one of the most oppressed people on the planet, at least as far as their employment goes. Trucks honk their horns at them. The corner is not a particular scenic place to spend an entire day.

I loved those Disneylands for Hipsters where I came of age, oh, how passionately. But this morning after dropping off Younger Girleen at school, I stood in line at my fav coffee shop (the one that offers me my large special friend) and thought how glossy those places were (and still are). Here, on the other hand, I've got an unfashionable bald guy in front of me with scuffed shoes, one of the barista's tattoos are old-prison-tattoo green, and the other barista is a little oily and probably didn't shower before he came in to work.

Depeche Mode's Master and Servant was playing on the sound system. Let's play ... master and servant whoever the lead singer of Depeche Mode was warbled.

Let's NOT, the barista opined as I walked out the door.

Oh, Atlanta, you may be a lame, out-of-date city, but you're my lame, out-of-date city.

*I'm thrilled by this opportunity to spin the arranged marriage metaphor past its breaking point.

The Pursuit of Happiness...(Dispatches from the Front)

2008-01-09T09:59:00.000-05:00

Younger Girleen is currently very interested in figuring out the concept of Happiness (and the concept of unhappiness, for that matter).

Are you happy? she asks. Are you not happy? When something doesn't go her way, she roars like a small lion and then turns her tear-stained face toward me, sobbing I'm NOT HAPPY. It turns out that she's one of those children capable of hyperventilating the second she starts crying, so she can barely get the words out, and that makes it just that much more heart-wrenching.

The endearing thing is that, a minute or two later, after I've hugged her, or distracted her, or read her If You Take A Mouse to the Movies just one more time, she looks at me earnestly and says: I'm happy now.

She is wonderfully self-possessed, and not just that, she has lightning-fast powers of recovery. What if we were all that articulate, and wouldn't it be great if reading If You Take a Mouse to the Movies (something I've read until my eyeballs could fall out) could change your mood so quickly?

I know I'll forget things like this before I know it (poor, Elder Girleen, I already forgot most of her cute two-isms!), so just for posterity's sake:

Oatmeal has been transformed into Eatmeal.

Daddy, daddy she wailed the other night. I need a Kleenex. I got BURGERS.

Then vs. Now

2008-01-05T10:36:00.000-05:00

Who knows why one starts thinking about something... it may have been the "lose ten pounds" uttered but unuttered resolution (isn't it cool how I did that?) that led me to it, but for some reason the other day I remembered/realized, with a combination of nostalgia and horror, that way back in the day (ie, my late teens/early twenties) it used to take me TWO HOURS to get dressed to go out at night.

Well, "going out" (in other words, presenting oneself to the world as a creature worthy of the world's interest) has not been part of my life since the days of the dinosaurs, but nowadays, I pride myself on how quickly I can get myself ready to leave the house: the less time I spend on that, the more I can spend on quality things... like reading a magazine, drinking a cup of coffee, tinkering with the way this blog looks. I can shower in three minutes. I no longer futz about with hair dryers, make-up, interesting clothes. In short, I am a fashion dud, and that saves a lot of time.

Back in the day, when I spent those hours on grooming, it's not like I was painstakingly shellacking a 'do onto the top of my head or trowelling on the make-up (though for a while I was partial to heavily-kohled eyes); it's more that getting ready to go out was an aesthetic process.

Back then, I worked at a vintage clothing store and received a portion of my pay in clothes (one of my favorite pastimes was spending the hour before closing on Saturday nights picking a new outfit for the evening), which might give an idea of what I mean here: we're talking dressing as a performative act. A leather miniskirt that belonged to the wife of the owner of Capricorn Records during the Allman Bros heyday. Brocaded sixties cocktail dresses. Midriff baring shell tops with sequins lying close as fish scales. Paisley-patterned cotton dresses worthy of the best 50s' housewife, way too big and belted with a leather belt, accessorized with granny boots.

Imagine the scene: victorian house, chopped up into rentals, complete with sofa on the front porch. The younger version of myself examining herself in the round Deco mirror of a vanity with peeling veneer picked up at Goodwill. She has to try on at least five outfits. The mirror of the vanity must be hung with twinkling Christmas lights. The music on the stereo must be a tad melancholy (rainy nights and Leonard Cohen singing Chelsea Hotel, perhaps?)

Oh, those were innocent days, weren't they?

For a while, the store where I worked also carried mid-century modern housegoods: gaudy lamps with swooping shades, McCoy vases. Big yawn as far as I was concerned, though I was happy to sell them to elderly hipsters (as I considered those over 30 to be) . Clothes were what it was all about. They were where it was AT. The rest was secondary (though, thankfully, I did spend some of my pay on a few of those lamps).

But here's an interesting thing: While mucking about with the header of this blog yesterday, which on one level is the biggest time-suckage imaginable, I realized that I may not spend any time dressing myself these days, but it's not that I no longer care about aesthetics — it's just that the focus of my desire for attractive aesthetics has changed.

Clothes were once my armor, my palette; were plumage and shell I took creative joy in embellishing. And just as I once took pleasure in putting together an outfit, I now take pleasure in putting together my house, my yard (though whether anybody else in the world would agree with the success of these efforts is debatable, I realize).

Is it motherhood or larger cultural currents that've caused this shift? On one hand, back in the day when I was getting myself up like a cross between Cyndi Lauper and Jacki O, who would've dreamed that an entire nation would someday become obsessed with "home improvement"? On the other hand, my life is mostly played out on a domestic stage these days and I spend a heck of a lot of time here.

Back in those old days, when I was young and foolish and judgmental (and sure I knew EVERYTHING) I perceived anything more than a minimum of attention paid to ones surroundings as a particularly vacuous past-time. And now here I am, fiddling with how this blog (which is viewed by an audience of no more than ten) looks.

A New Year, A Blank Slate

2008-01-04T06:59:00.000-05:00

To everybody who stayed loyal during this latest blog drought*: thank you! An end-of-the-year corollary to the mathematical equation that rules my life has been discovered:

Brisk walk + Strong strong coffee (squared) - Kids in school =

Big fat zero blog entries (and writing in general).

To commemorate the new year, I should probably immortalize a list of resolutions I probably won't keep (lose ten pounds, draft the novel I've had on the back burner since Elder Girleen's birth, meaningfully augment my social life, have a house as glossy as house porn while simultaneously maintaining a satisfying and lucrative creative life, recycling more, spending less, and so on and so on...) but the girleens are still home from school, and the playing-together-quietly timebomb is ticking down, so alas for both me and you, I can't.

But the New Year is a time for ruminating after all, so I'll try to squeeze in a little mental cud-chewing before I have to go break up a fight between siblings:

The world is full of internet and blog naysayers fond of tossing out a line that goes like this — online interface is mostly just self-absorbed, one-sided navel-gazing; as prime an example of fiddling while Rome burns as ever there was.

I won't argue the validity of such a position, but five months of doing this has made me happily aware that friendships formed online are, in fact, legitimate friendships, and besides that, the internet isn't bad at serving as glue for relationships that, due to distance, motherhood, and time constraints, have been in need of tending.

So, as the new year starts, I'm a convert.

*Mainly The Husband, who checks in a couple of times a day, even if he knows I'm... like, off at the dentist or something. Which I'm afraid says a lot more about the compulsive nature of the internet than it does about the deathless nature of my prose.

Ask a Silly Question...

2007-12-23T09:56:00.000-05:00

Me to Younger Girleen: We don't bite people! Why did you bite (Elder Girleen) on the back?

Younger Girleen to Me: Because I couldn't bite her on the front.

Revisiting Ownership

2007-12-19T09:55:00.000-05:00

My life these days revolves around a few simple but important mathematical equations, the simplest and most important being this: brisk walk with Younger Girleen + strong strong coffee (squared) = blog entry. Clearly one or the other has been missing the past few weeks but we're back on track this morning.

Actually, the more honest reduction of the above equation might be this: brisk walk with Younger Girleen + strong strong coffee (squared) = impractical flights of fancy, since on a 30 minute walk I was able to not only consider blog life but also imagine an alternate universe where I am the owner of a wonderfully quirky and hip coffee shop (all this being caused by walking past a vacant storefront) that not only serves the city's best coffee but also displays all my peeps' best art and crafts (to be knowledgeable enough to run it I will apprentice at my fav coffee shop, where I go to get my Large Special Friend; I'll hire artists as baristas through Craig's List) AND not only that, but in the same 15 minutes I can consider just how wonderfully purchase of the sixties-era aluminum tin-can Scotty Sportsman trailer listing on three tires that I just walked past will change our lives.

Not even heroin can get you to such places.

Now that you've had a glimpse of my overly-caffinated morning, I'll get back to matters at hand:

A couple of entries back, I made stab at parsing out a particular phrase, that phrase being one sent to me by email recently: are you willing to own this effort?

At the time, I was interested in examining the way making such a request serves to distance the requestor from the requestee. A little more thought led me to this: asking if someone will "own" an "effort" rather than asking "could you help" ALSO makes it awfully easy for the requestee (ie, in this case, me) to say "hhh? who, me?" and shirk any responsibility as well.

It's sorta like Spanish grammer, in that rather than saying "I dropped the vase," you say "The vase dropped itself". Efforts may be owned or not owned, but none of it has a damn thing to do with me.

Ownership. There's a video circulating these days that makes it awfully clear just how unsustainable our consumer culture has become. The video's primarily discussing actual material stuff, but it includes a quote made soon after WWII by retailing analyst Victor Lebow that is now seared on my brain:

Our enormously productive economy... demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption. We need things consumed, burned up, replaced and discarded at an ever-accelerating rate.

Any one who has a kid is pretty aware of the ways in which the language of the marketplace has come to pervade our children's educational experience.

Or maybe we aren't consciously aware of that. But maybe they're all links in an insidious chain: the fundraising auctions, the requests to "own" efforts, communications committees, corporate sponsorship, PR... all of these address us as consumers: any time and money we might give an institution is cloaked in a consumeristic experience; rather than helping out, by owning an effort, volunteering becomes something I can choose (or not) to possess.

The saddest thing is that this is a chain we've thoughtlessly wrapped around ourselves. And our children, those little beings we would lay down our lives to protect.

Snippets

2007-12-19T06:15:00.000-05:00

Yes, I've been a lame blogista the past few weeks. Sometimes life gets in the way. Held a tamalada (tamale-making party) a few weeks ago (causing me to be more intimate with pig than I've ever been before: I'm here to tell you you really don't want to eat tamales more than one or twice a year); then Elder Girleen and I squandered The Husband's last frequent flyer points with a whirlwind wonderful weekend visiting friends in The Big Apple.

So, per the New Yorker, we've already established that diaries are full of dross; blogs, blather. What do you call it when you simply recount your life? David Sedaris and Jerry Seinfeld discovered this long ago, but if nothing else, blogging has made me realize that riffs about nothing may be inherently more comedic than ... well, life.

This may be why the Wry School of Parenthood Writing is so popular and pervasive in the blog world. The absurd is funny. The day-to-day is just ... the day-to-day.

In the homestretch to Christmas, though, I've got nothing going on but the day-to-day.

And really, now that I think about it, what a jaded, crazy world we live in that I would breathe the words day-to-day and trip to New York in the same few paragraphs. And since this will float around attached to my name for eternity, let me set the record straight: we don't actually jaunt off to Manhattan on a regular basis.

Back in the dark ages B.C. (Before Children), my mother, fretting about my advancing age and seeming diffidence about having offspring, would say Oh, but you get to experience childhood all over again! (This wasn't her only persuasive argument by any means; she was also fond of saying but I want to be a grandmother!). At the time, because I had no experience of childhood but a child's I was unmoved. The thing I remembered most about my childhood was my painful overwhelming shyness. No way did I want to experience that again.

The lovely, scrumptious center of the candy-coated experience that was our trip to NY was a matinee showing of Mary Poppins, not just Elder Girleen's first experience of Broadway but mine as well. This tells you just how much the world has changed: she is five, I'm 10 days away from 43.

At the end of the performance, when the actress that plays Mary Poppins soars up and over the audience on wires, her umbrella unfurled, I glanced over at Elder Girleen. She was clapping wildly and her eyes shone like stars. In fact, veering into sentimental territory, you could practically see her soul shining out through her eyes. She was completely and utterly happy.

Oh, I realized, so that was what my mother meant. It's not just that you get to re-experience childhood when you have children, it's that occasionally you get to re-experience childhood within the context of your battle-hardened adult life.

And that might be the most magical thing I've ever experienced.

Caught in the Capitalist Matrix Once Again

2007-12-12T09:33:00.000-05:00

A while back I vowed to self-censure as far as writing about certain parental groups with which I am emmeshed goes, and where I couldn't self-censure, having already shot off my mouth, I would redact, but yesterday I received an email which included this request: "Also, would you be willing to own this effort?" and if I can't dissect that language here, where can I dissect it?

My kinder side won't allow me to divulge the particulars of what exactly I'm being asked to own, and what owning of it might mean, but bear in mind that this discussion takes place on the periphery of the "educational experience" of children who are mostly too young to know whether they are being taught the ABCs in English or in Swahili. Also that agreeing to own anything at this place will mostly just put me in a world of pain and add at least 250 emails to my inbox... all before Christmas.

Asking me if I would own this effort is clearly a ... veiled? coded? benign? more polite? ... way of saying the much clearer "would you do this for me?"

So... why not just ask me to do it?

Because asking me to do it outright would require agency on the requestor's part: "would you do this for me?" And the act of doing something for someone requires give-and-take, a favor asked and bestowed, a personal connection. Talking about ownership removes the requestor from the process entirely, and absolves them of any responsibility regarding it.

When I received this email, I had a brief Walter Mitty type moment when, more than anything, I wanted to respond: As someone who once contemplated joining the socialist party, I'm not all that big on ownership....

Or, maybe a better response would be: I would love to disown this effort.

Yeah, Things Do Look Different...

2007-12-11T14:03:00.001-05:00

This might be considered by some a throw-away post (I mean, you can't get any more navel-gazey than discussing the look of your OWN blog, can you), but yes, I've changed the layout.

It wouldn't be worth mentioning except for the fact that the layouts have clearly gotten more and more blog-like as the months go by. When I started, I wanted something that looked as much like print as possible (ie, a blog as if published by the New Yorker, maybe). Well, now we've got four months under our belts and I've realized that the Blog Is Its Own Beast. It shouldn't look like print because it has nothing to do with print. It's a completely different animal.

Besides, fiddling with templates is a great way to sit at the computer and pretend you're doing something productive.

I know I've fallen down on my job here lately, but you know, I've got other stuff going on right now. I've got to go out and buy stocking stuffers for my own stocking and then pretend to my children that Santa Claus put them there.

So, is it Blather or is it Dross? (Another Rhetorical Question)

2007-12-06T14:00:00.000-05:00

From a recent critical piece in The New Yorker:

In a diary, the trivial and inconsequential — the "woke up, got out of bed, dragged a comb across my head" pieces — are not trivial and inconsequential at all; they are defining features of the genre. If it doesn't contain a lot of dross, it's not a diary. It's something else — a journal, or a writer's notebook, or a blog (blather is not the same as dross).

Interesting hair-splitting; but true, I suppose. Funny how much more serious dross sounds than blather, though.