Linkage

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.

Life, and How to Live it?

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 Pause that Refreshes

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.  

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.

Of the Weekend, and Such

The Husband and I had an interesting "conversation" this morning during breakfast, though I say "conversation" in quotes because our exchange lasted approximately 30 seconds and was about as deep as a baby pool.  

— How often do you feel guilt? I asked him.

— About once a week.  Why?  How often do you feel guilt?

— Maybe four times a day?   

Setting aside any thoughts you might be having about how this mostly indicates my need for medication, guilt might be one of the differences between — I was going to say a man and a woman, but that's not specific enough — a mom and a dad.  

I feel slightly (not very but just a little) guilty that instead of going to Related Arts Curriculum Night at Elder Girleen's school next week, making dinner for the mother of one of Elder Girleen's classmates who just had a baby, attending a School Work Day, answering Michelle Obama's personal email message to me to man the phone banks, visiting Miss Nell next door (eighty years old and extremely lonely),  I am going off to the Hambidge Center for Artists, where, I imagine, for ten days I'll sleep, walk in the woods, read, research and — god willing — write 7-10 pages a day on my novel.  

But do I feel guilty enough not to go? Not just no, but hell, no.  

Tidbits I've gleaned from typing "Hambidge Center" into Google (or "The Google" as my mom referred to it the other day):  

That the vegetarian dinners the artists there gather for each week night are very very good.  

That it's possibly haunted.

That bear have been seen.  And mice.  (The former outside the studios, the latter inside).  

Though I know home will tug at me every moment I'm there, I'm also as excited as if I were going to Disneyworld.  Actually more so, since I'm extremely disinterested in ever setting foot in Disneyworld.

But because it would be helpful to my loved ones left at home* if before I go I get caught up on the laundry and stock the house with enough food to last a midwestern winter, this entry probably the last you'll hear from me for a few weeks.

But because reading columns in the New York Times by Judith Warner has lately turned my morning coffee-drinking into an even more delicious experience than it usually is , I leave you with her latest, here.  

What with the way politics hangs like a dark cloud on the horizon these days, we all need a reason to laugh.    

*Or because I think it would be helpful to my loved ones left at home.

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.  

    

Pool Digressions, Part II

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).  

What I Can See from Here (Stories at 6 a.m.)...

...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.

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 Stuff of Childhood/The Stuff of Motherhood

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

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.

Snippets

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

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.)

And Now We are (Almost) Six...

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.

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

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.

The Turn of The Screw

Those who know me best know I have this thing about ghost stories. Not only do I love them pure and simply, so much so that in spite of all the navel-gazing I can engage in, I've never even bothered to examine why I might be so drawn to them, I love the sort of conversational down-time that leads people to reveal ghost stories to one another.

Luckily (or not, depending upon how you view things), I've had plenty of employment chock-full of the sort of heel-cooling that lends itself to the telling of ghost stories. Nothing like cleaning national park cabins in the rain to get two maids making beds in the mood for swapping ghost stories! Smoke breaks from waiting tables: also a good source. Ditto long aimless car trips taken in your twenties.

I've never heard a bad ghost story, because even the most rudimentary snippets of one carry so much cultural weight that you can pretty much fill in the blanks yourself. Even the worst storyteller can raise the hairs on the back of your neck with a few choice ghostly sentences.

Stay-at-home-momdom, it turns out, sometimes involves that same sort of downtime, particularly when one spends a lot of time pushing a stroller in the company of other moms. Taking walks for over five years, I've heard fascinating things (all to be kept private for the sake of the tellers) over the years.

Yesterday, while walking, I learned that someone who knows someone that I know is being troubled by ghosts. The family is newly moved into an aging grande dame of a Victorian house that when they purchased it was sadly in need of a face lift, which, threats of divorce and bankruptcy aside, they were thrilled to deliver.***

The house is now freshly-painted, wired for electronics, pristine, lovely.

But late at night, after the rest of the family has gone to sleep, the mother of the house has begun hearing what sounds like the rattle and turn of an ornate flourish of brass doorknob, the one attached to a particular closet door in the upstairs hallway. She tends to hear the noise most often when she's brushing her teeth. She rushes out of the bathroom and peers down the hallway: nothing but late night and sleeping house. Goes back into the bathroom to rinse and spit, and there it is again, that small insistent rattle.

The closet, the friend who knows the friend tells me, is the only interior door in the house that had a sturdy latch on it, placed at adult height.

What do you want to bet, the friend tells me as we walk along, that that was the Victorian time-out closet?

I'm too lazy to look it up, but wasn't it the presence of a child in a ghost story that Henry James considered the turn of the screw? Ghosts are all well and good but throw a kid into the mix: well, now you're cooking with gas!

Lately, I've been spending a lot of time sitting on the floor of the bathroom while Younger Girleen fumbles toward figuring out potty-training (this will come as no surprise to astute readers). I mean a lot of time. In fact, I spend more time sitting on the bathroom floor conversing with Younger Girleen while she sits on the potty than I probably do on anything else right now (this may be why I'm so concerned about effective use of my free time).

This afternoon we were having one of our periodic bathroom klatsches when Younger Girleen looked up.

Daddy's here! she said brightly.

Daddy's at work, I explained.

Then who's that man?

What man?

That man I hear talking?

Where is he talking?

In the back yard.

What is he saying? I pursued, curious.

This took a little thought on Younger Girleen's part. He's saying Mama, she said. He's saying Mama, mama, I want my mama.

God help me, I actually stood up and flicked back the curtain and peered out into the back yard.

Everybody wants their Mama, even ghosts in the backyard.

***Interestingly, the house is in the neighborhood that was also the location of the very best ghost story I ever heard, told around a campfire at Big Bend. I've concluded this particular neighborhood is Atlanta's ghostliest, but local readers should feel free to put in their votes...

Is it Art or is it China Painting?

When my maternal grandmother died in 1994, one of the things passed along to me was a sagging corrugated cardboard box. Within, nestled in yellowed wads of the San Antonio Express were at least twenty-five china plates, cups and saucers rimmed all with gold and painted with a sort of blowsy bloom unknown to botany. A cross between a rose and a peony — let's call it Late Victorian-Era Floral, and examples of it gather dust in every single antique store in the United States. I didn't know that then; all I knew was that the set of china had been painted by some vaguely-related female ancestor — a great great aunt, a cousin thrice-removed as is the wont of old southern families — who had been quite skilled with her brush.

How artistic! I thought, picturing some rebellious, bohemian artist type making do with what she could get in Mexia, Texas in 1902 (canvas and oils seeming unlikely).

Fast forward a few more years to the death of my paternal grandmother, and I'm bequeathed the twin of that self-same sagging cardboard box. Only this time the newspaper the china's wrapped in is the Dallas Times-Herald and the blossom is leggier; a cross between a columbine and a violet, maybe. Same level of execution (pretty darn good), same gold rimming the edges.

And so I learned about the fad of china-painting, the scrapbooking of the early 1900s. And once I knew about the kilns women bought, the boxes of blanks from Europe shipped by the boatload and the gatherings to paint them in Victorian parlors, I started seeing examples of the fad everywhere: practically every female friend I have has at least one piece done by some ancestor shoved to the back of their kitchen cabinet.

Is it Art or is it Craft?

Apparently I have very complicated, mixed feelings about these two states— in fact, you might even say that along with Bad Mommy Spectre and Bad Writer Spectre, Art and Craft tend to duke it out pretty often in my mind. Snobbery, cliches, elitism: I am embarrassed to say that I've fallen prey to all of them.

Interestingly enough, Art vs Craft wasn't much of a debate I had with myself pre-motherhood. Sitting down to write a short story was clearly engaging in the pursuit of art (let's set aside, for the moment, how pretentious that might sound). The fact that around the holidays I bought a bag of potatoes and made potato stamps and created my own Christmas cards while I watched TV was Craft, pure and simple. And what made it Craft? The fact that I could do it while watching TV? The fact that I hadn't gone to grad school in potato-printmaking but had in short story writing? That I wasn't very good at it? I didn't even care, I just did it.

Last year, during one of those life-periods when the family boat has a brand-spanking-new coat of glossy paint and is riding high and pretty in the water, I took a Collage and Assemblage Class at SCAD (Savannah College of Art and Design, Atlanta campus), and after years of putting any creative energy I had into words and text, I loved doing something visual. Was I good at it? No. Could I do it while watching TV? Yep. Clearly Craft, then.

The whole debate would be like wondering how many angels can dance on the head of a pin except that apparently I have set myself a fairly stringent criteria for any free time I might ever have. Novel-writing? High art. Or if not high art, at least a productive expenditure of time. This Blog? Collaging a canvas for a Christmas present or to adorn Elder Girleen's room? Craft, pure and simple.

Those poor Victorian matrons, I used to think. Sitting around painting china when they could have been striping canvases with manly bold strokes of oil. History has clearly seen them for the sad joke they that they were (or so I told myself).

Or has it?

The other day I ran into my favorite coffee shop (small, not bitter) for a latte. The baristas (so quick to offer me a Large Special Friend) clearly take their calling seriously: the cup handed across the counter to me was adorned with a lovely, leafy fern composed of striations in the foamy crema.

Art or Craft? They could probably do it while watching TV (if they had an espresso machine in their living rooms). Heck, they do it in thirty seconds while they work. So it's craft, right?

I dunno. It looks like art to me.

Just Put Me On the Cover of Bad Mommy Monthly (Repeat Once More, With Feeling)

Last night, Younger Girleen was troubled by a very particular sort of rash that made her a very unhappy camper. How do I know this? Because between 11 p.m. and 12:30 a.m. she sobbed out at intervals "Mommy, Daddy! My bauble hurts!"

First off, I suggest we ALL begin referring to our girly parts as "baubles" (If we are of that portion of society that possesses them). Authors of Mother-Blogs I've found myself reading occasionally wax anxious over what name they should teach their girl children for the the body parts that make them particularly girlish (fathers do not have this anxiety about their sons' body parts, and actually, now that I think about it, mothers probably don't either). But now, hooray— here's Younger Girleen, to save the day! In my book, bauble wins hands-down over "front bottom," a moniker a mom acquaintance actually once uttered in my presence. Without laughing.

(Even my parenthetical expressions have parentheses! This is a writerly talent on a par with being able to manage flashbacks within flashbacks, right?)

All this being said, nature abhors a vacuum, as we all know, and there's no vacuum like the brain of a mother who's lying in bed, every nerve tingling, waiting for the next cry of a child that she knows has not had done with crying for the night. Last night mine quickly became the perfect space for the Bad Mommy Spectre to insinuate herself into into.

O, Bad Mommy Spectre, my old friend, where've you been? I was missing you!

First things first, the Bad Mommy Spectre let me know in no uncertain terms that Younger Girleen most certainly had this particular rash because I had fallen down on the job. In fact, if I'd really been on top of things, she wouldn't even be in diapers at this point. Bad Mommy Spectre and I then moved on at a merry clip to revisit the conversation I'd had earlier in the day with Elder Girleen's teacher about the fact that seeing a picture taken of herself on a recent field trip with her eyes closed had forced Elder Girleen to have a complete and utter emotional breakdown for a portion of the school day.

Bad Mommy Spectre and I then hand-in-hand revisited the rest of my day (Bad Mommy Spectre shares some traits with the Ghost of Christmas Past from A Christmas Carol) and determined that the chaos of the dinner table, the kvetching, the refusal to let certain foods touch certain lips, the penchant for getting out of one's chair and making a complete circuit of the house before sitting back down are of course all due to my neglect of my duties.

We then dwelled upon the fact that Younger Girleen's best friend is moving in March (he's her best friend mainly because his mother is the mother I most often choose to hang out with, but still...) and because of my lack of attention to her social life, I have no idea who we will invite to her birthday party next May. If I were a good mother, I wouldn't be walking us over to X's house so I can have coffee with X's mother while Younger Girleen and X play, I would be forging friendships with the mothers of two-and-a-half-year-olds who won't be moving any time soon. Even if I don't like them!

Even recounting all this makes me tired. You get the picture, though.

Bad Mommy Spectre's best friend is Bad Writer Spectre. Having less material to work with these days, Bad Writer Spectre just shows up every so often to tell me I suck, and then wanders off for a smoke break.

Sixteen Tons

Sixteen years of sending out submissions! Setting this figure down on (virtual) paper turns out to have been a very dangerous accounting to have engaged in.

Not because acknowledging how hard publication is will turn off the thousands of people with publishing power trolling the 'net for their next meal ticket the way Hollywood discovered starlets at Schwab's lunch counter back in the day. Not because admitting how hard publication can be cracks the head-to-toe veneer of positive spin the business of writing now requires from each and every writer — although by airing this bit of dirty laundry I probably have doomed myself to booklessness evermore.

Rather — it was dangerous more because only the foolhardy add up how many years they've spent on any avocation, and only the quixotic look at that final sum and think it's a good idea to keep on keeping on.

This past weekend, I thought off and on about that number. Sixteen years! In that amount of time you could create offspring almost old enough to vote. You could build a house from scratch. Using tinkertoys. Hell, in that amount of time Manifest Destiny populated the entire western half of the country, exterminating everything in its path.

Sixteen years! If you like, you can hum "Sixteen Tons" while you read the rest of this:

You load sixteen tons, and what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt.
Saint Peter, don't you call me, 'cause I can't go;
I owe my soul to the company store...

This past weekend I mulled this figure over. I added and subtracted (years since I wrote my first "book": 35. Years I could deduct through creative accounting and because of childrearing sabbatical: five?) until I came up with what momentarily seemed like a profound insight.

You know, I said to The Husband, it's a waste of time to ask myself whether or not I should hang it all up. When it's time to hang it all up, it'll just happen. People just don't keep doing things they don't get any satisfaction from.

This is what passes for profound thought in our house, where it's considered calm when we're eating a hastily-thrown-together Sunday lunch of peanut butter sandwiches and cherry tomatoes with two people under four feet tall, one of whom is busily shoving crusts of bread into a glass of milk teetering on the edge of the table, the other of whom is singing a Hannah Montana (who is she? I am getting close to despising her) song so violently she can hardly keep her rear end in her chair.

The Husband looked gravely at me. Katherine, he said. People keep doing things they don't get any satisfaction from ALL THE TIME.

The Business of Writing

Back in the days when I was employed as an Administrative Assistant, a career "move"* that drove to me apply to grad school in creative writing, I had no idea how well what seemed like an OCD-level attention to detail would serve me in later life. (Nothing like being reminded to use color-coordinated thumb tacks on the bulletin board that hangs behind your desk to make you re-evaluate what you're doing with your life.)

Not only has my "administrative" bent come in handy for times when I prove I'm out of my mind by doing things like serving on preschool Boards, it's one of the few things that's allowed me to keep my sanity for SIXTEEN YEARS of submitting short fiction.

Sixteen years! If the simplest definition of mental illness is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results, I clearly should be institutionalized.

On such administration did I squander my morning. But in the process, I uncovered this site devoted to the business side of the submission process.

It's a dirty job but somebody's gotta do it.

And for anybody who's interested, apparently there's a genre we've all been reading called Brooklyn Books of Wonder. And a backlash against it as well.

It sucks to be so behind the cultural times.




*It seemed better than managing the Bennetton's at the mall.