The Lilies of the Field, They Toil Not, Neither Do They Spin

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.

Consider the Fig

It's not news to anyone:  spring's long long gone, not even a whisper of memory anymore.  The rabbit's-foot curves that were the leaves of the fig tree at the side of the house in April are now completely unclenched; as early as June they'd become hands with broad, spatulate fingers.  

I stand on tiptoe, push the leaves back with both hands, searching for fruit, greedy.

A cicada insists:  hot, hot, hot.   A mockingbird patrols the sag of the phone line.  Who would think it's September?  Not I,  trills the bird mockingly, over my head.  The figs I find weep milk and crystalline sugar.  They're purplish, ripe, completely unlovely.  Borne of plants put into the ground a generation ago, when this neighborhood was bars-on-the-windows and frugality handed down.  

Now we live in such plenty:  nobody eats them.  

Me, though, I might be a scavenger born and bred, the offspring of hippies who scoured their neighbors' Madison, Wisconsin lawns for dandelion greens, a copy of Stalking the Wild Asparagus open to the leafy greens chapter.  I've been known to ... well, let's put it this way: one summer, when Elder Girleen was still young enough to sit in a stroller, I filched handfuls from the back yard of a vacant house and carried them home in an emptied sippy cup.  And the boughs draped over our backyard privacy fence from the neighbor's yard:  if I can reach the drooping figs, I can consider them fair game.  

They're wonderful with goat cheese and arugula.  One summer I made them into ice cream.  I don't know when I started to like them.  When I was little, I equated them with the gardens of elderly women:  on a par with swept dirt yards , cracked tire planters, whitewashed trunks of pecan trees.  Inside the sorts of houses that fig trees belonged to, there were sure to be dirty kitchen drawers lined with yellow, curling shelf-paper.  Sure to be window sills displaying mason jars with screw-top lids full of miscellaneous screws, and balls made from old rubber bands saved for decades.  

In Texas, my grandmother had a fig tree in her yard.  We visited every summer; every morning I watched her breakfast on figs ripe from her tree, sliced and swimming in bowls of half-and-half.  I turned up my nose.  

But I would sit cross-legged in the dappled, rustling shade underneath the tree, reading  books I found in the old glass-front bookcases; musty-smelling books I never would have dreamed of reading at home, where I had access to friends, television, the library:  Anne of Green Gables, Return of the Native.   Whose names were inscribed on the end-papers of those books?  Ancestors, I supposed.  I didn't know them. 

Now, here I am, forty-three:  when I reach for the figs on the trees outside my dining room window, maybe all that history is still within my grasp.  I part the leaves, I reach for summer with both hands.  The Girleens like them with Greek yogurt and honey.  

We get two or three at a time.  They're certainly not anything you could live on, but when I check for ripe ones while the Girleens are at school I feel like ... like what?  A good provider?  Inside the house are lists to be made, emails to answer. I am procrastinating.  I am outside in the yard, picking figs.  

Lists.  I make them, I change them.  In two weeks, I leave for  a two-week residency here.  I did this sort of thing before,  but all that was in another life, one before children.  Now I have two kids, and I find that I'm preparing for being away from them (and it's not even two weeks, it's ten days) the way a mother bear eats berries in preparation for winter.  My lists — what time people have to be at school, how many snacks have to be packed to go with them, when they have to be picked up, when and where piano lessons are, the telephone numbers of neighborhood mothers whose help has been pro-offered and gratefully accepted — have become so elaborate:  I may have to give the Husband and the Grandmother, who is coming to stay, a Powerpoint presentation before I get in the car loaded up with files and research books and computer and printer and drive off to the mountains!  

For ten days, I will be responsible for no one but myself, and this feels both seductive and frightening.

I imagine that driving-away, and it feels like it's for so long, and to such a far-away place.  I remind myself it's not rocket-science, this mothering I spend so much of the day-to-day engaged in.    Everybody will be fine!  Children learn good things from seeing their mothers engaged in work. They learn good things from going to school with hair uncombed every once in a while (this being one of my predictions)! So what if they eat too much pizza for dinner!  

I will learn good things.  I will have the chance to replenish, to write, to rub shoulders, to talk shop.  

But if people can get along without you, then they can get along without you.  And that is complicated stuff.  

So what do I do to combat my anxieties?

I pick figs, as if that would be enough to keep anyone from being hungry.  The house is better stocked with food than it usually is, no matter that I've done it so far in advance my stockpile while be long-gone by the time I drive off.  I do load after load of laundry, as if that will keep people from running out of clean clothes two weeks from now.  

    

Topics of Pressing Interest

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

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?

A Picture's Worth 1000 Words...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have drunk from both this morning.

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

The Best Laid Plans...

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.  

On the Threshold...

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?

The Pristine Surface

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.

A New Year, A Blank Slate

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.  

Caught in the Capitalist Matrix Once Again

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.  

And Now Let Us All Contemplate...

Way back in the 70s, when eating whole wheat bread marked you for the commie pinko hippie you were, my parents embraced composting with the sort of energy you'd expect if composting created... gold... rather than, well... dirt. We were newly moved to the South, I was having a good old time starting first grade the year the elementary schools in our town were being desegregated (nothing like learning a song called "Glory, glory to old Georgia, the South will rise again!" and being laughed at because you say "you guys" to encode skepticism about the South into your bones) and my mother concluded that the way to turn approximately an acre of hard red clay into a flourishing garden was to amend it with compost. (38 years later, she turns out to have been right: patience is a virtue).

My parents had owned a house previous to buying the one that over the years became the family manse, but I'd been a baby, my brother hadn't hit the scene yet, and that house had had starter house scrawled all over it. This house, which they bought when my dad started his professorial career, was the real deal: solid, brick, front yard, back yard, lots of bedrooms, basement and attic, and even doors that sometimes swung open of their own accord.

Taking produce scraps out to the compost was a chore meted out throughout my childhood:  I remember doing it even as a slouching teenager, when I showed my distaste for the whole process by simply flinging scraps onto the top of the pile, rather than covering them with leaves (and then sneaking a cigarette in the backyard).

Given all this, it stands to reason that as soon as I hit thirty I became genetically incapable of throwing away apple cores — as soon as the Husband and I settled down in one place long enough we set up a Family Bin.  

And even the most skeptical have to agree that there's something seductive  about composting:  I may not be able to spin straw into gold, damn it, but I can turn garbage into dirt like nobody's business!

Elder Girl's school also composts, and recently she RECOILED IN HORROR when she saw me put orange peels into the compost bin.  

Citrus hurts the worms' stomachs!  she cried.  

Every morning I prepare grapefruit for the girleens and because of my upbringing, very fiber in my being shrinks from throwing those peels into the garbage can.  My hand hovers over the bowl for scraps for the compost.  But...those poor worms, their stomachs eaten away by acidic citrus!  I'm damned if I do or damned if I don't, which, now that I think about it, is an example of an either/or that seems to be becoming a uniquely 21st century dilemma.  

The trend in women's magazines this year seems to be the sort of article that bemoans the fact that the holidays are weighed down nearly to drowning point by consumeristic crap.  These articles cozy right up to advertisements for all manner of beautiful, luxurious and useless things.  Oh, yeah, I vow, reading these articles, this year we're going to simplify!  

Then, of course, I slam the magazines shut and head for Target.  

Because The Husband and I are the sorts of parents who want to do right by our children, at least one Sunday a month we drag our formerly agnostic selves to church, and this past one, the Simplification Message was delivered from the pulpit.  Yes, yes, I thought.  We'll metaphorically unplug the Christmas tree this year!

Then the sermon ended and we were reminded that the Cathedral Bookstore had books for sale in the Parish Hall and 10,000 Villages was displaying its wares in the library.  

This what it means to be liberal at the dawn of the 21st century:   continuously bombarded by philosophically irreconcilable messages. About EVERYTHING.  All the time.

Don't know about you, but I'm off to do some conflicted Christmas shopping.

Halloween Grist

Back in that misspent youth I'm so fond of mentioning, I usually spent Halloween night babysitting friends. No, no typo there, I wasn't babysitting for them, I was babysitting them, their chosen Halloween recreation leaning toward situations requiring nursemaids. (And I thought I had no experience mothering until I had children!) This didn't really endear Halloween to me, though over the years I forced a number of roommates to sit through movies I decided were suitable for the season (Note: The Old Dark House, made in 1932, is not scary and will drive even the most tolerant of roommates out of the room).

Given such an ambivalent history with Halloween, I'm astounded I've managed to squeeze as much blood from that particular turnip as I have in terms of blog entries. But Halloween looms so large in the lives of my children — how could it be otherwise? Most years, Halloween begins for us about a week in advance: there are school Halloween parties, neighborhood Halloween parties.... Basically, by Halloween itself, The Husband and I are wiped out, and bicker over who will do what on Halloween night — is it better be the one at home passing out candy to teenagers whose "costumes" consist of peach-fuzz mustaches and cigarettes (and sometimes infants with their own trick-or-treating bags), or traipse through the neighborhood with two exhausted, overly-sugared fairies?

Due to a great stoke of luck, we'll miss most of the auxilary Halloween celebrations this year. Elder Girleen is crushed — only the fact that she's missing them to be a FLOWER GIRL gives her any consolation. I'm thrilled though — at least I don't have to scramble for a costume the afternoon of the preschool Halloween party. Usually I put on a cowboy hat and my boots and leave it at that, but after five years of attending, I've noticed that most of the moms at this particular event show up as ... witches.

This morning, when I took Younger Girleen to school, the front yards we passed were not just dotted with inflatable ghouls and pumpkins, sadly deflated (last year's fad), but gravestones have popped up like toadstools.

These might be the end times, indeed. Our houses are built upon graves, and motherhood resembles a coven.