Oh, the anxiety of time and books. I’ve talked to Lacy about this. The gloomy awareness that there will never be enough time to read everything we want to read. I have a list already for 2008. Which I will share when I have the energy. For now I’m already in bed (what a Saturday night! in fact this is dreamy) with my current novel (Ghost Brigades), a Zagat, and SELF magazine. Tripolar tonight, I guess.
I have long loved Naomi Wolf. Misconceptions remains one of my favorite books about the experience of pregnancy and childbirth and the ways that modern medicine can interfere (though the new book Hils gave me for Christmas, Pushed, may well join the pantheon). I’m having a bit of trouble following Naomi’s current super-liberal angle and book about the destruction of American liberties, but on the complex topics of female empowerment, identity, and relationships there’s nobody better.
I found this letter she wrote to her 12 year old daughter today, and I love it. The stuff about how a time when women had to fight to be considered equal seems like the Roman empire is fabulous – and that’s precisely how I want Gracie to grow up. I remember at Grace’s intake conference at her new school I burst into tears talking about how her nursery school had provided a very natural environment of diversity; I described the immense privilege of growing up in a world where one just knows as normal a very diverse set of people. This is true of races, sexual orientation, religions, and genders. My wish is that Grace maintains her profound openness to all kinds of people. I hope she can grow up in a world where it is taken for granted that her gender will be neither roadblock nor advantage.
Photo above is of course of Gracie, and of Nana, the woman whose daughter I am blessed to be!
by Naomi Wolf:
This is a love letter saying what I am never allowed to say directly to a twelve-year old daughter of someone whom I am not allowed to name. It is a celebration of who you are right now and I have to write it obliquely because if I said it to you directly you would say `Ew!’ and leave the room in a dramatic huff. You were born ironic, just as your brother was born sentimental, and I can’t be too mushy to your face.
I love that you are in a moment when within half an hour you can look like a Spanish maja admiring your piled-up hair in the mirror — and then you can dissolve in giggles when your little brother falls off the couch head first while doing an acrobatic move. I hope you can stretch that moment of easy movement between glamor and silliness for as long as you want to.
I love that when we talk about the days when people thought women couldn’t do as well as men at some things and didn’t have as many rights you react as if we are talking about the late Roman empire, which you are also learning about.
I love that you can switch to valley girl speak and switch back and also that you make up your own weird blends of pop culture when you are dancing, like setting Fiddler on the Roof songs to hip hop beats and moves.
I love that you have started to look appalled and not let me go out the door until you have edited my clothes and it is really kind of great that you are almost always right, even when it means I have to completely change everything I am wearing. Once in a while you aren’t right and I love that in your world you don’t know that yet; I love that you think a bustier and jeans and high heels are appropriate for a business meeting. I love that you made a pile of everything `classic’ in my wardrobe and are trying to forbid me from wearing any of it, to the point of barring the door with your body. I love that when I try to wear a coat with black-and-white fur trim you won’t let your dog, who is black and white, look at me.
I love that every Monday you become a vegetarian because you are starting to wrestle with ethical dilemmas and I love that by Thursday you are eating corn dogs from the street fair, but you still love animals and are still figuring it out.
I love that you stick up for kids at school when they are ostracized.
I love that you want to tell me all the time that everything I think and do is wrong but you still want to sit on my lap.
I love that when I make you laugh you have the same crazy smile you did when you were four months old sitting in the baby seat in the back of the car holding your foot straight out in the air with your tiny fist.
I love that you would have no idea how to hide your opinions and your intelligence if you had to.
I love that you think women empowering girls is so retro and that everyone does it everywhere and that it is a cliche.
I love that you have no hesitation in winning at soccer and no shame in losing given that you tried your best. I love that you have a sense of honor and that you are a good sportswoman. I love that the fact that your mom was a couch potato and a nerd neither holds you back nor makes you create an opposition.
I love that it never occurs to you to be in anybody’s shadow.
I wish you the strengths you have now forever and that they will not be eclipsed but simply join all your strengths for the future too.
I promise to embarrass you for the rest of your life.
Yours, (not telling).
Saw Bouff, Kara, and Sky this morning for brunch at Full Moon. Still kind of wild to think that we all have children (well, Kara will in two weeks!!). We slip right back into the old patterns, and it’s such a blessing to have friends with whom distance and time vanishes when we are together.
It’s fitting that I came home to find the passage below on my Google Reader. I think Kelly Corrigan has joined Catherine Newman as one of my favorite writers – I am looking forward to her book, The Middle Place, which comes out next week. The notion of the middle place resonates with me, and I can’t wait to read her account. The words below are as good a meditation on female friendship as I have ever read. They’re worth reading all the way through. They brought to my mind a very wonderful set of women, the women I think of as my team, moving through life in parallel no matter how far apart we live. I am inexpressably fortunate to have these women as my dedicated fleet.
by Kelly Corrigan:
I turned 40 a few weeks ago. I tried (twice) to make a toast about friendship but both times, I blew it. I wanted to say something about my mom and her friends, who call themselves “The Pigeons.”
There were once at least a dozen “Pigeons” (I believe the name was a self-effacing twist on Hens) but in the past few years, they lost two of the greats, Robin Burch and Mary Maroney, to cancer. On the pigeons go, though, like women do, limping one minute, carrying someone the next. They started in the 60s, in suburban Philadelphia, with bridge and tennis and chardonnay (ok, vodka) and, over time, became something like a dedicated fleet, armed ships sailing together, weather be damned.
For me and women of my generation, it started with playdates, cutting carbs and meeting on Monday mornings in workout clothes to do awkward moves with large colorful balls. And I can see exactly where it’s heading.
We’ll water each other’s plants, pick up each other’s mail, take each other’s Christmas card photos. We’ll confer about jog bras and contractors and pediatricians. We’ll gossip about babysitters, teachers, neighbors, in laws. We’ll speculate about who had a shot of Botox, who cheats on their taxes, who cleans until midnight. We’ll implore each other to read this book or see this movie or listen to this song. We’ll persuade each other to bake, sell, recruit, fold, stuff, paint, clean and write checks for our favorite non-profits.
We’ll celebrate each other’s achievements –opening an exercise studio, a corner store, a jewelry business. We’ll celebrate our kids’ achievements – making the traveling team, singing in the choir, learning to use the potty or speak French or play the flute. We’ll borrow eggs, earrings, extra chairs, galvanized tubs for a barbeque. We’ll throw birthday parties for each other and stain the rugs and shatter the wine glasses and mark up new counters with the odd slice of lemon. We’ll worry about who seems down, who looks tired, whose drinking more and more. We’ll say things we wished we hadn’t and have to find a way to regain each other’s trust. Things will break, they always do. Many will be fixed.
We’ll fret over our children—too shy, too loud, too angry, too needy. We’ll brainstorm ways to help them become more resilient, patient, forgiving, light-hearted. We’ll protect them—fiercely—pulling little bodies from the deep end, double-latching windows, withholding car keys.
We’ll bury our mothers and our fathers—shuttling our children off for sleepovers, jumping on red eyes, telling each other stories that hurt to hear about gasping, agonal breaths, hospice nurses, scars and bruises and scabs and how skin papers shortly after a person passes. We will nod in agreement that it is as much an honor to witness a person come into the world as it is to watch a person leave it.
People will drift in and out. Book clubs will swell and thin. We’ll write someone off and they’ll reemerge later and we’ll remember both why we loved them and why we let them slip away but we’ll be softer and we’ll want them back, for nostalgia will get stronger.
We’ll admire each other for a fine crème brule, a promotion, a degree, a finished marathon. We’ll commiserate about commutes, layoffs, mortgage rates, bosses, unappreciated toys. We’ll confide in each other about feeling anxious or angry or uninteresting or uninspired or how many pieces of Halloween candy we accidentally ate from our kids’ bags. We’ll confess that our husbands don’t really listen to us or that we should be having more sex or that we yell at our kids every day. We’ll admit that we believe in God, Jesus Christ, Heaven and Hell, or that we don’t.
We’ll give up things together—caffeine, catalogs, Costco, social smoking. We’ll take up things too—morning walks, green tea, organic dairy, saying grace.
We’ll throw potlucks and take each other to lunch and give each other frames and soaps and bracelets. We’ll check each other’s heads for lice and examine new bumps and moles and listen to lists of symptoms. We’ll diagnose each other’s brown lawns, torn muscles, basement odors. We’ll teach other how to set a ring tone, make a slide show, download a movie.
We will call and say “I heard the news” and whatever the news is, we will come running, probably with food. We’ll insist on taking the kids, finding second opinions, lots of rest and the best surgeon. We will face diseases, many kinds, and will—temporarily—lose our hair, our figures and our minds.
Eventually, someone whose not supposed to die will, maybe one of us, maybe a husband, God forbid a child, and all this celebrating and sharing and confessing will make certain essential comforts possible. We’ll rally around and hold each other up and it won’t be nearly enough but it will help the time pass just a hair faster than it would have otherwise. We will wait patiently and lovingly for that first laugh after the loss. When it comes, and it will come, we will cry as we howl as we clutch as we circle. We will transcend, ladies. Because we did all this, in that worst moment, we will transcend.
Anyway, that’s what I wanted to say.
Points to anyone who can figure out the picture above! It’s in the ceiling at Upstairs on the Square.
It has been the most lovely few days. This week between Christmas and New Year’s always feels apart from regular life, somehow. The past couple of days I’ve been hanging out on my own and really enjoying it. Grace and Matt are in Vermont and Whit’s been with Anastasia. It is simply sublime to have time like that. Saw the movie Juno yesterday – run, don’t walk, to see it. Funny, heartfelt, wise, unusual. It’s a great movie. And Ellen Page is a terrific new talent.
My new year’s resolution this year is the same as every year for the past several: learn to go with the flow better. Courtney and I used to joke about this years ago, and I fear I haven’t made substantial progress. What I really want is to learn to trust the universe more, to embrace ambiguity and to truly accept that change is the only constant. To know deep in my heart that I am loved and safe and that things are unfolding according to some pattern that is good and right, even if I can’t see it yet.
Terence always takes the best pictures. See above from this morning’s playground run-around.
Was a lovely Christmas. I am especially delighted that everything was cleaned up and put away (including children bathed and in bed) by 7:30.
Last night was the Christmas Eve service at Christ Church – one of my favorite traditions. We sang many of my favorite carols. A few scenes from church … Gracie as an angel, walking down the aisle all by herself brave and unruffled … Lucien Wood asleep on Claire Messud’s lap … Sammy and Gracie hugging in the communion line … whispering to Gracie, “there’s our dentist, Dr. McEachern!” and having the person in the pew in front of us turn around to say, “we saw him too!” – the local dentist = demigod … Grace wiping tears off of my cheeks during Silent Night and asking me quietly, “Are you crying, mummy, because it’s all so beautiful?” (no, it was because I was thinking of Nana, but it was indeed very beautiful) … outside the church with Whit during the sermon, watching a full and yellow moon rise over the horizon and through the shadows of the trees on the Common …
This year and last I’ve been obsessed with Sarah McLachlan’s Wintersong. Track 6, Oh Little Town of Bethlehem, is my favorite, particularly, for some reason, the last line … I could listen to it over and over again:
… we hear the Christmas angels, who great glad tidings tell, oh come to us, abide with us, our Lord Emmanuel …