everyday life

Questions and answers

A couple of people who commented on my Six Year post asked about what I am reading, both in terms of books and blogs.

Books is the easier answer.  I am currently reading Teach Your Children Well by Madeline Levine.  I recently ready Amy Sohn’s Motherland and re-read Operating Instructions by the incomparable Anne Lamott.  Next up is Lee Woodruff’s Those We Love Most.  After that, my list includes Allison Pearson’s I Think I Love You, Molly Ringwald’s When it Happens to You, Andrew McCarthy’s The Longest Way Home, and Will Schwalbe’s The End of Your Life Book Club.

Blogs.  I read a lot of blogs.  There are some I read in full every single time they write something, others that I tend to skim.  It’s hard to pick my favorites, and even trying to list the ones I read makes me nervous because I know I’ll forget someone.  Some of my favorite blogs are dormant right now, so I don’t list them. But here is a partial list of people whose blogs read most devotedly: Katrina Kenison, Jena Strong, Amanda Magee, Denise Ullem, Aidan Donnelley Rowley, Pamela Hunt Cloyd, Meredith Winn.  There are so many more!  There are over 100 blogs in my Google Reader, and I check that several times a day.

I read blogs in other categories, too.  I read several style blogs religiously, a handful of cooking blogs, and a couple of hilarious commentary-on-celebrity blogs.  I read a lot of what Lisa Belkin shares on Parentry at the Huffington Post and many pieces on Literary Mama.

For years I joked that you could tell a lot about someone from the magazines they read.  After all, I have such a varied magazine list that a stranger on a plane once commented on it.  I think that the same is true of someone’s Google Reader.  What they value, what they love, what interests them: these are all apparent from what is contained in their Reader list.

If that’s so, I think my Google Reader selections demonstrate someone who cares passionately about excellent writing, who thinks often and hard about parenting, who likes clothes and fashion and Hollywood news, and wishes she cooked more often and more successfully than she currently does.

What do you read?  Books, blogs, magazines?  What do your selections say about you?

Moments of change, red leaves, lost teeth, and the world spins on

The moment of change is the only poem. – Adrienne Rich

I had these words in my head all day yesterday.  And I sat down to my computer and realized that these two pictures from the weekend are both saying the same thing.  I shared both on Facebook yesterday: the tree, on my facebook writer page (shameless plea to please like it if you haven’t!) and Whit with the missing teeth, on my personal page.

Sometimes my body and my fingers and the tears in my eyes know something before my brain does.  In fact, that’s almost always how it goes.  According to Westinghouse Denta here, this, these leaves changing, these baby teeth falling out, it’s all the same, it’s all change, the irrevocable and resolute turning forward of the earth.  This, the way the world spins with a mute inexorability that is at once the most violent and the most beautiful thing I have ever witnessed, is the black hole at the center of my life.  It’s the still point at the center of all my writing, of all my tears, of all my feelings, of all my joys.

Because these moments of change, they are poems.  But what I believe is that every moment is a moment of change.

So it’s all poetry.  Every second of this life.

 

 

I want to remember

I want to remember Whit’s still-wobbly handwriting, and the fact that he unabashedly wrote that he “loves me very much” for public consumption in his back to school night letter.

I want to remember that part of my run where, in late summer and early fall, I have to push through a thicket of cosmos which are growing out of the sidewalk around a pole.  I love that these flowers grow so insistently in the middle of an urban sidewalk, and I love the way they remind me of my grandmother.

I want to remember the way Grace looks, curled on her side, when I wake her up every morning.  Her eyelashes cast shadows on her cheeks, she still hugs her brown and yellow bears to her chest, and she looks so peaceful.  When I wake her up she always smiles slowly and stretches her arms over her head before saying “Good morning, Mummy!”

I want to remember the outrageous, lucid blue of the sky in the middle of September, the goosebumpy way September 11th is always gorgeously clear, just like 2001, and the beginnings of the flash of orange leaves in the trees on my street.

I want to remember the surge of joy I felt as I watched Grace streak across the soccer field at her first practice this fall.  I was worried about how she would feel, returning, after her broken collarbone.  I need not have worried.

I want to remember the weekend afternoons when Grace and Whit sit on either side of me in bed, the three of us in companionable silence, reading.  When my company, and a book, satisfies them utterly.

I want to remember this golden moment, these ever-taller, lankier children who still carry echoes of the babies they were, the peace-sign and robot-patterned backpacks, the floating sound of lullabyes from the rooms of sleeping children, right now.

Inspired by Ali Edwards‘ beautiful post on this theme.  What do you want to remember?

Proof that Whit is my son

I have often joked that parenting is primarily the painful experience of watching your own worst traits animate in another person.  That’s certainly something I do often with my children.  Grace’s similiarities to me are immediately evident, but Whit’s are more buried.  His little boy bravado and bluster hide a core of deep sensitivity.  He can be sentimental and nostalgic, and is prone to emotional outbursts about things being over.  There were several moments this summer when I was reminded with breathtaking clarity how much my son’s emotional terrain resembles my own, though we are wrapped in such different packaging (and how different those packages are.  notably, his is adorable, and hilarious.  mine, not so much.).

Three experiences in particular did this.

Arguably the scariest ride at Legoland is called “Knights Tournament,” and two riders are strapped into seats which are then thrown around, upside down, all around.  There are 5 levels, and Grace and Whit are only tall enough to do 1 or 2.  Last summer we tried 1.  This summer we went for 2.  The first time we went on it was at dusk on our first evening in the park (we have a routine of going back after an afternoon swimming break and early dinner).  Whit disembarked and, taking my hand, announced, “Well, that was fun.  The best part about it was that you got such a good look at the sky.”

Our second night home Whit was absolutely inconsolable at bedtime.  He could not sleep.  He was tearful and clingy.  He told me he missed Legoland desperately, and was incredibly sad that something he’d so anticipated had come and gone.  It’s just going too fast, Mummy, he said, murmuring into my neck as we lay on his bottom bunk in the dark.  It’s hard to console someone when you yourself are overwhelmed with the precise emotions they are trying to deal with.

On the first Friday of school, I picked Grace and Whit up and took them to our local library to return some books and collect some others that I had ordered.  I let them each choose a movie also.  Two of the books in the stack the librarian handed to me were for Whit: Origami Yoda and The Way Things Work.  As we walked out to the car I had a stack of books and the two movies on my arms.  Whit held the door for me and then, trotting next to me to the car, announced, “Oh, Mummy, I love the library.  Look at all this great stuff we got there!”

I am constantly amazed and often flummoxed by the ways that genetics work.  Both of my children contain aspects of Matt, parts of me, and some mysterious element all their own; and through the particular alchemy of personhood they are each their own, unique, maddening, extraordinary person.

No blueprint

Last month Christina Rosalie, in a beautiful post called there is no blueprint for being everything, asked “Is it possible to be great, to be a Creative in the broadest sense, to live deeply into the world, and still create the measured tempo of home, the rhythm of domesticity, the moments of daily bread and wonder?”

I’ve been thinking about that question ever since.  I think the answer is yes.  I hope the answer is yes.  But even if it is, that yes isn’t simple, and we don’t arrive at it without major trade-offs.  As I’ve shared before (ad nauseum), I wrote my college senior thesis on this very question.  Focusing specifically on mother-daughter relationship in the work and lives of three 20th century poets, I explored the tension between motherhood and creativity.  My ultimate conclusion was that the work of these poets was enriched profoundly by the experience of mothering their daughters (and other children).  But the questions raised in those long months in Firestone Library have echoed through my life in ways I could not possibly have anticipated.

It gives me goosebumps, in fact, to think back to my 21 year old self hunched in her small carrel in the library, writing about the questions that she would intimately inhabit 10 years later.  It’s extraordinary, isn’t it, how the perspective provided by the arc of years illuminates choices we made long ago?

The thing is, talking about the ‘choice’ between motherhood and creativity feels artificial to me.  Sure, there are tensions – and they exist on myriad levels, from the initial choice to birth children as well as art all the way through the daily trade-offs of trying to be present to both small people and demanding creative work.  But the whole dialog is predicated on the assumption that the measured tempo of home (as Christina so beautifully puts it) is somehow at odds with creativity.  I’m sure that is true for many: creativity is a many-colored object, a phoenix of such startling brightness that it cannot possibly be reined in by the quotidian demands of life as a mother.

But the thing is, for me, it is precisely in that rhythm of domesticity that I find creativity.  It wasn’t, truly, until I had sunk deeply into the mundane details of life with my small children that I really began to see the magnificence that is at the heart of anything you might call creative about me.  My subject chose me, as I’ve said over and over, and that subject was these daily moments of bread and wonder.  I guess this just says that my creativity, such as it is (and I have a hard time thinking of myself as a creative person, I admit, which may well be correlated) is a sparrow rather than a phoenix, dun-colored rather than replete with dazzling brightness.  The more I think about it, I think that is just fine with me.

Please read Christina’s beautiful thoughts on this matter.  I’d love to hear what you think, and how this tension plays out in your life?  Separately, are there places in your past where, with hindsight, you can see the present glinting through, even though you didn’t realize it at the time?