Month: April 2012

11 Questions, 11 Answers

This blogging world has brought me so many gifts.  One of the richest has been The Tribe, a group of creative women who have (foolishly, and I’m still waiting for them to realize their error) included me in their number.  One of these years I will be able to join the annual retreat on the coast of Oregon.  Elizabeth Grant Thomas is one of the Tribe, and if you don’t know her luminous, thoughtful writing, you should.  She writes about many of the same themes that haunt my work (and my life): impermanence and what endures, relationships and family, the fallibility and brilliance of memory.

Last week Elizabeth shared 11 questions and her answers.  I loved reading her stories, about the adorable way her husband proposed, her favorite historical period, and what day in her life she’d go back and re-live.  Then she tagged me in the meme, and I so enjoyed reading her answers that I was excited about answering with my own.

This is how it works:

  • Post the rules
  • Answer 11 questions the tagger posted for you
  • Create 11 new questions to ask the people you tag
  • Tag 11 people
  • Let them know you’ve tagged them

So herewith, my answers to Elizabeth’s wonderful questions, my own set of new questions, and the 11 people I would love to hear answer them!

1. What book has moved you the most in recent history?

I was tremendously moved by Stephanie Saldana’s The Bread of Angels.

2. What’s your favorite way to spend idle time?

Sitting in my bed, with my daughter next to me, reading (separately).

3. Share a silly photo of yourself.  What’s the story?

This was in high school, when my dear friend C and I were in the Dance Concert together.  We also ran cross-country together, and part of why I love this photograph so is that we are teaming up to run a 10K Mud Run in May together.  20 years and 5 children later, we’re back to running in the woods side by side.  I can’t wait.

4. What astrological sign are you?  Do you believe in astrology, or think it’s a bunch of hooey?

I’m a Leo.  I oscillate between believing and thinking it’s hooey.  Fun fact: my father and my husband are both twins and Geminis.  When I was growing up, I thought being a twin was a requirement of being a Gemini, since my father was both.

5.  What is the most memorable meal you’ve ever had?

Several dinners, cooked over a campfire, out in the African bush when Matt and I were on safari in the summer of 1998.  Somehow they conjured the most extraordinary meals out of nothing, and the setting sure helped.

6. Do you believe in fate, or that we’re masters of our own destinies?

This is a tough one for me.  I’m really not sure.  I lean towards the former, because I often sense the hand of something large and ineffable at work, but I also believe adamantly in the power of hard work and good decisions to shape our lives.

7. What is one of your favorite memories from childhood?

Singing Circle Game with my sister and our “four family” siblings, the extended family we grew up with.  We wore white, we stood in line by height, and all eight of our parents watched us with tears in their eyes.  There are also many special memories from my summers at sleep-away camp.

8. If you know it, what is your Myers-Briggs type?  If you don’t know it, would you characterize yourself as an extrovert or an introvert?

I am an INFJ.  100% F, 100% J, closer to the middle on the other two.  I am a big believer in the Myers-Briggs as a framework for understanding ourselves and others in our lives.

9. What is your favorite flower?

Peonies, hands down.  Ranunculus after that.

10. No one can ever believe that I’ve never seen The Princess Bride.  What movie have you never seen that everyone else seemingly has?

Silence of the Lambs.  I’m too scared.

11. What quote or motto best describes how you endeavor to live your life?

There is no such thing as a complete lack of order, only a design so vast it appears unrepetitive up close.  (Erdrich)

It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work. And when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey.  The mind that is not baffled is not employed.  The impeded stream is the one that sings. (Berry)

To miss the joy is to miss all.  (Stevenson)

Did you really think I could pick one?

And so, here are those I “tag”:

Aidan of Ivy League Insecurities
Christa of Carry It Forward
Denise of Universal Grit
Pamela of Walking On My Hands
Lisa Bonchek Adams
Kathryn of Good Life Road
Hilary from A Year On
MK Countryman from My Suburban Life
Katie Gibson from cakes, teas, and dreams
Rebecca from June Carol Claire
Erin from Elements of Style

And these are my questions:

1. What is your favorite book?  Why?

2. What song brings you back most viscerally to a moment in your history?  Where does it take you?

3. Who is your favorite character in fiction?

4. What is your favorite food?  What about foods you abhor?

5. Are you a morning or a night person?

6. What is your default font when you write on your computer?

7. How many siblings do you have?  How many children do you have (as of now)?

8. What season do you like best?

9. When you were a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?

10. If you practice yoga (even sporadically) what is your favorite pose?

11. When was the last time you cried?

Being Called to Listen

…this is the moment you want to remember, and it’s not about peace or stillness but what it is to be awake enough to recognize that the body leaning into the chair knows the chair, knows wildflowers, knows the heat that leads to water, knows the stretch of neck to widen the space for nourishment and the invitation to not have to say a word about it all and that a song is being sung just for you and that you are being called to listen.

– Maya Stein, “What it is to be Awake Enough”

Perfect

This past weekend was difficult.  Tensions ran high, nerves were frayed, voices were raised.  I was reminded, for the umpteenth time, that Matt and I are Grace and Whit’s weather, and though they exhibit it differently they are both keenly aware of our moods.  It’s a big responsibility, being someone else’s sky: when I’m stormy, that has a huge impact on them.  Still, still, I had my camera out, and I was able to unearth a few gems from a weekend otherwise filled with a slurry of sorrow and frustration.

Grace let me braid her hair.  This reminded me of my own childhood, spent often in two uneven braids.  This was the result of several tries; I’m not a good hair-doer.  Still, the braids were perfect.

Matt got home late on Friday night so I took Grace and Whit to our local pizzeria for slices for dinner.  As we waited I turned to shush them and saw that they were (loudly) dancing around the empty room.  My voice, raised to tell them to be quiet (oh, irony, I know) stilled in my throat and tears sprang to my eyes.  It was perfect.

Saturday night Whit would not go to sleep.  He was wired and tired, bouncing off the walls with a frantic energy.  Everything was a chore: trying to get him to brush his teeth, clean up his room, put on his pajamas.  My defenses were (and remain) paper-thin: the mere sight of his big top teeth coming in, where so recently there was a gaping gap, made me cry.  And still, amid all of that, I couldn’t stop laughing when I saw this in the mirror.  It was perfect.

Late on Sunday afternoon Whit and I dropped Grace off at a friend’s house and, needing an escape from the house, drove to the cemetery nearby.  We arrived at our tower to discover that they had just closed it.  Crestfallen, we got in the car, and then Whit asked me to pull over so we could climb down to a pond at the bottom of a ravine.  I did, and followed him as he skipped ahead of me down the narrow path.  The end of the day grew dusky, and I waved away mosquitoes as I watched Whit watching a pair of ducks and a small, silent turtle at the edge of the pond.  Moments of calm descended on me, but I also felt aggravated, and impatient, and aware of an internal thunder whose rumbling I could not quiet.

Finally we turned to head back to the car and made our way back up the path.  Whit trailed me, carrying his “walking stick.”  “Mummy?” I heard him say behind me.  I turned.  “Yes?”  “I really like when we spend time just you and me.”  It was perfect.

One year and one day ago I wrote these words:

I need to trust that as surely as my frustrations and irritations, my guilt and paralyzing panic about missing it rise up, they will ebb away.   These emotions are clouds sliding across the sky of my life, that is all.  This is what I am realizing: it is up to me whether I let these feelings, these moments when I am not the mother I want to be, mar the perfection of this life.  And I won’t let them.  I can’t change, I don’t think, the spikes of agitation and restlessness that sometimes overtake me so fast my head spins.  But I can change how I let them impact my overall sense of my days, of my life.

This life, this moment: it’s all so perfect it breaks my heart.  Every day.

And my emotional sky remains full of clouds, and it’s all still perfect.

Raising a boy

I read this extraordinary list of 25 Rules for Moms With Sons on The Good Men Project.  And I cried, and then I read it again.  There’s such a turbulent sea of feeling under the surface when it comes to my children.  It doesn’t take much to pierce me at my core, to bring tears, to unleash floods of nostalgia and emotion and regret and longing.

It’s no secret that I was shocked, when Whit was born, that he was boy.  Well, at first I imagined I would have only boys.  I imagined the universe would refuse me that relationship (that between mother and daughter) I’d studied so closely and cherished so dearly.  Why I imagined that is surely fodder for another post.  But then I delivered Grace, and after that I assumed I’d have all girls.  After all I was one of two girls, and most of my dearest friends were one of two girls, and well, I just figured that was the plan.

Though we did not find out the gender of our baby either time, when I was pregnant with Grace, I just knew she was a girl.  This despite the firm conviction of every pharmacist, cab driver, and little old lady I encountered that I “looked like” I was having a boy.  With Whit, I had no idea at all.  I joked “I’m just hoping we don’t have to make a call in the delivery room, you know, hermaphrodite style” so many times that Matt finally told me to cut it out.  But then Whit was born, and he was certainly not the Phoebe I’d imagined, and the rest is history.  His blond hair and vivid blue eyes shocked me almost as much as the fact of his boy-ness.  Only his cleft chin, so much like mine and Grace’s, was familiar.  Everything else was foreign, and has been ever since.

My boy.  It shocks me, to this day, to note that I have a son.

How he beguiles me.  While Grace is so much like me the identification sometimes gives me vertigo, Whit is so absolutely other I often wonder where he came from (and when I ask him he always says, immediately, and deadpan, “Texas.  I come from Texas.“) It is not just gender, of course.  But that is some of it.

He amazes me every day, and he also infuriates me most of them.  When I think about my son becoming a young man in this world, I am overcome with an intense sense of responsibility.  I want to contribute, in whatever way I can, to my son being a good man.  I want him to be a man who is not afraid: not of his feelings, not of his strength, not of the moments that feel like startling weakness.  I want him to respect women and men alike, for all the ways they are similar and also for all the ways that they differ.  I want him to know how to express the emotions of his heart, no matter how strong or ugly or passionate.  I want him to know that his mind and his soul and his body all have important claims to this life, and that he must respect the needs and calls of each.

My father has always held that children are 95% nature.  I didn’t believe him until I had two, so that I could compare.  And of course I cannot disaggregate gender, birth order, and basic personality when I parse the ways that Grace and Whit are different.  But how can I not ascribe some of their more bald distinctions to gender?

Whit has an indestructible sense of wonder and indefatigable hunger to understand how things work.  He crouches under the sink and puts his hand on the pipes, he unscrews the bolts on his lamp, he builds a 900 piece Lego in two hours.  He is an engineer at heart and I know just where he gets that from.  He is funny beyond all description but this humor can mask a deep seam of sensitivity that often startles me when it glints through.  I hope that I help him cultivate these parts of himself, but I also hope I can help him live in a world that I know may well shame him for them.  He is affectionate and loving, and I dearly hope that these instincts don’t fall prey to the world’s insistence that “real men” ought not hug their mothers.  In a recent “choose a biography” unit in 1st grade he chose Amelia Earhart and was mystified when I cried, openly, when he presented me with a book about her.  I have taught him to write thank you notes and to look adults in the eye, but I also wait patiently while he is rowdy and noisy, while he works through his fascination with guns, while he fake boxes me and says, “Bring it, Goldilocks” and I dissolve into laughter, asking him where the hell he learned that.

Read these 25 Rules for Mothers With Sons.  They will make you weep.  They remind me of the kind of mother I want to be to Whit

The Brita-filler

Not long ago I wrote about a Gail Godwin quote I love:

“The more you respect and focus on the singular and the strange, the more you become aware of the universal and infinite.”

There’s so much in this that makes sense to me.  Sometimes I’m struck by a tiny detail about someone that seems to speak volumes about who they are.  For example: more times than I can count, I fill up other peoples’ Britas.  I see them almost-empty in their fridges, and I fill them up.  Why?  I don’t know.  But it says a lot about who I am, I think.

Also: I inevitably, always have the coffee for the next morning all set and pre-programmed by 6pm the night before.  In a related, kitchen-centric detail, I’m an avid clean-up-as-I-go cook.  When I served Thanksgiving dinner to my family last year, every single dish was washed and put away before we sat down.  I cannot comprehend why others don’t do this.

Also: I still make old-fashioned photo albums, every few months printing out a bunch of pictures and pasting them into the pages with the peel-back clear covers.

What does this combination of small things say about me?  I’m neurotic, thoughtful, and sentimental?  Those would all true.

What are some of the tiny but wildly telling details about you?