Back in the Saddle Again

Fall arrived while we were gone (first mentally gone, as Elder and Younger Girleen passed the first respiratory crud of the season back and forth; then physically gone, to the lovely wedding that took us out of state and far from the madding crowd of school halloween parties and so on) — red-tailed hawks are circling and diving over Interstate 20, picking off the pigeons lured there by the convenience store owners that feed them.

Remember when seeing a hawk was rare, almost unheard-of good luck? (Back in the Crying-Indian Commercial, DDT days of our youths? The fact that I saw FIVE between driving Younger Girleen to school and back gives me hope: with enough media and pop culture overkill, we can change things, and for the better. Slowly, slowly, slowly, and maybe not enough, but I just had the good luck hawk-spotting bestowed upon me so am seeing the world through rosy glasses.

The fact that this blog is back up and running may be illustration of something; serious commitment issues, ambivalence about my writing life, my wishy-washiness in general, but I realized a few things this weekend:

1. I sorta missed the blog, for reasons I don't even want to take the time to examine (my exhibitionistic streak, maybe?)

2. Seeing folks in Texas who read the blog made me realize the best thing about a blog: it forges connection (let's not parse
out how one-sided and solipsistic that connection might be). There're people out there that I just don't want to lose touch with.

3. Klatsching over coffee with friend J about writing and blogging made me really think about a possible difference between "old-school" and "new-school" writing. In the "old-school" literary view of writing: your words are like pearls. You guard them, keep them close and don't squander them. For years I've subscribed to this slightly anal-retentive view of writing: if anybody's gonna see what I write, it better be as polished as I know how to make it. But blogging in specific, and the internet in general are evidence enough: we are awash in a sea of words. I go back and forth on whether or not this is a good thing, and whether or not I should be adding to all this white noise, but after years of parsimony, I figure a philosophy of writing abundance might work wonders for me: maybe there always WILL be enough. For this, for the novel, for writing agent query letters, for anything that might need writing. I suppose that, at its heart, is what this Grand Experiment is really all about.

So yeah... here I am. I'm back; I'm lame; and I missed you. Like everything else, this is a narrative. I shade, I embellish. Take it with a grain of salt...

Joining the Throng

I don’t know if there’s a timetable somewhere for midlife crises but 42 seems a pretty good age to embark on one. At thirty-one I was jetting around the country to promote a book (although the fact that I was doing this at my own expense and had to take a plane because I lived in another country slightly dilutes the freewheeling and successful image this conjures up). Now I’m forty-two and the only thing I’ve done in the past year or so that can be classified as “writing” is to waste the previous year waxing eloquent in emails sent to the other members of the board of my oldest daughter’s preschool about a variety of subjects that mattered not a whit to a single sane soul in the universe. Because these women also often found themselves deeply concerned about subjects that mattered not a whit to a single soul in the universe, occasionally one would be nice enough to profess admiration for my writing ability, but other than that I think it would be safe to say that my writing career, my avocation, my calling — whatever you want to call it — is pretty much dead in the water. Since it was hardly seaworthy at the best of times (can you say “literary fiction” and “midlist author”?) this is a pretty fucking sad state of affairs.

Perfect reason to embark on a midlife crisis, right? Running out to put a bright red sports car on the Amex has not been a viable means of getting through this period of my life; nor is taking up skydiving. So lately I’ve been asking myself: What would be the 21st century, cutting-edge way to indulge a midlife crisis? (In other words: is there a cool way of being so uncool as to question what the fuck you’re doing with your life?)

The answer of course — is to start a blog. If the cyberworld were an actual physical space, blogs would be the cockroaches that live beneath its floorboards and behind the drywall. There are millions of them. Each one has links to three more just like it. The obvious conclusion to be drawn from the number of blogs in the world is that nobody in America is doing any “work” — we’re all just punching clocks, literal, metaphysical or spiritual, so we can sit down and vomit out our hearts out to our computers.

Or put another way: Blogging is the new knitting! Some of us make lovely cashmere sweaters, others of us, unidentifiable lumps of overly-handled dingy yarn.

So why add my voice to this unholy clamor? We’ll pass over the naive greed that for about .73 seconds made me entertain the idea that writing a blog might actually be a way to make money from writing. (This turns out not to be the case, of course.)

When my oldest daughter was born, I found myself unable to surgically amputate my writer-self from the Mommy I had become, a state of affairs that did absolutely nothing for me but lead me down the primrose path of postpartum depression. In fact, sad refugee from academia that I was, I found myself unable to keep from examining the world in which I found myself as a potential narrative.

How do women write about motherhood? How do they talk about it?

The conclusion I came up with then, and could probably call my manifesto now (except that all you have to do is Google “mother” and “manifesto” to see how overused that concept is) is this:

We all behave as if the choice about how to talk about motherhood 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.

I suppose I’m adding my voice to the calaphony because it still seems laudable, to wade through the bog of motherhood in search of that watery elusive truth. To figure out a way to talk truly about this messy business of mothering, called women’s work for so many millennia.

Besides, I spend most of my life with the under-six set. With who else can I share my observations about the deeper meanings of My Pretty Pony, Dear Reader, but you?