Pool Digressions, Part I

— 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.  

Days, of the Motherhood Variety

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!

Setting Foot on the Shore of a New World (Happy Columbus Day)

For reasons that escape me now, I spent the approximately 43.6 free minutes I had on Sunday afternoon making things with pears. They were actually edible things, not cunning little outfits, but all the same, this is about the point when those reading this who knew me back in earlier days when I was a "real" person with a "real" life may consider jumping on a plane and heading here to stage an intervention.

Remember those beautiful pear trees in the outdoor classroom at Younger Girleen's Preschool? Remember, weeks before, the way the "OC Team" was summoned to a "special meeting"? At the time, I preferred to discuss metaphor (Alice-down-the-rabbit-hole in particular), but facts are facts: one of the reasons for the special meeting was that pears from the pear tree were falling on the ground and the OC Team was not picking them up on a regular basis.

Let me be the first to testify: you actually can spin straw into gold. I didn't plan on it, but wow, here we are. Even this blog tells a story of sorts.

Being the girl that I am and the daughter of the woman that I am, I couldn't stand to see all those pears chucked in the compost. End result: I spent the approximately 43.6 free minutes I had on Sunday afternoon making pear-pecan bread and something called perada that, according to the recipe Googling gave me, resembles membrillo and will really impress your friends and neighbors when you pair it with manchego cheese.

I'm making all these things for a Preschool event, of course (nudge nudge, wink wink).

Way back when Elder Girleen was first born, when at least three-fourths of the time I felt like crawling in a hole and pulling the hole in after me, I went to an acupuncturist. She was a wise and lovely person, and I wish I could say that acupuncture rid me of the urge to crawl in a hole, but it didn't, but she and I spent much of my first appointment talking about who I was at that point in my life and who I had been before I had children. She asked if I was okay about the fact that I seldom wrote anymore and I looked at her like she had asked me if I was okay about the fact that I had just pulled the plug on my own ventilator, so at that point she beat a hasty retreat and asked me if I was able to find any time for anything else that I considered creative.

Anything else creative? You mean, there was something else? For years, I'd made most major decisions, including where I would live or what job I would take, based solely on my assessment of how much those decisions would affect my writing time. For example: the guy who would become The Husband would to ask me out and I would turn him down because I had to work on my novel. Thankfully, five minutes later, I would realize how stupid this was and call him back. The rest is history.

At the time the acupuncturist asked me this question, I figured she was asking if I had found a way to make motherhood creative, and I recoiled in disgust and every single fiber of my being screamed sell-out at such a thought. Writing was real legitimate art (or at least creative). Anything "creative" I could even begin to imagine about motherhood was simply lowly domestic art. Engaging in the mental smoke-and-mirrors that would render it as creative as writing was the grossest self-delusion.

Five years later, here I am: growing a garden, making a pear-pecan bread that perfumes the house with the cinnamony smell of fall. What I don't have: that third (or second for that matter) published book under my belt, as do many of my peers.

Contemporary motherhood writing (blogs in particular) are chock-full of a phenomenon involving a new mother who gazed down at the little miracle in her arms and rushed over to the computer and started writing like nobody's business.

I'd read these accounts during the crawl-in-a-hole days, and they'd just give me another thing to add to the inadequate mother list I was keeping in my head. Not only did I wish that I was off on a spun-sugar beach somewhere in the Caribbean all by myself, but motherhood was not getting my creative juices going. I was a failure not just as a mom but as a writer.

Can the essence of pears, concentrated, its backbone stiffened with sugar and an hour's occasional stirring, be art?

The tiny Republican in my heart, whose motto is always pull yourself up by your bootstraps and whose job is to keep me on-task still whispers sell-out — and maybe I am one.

If pears can be art, it's a fleeting one, here and gone. No one praises what I've created but me — I do it solely for myself, for the joy that comes from making.

Mistress of the Metaphor

If I think too hard on what actually might be the point of all this, I'm pitched headfirst into the Slough of Despond, but that's kinda what happens whenever I think too hard about anything that has to do with writing. Your — the reader's — entertainment is certainly higher priority than my — the writer's — edification, but all the same, I'm learning things, and I hope my readers don't feel ill-used by being part of this grand experiment.

First things first — being artfully artless, one of the chief goals of any good blog, is a hell of a lot harder than it looks. As I'm seldom artfully artless in Real Life (I was never a good flirt, and as far as my life goes, things that are difficult also generally look difficult) it would stand to reason that I'd find this a challenge in my blog-life as well.

More interestingly, though, (at least from a writerly perspective, this insight and 4 bucks'll buy you a cup of coffee in the Real World) I've also noticed that the more unappealing I find some aspect of parenthood, the more apt I am to use metaphors to describe it. Thus, Younger Girleen's preschool has appeared in the same sentences as allusions to:

a soap opera
the Jonestown Massacre
A soulless corporation
Wonderland, as in where Alice Ended Up
the royal court of Marie Antoinette


My sense that XXXX Preschool gives me the opportunity to experience a world (I always wanted to time-travel, I just didn't know having children would make it possible!) full of political intrigue, Machiavellian plots, and character assassinations has, if anything, grown in the past few weeks. And in fact, I've realized that I actually like thinking of XXXX Preschool this way.

Once upon a time, way back in those days of peasant blouses and bellbottoms known as the early '70s, a well-meaning hippy-ish couple sent their first born off to the world of public school in small-town Georgia clutching a brown-paper sack lunch. At noon, when she sat down to lunch in the cafeteria redolent with the smell of overcooked collard greens and unpacked a Roman Meal bread sandwich wrapped in waxed paper (less plastic in landfills) and a bruised Red Delicious apple, she looked at the Twinkies, the SnakPak puddings, the lovely pillowy Wonder Bread bologna sandwiches of her peers with the first real envy of her young life. That is, until she met the only other third-grader forced by her parents to eat sandwiches made on whole wheat bread. They became inseparable, inventing games that got them through the school day: they were spies, they were detectives, the school rotunda was haunted by the ghost of the man the school was named after... And everyday at lunchtime, they unwrapped the waxed paper from around the sandwiches made from peanut butter purchased at the town's only health food store (less sugar), closed their eyes and said to each other fervently: maybe if we pretend real hard that we're actually eating pizza, these sandwiches will start tasting good.

Metaphor enlarges our lives. This might be why "it is what it is" is such a frightening buzzword. If you extrapolate from "it is what it is," a good many of the tasks we are forced to undertake in parenthood (this is probably true of life, too, but we don't take on that weighty subject here) are — let's face it — just plain tedious and unnecessary. Given that alternative, wouldn't you rather see yourself as a a cloak-and-dagger courtier skulking in a dark corner of the royal palace? Or an anthropologist taking notes out in the field? Or a clandestine operative working undercover?

Plus, I have to say I enjoyed giving this entry the header "The Mistress of the Metaphor" — as if I were some sulky dominatrix.

Metaphor. I did it again. I wonder what kind of inappropriate search engine tag will come from using that one.