Steady as She Goes

Here's the thing

2012-02-09T09:05:00.001-08:00

Life does not respect plans. Plans are a great coping mechanism for the vagaries of life, but they oblige life's cooperation not at all. Approximately three months ago, I learned this very personally. My husband came home with news that forever and essentially changed my understanding of my life -- where it was going, who the players were, how they operate, how I operate.

Perhaps we are headed for something much better. That remains to be seen. Perhaps we are headed right over a cliff to calamity. That also remains to be seen, but I'm the kind of person who generally tends to suspect the former rather than the latter, on principle. That's another great coping mechanism.

In either case, there is only right now to contend with. It doesn't seem that way. It very much seems like what matters, what requires response/reaction is (a) the already written past or (b) the unwritten future. Which is, as it turns out, another coping mechanism.

What I do not want to do is sit still, here, with the discomfort of not knowing where I am headed, who I am, who my husband is, what will happen to our children. There was this event that underscored how in flux all of these things actually are, but in truth, they have always been, will always be, in flux. Unwritten in the future, despite however they've already been written in the past.

The sensations that go with sitting still and feeling this in-flux-ness are uncomfortable. My chest feels squeezed tight, my heart pounds, I have a slight queasiness, my ears ring slightly, a lump forms in my throat. Hey, how about that future that might be? Even in ten minutes, or less, when I hit "publish"? How long until someone else reads this and what will they think? Or, hey, remember ten minutes ago, when my husband got really upset about something that I don't think deserved that response? Hey wasn't he crazy about that? What a jerk.......?

Nope, not helping. My chest is still tight, my heart pounding, etc. I am still uncomfortable. I am still in flux. The future is still unwritten. The only thing written -- and beyond revision -- is the past. This is all there is that is actually happening: this. Here. Now.

And despite all my coping mechanisms to escape this, here, now -- it is all there is that is happening. If I want to be present to my life, here's the thing.

This tightness, this discomfort, this lump in my throat -- do I believe they will last? No. If I sit here and pay attention, maybe I'll even notice the moment they change into something else. What will come next? Already, again, I am thinking about the future. All that is happening right now: my fingers hitting the keys, the way the lump is moving up my throat, and -- I suspect -- will soon burst out as tears. Yes. Here there are tears. My face warms, my chest heaves, I sob.

The lump in my throat passes. My chest is less squeezed. My heart still pounds. And I am here. Still here. And planning to stay. To the best of my ability.

Repeat until it sticks

2011-04-18T14:22:00.001-07:00

On the day they are due to depart for the weekend, the same day her period has started, the mother discovers her daughters have eviscerated a large floor pillow. The stuffing is all over their room -- which she will have to stop packing for their weekend trip away to clean up. As it is, she is not nearly as far along with the packing as she feels she should be so shortly before they are due to depart.

After first denying responsibility, the girls finally confess and show the mother other things they have "trimmed"-- including their bedroom curtains. The mother, trying very hard to be a "good mom," swallows her anger and though she admits to feeling angry with them, tries instead to focus on her gratitude that they would (if not at first, then finally) tell the truth and to remember that someday this will be funny. However, while restuffing the pillow contents into a new case, the zipper to close it breaks when she forces it a little too far; it might as well be the first few water drops heralding the leak in a dam. Then, while muttering to herself as she surveys and cleans up the remaining damage, she hears her daughters screaming bloody murder. She runs to where they are, worried something terrible has happened.

No. The younger girl has thrown water at the elder girl while she is on the toilet--not only the trapped daughter, but also the floor are drenched. The elder daughter is screaming in frustration. When asked why the younger one is screaming, she explains: "I told her not to tell on me, but she did!" The mother feels her own rage well up and her body starts shaking and soon she's yelling in an ugly mean voice. "What's wrong with you?? Are you animals?? What's so hard about treating each other and this house and me with respect for the rules and each other's feelings?? I'm trying to pack so we can go--you WANT to go...Why make it so much harder for me at every turn??"

Their expressions are a mix of amusement, fear, apology, regret, confusion and defiance. The mother tells them they are both on "time out." They both begin whining--the sound like nails scratching against glass at this point--about the injustice of being punished.

The mother's body thrums with the desire to hit something, strangle something, explode. It is terrifying. "I can't handle this! I can't handle this!" she yells and escapes to the back porch, the back door slamming behind her.

She is taking deep breaths. She is ashamed of herself and she is still livid -- as much with herself as with her daughters. A hard heaviness settles in her chest, a fist around her heart. She is fighting the urge to cry, or scream.

Abruptly, as though someone had interrupted her, she notices how blue the sky is.

"Dear one... dear one..." the mother hears -- or imagines, in such cases it is hard to know for sure -- God calling softly.

"Here," she responds as though teacher has called the roll.

"Here I am, with you," she imagines God responding.

She's mad again. "I don't believe you. It sure doesn't feel like it. You're HERE, in THIS??" she gestures back to the house, to her rageful outburst, to children who in just being children are inconvenient and challenging beyond their mother's limits, to a mother with limits that feel simultaneously too short and too lax. Why would God be in THIS?? And WHERE is there even ROOM for God in her anger, in her failures as a mother, in her children's childhood craziness? "I don't believe it," she says aloud, with force.

"Here, I AM here, WITH you," she "hears" again--and again. She allows herself to be consoled even though she really has no idea whether God is talking or she's just talking to herself.

What would that even mean? God, HERE, for this?

After a few moments longer, listening, breathing, noticing for the first time that leaves have started to fill in the overhead tree canopy -- until recently a skeletal cross-hatching of bare limbs, but suddenly alive with color; and their color, a strong green against the bright blue clear sky--the mother lets herself be reassured that life is intact and okay. She is practicing faith.

When she returns to the cleaning up and packing, her heart has room for itself and she is gentler and slower with both herself and her children, at least for a bit.

Growing up

2010-11-15T10:31:00.000-08:00

I've been in a bit of a developmental eddy lately.

It's been approximately two and a half years since I ate the foods that, for me, are directly analogous to drugs for a drug addict, or alcohol for an alcoholic. I haven't always eaten perfectly healthfully or moderately, or even uncompulsively, but I have abstained from what I accept is an addiction to the best of of my ability, as made possible through a lot of gut-wrenching honesty, accountability and surrender to the need to learn -- and the need to exercise discipline in the learning -- how to live my life in way that makes staying "present" to it possible.

As a result of these almost two and a half years, I am starting to recognize patterns of behavior and their sources in a way I haven't had the clarity to do before. Just lately, I've been feeling a lot of anger and hurt leftover from my childhood and recognizing where it comes from -- the specific things that happened. None of it is like suddenly realizing you were abducted by aliens or a victim of incest or anything nearly so dramatic or dark. All of it I knew as part of my history, but feelings I never acknowledged -- covering them immediately up with a sugar/chocolate high -- have finally bubbled to the surface and want to be named for what they are and recognized as appropriate to the experiences from which they stem.

And they are.

But they're also -- some of them -- over 35 years late. It's kind of a conundrum. I recognize the need to honor them, but I also recognize the need to frame them as from the past, about events that are over and done with -- facts of my history that sinking into the feelings they spawned, but were buried for so long, will not alter or improve. And which, in fact, expressed and experienced now, interfere with the present moment, delay my experience of what is happening now, and often prompt inappropriate responses to it. Maybe, if I lived alone, that history is a deep dark well I could crawl into and wallow until all the emotional intensity of those events from the past was spent and over. But I don't live alone. I live with a husband I adore and two small kids I also adore who need my attention and engagement. I have commitments -- explicit, implicit, emotional and logistical -- to friends, family and community which I need the wherewithal to honor.

On one hand, I need to be functional and attentive to the here and now, loving to the people I am with, and the moment I am in. But on the other hand, there is a -- justifiably -- very hurt, lonely, and scared little girl inside of me clamoring for reassurance and attention and love, who actually does also need those things in order to release me to be an adult.

There is a medium here, a middle way, and I'm weaving and veering this way and that way across it -- but it's the guideline. I'm trying to use it to keep my bearings, bringing my swerves to one side or the other shallower alongside its course.

Yesterday, the following very clarifying thought came to me:

A child learns love by receiving it; an adult learns love by sharing it. The child in me that needed love she didn't get will always lack it, as a fact of the past she lived through. I am not that child anymore; even if she does still live in me, we are not living in the experience she had. That is over. NOW, the best way to "get" the love "she" and "I" need is to share/show/experience/have/give love to others; we will learn it together, experience it together, and -- I pray -- she will keep us honest about soaking it up as it comes, about letting it sink in until our parched self is lush and juicy with it.

I don't expect myself to do this perfectly. I just pray for the ability and willingness to keep learning how to do it at all.

a drag

2010-10-04T13:17:00.000-07:00

Mama's draggin' today. PMS, a cold, and maybe remnants of the predictable annual spell of fall weather melancholy, and I'm completely done. Except that I'm not done by a long shot. I had a few hours this morning to myself -- ordinarily prime writing time. But after seeing Kay and Dee off to their schools (having forgotten Kay's homework and practically bursting into tears when a well-meaning new acquaintance asked with too much concern if I was okay), I came home, crawled back into bed, and listened to This American Life and Fresh Air podcasts. And I drank tea -- no coffee. It literally hurt to get out of bed when I finally had to go collect my brood.

Now the kids are home and a long afternoon ahead of us. Not done. Can't be done. Cannot be done. Must go on. Must figure out a plan. Must pay attention. Must... must... must...

Some aspects of motherhood are grueling.

Thank god for the Sacramento Public Library's stories online which is, at the moment, entertaining them while they eat lunch, and I sit nearby, taking this brief break to type -- though I'd rather be lying under my down comforter, eyes closed, a pot of tea on the bedside table.

Novel development

2010-09-23T10:24:00.000-07:00

Wrote something related to my novel for the first time in over four months recently. It doesn't fit with the story as I understand it right now, but it was fun to visit with some of the characters and practice my fiction writing.

Since I really don't know how or if I'd use this in my novel, I thought I'd post it here.

[Backstory: Tallie is the protagonist. She's currently separated from her husband and in the process of recognizing that the marriage is over. She's recently been introduced to Henry by her best friend, who is more eager than Tallie for her to move on with her life, and Henry and Tallie had an immediate rapport, which makes Tallie really uncomfortable since she hasn't reconciled herself yet to the inevitability of her marriage's end. Henry is a supervising veterinarian at a marine mammal rescue clinic, and he proposed, now well over six weeks ago, that Tallie, who by profession is a wedding videographer, come by to take some photos that he could use as promotional materials for the clinic.]

Henry's tour of the facility was quick, perfunctory. It's just his normal workday, she reminded herself. At each of the few enclosures with actual animals, he excused himself to check in with the vet techs, leaving her to explore the photographic opportunities. Her camera hung heavy on her neck – the light and the subjects not as inspiring as she'd hoped. She'd need a lot more equipment to get anything really attractive out of the possibilities present, though she thought she'd probably gotten one or two sweet shots of an otter with a bandaged back flipper playing with a vet tech.

After peering into the last, also empty, holding tank, they headed back toward the lobby of the building walking side by side through a sterile hallway. The overhead fluorescent lights had a pinkish cast offset by depression green walls. Even his sun-weathered skin looked sort of sickly – she didn't want to think about her own.

"There aren't many animals here right now, which we like to call a good thing. But it doesn't make an interesting tour. There were a lot more a few weeks ago…" His words, as they had been since she arrived, were slightly clipped, and for the first time, Tallie wondered he was irritated with her.

She felt heat rise to her cheeks. "I'm sorry. It was probably over a month ago, when you suggested I come by. I just… I'm sorry."

Henry didn't look at her, and she found the side of his face difficult to see or read. He didn't say anything either and just as it occurred to her to wonder if he was waiting for her to say something more, her contrition evaporated. Was he thinking she somehow owed him more than that, admittedly stupid, apology? She didn't know him well enough for him to have expectations of her. She tried to put together words that would convey what a mistake she'd made to come at all, that clearly she'd misunderstood his invitation, or he'd misunderstood her situation and decision to accept it, or…

He stopped, and she felt in her body the momentum to keep on going, to break into a run, and escape out the door with the illuminated red exit sign overhead just yards away. Already a few steps ahead, she forced herself to stop and turn back to face him.

He was smiling. "I'm really glad you called." His face was open and clear, his light brown eyes lit and happy. She believed him, felt a friendship in him that surprised and confused her.

The pressure in her chest dropped to her stomach. She fumbled for words. "I… wasn't sure."

"Let's walk down to the beach," he said, stepping through the space between them.

Big glinty waves crashed hard on the stony beach, then melted into backlit lush white foam shushing the next waves following as they pulled back out to sea. Henry walked toward a log close to, but safe from, the water's farthest reach. They hadn't said much since leaving the facility.

Tallie asked how many animals the facility could accommodate, how often it was full, how many vets were on staff. Henry's answers weren't brusque, but they were concise. She tried to think of what else to ask. Again, Tallie felt confused about what he wanted from her, why she'd come. A silence fell between them, at first a small thing, a possible wedge, but then as Tallie began listening into it, hearing the waves, and birds, and wind, it seemed to wrap around them, a bundling blanket. She closed her eyes. At some point she sighed, and felt she could almost lean into the comfort of it.

When she opened her eyes and turned to look at Henry, he was watching her, his eyes – again – so kind, his lips soft in barely a smile.

"When you look out at this," he asked, gesturing back to the ocean. "How do you see it?"

She felt an ease in her body that surprised her – how long since she'd felt so at ease? She considered the question, resisted lifting her camera to her eye.

She pointed to the horizon. "That's the emotional center of this view for me – if I were going to take a picture, I'd want it solid and formed, just the way we see it right now, the deep slate gray juxtaposed against a light dove sky, naming and focusing the line."

She stood, took a few steps forward and crouched, again avoiding a cliché by framing a shot with her fingers, though she imagined them just so. "But these waves are the story, their brutality collapsing into something so soft and…" She reached forward toward foam that had been tossed onto the beach. She was suddenly self-conscious and glanced back at him. "Is this what you mean?"

He was smiling. "Yeah, exactly."

She smiled back at him, returned to the log. "The real trick of the shot – if I were going to take a picture," she paused, and he nodded his agreement of the assumption. "Would be the light. The light, of course, is everything. It controls the whole deal. What you think you see before you take a picture has nothing to do with what you'll get, if you don’t let the light tell you where to stand, where to point, what's possible and what isn't. Some of that you can overcome with the right equipment, but it's all, always, about what the light wants to say."

"What the light wants to say…" Henry's voice held a smile.

Tallie smiled but continued, eager to say it aloud. "When I first started taking pictures, it was a huge surprise to me. It's like a camera gives light a voice to talk, and we suddenly have to listen. Once it's caught on film – or, you know, pixels, though they're more easily manipulated – it tells you whether the picture was possible. It tells you whether you're looking at the right things."

Henry laughed.

Tallie smiled and shrugged. "I know. It sounds far out."

"No," Henry said, touching her arm. "I love it."

Before she thought about it, she lifted her camera and took his picture. He let her, holding his open smile. She set it back in her lap and felt heat rise to her cheeks. "I… you were... The light was right." She said, then laughed.

"I believe it," he said, his smile deepening. He leaned forward slightly.

Tallie stood up. She was embarrassed. She smiled at him, held out her hand to help him up. "You probably have to get back to work," she said.

He laughed again and took her hand, pulling himself up. "Yeah. Well, I probably do." He let go her hand and brushed off the back of his pants. She immediately missed the warmth of his hand in hers, rubbed her own together, brushed off her own backside.

They turned back toward the hills and began making their way across the sand. "Thanks for coming out here, Tallie," he said.

She grabbed his hand lightly, quickly letting go. "I'm so glad I came, Henry."

A few minutes before the next big thing

2010-09-07T07:08:00.000-07:00

I have only a few moments for this post, and then, it's off to wake up daughters for their first day at new schools. Dee off to a new preschool, and Kay off to Kindergarten. We've dwelled mostly on the transition Kay's about to make, but Dee, too, is off to new things, and not only in the classroom. With Kay's entry into Kindergarten, our whole family will take on a new rhythm, which will adjust in only minor ways for the next fifteen years. I'm excited, I'm anxious, I think -- dare I say it? -- I'm ready.

I don't mean that I won't cry. As Skip left for work this morning -- he sadly has to travel out of town and can't be a part of this morning's ceremonies -- he asked me if there will be time in my morning for a good cry, or some other kind of emotional reckoning with the events unfolding. And there will. (And in that is some joy: back to a routine that involves time to myself! Yes!) But I am surprised by how ready, in the larger picture, I feel to step forward onto this new page, and new chapter of our lives together as parents and children.

I kiss goodbye, with complicated affection and a willing heart, my doubts and concerns about whether I've prepared Kay enough for this entry into the world. It may sound overwrought, but the truth is that as of today, Kay will belong to her school, her teacher, and her friends -- and, thus, the larger world -- in a way she could not and did not up until now. She has been ours. And now she's yours, too. And most importantly, she's hers.

Or, at least, she's at the beginning of becoming so. I can hardly wait to watch her unfold her wings and start to take flight. Because -- oh, I have no doubt, and through no credit to myself -- that girl will fly. And her little sister will catch that updraft, maybe even before it builds, to rise up with her. They are miracles, my daughters, and I am a lucky, grateful witness. My job remains, as it always has, to give flight instructions, sometimes sought and sometimes ignored, sometimes from the air, sometimes from the ground, but at this point forward -- increasingly --with my hands off the wheels of their own crafts.

God, guide my words and my daughters on their way.

Fear

2010-08-18T07:51:00.000-07:00

I was going to type out a list of my fears this morning. Not sure why that seemed like a good idea, except that I've been noticing that what really gets the chattering monkeys worked up is fear, and they've been really loud the last 24 hours. But as I started on the list, there is really only one that comes easily to mind right now:

Something terrible and preventable and/or perceived as preventable (particularly by me) happening to my daughters.

I want for the one reason this is frightening to be that I'm a good mother concerned for their well-being. But there other reasons behind that one. I don't want to fail at this one most important thing. I don't want to fail them, obviously -- both because I want them to thrive and because I don't want them to resent me. I also don't want to fail myself and live in the hell of endless self-recrimination. And, I don't want to be perceived as a failure by others. It's not always pretty, the truth. I feel shame about it.

There's a 12 Step slogan about fear -- that it stands for False Evidence Appearing Real. And in this case, I think it applies. It is a lie of my mind to believe I would ever do anything less than my absolute utmost to prevent anything terrible happening to my daughters that I could prevent. And, what's more, I would, I know, do it instinctually, from the very best of motivations: love. The fear that anything terrible that might happen to them might not be prevented by me is dependent on the erroneous assumption that I have the control to prevent terrible things. I don't. I may even be part of the process, make a decision in a chain of events, that leads to something terrible -- but I do not have perfect foreknowledge of how everything I do will turn out. I would never choose to cause something terrible to happen. And yet, terrible things might happen -- terrible things that I may even be able to find some culpability in, because I am their mother, involved in nearly every aspect of their lives, especially right now.

It is a difficult thing to live in a world where terrible things happen. But they do. I am inoculated from so many that I forget that this is just how life is, and I do not prepare my mind and my heart in some regular practice for their eventuality. I perceive them as something that can be kept at bay because they are kept at bay by factors largely outside my control, like my nationality, my socio-economic status, the language I speak, my skin color, my education and, especially, the ways the society I live in perceives the meaning of those things. But none of these things alter the ultimate truth of this life... that we will all experience terror and pain as well as awe and beauty.

The same person who told me that I am not interesting to her because I am a stay-at-home mother, also told me that "humility" means having the strength of character to suffer without resentment. And the more I think about this, the more I see its truth. Who am I to think that I should not suffer? Why go about blaming others, myself, the world, the circumstances, God for the fact of my suffering? Aren't I human? Is there any other choice for human beings but to suffer on occasion? Why should it surprise me when I do? Why should I hold my arms out straight against that inevitability as though I can keep it at bay? Only pride would tell me that I am different from the absolutely every other human being who will have to surrender to it. It bends us, it breaks us, and if we're lucky, it breaks us open, so that the beauty of life can penetrate that much more deeply.

Chattering monkeys

2010-08-17T08:14:00.000-07:00

It came as a huge relief to me the first time I heard someone else refer to "the chattering monkeys" in his head. I've got a big troop of them, myself. Lots of noisy opinion-holders on everything about me, everyone around me, and everything that happens, who chitter and chatter incessantly their more or less well-formed or baseless thoughts and feelings at nearly deafening levels (all, of this, of course, entirely between my ears -- and lest you worry, dear reader, entirely metaphorical).

On a bad day, I mistake their noises for my own feelings or thoughts. On a good day, it's almost as though I have located some magical volume control, and am able to turn their noises down so low as to make the voice that I identify most comfortably as me (it's the sane, reasonable, compassionate, and gentle voice, of course) the only one I have to listen to.

Yesterday two things happened that got them chattering to a profoundly distracting degree.

1. A family, for whom this news makes me glad, heard that their son is now invited to enroll for kindergarten at a school for which Kay is also on the waitlist -- and whom, I'd been given to believe, Kay was above on the waitlist. We haven't heard anything yet. The monkeys tell me that this means that Kay is not going to get in and that it is my fault. It is my fault for wanting her to get in despite having a perfectly good school in which she is already enrolled. Its my fault for having made a summer-long campaign of reminding the school administrators that I wanted her to get in and thus making a pest of myself. Nevermind that this is a school with a parent participation contract, in the final analysis (say the monkeys) obviously no one would want a person who by constantly drawing attention to herself and her hopes for her child makes clear that she would be a nuisance as an active parent. And not only that, but clearly, this is the universe's way of telling me to stop trying to manipulate events as I'd like them to be and the next thing that is going to happen is that we're going to learn that Kay can't go to the school where she is enrolled because we've moved out of the attendance area since she enrolled. We'll be scrambling mad-dash to get her in anywhere the first week of school and it'll be a terrible school where she will have terrible experiences and all of this will establish proof-positive my incompetence as a mother. And it is all my fault. This thing -- where all that has actually happened is that good friends of mine got good news -- is clearly, desperately, my fault. [Self-centered, much?]

2. I met with a person yesterday who is working through some of her character issues and was worrying that if she stops gossiping, exaggerating and "putting people in their places" that she will be boring. I asked her if she knows anyone who she would characterize as free of those issues and she said, "You." Which is not the answer I expected -- for one thing, I do gossip, exaggerate, and if I don't "put people in their places" out loud, I certainly do in my head -- but while I momentarily enjoyed the puffing up of the ego that went with her erroneous impression, it was not to last. In my intention to prove to her that those things do not make a person interesting, I continued the line of reasoning I had intended to follow with whomever she named. "And do you consider me interesting?" I was pretty sure I knew the answer to this one. This is a person who calls me regularly for a sanity check and who usually expresses astonishment and gratitude at my insight and usefulness to her at such times. Obviously I'm interesting, right? "Well," she said. "No offense [it was tip off, I realize now, that what followed was going to be offensive], but... I think what stay-at-home moms do is really valuable, but honestly I don't think I could say I think you're interesting."

This is, in fact, probably one of my most pernicious fears about being a stay-at-home mom: I'm boring. My daughters are going to tell people what I do or did as they get older with a dismissive, slightly embarrassed need for the person to whom they're telling this to recognize how far away they're going to fall from my tree, "She's, well, she's a [voice speeding up as it simultaneously drops to a whisper] ...stay-at-home mom." I'm not even interesting to them, now. I spend too much of our time together running errands, or issuing orders, or working on the computer. Even with other adults I often have nothing interesting to say; my reasoning faculties having all gone to seed since I quit the workforce. And why don't I have a driving professional ambition? Where's my list of noteworthy accomplishments? What's wrong with me? Why don't I behave like a liberated woman of the new century? How would anyone ever know that there is someone interesting in here? Is there? Maybe there isn't. Maybe my friend is just right, and I'm not interesting. Nevermind that she's totally wrong about me being without character defects, she's obviously right about whether or not I'm interesting.

"Hey, MONKEYS! Shut the [bleep] up!" never works, as it turns out. They just raise the volume. But exorcising them by revealing their voices in writing helps. For right now, anyway.

Today's practice is concluded.

Always something else to do

2010-08-16T13:13:00.000-07:00

There really is always something else I could, maybe even should, be doing besides blogging. Including, probably, "writing" -- which is really just to say working on one of the several pieces of fiction or poetry I've already sunk real time into and which will need much more to bring to "completion."

It is a guilty pleasure every single time I choose to do this instead. Because of the other things I could/should be doing. Because of the predictability with which it will draw my daughters, like magnets, to my desk side to whine about their boredom or something heinous the other has done. Because Skip approves of my "writing," but not my blogging. Because blogging has the particular drawback of acting like a fish hook caught in my sternum, with which my ego reels me back to the computer long after I've posted, over and over, all day long, to see if there's been a reader yet, or a comment, etc. There hasn't, so I console myself with one of those "quick"-become-an-hour visits to Facebook or other blogs I admire. The day slips away in pixels rather than in moments spent with my daughters, or admiring the summer tree canopy, or cleaned bathroom floors, or reading (or writing) a book, or any number of things I strongly suspect have greater value for humanity (including and most especially my own humanity).

But all of that said... I haven't written a thing all summer, except here. If it weren't for this blog, I do not believe I would have, either. This is -- and has been before -- the practice ground for the baby steps between blank page/dry well and tackling a writing project that "matters." Are you offended yet, rare and dear reader? Truly, I apologize, for my brutal dismissal of these words you are so kindly still here reading. This is a profoundly unpleasant post to put out into the world, and perhaps I shouldn't -- but that's the beauty/thing about blogging: here, I am writing. Writing. Maybe nothing that anyone else should read. But gah -- are you as bored by this repetitive theme as I am? -- I gotta do it somewhere. I do. Or, like that metaphorical dairy cow, I will explode. Eventually. And telling myself that I can't -- that I have nothing to say worth saying, no story to tell, no words to tell it -- is a lie. But I am unable to begin even to erode my stubborn insistence on that belief until I start to write. Anything. Even if it's just the same thing over and over again:

Here I practice. Here I tell myself I am a writer. Am I writer? I don't know. But I'm practicing. I'm practicing. I'm practicing. I'm practicing.

And trying to trust that will eventually yield something other than new iterations of the same sentence over and over again.

If you have an art, don't neglect it.

2010-08-15T09:33:00.000-07:00

The title of this post comes from a really beautiful video of the poem "How to Be Alone" by Tanya Davis. I'm a happily married woman with two small children, and I suspect that my single friends who relate to the poem as a commentary on, or inspiration to, their own lives doubt how deeply it pertains to me, too. But it does.

In very significant, beautiful ways that I do not take for granted, I am not alone. I don't sleep alone in a big empty bed, lonely for heat and passion and companionship. I don't face my night terrors alone, waiting for the light to break and reassure me that soon others will be up and about, available to talk to, be with. I don't sit to nearly every meal by myself, and have to muster the self-discipline and self-love to feed myself well. Loving my family helps me choose meals that are healthy, and then I get eat that food alongside them. I don't halt before leaving the house to go do something, wondering if I'm going to feel or seem weird going off to do it alone (though I do sometimes wonder if I'm going to seem weird for having brought my children along). When something extraordinary happens in my day, I don't spend even a second wondering who I can tell without bothering them or interrupting their lives. I have lived alone. I do remember loneliness. And I'm deeply grateful for its reprieve in these ways.

But in other ways, which I increasingly pay more than lip service to the truth of, I am alone. And we are all alone. And that is the nature of human consciousness. Maybe we're not truly alone: maybe God is always with us. This is something I frequently feel that I experience and I espouse belief in its truth, though I don't claim to understand what exactly I mean by "God" (especially in a theological sense), nor is it something I uniformly experience all of the time. Far more of the time, there is just me in my head, and so, so much of my reality, really, happens exclusively in my head that much of my experience is of being alone.

And everything in that poem resonates with me, whether metaphorically or literally.

Today the line that prompts me to practice is "If you have an art, don't neglect it." And it is much nicer to live alone with me in my head when I am not neglecting my art. Quieter and happier.

Today, I'm grateful for this outlet.

Just 10 minutes

2010-08-10T07:58:00.000-07:00

I have no idea how much can be said -- and far less, I imagine that is worth being said -- in 10 minutes, but that's how long I'm giving myself to practice this morning.

One of the gnarliest knots in my life these days is the tangle of my needs, my children's needs, Skip's needs and then all of those other people whose needs also wrap themselves around and into ours -- complicating the interweave further. I have responsibilities to address many of those -- given to me by love. Through love, I am tangled up in other people's lives. But without question, I get unproductively twisted up and intractably entangled by trying to address more of them than are, strictly speaking, mine to worry about. The trick is figuring out which ones ARE mine to address.

So often, it feels like trying to separate my needs from my children's needs, for example, I just get more tightly -- constrictively -- tangled. And what that means and how to walk through it is mysterious to me.

I think the reason is that I really just don't know HOW to do it. I didn't grow up in a household where the adults knew how to do it. Whether that's because nobody does, or because that says something about my parents is also something I don't feel able to judge.

Here's the good thing -- increasingly I remember that I don't have to know how to do the things that overwhelm me upon contemplation. I may not have any real choice but to learn -- such as in this case -- but I do get to learn, at my pace, in my time. For today, all the permission I need to stay on track is knowing that I don't have to get it RIGHT, I just have to keep trying, making mistakes, forgiving the mistakes and trying again.

--14 minutes--

Awe-full

2010-08-09T08:46:00.000-07:00

Had quite a weekend. A weekend in which a friend of mine would have found much to point to as "serendipity."

Something very interesting is happening in my life right now. It's as though I have emerged from a fog, or a forest so thick and dark that I could no longer identify individual trees and canopies, much less where I was going or -- for that matter -- whether I was going anywhere. And it's not that I've suddenly broken through to a mountain's edge overlooking a golden valley or some other inspiring vista. I'm still thick in the trees, but now, I can tell the path is well-marked, signage everywhere, and while I have no idea where it's going, really, I'm truly enjoying the journey.

My heart is tenderized and open.

Which is part of why, when listening to Anne Lamott talk on Saturday night about the writing life, the parenting life, the daughtering life, and the faithful life, I felt gut-punched over and over again by identification and -- through identification -- liberation.

Part of why, when having dinner with friends I haven't been in the same room with for two years (despite not living even 2 miles apart) on Friday night, I could feel our great big new house brimming over with love.

Part of why this morning -- just this morning, maybe -- I am awed. Too awed to write about anything else. Too awed not to write. Awed by mystery, awed by miracles, awed by serendipity, awed by friendship, by family, by two years without chocolate chip cookies (a travesty to maybe half the world, and oh, dear, dear, God, such freedom for me), awed by animals, by trees, by flowers, by music, by the internet. I am awed by the beauty -- in every sense of the world -- of my daughters and the gift of watching them, accompanying them, guiding them, as they grow. I am awed by the luck of having found Skip to spend my life with. I am awed by the way terrible trials and tribulations can be transformed and redeemed into gifts to self and others with the toolkit of courage, honesty and the willingness to make it -- let it? -- happen.

This is a strange, amazing world.

It's a little awe-full.

Huh? Oh... Yes, Right!

2010-07-30T06:43:00.000-07:00

I had an odd experience last night.

For the last probably fifteen years, I've had one favorite fantasy about what I'll be when I grow up: a writing teacher. Preferably at a high school or community college. A job where most of what I'd be doing, rather than helping people plan and inhabit a successful writing career, is helping them learn how to use and trust writing as a way to become who they are. I don't know anything about how to do the former, but the latter is pretty much my life story (the learning how part, more so than the perfectly knowing how, mind you.) Some days I get up a little head of steam on this and study the M.F.A. offerings and/or look up the teacher credentialing process. I've done similar work as a writing/teaching assistant as an upperclassman in college, and I loved it. I was good at it.

But approximately eleven years ago, that fantasy got interrupted by "a call" to seminary. It was really serious. I didn't know where it came from, and I didn't know where it was taking me, but it was very insistent, this feeling. I've never been very pious, or, for that matter, evangelistic. I'm just not so certain of what people should believe to feel comfortable in that role. I have a personal faith, that's ebbed and grown, mostly cyclically, over the years. It's informed by religion, but in no way defined by it. In any case, I found a seminary where I could be at home, applied and was accepted. I would have entered the fall after my first husband and I separated -- and, at the time, had I done so, it would have been as if to say, "I want a divorce." I was not prepared to say it at the time (that came approximately six months later), so I deferred for a year. By the following fall, I was in the crazy hormonal stew of no holds barred, falling head over heels in love with Skip, and seminary didn't even make sense to me. I deferred again, understanding that I would have to re-apply when/if the time came again that I was sure that's where I was headed.

But I'd lost that certainty. Not just because of Skip. I'd had a deep emptiness in my life around the time I got that "call," and that "call," and following it, propelled me out of that empty life into a full one -- even if it didn't take me where I thought it'd said to go.

In any case, last night I was at a community function, seated next to a man I've talked to before though never at length. A friend at the table asked him what his wife does and he said, "She's a hospice chaplain."

And then someone at the table said, "That's my dream job!" When all the heads at the table swiveled my way is about when it really penetrated with me that I was the one who'd said it. I can't imagine what expression was on my face at that moment, but in one of those perfect illustrations of the malleability of time, in probably not more than 2 seconds, my brain shuffled and examined memory after memory of feelings, of experience, of books, of things other people have said to me, and when someone who knows me well said, "Really?" I could look her in the eyes and say, "Yeah."

I have had the thought before -- but more as a nebulous kind of "I wish this kind of a job existed," not as a thing I thought I could set out to do. Until he said the words, it didn't seem possible, I suppose, to me, that a person could really have that job. Could actually apply for a position and be paid to sit with people who are dying, loving them across that line, and of then being there for the friends and family, in some meaningful, but totally non-clinical way.

I've been at several death beds in my life. Short of having my daughters handed to me after birth, and the moment I looked into Skip's eyes and learned what 100 percent mutual commitment and adoration feels like, I've never felt so much like I was in the right place at the right time. Teaching (both teaching writing in college, and working with learning delayed kids after college) had echoes of it. When I write, and when something I write communicates, that's a very good feeling, and very analogous to the one I'm writing about now, but short of those things, there's not much else that is quite so "right" a fit. I often feel like an odd person, kind of out of synch with the people and culture around me -- not in a horrible way, nor, I suspect, a unique one. I think primarily in way that reflects not knowing, and not inhabiting, what I'm here to do.

Not everyone believes in this stuff. But I do.

It's a little unnerving to stumble across an unmarked path and feel like you're supposed to follow it. But there's a quiet, private giddiness in me right now that I plan to let sit and germinate -- if that's in fact what it's going to do. The first footfalls along this path are ones I'll be taking all alone, and that's okay.

The gift of practice

2010-07-29T08:28:00.000-07:00

Yesterday afternoon I dropped my daughters off with my mom and went to say good-bye to Bear.

In all the time I've known her, maybe even from the very first time I've met her, Bear has always greeted me with a fiercely wagging tail and stuck her nose directly into my armpit. It was a special greeting she saved just for me. Odd, yes. But endearing, somehow.

Yesterday her tail didn't even wag. She couldn't get up. She lay in the grass in my friend's backyard, in a patch of sun, curled up in a ball. When she registered it was me, kneeling beside her, she put her nose on my nose and then licked it. Her eyes were wistful and far away. I know it's anthropomorphizing, but that expression in a person would have conveyed years of memories she was revisiting.

I sat with her until she closed her eyes again, whispering to her how much I loved her, what a fine job God had done in making her, what good dog, a great friend, she was. I apologized for encouraging her to "fetch" rocks. I rubbed her face the way I've done for years, and when she painstakingly stretched back on to her back, I rubbed her belly, as she loved.

It wasn't a long good-bye. Maybe 10 minutes. When she closed her eyes, I went back to check in with my friend for a tearful conversation about how to know when to let Bear go and how different a dog she is to us, who knew her when, than to folks who've only known her as an old, withdrawn dog; how few people will properly appreciate who it is that has left us when she goes.

If Bear were a person this might all sound more "appropriate," I suppose. But I loved that dog as much as I've loved many people -- if not always quite as well. And, she loved me, more fiercely and faithfully than most people who've claimed to.

My friend was the one who had to give permission to Bear to go. Bear wasn't waiting for me. And I would have missed that goodbye if I hadn't written about her yesterday right here. I would have let a moment pass that warranted noticing, that warranted experiencing -- and I'm so grateful I didn't.

Bear died yesterday evening.

It's a gift, the practice.

Bear

2010-07-28T08:50:00.000-07:00

I got nothing this morning but an intention to practice.

Just as I was typing that sentence, however, I got a text from a friend who is watching the quick decline of her dog. It's a matter of time, of course, for all of us. But Bear, a gorgeous long-haired, big, funny, and exuberant german shepherd is now staring down the last of her days.

It's sad. For my friend, of course -- which brings its own especially acute sorrow to my heart. And it's also sad for me.

Back in my single days, I used to "borrow" Bear after work some days. I'd take her to the river, or out for a walk. I'd never had a dog of my own, and she wasn't mine -- more like a dog-niece. But we had a bond. She trusted me -- even after snorting a few nose-fulls of water when I threw a rock in the river for her to "fetch." And I trusted her, even after she barked and barked at me one day as I was sobbing hysterically over the end of my first marriage.

The stories that her friends will tell of her for years are classics. The chocolate cake that disappeared on its way to a birthday party, despite Bear's being in the back of a car, and the cake being in the next row of seats. The dog friends she broke out of her yard to go visit, blocks and blocks away. The dead rotting salmon she rolled in just before Thanksgiving dinner. My friend, one-time, lost for words to keep Bear from running around the house like a maniac, yelling, "Restraint, Bear! Restraint!" (We still laugh about how helpful that would be as a dog -- or kid -- command, if it worked.)

Bear wasn't always endearing -- but some how she's always been deeply loveable.

My dog and Bear were buddies back before my friend's and my real kids came on the scene -- they both got relegated back to "dog" status afterwards for several years. But while Corrina, my dog, can still go unnoticed even under my feet in the rush to meet my daughters' or my own needs, Bear's always captured some part of my attention when I visit. For one thing, she still greets me like I'm arrived to spring her for an afternoon and forgives me when I don't.

That won't happen again, now. She's weak, fading fast. If I don't see her soon, I may not ever see her again.

Today's practice is concluded. I have some place to go.

practice, practice, practice

2010-07-26T11:09:00.000-07:00

Skip and I have been particularly drawn lately to a recent finding among child development researchers that children who are praised for effort, rather than outcome, tend to try harder and achieve more over their lifetime. So, we try to keep that in mind when, as solid citizens in our generation of parenting peers tend to do, we are constantly affirming and praising our children.

But just recently, it's occurred to me, as someone who often feels a little lost at sea if no one has told her recently how well she's doing, that even the "right" praise can be manipulative and unhelpful. For example, my parents unquestionably meant well, but their praise was overloaded with meaning and value to me. As a child of divorce especially, constantly looking for the reassurance that they weren't about to divorce me, I came to depend deeply and -- I see now -- a little neurotically on their validation of me. Consequently, I worked hard to be however, and whoever, was going to elicit that much needed pat on the back and assurance of security.

I've got a long way to go but, I'm working on -- at 41! -- learning how to validate my own efforts in life, without looking to someone else, and without requiring a specific outcome. It requires a depth of honesty about why I'm doing what I do -- what my intent is, who I'm trying to impress, etc. -- which I try to give, but I recognize that I do sometimes hide the truth from myself.

That's all I have to say today. I'm out of the time I've allotted for practicing.

Practicing, practicing, practicing -- without being overly-attached to outcome. Hey, good job, Phoebe!

Trying to Remember

2010-07-22T08:55:00.000-07:00

In order to post more often, I realize I have to give up the desire to be artful every time (not that I am -- but the pressure to try to be is always with me). I have to be willing to talk about what's going on with me right now, even if I don't know whether there's an audience for it, or should be.

So here -- I practice again today.

Today I am committed to the work it takes for me to be able to remember and experience that I am in kinship with everyone I encounter. I may not understand how that works. I might not even FEEL it as true all of the time. But there is not a living being to whom I am not kin. It may sound sappy or naive and simplistic, but over and over again in my life, I am brought to recognize this as the central fact of my existence.

When I cannot (or do not) live in a state of kinship, then I feel out of place in the world -- on the outside and ill at ease. Feeling kinship -- or, in another way of expressing it: a responsibility and love toward all of life, and a joy in its very existence, and in my great luck of existing among all of you -- this is what I want more than anything else in my life. Not as an always and ever state of being. I'm human. Never going to happen. But to be there more of the time -- to be there most of the time -- that, maybe, is in sight.

And, I am learning, I cannot live in a state of kinship with those I hold resentments against, or live in fear of what they think of me or might do to me. I can't live in a state of kinship with others if I'm holding resentments against myself. Happily, today, I have a path to follow which promises me relief from the ways I hold others and myself apart. I know real people who do live in kinship with others most of the time. And I hope, I pray, I'm on their path, even if miles and miles behind them.

For today, my job is just to keep moving in their direction to the best of my ability, one footfall at a time.

That itch

2010-07-21T09:48:00.000-07:00

is back and growing.

One of these days I'm going to be working on my novel or short stories again.

One of these days a poem is going to knock gently, but increasingly insistently, until I give it the ink it asks for.

One of these days I'm going to burst out in words again.

Skip told me today that he'd read about some author somewhere who'd said (something like): "A writer is like a milk cow... If you're really a writer, at some point you just gotta get the words out, or you're gonna burst; and best of all, is to release some daily."

Oh, for a daily practice! There will be a time in my life, I trust, I know, when I will have a daily writing practice. Here -- for all that it is not, and for anything it is -- is today's.

Wish I had the time...

2010-07-09T10:30:00.000-07:00

Just read a passage (below) from Judith Shulevitz' The Sabbath World and immediately began thinking of all I'd like to write about it... but ironically, I do not have the time right now.

For now I'll just say this much: Dang. This woman has put to words a dynamic in my life as a stay-at-home mother that I have gone in and out of awareness of, though never to this level of articulation. The quality of Time that goes with this job -- the experience of it -- and my guilt about the expansiveness in it, which leads to "corrective" measures that greatly reduce the pleasure I take in it -- is a huge part of my experience of this time of my life. I'm so grateful for this description of it, which helps me to see and know it for what it is -- rarefied in our society, and, simultaneously, exalted as ideal and reviled as unredemptively unproductive -- and to recognize in myself the ways I take those messages in as messages about MYSELF and find discomfort in the fit (both sides of it), never quite feeling like I fit anywhere, as a result.

Hopefully, I'll come back to say more about that -- in the meantime, here is the passage (for spurring your own reflections...)

From The Sabbath World, by Judith Shulevitz (pg 23-24)

Home is the place where we dream of escaping the time-and-motion calculus [of the workplace]. Family time is best measured by the activity, not by the clock. You serve your stew when it's ready, not when it has cooked for an hour. You put away your sponges and cleaning fluids when your bathroom is clean, not after five minutes. You nurse a baby until she's full, whether that takes ten minutes or forty. This form of time measurement is known as task orientation, and it is the kind of time that is kept in less industrialized societies. Task orientation is also characterized by a tendency not to make overly fine distinctions between "work" (doing chores) and "life" (chatting, eating, relaxing).

People used to working a set number of hours often find the task-oriented approach to time scandalously wasteful, an attitude that can contribute to misunderstandings not only between industrialized and non-industrialized cultures but also between spouses, especially when one works out of the home and the other stays in it. "Despite school times and television times, the rhythms of women's work in the home are not wholly attuned to the measurement of the clock," E.P. Thompson wrote. "The mother of young children has an imperfect sense of time and attends to other human tides. She has not altogether moved out of the conventions of 'pre-industrial' time."

But time in the home is still money. Feminist economics has taught us that the domestic sphere floated above the sordid dominion of the dollar only because it relied on the free labor and the forgone opportunities of women. Ever since women grew weary of the unwritten rule deeming their time worth what they were paid for it, it has gotten harder to find anyone.... to invest the time to meet our most intimate physical and emotional needs.

We all know what it feels like to give short shrift to ourselves, our families, and our children, not to mention the stranger in our midst. It feels disgusting. Our bodies, our houses, and our relationships spiral toward disorder and decay. Our nails lengthen because we forget to cut them. Our eyesight blurs because we can't be bothered to visit the eye doctor. Slime accumulates on pantry shelves. The tone in our spouses' voices hardens. Children mutiny at times seemingly calculated to be inconvenient. Too busy to attend to our own needs, we lack sympathy for the needs of people who seem less busy than we are. That, too, has consequences. Before long, the underemployed become the unemployable, then the menacing mob.

What I Should Have Said Was... Nothing

2010-05-27T13:32:00.000-07:00

Recently Skip and I watched Mike Birbiglia's stand up DVD, and with all due deference, since then I find myself generating circumstance after circumstance in which what I should have said was, well, nothing. (So I thought I'd post examples on my own Secret Public Journal.)

Two instances come to mind, and in a minute one of them will make clear why I am ending a blog-silence of over 10 months to share it. Let's start with that one.

1. I've been working out, on and off, for over the last ten years with the same personal trainer. There are a combination of factors to explain this: first and foremost, I just like him. He cracks me up and I appreciate his personal vision and commitment to physical fitness as a doorway to personal empowerment. Also, his workouts are never quite the same so I don't get bored doing the same thing over and over again. Boredom while exercising, I've come to see, is really unnecessary, and kind of a shame. Also significantly: I seem to completely forget what I can do (physically) when I am not overseen by someone to whom I am willing to surrender some authority about my limits. Left to my own devices, I am apt to consider everything that might actually result in strength development just a little too much work. (A shorter way of saying that might be: "I'm lazy.") But last, and far from least, my workouts with him during the process of leaving my first husband and beginning to get to know and then marry Skip cemented a feeling of friendship and kinship. He's seen me through some shit. Though I'm older than he is, we both sort of feel like he's my older brother.

In any case, a good friend who knows that I work out with this guy stumbled upon a blog post by someone who had recently completed Sacramento's first "Fit-Crawl."(Think Pub Crawl minus beer and pubs and plus gyms and workouts -- okay, it wouldn't be everyone's idea of fun.) I wish I could say I had completed it, too -- I'd kind of meant to, and then let my life with small children serve as excuse and distraction. Well, my trainer's location was on the route and the blogger, without naming him, radically misrepresented him and his philosophy to such an extent that I thought it was genuinely funny. It said that he didn't think women like to be strong. I don't really know any man who is more committed to the correction of that popular misperception, so I told him about it. He didn't seem to be as amused as I.

I know, right? What I should have said, was uh, nothing. Well, it gets worse.

He felt publicly attacked. Even though I think she probably intended to be discreet, I had to concede the point; I mean, she did make the comments on her own Secret Public Journal. And I gotta say, even though she didn't say his NAME, anyone who knows the Sacramento alt-gym scene would know immediately who she meant. The friend who forwarded me the blog doesn't work out with him and yet she recognized the reference.

So, not only did he post a long correction as a comment on that blog -- which I can't imagine any circumstances in which if I were the author of that blog I would take in stride and respond to in friendly dialogue, though I think he tried to convey that as his intent -- but then I, not leaving well enough alone, had to chime in. I just didn't want him to look like a crazy person who scours the web for any potential misrepresentation of himself and then responds at length. But as I've read, and re-read, and re-read, and asked friends to read, my own post (which is identified by user name of this blog), it just looks worse and worse to me.

Here, check it out and form your own opinion:

http://yeptheyareallmine.blogspot.com/2010/05/fit-crawl.html

I know, right? What I should have said, obviously, was nothing.

But so, here's why I'm breaking my own blog silence: Just in case, JUST IN CASE, you the Kimberly of yeptheyareallmine find me here, please know: I really did not mean to crash your scene in an intrusive way. I admire both your writing and that you did the Fit Crawl. Really. Especially as a mom with small kids, I get what that means. I'm impressed. In a different setting I think we'd be friends... Well, I don't really know that, but it seems possible...

I do think you got Chip all wrong, though.

Okay, stopping here, on this one.

2. After playgroup today (during which I double-checked with all of my mommy friends whether I'd just gone totally over the deep end in responding to the situation above -- and was not exactly reassured by their responses, probably for good reason), I took the kids to Trader Joe's where we ran into some other friends -- the mother among whom asked me what cheese goes well with Cauliflower.

Tough one -- what do you think?

I suggested Swiss or Jack -- for some reason it really seemed to me that a white cheese would be preferable. (I don't know, orange cheese on white cauliflower -- more colorful, but somehow not appetizing...) At which point a woman of indeterminate age chimed in suggesting that a sharp cheese might be best.

She looked really familiar. And while we all discussed the potential options (settling on a sharp white cheddar), my brain ran through hundreds of possible connections with this woman.

"You look so familiar to me," I said to the familiar woman.

"Do I?" she said with a funny distancing smile.

I tried to laugh, "I guess I don't look familiar to you, then." (I know, right? What I should have said was... well, it gets worse.)

"I often look familiar to people," she said. "I guess I have one of those faces. But let's just say this, I am definitely of a different generation. You have small kids."

First of all, I have to say she really didn't look like someone who was old enough to be my mom -- but that's when I figured out who she was. It's just, at this point, I didn't have the courage to say so.

Instead, I pushed my cart around the store absent-mindedly, trying with one third of my mind to remember what we needed, with another third to keep my daughters in sight and under control, and with the other sorting through memories of her son and my one significant interaction with her (when I called her to tell her that her son had a plan to commit suicide that weekend). I'd met her son in high school. And I'd loved him. Not exactly romantically -- though he was, at the time, the most sexually charismatic person I'd ever met, an effect to which I was far from immune, and not alone in experiencing -- but as a friend. I remember one afternoon, leaving school after an intense experience together in our Peer Counseling class, when he said, "We're going to be friends for the rest of our lives."

And I said, "Okay," sardonically, because, honestly my opinion of myself at the time did not easily incorporate the possibility that this very attractive, very popular, very charismatic boy was serious.

But he stopped on the sidewalk and waited until I turned around to look back for him, and said with a deadly earnestness, "For the rest of our lives. I'm serious."

And then for the next several years he started to convince me. We remained friends throughout college -- long past the suicide scare (which his mom seemed to take seriously at the time I called, though he reported to me afterwards that she was really pissed with him and insisted he call me to apologize for scaring "that poor girl" -- and in retrospect, really, she obviously knew him better than I did). It was one of my most valued friendships. We knew a lot about each other and could start a conversation after a long separation deep in the middle of the gnarliest truths about how we were doing. I really loved him.

But the summer after college I finally slept with him. It was not exactly all I'd hoped it be, for a couple of reasons: (1) midway he stopped, hitting his forehand with his hand and rolling away from me while muttering to himself, "you shit, you shit, not with HER;"and, (2) I was cheating on my boyfriend to be there. And when I told him I'd have to tell the boyfriend, he asked me not to. He rightly predicted it would be the end of our friendship. And in that moment I wanted it to be. I was so hurt by his drawing back, by calling a mistake something I thought I'd wanted for so long, I promised the boyfriend I wouldn't talk to him for awhile. By the time I knew what I'd really lost and was ready to mend fences, he was long gone and out of reach for good.

My life has turned out very well -- wouldn't change anything that got me from there to here if it altered where I'd end up. But memories of that time still have the effect of making me feel embarrassed and sad.

And then, today, his mother and I passed each other yet again in another aisle. "I think I've got it," I said. "Do you have a son named M___?"

I know, right? What I should have said was...

Of course she has a son named M___. And my name meant nothing to her, which was awkward, though she was polite and not unkind. She told me where he is and how he's doing -- you know, at the surface. I could tell she wouldn't even remember me enough to mention to him that she'd run into me, and I seriously, seriously hope that's true.

Because what I should have said, seriously, was nothing. You know, if I were sane in that kind of a way. Which apparently, today, I'm not.

[Sigh.]

Sometimes the moment is the present

2009-07-23T15:24:00.000-07:00

I rub her back in clockwise circles, my hand's length nearly her back's width. Her head is pressed against her pillow, one eye open.

I wonder what she's seeing, and what words accompany the images, if any. I try to remember being that small. She's got the ten-mile gaze which might mean she's mostly asleep but her brain just hasn't remembered yet to pull the shutters of her eyelids. Or, maybe she's replaying the morning, remembering things said. Does she yet fantasize about things she wishes she would have said?

She blinks and her eye refocuses on the rise of the pillow created by the impression of her head against it. The white pillow case must rise like a hill, creating an horizon line from her vantage, the shadows telegraphing its roundness, which she may someday be able to see with a visual artist's eye, in that compressed two-dimensional recognition that it is only color and gradations in color that tell us the shape of the things we see. Touch confirms it, but seeing isn't touch -- a concept that only came home to me when I began to take art classes in college. Seeing is interpretation. Art is translation.

She blinks again and her eye drifts to the bangs from her forehead, falling to the side of her nose. I remember that cozy private den -- the dimensions of space framed by my nose, cheek and hair, and the rise of a pillow. Even recently, lying on my stomach on a sun-warmed towel after swimming in cold mountain waters, I was noticing it -- though it was my arm serving as a pillow. The light's play on that small essential sanctuary of time and space, the curve of the bridge of my nose, the remarkably vast and minute distance between the surface of my eye and the surface of my pillow (or arm), the red shadows cast by the fine strands of hair that rest across the distance -- it's holy.

She blinks again and refocuses on me, discovers I'm watching, and, too late, I close my eyes.

She rolls over under my hand, and when I reopen my eyes, both hers twinkle at me.

I wish I were the mama whose eyes twinkled back at her in conspiracy -- "Let's spend this afternoon together letting life break open before us and amaze us." Instead, I sigh and redouble my efforts to encourage her to close her eyes to dream.

Coming through -- I seem to be

2009-04-15T23:03:00.001-07:00

We used to have a block print poster above the desk in the office, before the office became our daughters' bedroom, of a monkey holding a firecracker, his mouth wide open as though he were about to toss it down his throat to his stomach, in which roared a fire. In the left bottom corner were the words: "to be okay"; and in the bottom right corner: "everything's going."

"To be okay -- everything's going."

Intentionally ambiguous. Was everything going to be okay? Or, to make everything okay, did everything have to go?

It's been over two weeks of not even one complete REM cycle due to one or the other of my daughters' chest-cold-aggravated night-time asthma, two weeks of long extra hours for Skip at work, two weeks of both girls testing the power of whining and screaming, last week's spring break for Kay's preschool, this past week my mother's out-of-town vacation, a week of new computer-on-the-blink frustrations, yesterday's throwing out my back, and -- tonight -- an overdue date night thwarted by Kay's onset of the stomach flu...

Sigh.

I'm tired. And, I'm surviving. Tonight, that sort of leaves me in awe.

I'm not super-human. I've been crankier than usual the last few days. I've yelled at my kids to the point of needing to reassure them that I was out of line and that I know they're just being kids and that I love them just as they are. My meals have been big and sloppy, spilling over into terrain I've been able to avoid for nearly 9 months. I feel a little depressed and prone to isolation.

I'm not proud of any of this -- but I'm not mistaking it, either, as anything other than ordinary human frailty, and in that process forgiving myself enough to be able to stay within my own skin. To be here. To ride it. To let myself feel and enjoy the moments of hilarity, pleasure, and comfort, even amid discomfort and unease. To keep large meals from becoming coma-inducing binges or an excuse to eat foods I know will trigger such a binge. To remember to be kind to myself.

That's a new thing in my history as a mother. And it's amazing. I love it.

Coming through -- I seem to be.

Wind

2009-03-31T12:35:00.000-07:00

On Sunday evening, I was in Mendocino. It'd been windy all day -- rattling windows, peeling back shingles kind of wind.

I had dinner at a restaurant called "The Ravens" and was nearly alone in the dining room, with a wide view of the bluff above the outlet of the Mendocino River flowing to sea. Scraggly, wind-whipped pines rocked and swayed at the brink of the bluff, backlit by a slow sunset.

As I watched, several large black birds (ravens, undoubtedly) swung by, dipping and veering in the wind. Occasionally they'd attempt to alight on one of the pine boughs, and just as quickly be swept off, their wings flapping rapidly to regain equilibrium.

Perhaps the metaphor is a stretch, but it is lingering. Motherhood is like that wind in my life. It is a force completely larger than me, has a direction and a power that I cannot reign in or control. Truly my choices are limited to these: ride or resist. Neither is going to help me gain control of the pressures at work on me. That isn't an option.

I am a mother, at the whim of the unbearable depth and power of love and responsibility that was my daughters' afterbirth -- and all of the ways it buffets my ego and calls me out of the comfort of my own little cozy conception of who I am and what I'm supposed to be doing. It's beautiful -- exquisitely so. Often pleasurable with a joy that is worth life itself. And yet -- it is a kind of violence sometimes, too.

I can resist that, and flap my wings, expending that energy fruitlessly, fearfully, and exhaustingly. Or I can open them up, glide, and let it take me where it is going. Which is not without its own fearsomeness -- but is, at its most practical, a much more efficient response, and which allows for an exhilaration that isn't possible otherwise.

May I ride the wind like a raven, reminded when I resist with a gentle push from which I can recover with a rapid flapping and another surrender. Over and over again.

In God's Hands

2009-02-11T13:29:00.000-08:00

2009, man. It's already been as full as a year for me in many ways.

Yet I'm so glad it's only February. It feels like a year that bodes lots of trouble , but -- and this is the source of my gladness -- also lots of roots-deepening and rich, rich joy.

As disclosed previously, I am on a 12 Step journey. Recently, I "completed" Step 3 (since it's pretty much a daily, sometimes hourly commitment, it's pretty much impossible to "complete" but I have finished the work suggested by my sponsor through Step 3 -- next up: Step 4, which is a topic fit for another post).

Step 3 is one of the deal-breakers for a lot of people who walk into 12 Step program rooms and then leave them just as quickly. And mostly for this nasty little three letter word: "God."

The Step itself is: "Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood God."

It's easy, and common, for people to think that "God" means the same thing, in rough enough terms, for everyone who uses it. Usually something along the lines of an omnipotent, omniscient, more or less loving, more or less wrathful, deity who is responsible for the creation of the universe, and who metes out karma with a figurative or literal long pointed finger, more or less justly. I know there are plenty of people in 12 Step programs for whom this God works.

It doesn't for me. I can't understand God that way. But I don't understand God, either -- so then, there's that.

Here's what I have come to understand: I do not have, and cannot obtain, conscious access to the power or strength of character within myself to reliably make the right choices for myself. Certainly where food is concerned, but in a lot of areas of my life. I wish it were otherwise. I do. But take Facebook, as a trivial example. I will futz around on Facebook for hours while any number of things far more important to me are not getting done. I'd like to get those things done. I know that they need to be done. Often I even recognize how easy and more pleasurable they'll be to do compared to working myself up into an anxious tizzy about all the time passing while I "FB," but somehow, whatever mechanism it is that allows other people to choose their actions and implement them without delay is not functional in my life. I've got forty years of experimentation on this in various arenas, and feel quite sound about this claim. I'm not without self-esteem, or the ability to recognize that I have many lovely traits. But the ability to self-regulate obsessive-compulsive behavior is not one of them.

So -- all would be hopeless. I would be certain to die of morbid obesity or some other result of this character flaw except for the very strange fact that it works for me to allow myself to believe that a power greater than me, outside of my mind (or, at the very least, outside any part of my mind that I will ever be able to control), will not only help me to self-regulate if I ask, but wants to. Wants my freedom from obsessions of all forms which divert my attention from the business of living.

I don't ask myself what that something is, really. It kind of makes me nervous to ask -- like peering over a cliff-face down to the bottom of a very, very deep chasm. But I call it God.

And for the last several days, I've been putting my life in God's hands. I have a ritual for it. I gathered a bunch of symbols and photos of the things in my life that mean the most to me and put them in a little sack, and then every morning, and sometimes throughout the day, I pick up that sack and set it in a set of porcelain hands someone gave me a long time ago.

The thing about those hands -- they're so feminine, so graceful and open -- if I am developing my own new understanding about God, I like the image those hands convey.

One of these kinds of days

2009-01-08T14:38:00.000-08:00

After slamming the door to their room, after slamming the cabinet doors as I put the dishes in the dishwasher away, after making as much noise as I possibly could to express how completely over my head FED UP I am of today's particularly protracted naptime battle, I found myself screaming at the top of my lungs:

"All that I want is for you to NAP at NAPTIME! All that I need is for you to SLEEP when YOU are EXHAUSTED! IT IS NOT TOO MUCH TO ASK!"

But, of course, it is. I don't know why and it's hard for me to understand how human beings lasted this long when we are so completely aggravating to our parents as children. But today, apparently, it IS absolutely too much to ask.

Unfortunately it is also too much to ask of me, apparently, to suck it up and accept that. Honestly, I'm about ready to slam my head through the sliding glass doors listening to them fight off sleep. Sanity, of course, would be to somehow come to terms with the fact that if at a quarter to three if they aren't asleep then I don't want them to fall asleep, either. But it's just one of those days when I am done with their company. I need a break -- and the only way I can get one is if they stay in there for just a couple of hours and be QUIET.

Thank God these days don't come around often. Because, wow, they are humiliating, exhausting and demoralizing beyond belief when they do.

For right now, the miracle is that I finished my lunch and I'll make it to dinner without any additional food. That's not a small something. But it doesn't make it all that much easier to look myself in the mirror and face how completely outmatched I feel right now, and how sad that is. And how hateful it is to pit myself against my children. Feeling pretty flippin' low about that right about now. And wishing very much that I knew where to draw the resources to be the mother I'm sure everyone else is -- patient and kind, or in charge and controlled. I'm none of that today.

Today I'm at my wit's end, holding the bedroom door shut and insisting that I don't care what they do just so long as they stay in there until I've had a chance to catch my breath.

Four days from 40

2008-12-12T14:19:00.000-08:00

Our chief want in life is somebody who shall make us do what we can. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

I read this, this morning, and, well... Related.

I am four days from 40 years old and that's both irrelevant and totally pertinent.

I just get this. I want someone else to make me do what I am capable of. There are all kinds of things to which I sometimes aspire of which I am incapable. For example, I'd love to be able to eat anything I wanted without (a) overindulging, (b) suffering any digestive difficulty, (c) gaining weight, or (d) remaining preoccupied with what I'd eaten (or didn't) for hours or days afterwards -- this isn't going to happen. And today, I'm okay with that. I can't eat whatever I want without suffering for it in a hundred ways. Okay. Got it.

Also, I'd love to be able to make a living as a singer-songwriter. I love singing. LOVE it. And when I'm in the flow of it, I love writing songs. But I don't read or write music, I don't play any instruments, and it ain't likely anyone is going to pay to hear me sing anytime soon. This, too, I can live with as a fact of my life without feeling angst about it.

Really, this list goes on and on. I'd love to be able to trim my own bangs without looking like a victim of Edward Scissorhands' mentally disabled pet monkey. I've tried many times, but the technique escapes me. I'd love to be able to train as a boxer again -- but two babies later and my body's torn up. Some things just aren't going to go back together the way they were before and the effect is that I can't train without causing greater damage to parts of my body I rather enjoy having functional. I'd love to be able to do the splits -- or a pull-up -- or a handstand -- or a cartwheel. Now, possibly those things would be do-able in time -- with help. Training, etc.

You get what I'm saying. There are many things I'd like to be able to do -- some of which are impossibilities, and some of which are things that perhaps I could someday do with lots of practice and help -- but right now, I can't. I lack the skill, the know-how, the physical preparation, the practice, the magical powers... etc.

In any case, that's not the kind of thing Ralphie-boy is even talking about. Or at least, that's not how I heard it.

I want someone to make me do the things that I can do. Keep the house clean(er). Write a little something every day. Meditate. Practice the guitar for 15 minutes. Get daily exercise. Take a minute to recognize how profoundly blessed my life is -- how beautiful life is in all its forms. Dedicate at least an hour each day to doing something very intentionally with my kids, something that's for their education, entertainment, physical joy, curiosity, compassion and/or imagination...

After forty years, one hopes to be wiser. I don't know. One hopes to have taken herself in hand somewhere along the line and recognized this simple fact: There isn't anyone else who can make me do the things I can do but me. I'm it. The only savior who's coming.

That it's myself from whom I need saving is both totally pertinent and irrelevant.

Here we are and this is it. I am soon to be "officially" middle-aged. What I want for my birthday is some wisdom.

Family Traditions

2008-11-26T10:36:00.000-08:00

One of the rituals my family has always shared at Thanksgiving is for each person to read aloud a passage from something we especially liked over the last year (or, when I was a kid, that we found in some book that very day). Tempted though I am this year to read passages from some of Obama's campaign speeches, instead I am going to share a passage from a book I'm currently reading to which I particularly relate:

"To write, I have decided, is to be insane. In ordinary life you look sane, act sane --- just as sane as any mother of [young] children. But once you start to write, you are moonstruck, out of your senses. As you stare hard inward, following behind your eyes the images of invisible places, of people, of events, and listening hard inward to silent voices and unspoken conversations --- as you are seeing the story, hearing it, feeling it --- your very skin becomes permeable, not a boundary, and you enter the place of your writing and live inside the people who live there. You think and say incredible things. You even love other people --- [nearly as fully and deeply as you love your own children and your husband].* And here is the interesting thing to me: when this happens, you often learn something, understand something, that can transcend the words on the paper." in the words of the character Charlotte Bridger Drummond from WILD LIFE by Molly Gloss

In a spirit of Thanksgiving for the community of writers, artists, and mothers who find each other by whatever means they do and thus discover their kinship to people with whom they share no blood ties, I give thanks for you, fellow-bloggers/readers.

Happy Thanksgiving.

If by any chance, you decide to join in this tradition and post a passage from something you've read (or written) in the past year that is particularly meaningful to you at your website, please let me know. I'd love to read it.

*The actual wording of this passage in the book is "--- you don't love your children or husband at all." I am altering it to be truer to my own experience.

It's been awhile

2008-11-25T14:00:00.000-08:00

Yep, still here. Sort of. I mean, it's been awhile and I don't expect blogging to pick up on my list of priorities anytime soon -- but I do still expect to stop in and say something every so often. Probably just often enough to make sure I'm talking almost only to myself. But there are benefits to that.

Anymore I mostly use my writing time (a.k.a. the girls' naptime) to work on my novel. Which is great. I love it when I work on my novel. But just lately, I haven't been doing nearly as much of that as I have been working on my history as a compulsive eater. Today, 7,000 words later (yes -- 7,000; well, give or take a few hundred) I've finally sent it off to my sponsor and this afternoon I can't remember how to get into character enough to work on my novel.

This is only the very beginning of Step One -- for those of you in the dark, there are 12 Steps to the program of recovery from compulsive eating through Overeaters Anonymous (and let's just call this my online coming out party...) And I am anxious, a little, about how I am going to continue to work the steps and get any further with my novel. Especially in the holiday press of shopping, crafting, partying (I'm turning 40 in three weeks), wrapping, celebrating, etc. And, maybe I'm just not going to get any farther right now. And maybe, for right now, that's okay. Right now -- as in this very minute -- it's okay. But ask me in another ten and the answer might be different.

The thing is, over the last year it has become increasingly clear to me that I need help managing not just my eating but my thinking about my eating, and all the ways that the shame I feel about how I've eaten gets between me and the people I love most in the world. Especially with Skip and the girls, but also with my friends and family. And it's totally and uncomfortably humbling, but it's not a bad thing to ask for and get help. Mostly it's a reminder that all I'm supposed to be is a human being, which is to say: not perfect. Any other standard I hold myself to is destined to result in shame and misery because it is written into my very dna that I am and will always be flawed in simple and complex, common and unique ways.

I can't become perfect. I can, however, work on being kind, respectful, responsible, and honest with myself about the ways I am imperfect. And I'm really grateful for whatever gift of grace has brought me to the place that I understand that and am -- for today -- on that path. I'm hopeful this path will actually help my novel eventually. I believe it will.

For today, it apparently is going to help my blogging frequency, too.

Here's to a happy Thanksgiving for everyone. Yay, Obama!

A New Beginning

2008-09-22T15:45:00.000-07:00

Today's big plan was to get the girls to nap in the same room. For too long, whenever they are both here (they each spend a day a week with my mom), they have napped in separate rooms. We live in a small house. To lose access to two rooms (especially my own bedroom) during naptime is inconvenient, to say the least. Also, this is a precursor to putting them to bed at night in the same room -- a personal goal to achieve before my 40th birthday for no good reason except that it will give Skip and me a lot more flexibility in our evening lives. I want to feel like a grown-up again at 40.

So, after a long and fun morning at the zoo, I closed the door to the girls in their bedroom at 1p. Dee had fallen asleep on the car ride home, but woke up while I was reading to Kay (she needed a change -- fair enough, she'd taken a poop); as I left the room neither one of them seemed the least bit sleepy.

It was 2:30 before they were both asleep.

I had to go in four times -- once at 1:26 when I heard a loud, disruptive noise (among many, many) that I couldn't for the life of me figure out (it was Kay dumping out all of her legos onto the hardwood floor); once at 1:53 when Kay needed to go to the potty (also to poop); once, at 2:15, when after hearing screaming, I went in to find Kay standing in front of Dee's crib, trying to force her to drink water (I put Kay into her bed, kicking and screaming, and forced Dee to lie down for thirty seconds before leaving -- after I'd taken out all of the books, toys and dress-up clothes that cluttered her crib); and finally at 2:23 when I entered because Dee was calling for Mommy (Kay was already asleep and Dee needed her blanket put back over her).

Lord only knows how long they'll actually sleep (someone sounds kind of restless through the monitor, though not yet awake), but it feels like a small miracle that (1) they are still asleep an hour later, and (2) that I didn't eat our cupboards bare waiting for them to fall asleep as I anxiously anticipated a nightmarish afternoon of over-exhausted kids and over-exhausted mother. In fact, I didn't eat a thing.

Truly, a miracle.

That's my girl

2008-09-18T10:13:00.000-07:00

I hate bedtime

2008-07-14T20:13:00.000-07:00

I love climbing into bed myself, especially if I'm freshly bathed and the sheets are clean and I've gotten a good workout early in day. Oh lord. Heaven.

But I HATE putting my daughters to bed. Don't get me wrong, it's not because I'm sad to be parted from their company. By bedtime, I am done, done, done with three year old and 18 month old shenanigans. DONE.

Unfortunately, the worst of them are just about to begin.

Part of what goes wrong, I think, is that I'm always lulled by the bedtime routine. We get cleaned up. We brush our teeth. We get a glass of water. We talk quietly about all the highlights (and sometimes the lowlights) of the day. We dim the lights and read three books slowly and softly. I sing a lullaby. I tell them I love them. I kiss them goodnight and wish them sweet dreams. Honestly, by the time I'm leaving the room I'm just about sleeping on my feet.

The bedtime routine does not have that effect on my daughters. At least not lately.

The door closes and the younger one howls. Sometimes the older one coos to her, sometimes she says very sternly, "Dee! Lie Down! Be quiet!" If this sounds helpful, well, you're forgiven for not anticipating that as soon as the Dee DOES quiet down, Kay climbs into Dee's bed. If it weren't for the pause between Dee's settling and Kay's climbing in, I might miss it, since as soon as Kay's in, the wailing resumes. Or, worse, mutual giggling and gabbing ensues.

Worse, because -- while cute from a distance -- this reliably means that it will be another 1-2 hours before they both settle down again -- left to their own devices, which will not stay convival, no matter how sweetly it begins. It also means a minimum of another half hour of direct intervention. And did I mention that by the time I've left the room the first time, another 30 minutes of trying to keep it all together and calm enough to lull them back down is a little beyond me.

Of course, most nights I don't do this alone. "Second shift!" comes on at this point, and Daddy is usually fresh and ready for the job by some miracle for which I only understand enough to be deeply grateful.

As I am currently traveling far from home with both girls, solo -- because I'm arrogant and stupid and somehow convinced myself despite all of the warnings that it'd all be okay -- there is no second shift. Strange house, strange routines -- strange germs (did I mention we all have gruesome summer chest colds?) -- and though they mean well, my dad and step-mom are mere mortals. They're not Daddy. They aren't miracle makers. It falls to me. It falls to me. And I'm no miracle maker, either.

Tonight I lost my temper when I found Kay in Dee's bed. I dropped her onto her own bed and yelled at her for being so inconsiderate to me, to her sister, to her grandparents. She's three. Now, if you are a kind and compassionate soul, you might think to yourself, "Hey, now, Phoebe, give yourself a break. Just because she's only three doesn't mean she's not being inconsiderate." Bless you.

But here's a tip: yelling at your child about what a little jerk they can be (my words were nicer) and then slamming the door with the endnote, "now go to sleep!" doesn't work. It doesn't put three year olds -- or 18 month olds, apparently -- on the sleepytime dream boat. (With apologies to Anne Lamott who said it first and better.)

When I returned a few minutes later, slightly more composed, opening the door to two wailing children, I managed to resemble something more comforting. Enough so that Dee was contented with a gentle patting on the back, and Kay was able to compose herself sufficiently to say without tears or whining, and in fact, quite calmly and sternly: "Mama, I do not like it when you yell at me. I do not like it when you are angry at me. Do you understand me?"

"Yes," I managed to reply, both without laughing. Or crying.

Bleeding Purple

2008-06-13T09:45:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time, I fell in love. It was completely unexpected. No one, based on the entire of my life prior, could have foreseen who I would choose for my beloved.

I dressed for my love. I prayed for my love. I lost nights of sleep for my love.

And my beloved flourished. Was amazing and strong and the epitome of a truth that general society tends to discount and pooh-pooh. Namely, that ego and stardom may seem to rule the day, but passion, cooperation, and collaboration are the true winning strategy.

I was there, proud and encouraging, as I watched my beloved begin to prove to the whole rest of the world that there was another way to live (and play) -- that was more exciting, more engaging -- BETTER.

And I was there, standing on my feet, with the rest of my friends and family, as I watched -- at the most pivotal moment in my beloved's life -- as the supposed arbiters of justice denied us the simple faith that right action and unmatched dedication to a cause can prevail against the world's darker interests. Instead they pummeled, and stole, and beat those boys bloody. And my heart broke as surely as every single one of the Kings' players and coach.

I doubt there is a true Sacramento Kings fan anywhere, who upon hearing that Donaghy (the disgraced NBA referee) has said that the 6th game of the 2002 Lakers-Kings playoff series was rigged, didn't already know it as fact in his or her true purple heart.

So, why don't I feel vindicated? Honestly, it may sound absurd, but it just reopens the wound. Skip and I had a party at the house for that game. Fifteen people whose blood continued to rise and rise and rise as we saw call after call go the wrong way; as we watched our guys -- that magnificent, amazing team: Vlade Divac, Chris Webber, Doug Christie, Bobby Jackson, Mike Bibby, Hedo Turkoglu, Peja Stojakovic, Scot Pollard -- get kicked in the face over and over again, and felt each blow ourselves. No matter how many times they got back up, they were denied by forces larger than their hearts -- and who knew that was even possible?

When Skip came home last night and told me the news about Donaghy, my blood pressure shot up immediately. I was ranting and raving throughout dinner. And this morning, I am hung-over with lingering despondency. Wow, the world can suck.

I appreciate that maybe the truth will ultimately out here -- and that the Lakers will have to try again to justify winning that series against a more deserving, superior team who believed, along with the rest of us, that the game was about MERIT, about HEART, and about SKILL -- categories, all, in which as a team we had them BEAT. Let them be the black-marked 1919 White Sox of basketball. They deserve it for crowing about how they won a game anyone reasonable could see had been rigged -- and for the crass poor sportsmanship of calling us "whiners" and "Queens" for saying so.

Aach. My friends. The truth is that, just like my boys, I never recovered. As year after year, I watched the magical alchemy that was the 2001-2002 Season Kings get spread to the winds, I steadily lost interest in my beloved. I returned to my earlier interests, lost all curiosity about news from the sports page, became barely aware of when the season starts and stops. For a few years, back before I lost my NBA-fan innocence, that would have been inconceivable to me. But it's true. Having small children, and then, the loss of Rick Adelman, finally did in that great love affair. Out of time to care and out of interest, I thought I was over the Kings.

But, it's not so. Turns out my heart still bleeds purple.

Just because.

2008-06-04T15:39:00.001-07:00

Mama loves the baby

It's June, Kay's with my mom, Dee is sleeping, and I am sleepy but need to stay awake, so I think I'll take a minute to blog. Let's see, what's there to say? Ummm.

Well, gee, not much.

This photo was Kay's (and my) contribution to the mamazine.com's Mama Focus photo contest:

I don't expect it to win, but I thought it deserved to be seen. It captures something so real -- her simultaneous CONSTANT awareness of my attentions to her little sister, and her yet greater fascination with the rest of the world.

We're in a new phase of sibling rivalry. Kay recently had another one of her "I want Dee back" nights. And oh, lord, help me if I get caught by one of them holding the other in my lap. I have a big lap, but it is apparently NOT big enough to share. Pushing, hitting, hair-pulling --- and TIME OUT! TIME OUT! TIME OUT!

They are much sweeter to each other if I am no where to be seen.

Skip and I had our first weekend away by ourselves last weekend, which was fantastic. It is infinitely easier to be romantic when one or both of us haven't already given pretty much all of the energy we have to the unending needs of our daughters. What a gift to rediscover how intact our in-love-ness is. We often barely catch glimpses of it in our day-to-day lives. But a little step out of time with each other -- just 24 hours -- brought it back full force. I am lucky. I've been unlucky, too -- so I know this for what exactly it is: great big good luck. It's not about who's deserving -- we all are. It's harder to understand than that: it's just luck. And I'm grateful.

Sorry, that was a tangent. The relevant point is that while the girls were with Skip's mom they were apparently nothing but sweet to each other -- helpful, playing, laughing, affectionate sweet. I believe this, because I know she would have told us if they weren't. Still. I look forward to the day that I get to see it, too.

New Project

2008-05-26T22:03:00.000-07:00

Calling all GEMs...

Snippets from my morning

2008-05-19T09:20:00.000-07:00

Walking the dog and the girls this morning before setting the day into motion:

A spotlight of sunlight falling through the leafy canopy overhead finds a boy between the ages of four and five, with a mop of dark curly hair framing plump cheeks, dark eyes and rosy lips. He stands on a square of thick green grass, his arms lifting and holding a girl not older than two. His back arches with the effort. She hangs long below his arms, her feet barely off the ground. Her hair is also dark and curly; her eyes study some point in deep space and drool strings out of her bemused mouth, highlighted as a backlit spider web in a garden. Her yellow sundress rides up as he adjusts her in his arms.

There is noise, but it is like watching them through a window -- or a frame somehow. It is idyllic and silent. They glow.

As we draw closer the boy awkwardly twists his body this way and that to walk across the sidewalk toward a car parked on the street. He is laughing. The girl has noticed us and keeps her eyes on us, her head slowly rotating to keep us in sight as they move jerkily forward.

Shortly behind them comes a father, overloaded with briefcase, lunch bags, a diaper bag, his suit jacket and a steaming travel mug.

"I can't carry her anymore. I can't carry her anymore," the boy says, his voice still full of play, as he continues to move toward the street.

"Well, don't, DON'T," the dad's voice is not playful, grows more urgent as the boy walks across the last of the mat of thick grass, approaching the street curb. He has his hand out as far as he can extend it without dropping anything.

And then, at the last minute, dad sloughs off everything and reaches for the girl just as the boy lets go. She clutches him, and he sighs.

As we pass the boy finally sees us. He laughs and points at the dog.

Dropping my children off with my mom before coming here to write:

I pull up in my VW Passat wagon on the opposite side of the street. This is a Monday morning inconvenience. My mother's side of the street is closed for cleaning. But at least there is parking available, I think; and so is the inconvenience of crossing one of Midtown's arterials with two small children, purse, and laptop in arms mitigated.

At my first pass, I have inadvertently parked the car so that Kay's door is blocked by a historic marker. With a sigh of exasperation, I buckle Dee back into her car seat and open my door. Without closing it, I start the car and pull a few feet forward.

As I sat, I saw a woman across the street begin to cross. I look up now and realize she is not just crossing the street, but approaching me.

She is disheveled, wearing a dark t-shirt washed so many times it is threadbare, its pronouncement or design now lost to time, with navy pants that are far too big for her -- and she is large. Her hair has not been brushed today. But her face is clean, open and sincere, and she stays at an appropriate distance. Though I sense impending discomfort, I am without anxiety.

"Hey lady," she says, holding out a cell phone and charger, cupped in her hands like a buddhist monk's alms bowl. "Can you take me to the nearest Verizon store? My phone, it's not working. I know you don't know me, but I just don't have... I just don't have..."

She slowly looks down at the phone and the charger and then lifts her eyes back to me. Her voice is barely audible. "I just don't have."

I cock my head to the side. I think I am considering this and then find myself saying, "I'm so sorry. I don't even know where the Verizon store is, and I..."

And she turns before I can finish, dropping her hands by her sides, the phone and charger still in them. For a second I consider running after her, but the logistics of this swamp me. I have my children with me. I leave my car with my mom on Monday mornings so that she can get them to a class they all take together. I really don't know where the Verizon store is.

By the time I have both girls out of the car, she is no where in sight. I am wondering how long she -- and my response to her -- will haunt me.

Me on the Canvas

2008-05-16T17:29:00.001-07:00

This morning I was working at Weatherstone when a group of mothers with children gathered at the table next to me. All of them were in their 30s, outfitted in hip-boutique gear, from the clothes they and their children wore to sippy cups, diaper bags and strollers. Their oldests were all two years old or slightly younger.

One of them, looking exceptionally well put together, had a five week old infant and a daughter probably 18 to 19 months older (the spread of my own children); two were just announcing their first trimester pregnancies to each other; the fourth was hoping to have another and recently trying. Her child was the oldest of the crew.

They were trying to have adult conversation while attending to the exploring, nursing, dancing, jumping toddlers in their midst.

If I hadn't gone into the headspace in which I compare myself unfavorably nearly automatically to anyone with mulitple matching data points, I would have been feeling very warm and friendly toward them. They were good with their children and good to each other's children. Their conversation was not boring -- though, by necessity and effect, due to the presence of their children if nothing else, it was also not profound and deeply stimulating. They would have reminded me of my own mom's group a year ago.

Instead, I was comparing my still-loaded with post-pregnancy (and post-post-pregnancy) weight body in my stained Cherokee t-shirt and Wrangler shorts to their nifty, composed, and stylish exteriors.

I think this is why it took me so long to really make sense of what was said, when as they were parting, and one of the newly pregnant mothers asked the mother newly of two children how it was going, the mother of two said, "Well, the first couple of weeks were good -- XX's mom was with us, I highly recommend that if you can do it -- and then the third and fourth weeks were really hard, but things are great now. It is SO much more manageable than I worried it would be."

"Things are great now?" I thought to myself -- and immediately began questioning why I had thought it was so hard, for so long, having two. I felt so deeply at odds for the first several months, so deeply torn by the existence of two children who needed me equally -- one long accustomed to having me all to herself, and the other who was just never going to get me as totally as the first had for so long (though she was, by all rights, equally deserving). Juggling their (not to mention my own) competing needs is still the biggest challenge of parenting for me, but by now that act feels "normal," rather than a daily emotional crisis for which I never feel like I gain traction toward sustainability, much less balance.

"So much more manageable?"

I thought of the multiple attempts my 15 month old daughter made just this morning to shove her sister out of the way and take the book I was reading to her sister from my hands. The book her sister had patiently (with great effort) waited for her turn to hear. My baby girl, who has recently learned to use the word "no!" with conviction, but not yet the "please" that her sister is now required to add to every request she makes.

I thought of their frequent hitting and biting, hair-pulling and pushing.

I thought of a recent moment when they were running in opposite directions, both toward the street.

Manageable? -- barely.

Maybe, I began to think, I'm just not as good of a mother as she is. Maybe my emotional intensity bogs me down, prevents me from being the happy-go-lucky mother who would always maintain an even keel and project a calm and a sense of fun that makes her children feel so safe and secure that they don't jockey for attention or make crazy willful breaks for the street.

It was at least thirty minutes into this train of thought when I remembered that the woman's second child is FIVE WEEKS old. Maybe the third and fourth weeks were just the toughest yet. In fact, that is almost certainly the case.

Honestly, I don't wish for her, or for anyone, to have a hard time with motherhood. But it was a relief to consider that maybe she: (a) doesn't really have any idea what she's in for yet; and (b) (and this one took a long time for me consider, but seemed obvious when I did) was trying not to scare the bejeesus out of her newly pregnant friends, and/or appear ungrateful to her trying to get pregnant friend.

For some reason, that thought was like a pass to a whole different perspective on myself, too. The thing is, ultimately, I believe I am well served by the emotional intensity and complexity with which I respond to my life. It isn't always pleasant. It's often murky and uncomfortable. But it undeniably adds nuance and richness to my experience that, according to my observation and limited understanding, isn't part of everyone's. And that belief derives from -- or is grounded by -- this strange little thought: that I belong on the canvas of human history. Me, my story, my perspective are part of a bigger picture under creation, in development -- however you want to put it. And so, I feel invited to live a little closer to the deeper truths of my experience. The painful parts as well as joyful parts.

I hope to pass along to my daughters this perspective: that they too (that we all) are part of the big picture, the biggest picture one can imagine -- and that to play their part, they have to show up like THEY show up, and not the way anyone else shows up. Even if sometimes that means in a stained, decidedly un-hip t-shirt.

It was nice to be reminded, however circuitously, of that myself. And that, for better or for worse, I show up in my teensy tiny corner of the canvas as the mother of these children, my children. Me, in all my faulty glory with them and all of theirs. And it's beautiful -- that big picture. A Masterpiece.

Writing like reading

2008-04-23T15:20:00.000-07:00

I'm engrossed in a novel lately.

When I'm not in its world, it colors the world I'm in. I see through the characters' eyes. I have their emotional responses to the events of my life. I have to exercise a certain degree of mental discipline to keep all of that emotional freight contained, to keep it from slopping over the sides of its containers into my relationships with the real people in my life.

I never get a long enough span of time to be with this story or these characters. When my life pries me away from them and denies me the kind of quality time with them that I crave, I'm still nearly always thinking about them, on heightened alert for the next opportunity I'll have to sit down with them and extract new insights into what make them tick, and what they'll do next. At least a little bit, being this deep in the world of a story feels like falling in love.

It seems obvious to me now, but it had never occurred to me that writing a satisfying novel would be so akin, in these ways, to reading one.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying it's a great novel that I'm writing. It's impossible for me to gauge how "satisfying" it would be to anyone else. But I'm having one of my most favorite experiences: total absorption in a story. It's an experience I hope for every time I open the cover of a new book, but this is a story that I am writing, and it is delighting me to no end.

I know what the writer is thinking when the plot takes a turn that I otherwise regret on behalf of a character. I buy it (because I wrote it). And I have the power to turn the plot when I feel it doesn't ring true and/or it doesn't tell the story that most interests me. And even the characters whose roles are to be the flawed, imperfect, sometimes detestable foils, are all so rich and dear to me. I know them so much more intimately than I would ever have known them as a reader -- I think as a result, I am completely in love with even them, as much and sometimes even more than the characters to which I most relate and/or would, as a reader only, be most attached.

In all these years of wondering what it would be like to give myself permission to "really" write, and thus putting off the work of doing it, I now realize that I was missing out on this experience! It's such a Homer Simpson "D-Oh!" kind of realization. My whole life it's been gut-wrenching and nerve-wrangling to care so much (too much?) about writing well -- with absolutely mixed success. But this, the just-finally-doing-it, is so much more fun that I ever imagined it would be.

Vinyl

2008-04-14T11:04:00.001-07:00

Skip has a huge collection of old (and new – they're back in vogue lately) LPs. And, he has several friends who also have sizable (some even larger) collections. They get together roughly once-a-month to play vinyl for each other. It's a version of a men's drum circle. And more power to them. In all sincerity, I think it is great.

For the last few years, the wives and/or significant others of these men have given them Amtrak tickets and Amoeba Music gift certificates for a day trip together to mecca (or, Amoeba Records in S.F. and/or Berkeley) as a Christmas present.

This year, in exchange, they got the "Vinyl Widows" a day trip to a spa.

We don’t all know each other equally well – each of us were among virtual strangers as well as close friends. All but one of us is a mother; mostly of very young children. And regardless, crazy busy. It's taken us since January to pull it together.

But yesterday was the day.

And it was a perfectly magical day. Massages, facials, floating in perfectly warm water with a pleasant breeze to tickle exposed skin, great food, and far and wide ranging conversations – from the mundane to the profoundly intimate – some in seclusion from others, most as a shared conversation among all of us – all in the very best tradition of women together. I can't remember the last time I had such a purely pleasurable day.

It could only have been better if I'd been able to join Skip in a hotel room away from the girls last night in order to maximize the bliss of occupying my body so fully and happily. Short of that – wow, manna for the soul.

Thank god for Vinyl.

More on food

2008-04-03T13:54:00.000-07:00

I've been looking at OA Twelve Steps stuff recently and considering this first step: We admitted we were powerless over food and that our lives had become unmanageable.

I mentioned this to Skip last night -- who is well aware of my life-long and recent eating struggles -- along with the fact that I'm really struggling with this idea of powerlessness and unmanageability. It's a hurdle. It seems like a huge kind of surrender, of acceptance. And I haven't been able to get there.

And he said, "Well, yeah, of course." And then proceeded to tell me about something he'd just read from a neurological perspective about how one of the curious aspects of the human brain is that we create explanations for our behavior after the fact that we then perceive as our original intention; but that really, most of the time, we have no idea what motivates our behavior. Our brain is so complex, our true motivations are actually deeply hidden from our conscious awareness. Much of our consciousness is this effect: creating an explanation after the fact.

So, I've been thinking, "Yeah, but how can I say I'm powerless when I know that some days I make plans and/or 'choose' to eat the things I know I'm like a crack-addict for?"

BUT, what if when I say, I "plan" to eat that crap some days, that's not necessarily true? What if, really, it's just my way of dealing with my powerlessness? The belief that "I" am choreographing my behavior is much less frightening to me -- even for the wrong behavior -- than accepting that this consciousness I consider "me" is really not in control at all, but just inventing after-the-fact explanations for some deeper, inaccessible, unconscious system of selecting actions or inaction.

Yet, truly, that makes more sense. I'm not a self-hating person usually (except when I can't get me to do the things I know I should or need to do). Generally, I like being me in the world. But if that's so true, then why do I "choose" foods and ways of eating that set me on a course of likely debilitating chronic disease, obesity, and premature death? Because. I'm not choosing.

Maybe my only power here is clinging to, or abandoning, the ego-comfort of believing that I'm choosing. Clinging to it is not helping. Maybe I just have to surrender to this deeper truth: I am powerless over food; and my eating, and its effects on my life, are unmanageable. Hell, really, my whole life is unmanageable. At least by me.

I'm an observer and appreciator (or not) of this particular view on the world that makes me, "me" -- but I'm not, in fact, in charge of my life at all. "I" -- the conscious decision maker -- do not, and apparently, cannot, manage it. Wow.

That's kind of a rough blow on the ol' ego. It doesn't make my mama-self all that comfortable either, even though I absolutely see its truth in that arena, too.

Think I'll reel with that for a bit.

Eventually to rise again

2008-03-31T09:34:00.000-07:00

Again, coming to you live on location at (now) "Old Souls at the Weatherstone."

Monday mornings are one of two spots in my week when I am free to do as I like -- an autonomous adult in the world. But it's generally assumed that I'll do at least one thing: workout. Instead, lately, I've just been holing up here with computer or journal the whole morning. With computer, journal and coffee. With computer, journal , coffee, and, ahem, cafe baked goods. Ahem. So much for will power.

I so wish it were as simple as I decide not to eat the things I know I can't eat rationally, and then, presto! Done with that. Well, blessings on you for whom that's your story. It's not mine.

I'm reminded of a line from Richard Rohr: "Trust the down because you won't stay there, it is always the prelude to up." This is not where I am staying, in this tar pit of obsessive eating and its accompanying despair. It will change. It will change.

Funny. And then, to follow on that thought, as I get to the bottom of my Americano this morning, each sip gets progressively sweeter, thanks to the big hunk of cookie that broke off as I was dipping it.

And, now, the last sip swallowed, the taste in my mouth is of a semi-melted semi-sweet chocolate chip.

Perhaps this strange benediction on my morning's lapse should cause me to feel ashamed, or sorry, or even confronted by my lack of will power. What I feel instead with surprise and delight, is that I've been winked at by Grace. "Yep, I know you. You funny thing. Just to help make the point of sinking down being the beginning of rising up, here: an sensory association that will speak to you."

Does God work that way? Who knows. I don't. But this is the bird that has alighted in my palm this morning and I'm letting it stay until it flies off of its own accord.

Mysteries solved

2008-03-28T14:48:00.000-07:00

Mystery #1
My baby girl likes to chew on her big sister's Dorothy slippers.

Mystery #2
Kay woke in the wee hours as if from a dream. I went to soothe her hopefully back to sleep and she cried, plaintively, "I want Dee back."

This has happened before. And, as before, I said, "She's right here, sweetie," gesturing at her sleeping sister in the crib.

"I want Dee back," she said again, this time more urgently.

"She's right here."

In the past this has appeared to resolve the issue, except to the extent that I've been left wondering what she must have been dreaming; Kay has quieted and gone back to sleep. This morning she persisted.

"I want Dee to GO back."

My mama's heart sank with understanding.

"Yes," I said, kissing her forehead. "I know you feel that way. But we love Dee and she loves us. YOU love Dee and she loves you. She's staying, sweetheart."

To which Kay gave a small nod and rolled over to face the wall, sucking her thumb.

Some mysteries are not so much fun to solve.

The Things That Get By Me

2008-03-11T15:18:00.000-07:00

End of a long miraculously pleasant morning at the zoo (all three of us were sick and cranky at home) and I'm perched on the edge of the cargo space of my station wagon, changing a squirming baby inside. The ride home is short, but long enough for the onset of naps and I'd consider that a good thing. Too good to mess up by having to wake her to change her at home.

I peel back Dee's diaper and as I do the sun glints off of several red shiny dots amid the dark brown canvas of compressed poo. I look closer. Glitter. Five, maybe ten, bits of glitter decorate her fecal waste.

No idea how they got there.

Also...

2008-03-06T17:07:00.001-08:00

I am a stew of mixed emotion in response to this blurb on the back cover of HAVING IT & EATING IT:

"Durrant writes about the vulnerability and diminished self-image peculiar to women with young children with honesty and humor." - The Sunday Times (London)

I suppose I know I'm a walking cliche. And I admit to taking some comfort at the thought; it's like a blinking neon sign of a reminder: this too shall pass; someday, I will be more recognizable to myself again.

But I don't know, something about this blurb also makes me raised-hackled and growly.

(According to A. A. Milne, "growly" is a word.)

A New Book

2008-03-06T14:01:00.001-08:00

I've just started "Having It and Eating It: a Novel" by Sabine Durrant. I'm still waffling on whether it's got me or not, but this passage from pages 19-20 surely did. (Italics hers.)

"I missed [my job] like hell.

"But I had the children. And really I couldn't complain. Oh I know there were days when I was subsumed by the task of it, by the things none of the manuals tell you: the mess and the noise and the chaos and the clobber and the palaver, and the squeezing of the person you used to be into this dull, one-tracked, loaded-down creature with opinions on the introduction of solids and an encyclopedic knowledge of diaper absorbency; the sense in those early years at any rate, of being swallowed whole. But things would change. The children would get bigger. They'd go to school. I'd read a grown up book again. .... There were moments even then 'trapped at home with the children,' when I would feel my soul soar with the freedom of it all. And it might just be hearing the theme tune to the two o'clock broadcast [of a favorite show] that would do it. Or it might be the sense, waiting at the station on platform 2 for a train to take me to the seaside or the swimming pool or a distant park, when everyone else was on platform 1, briefcases at their ankles, irritated fingers tapping watches, pinched impatient faces scanning the empty tracks behind, that I was going against the tide, that I was my own boss, the big cheese in a corporation of one -- and two halves. Or it may simply have been that I felt in touch with my own life, with the diurnal nothings of it, aware of every change in the weather, each kaleidoscope shift in the day's light. You may have no time to yourself when you have small children, but you also have all the time in the world."

I rode my bicycle, the girls in the carriage behind me, to our Thursday morning playgroup this morning and absolutely felt my soul soar with the freedom of this life. The weather was beautiful, the girls were being kind to each other (at least on the way there), and it took me maybe even three times the time to get to the park as it would have in a car, every minute of which I felt how truly I am here in the world and free in my choices. It was lovely.

And now, after not nearly a long enough nap, Kay wakes, cranky, and the also-truth of my servanthood is reasserted. For now, it is enough to know these two truths exist together to prompt my gratitude.

ps. If anyone can tell me why I'm losing the comfy double-spacing of my first paragraph, reverting to this squashed claustrophobic single spacing for the remainder of my posts lately -- and how to avoid it -- you'll be my hero.

MY-cookie-festo

2008-03-05T13:02:00.000-08:00

I'm outright stealing the title for this post from Sheri because, well, because I can't be bothered to try to out-clever her -- I'd stand no chance, anyway -- and because I'm drawing courage and encouragement from the fact of her same titled post to write this one, which will be similar in content, if not panache.

Please, please, please do not feel obliged to read on. This is not pretty.

I eat compulsively. I got lulled into believing that was a historical truth for several years when I didn't. I just didn't. It was amazing. For a shining five years, I did not eat sweets like an addict.

But the present tense is back.

I eat sweets, especially, compulsively. Yesterday I felt virtuous for making only a quarter-batch of raw cookie dough to eat. And then, um, I realized -- even a quarter-batch of cookie dough is well over a 1,000 calories.

I've joked that after spending my days lugging around and chasing after two toddlers, I should be the skinniest I've ever been, rather than marching my way up to the fattest. But what's the joke there exactly? That I eat so much I lose all the benefit of an otherwise active lifestyle? It's not really very funny.

I extend to myself the compassion to recognize that there is very little time in my busy day for me these days and that during those glorious years when my eating was "normal," I had a lot more time for journaling/writing, daydreaming, working out, praying/meditating, reading, and performing. In other words, the space for Me in my life was ample (and -- this is key -- I used it). When I eat sweets now (or whatever other "goodie" is chosen for this effect), the most common phrase that runs through my head is, "I just need something for me." How ironic that I grow so much more ample in size, the less ample the time I spend feeling like myself. The more of my body in the room, the less me?

This is my declaration -- my-cookie-festo: I'm giving up cookies -- and not just cookies but "goodies." Which technically should include all non-sweet food choices not driven by physical hunger. But I'm going to start here:

No more:

cookies
cookie dough
other homemade or store-bought sweets
cafe (or bakery) goodies
sweet and creamy drinks (coffee or not)

Unfortunately, my life is not such that I am able to replace them yet with the more time for myself and more motivation to use it well that I most crave, but I will practice* being gentle with myself more of the time. I will practice* being happy. And I will practice* faith in something in which I deeply believe but have yet to fully enact in my life:

It is okay to be unhappy/frustrated/angry/bored/tired/anxious/sad/whatever unpleasant or inconvenient emotion that triggers that thought "I just need something for me." That state will pass. It will. And maybe, just maybe, if I stop reacting to every unpleasant thing as though it MUST BE MADE BETTER RIGHT NOW, and just ride its wave, I will stop feeling so out-of-control, as though I must hide evidence, and like a poor role model to my daughters. Maybe I'd even feel like me more of the time.

A girl can dream anyway.

So today I've already had a cafe baked good. But I've toured the kitchen twice now while writing this and managed to sit down empty-handed. A lot more of that would be a big, big, big relief.

I'll try to let you know how it goes.

* "Practice" as in to train at, to attempt repeatedly with the goal of proficiency

Four-ish things

2008-03-03T14:43:00.000-08:00

#1 -- The Impetus to Post:
sheri, of happinest, tagged me with this:

Borrowing, with permission from bookbabie, the following fabulous idea: what would you say if you had to summarize your life in only six words? Bookbabie got the idea from a book written by Larry Smith and Rachel Fershleiser, Not Quite What I was Expecting: Six Word Memoirs by Famous and Obscure. It is a compilation based on the story that Hemingway once bet ten dollars that he could sum up his life in six words. His words were: For Sale: baby shoes, never worn.

Here are the rules:

1. Write your own six-word memoir
2. Post it on your blog and include a visual illustration if you’d like
3. Link to the person that tagged you in your post and to this original post if possible so we can track it as it travels across the blogosphere
4. Tag five more blogs with links
5. And don’t forget to leave a comment on the tagged blogs with an invitation to play!

I could spend a very long time trying to get this right, but Kay is stirring at her nap:

Everything is path, even when off-road.

I tag YOU -- dear reader, whoever you are. (Unless you're sheri, in which case, you're off the hook.) Please let me know when you post your 6 word memoir.

#2 - A New Look
I thought I was going to re-do my layout to make it look more like spring over here, but honestly, this new look is much more reflective of my very current (as in my RIGHT NOW) emotional state, which I recognize is not particularly "spring-y."

The weather's beautiful. Outside my window, there are pink cherry blossoms marching up their black-brown branches against a bright blue sky. I feel even more amiss, I think, because that image is so incongruous with my emotional state: I need dark bare branching lacing across a dark gray sky.

It's still winter in my psyche. I'm still laying fallow -- or maybe I'm even newly fallow, but that's a different story.

It's all okay. I'm just still a season behind.

#3 -- Other Changes
Weatherstone has recently undergone an ownership change. It is a Java City store no more. I was in there today, and I miss the staff.

However, the new owners (Old Souls) are keeping the name. And they make the very best cookies in town (though this is a topic I need to get to more earnestly than I intend to at this moment).

It feels momentous to me; an opportunity to make metaphor, and yet, I am floundering a bit for exactly what meaning to make of it. I may come back to this later.

#4 -- Where I've Been
I'm not making excuses, I'm not. I can't start that because otherwise the next time I tarry between posts, I'll do as I've done this time and waste time coming back while I try to figure out how to explain why it has been so long. If there had been a clamoring mob asking and harassing me about my absence from this blog that might be one thing, but this is one of the thousands (millions?) of humble blogs that may attract a reader or two a week, and which exists mostly, I think, because of the writer's fear that if she stops writing she might die.

In this particular case, however, I can attribute the lapse in part to the fact that I've been taking a writing class since January (the December lapse before that was just, you know, holiday insanity), and any energy, not to mention time, that I've had to write has gone into homework. The class ended this weekend and I am more than a little bereft about it. It's left me with three gifts: 1. a complete story-arc for a novel; 2. a commitment to trying to get together a writing group; and, 3. a clarity about myself as a writer that is less apologetic and in need of external confirmation.

Of course I want readers. Of course I do. Of course if I write this novel (and I think I might actually) I hope to sell it. But I want to write because I am a writer the way some people are painters or dancers or musicians: writing is where I touch the face of god. It's the activity beyond all other activities in which I reach simultaneously inward and outward, when I become more than myself and myself absolutely.

Barf, I know. But this is my blogging dilemma: the time I spend blogging is typically my fingers barfing onto the keyboard -- it's not time I spend carefully crafting my words, being purposeful with each word. And it was fun to return to that kind of writing -- really careful (full of care) with each word, each image, each line and to remember the transcendence in that effort. I want to do more -- which while not incompatible with blogging, changes the purpose of and time available for blogging.

What does it all mean? Possibly nothing. Stay tuned.

Two things

2007-12-05T16:03:00.000-08:00

1. What I most want for Christmas:
A magical inoculation against perpetuating the parenting mistakes of my parents.

Recently I caught myself saying to Kay, "It makes me sad when you don't listen to me."

"I make you sad?"

"Yes --" D'oh. Oh no. No please. Do not let me be doing this. First do not let me be confirming my toddler's developmentally normal, but if-not-outgrown,-emotionally-stunting, belief that she is responsible for everything that happens, will ever happen, or has happened. Very top of my list of the ways I hope never to repeat my parents' mistakes: I do not want to encourage or allow them (or me) to believe that they are responsible for my emotional state. Wow. I suck. I totally suck. I can't believe I did that. What did I just read about what and when it is appropriate to apologize for your parenting mistakes to your children? I don't remember. Wasn't the gist of the article that the important thing is to be the kind of person you want your children to be -- including responsible for one's errors, yet self-compassionate... Okay, ease up, Phoebe.

" -- um, well, what I mean is..." Wait, how long have I been silently thinking? This brings us to number two on the do-not-repeat list. My father's always explained his mid-sentence disappearing act as having a brain that thinks too fast; if you think of it as similar to how distracting browsing the internet can be, that's apt. Too much information available at any one time. You start out to consider one thing and notice a link to something more or less related and from there to something else and from there to something else, and so on -- and soon you are far away from where you started. This is not a problem when you are daydreaming at a desk all by yourself. In the middle of conversations, it's a hazard, and annoying. How many minutes of my life have I sat waiting for my father to return to complete his sentence? I'm sure it would be startling amount of time. I wonder how one would figure that out? Dear god, how do I get back to where I was, now?

"--- um... hey, are you listening to me?"

Kay looked up at me, wary and thumb-sucking -- a look to break a mother's heart.

"I really love you, you know that?"

She nodded. I sighed. Well, that's what's important, isn't it?

Oh geez, Santa, give a girl a hand...

2. Someone's out-of-town folks are in town
Out for a walk, Dee and I passed an older couple who gave us the giveaway shy smile of strangers in a strange land. I've made that offering myself in countless places: "Hi, I mean to be friendly, but I don't speak your language. Sorry" -- all hopefully conveyed in a smile.

On the shorter side with tanned wrinkled faces, and stooped shoulders, nondescript clothing draping inelegantly from their bodies, they looked like elderly peasants from another time and a very different land. They paused halfway through a crosswalk, which seemingly unbeknownst to them they'd entered during a green light. They wanted to let a car that pulled up to the intersection pass in front of them. The driver looked confused -- his light was red. The couple gave their shy stranger smiles and tried to wave him through, and then, realizing he wasn't going to pass, proceeded slowly across his path just as their light turned red.

I was so grateful the driver didn't honk at them as they stiffly ambled the rest of way, her hand on his forearm. May their visit be a good one.

Part One

2007-12-05T09:53:00.000-08:00

Note to Readers: I have no idea where this going, or when it will end.

-----------
They were laughing as Beth came in -- the last to arrive, as usual.

"What'd I miss?" she asked, waving to the waitress as she slid into the booth next to Esther, who reached out to help her out of her jacket.

"Hi sweetie," said Emily with a smile from across the table. Emily was 12 years Beth's senior, and having helped to raise her, at least in her own mind, never quite got over a maternal orientation toward the youngest of her sisters.

The twins, Esther and Elsa, were still laughing. "Tell it again, Essie!" giggled Elsa.

Emily intervened. "No, I've got one: A bear walks into a bar and orders a beer. The bartender says, 'We don't serve beer to bears.' The bear says, 'Give me a beer, or I'll eat that lady at the end of the bar.' The bartender shrugs," she says, demonstrating. Her sisters smile in anticipation.

"The bear heads down to the end of the bar, gobbles the woman up and slams his paw down on the bar, 'I'll have that beer!'

"'We don't server beer to bears on drugs.'" Emily paused for effect, mugging the bear's confusion.

"'That's a bar-bitch-you-ate.'"

The waitress set Beth's coffee down amid the groans and laughter. She waited for them to settle down before tapping the table, "Anything more for you right now, ladies?" She knew the answer, but she also knew the question was part of their routine.

They smiled and shook their heads, still chuckling as the waitress departed.

"Good one, Em."

"So, did any of you see that Harold's is going out of business?" asked Elsa.

"No! Really?"

"What's Harold's?" asked Beth.

"You know, that place on the corner of Elvas and 55th?"said Emily.

"Oh, really? I've never been in there."

"Honestly, Beth. Really?" asked Elsa. "Well, it is a great place. That's where I got Lisa's party platter set and Josie's crystal punch bowl?"

Beth's face was blank. Elsa scoffed.

"Ellie, is that where we went to get the table settings for Christmas a couple of years ago?" asked Esther.

"Yes!"

"Oh, that's a great place. Really nice looking things for good prices. Are they having a going out of business sale?"

Beth's phone beeped and she lifted it out of her purse to check the message, her eyes peering over her glasses. She frowned and quickly tapped several keys.

"Are you text messaging?" asked Emily incredulously.

Beth nodded as she continued to tap away.

Emily looked at Esther and Elsa. "I can't even figure out how to respond to email. Jacob set up an account for me, but I can't remember how to use it."

"Oh, Em, for chrissakes. Get with the times," the affection in Esther's voice was clear, but Emily bristled nonetheless.

Beth put the phone away, and her sisters turned to her. "Denise," she said.

"Oh."

"How long do you think she'll stay with you?"

"I don't know. Josie says she and Vince are making progress; but Denise talked to Vince the other night and he told her he was going to spend Christmas in Ohio with the boys and his parents, so..."

"Oh, Beth," Esther laid her hand on Beth's arm.

"Well, you know the worst part is that Denise just adores Vince. He's really the only father she's ever known and while I think he did think of her as his daughter, I don't see Denise ending up in shared custody with him. I mean, he's never adopted her..."

"But, what court would prevent it? And Josie surely wouldn't fight it, would she?"

Beth stared into her coffee. Emily told Elsa, "Vince told Josie that he only married her to have a family. Now he doesn't need her -- and, probably not Denise, either?" She looked to Beth for confirmation. Beth nodded.

"Of course, he hasn't said that."

"But now, with the boys..." Esther said. Beth nodded.

"Oh, that's sad. I've always liked Vince," said Elsa.

They all nodded. In silence, they sipped their coffee.

"Did Nick and his tornado of a family finally go home?" Emily turned to Esther.

Esther laughed. "YES! And it was funny. I thought they were staying until the end of the week, but on Monday, Nick told me they were going to head back early and they left not three hours later."

"That is so Nick." "He just does not change, does he, Essie?"

Esther smiled. "You know, the scary thing is that Jake is just like him."

"Oh, that is so true!" Elsa leaned over the table. "Did you guys hear what that crazy kid did to Foxy?"

"I knew it was a mistake to let Aunt Marion bring that dog!"

"I haven't heard this story," said Emily.

Elsa turned to her, "He fed her a bar of soap!"

"What?" "No!"

"Yes! Julie found him in the bathroom breaking up the last of a bar of soap and feeding it to that dog."

Esther laughed, "You know, it's really not funny. That boy is just too much for himself, much less his parents. He has to be watched all the time."

"Is Foxy okay?" Beth asked.

Esther's phone rang, and she nodded at Beth as she flipped it open, "Hello?"

Elsa leaned toward Beth, "Aunt Marion was about fit-to-be-tied. Did you know that she knows her vet's phone number by heart? --"

"Not surprising."

"-- Apparently, dogs can eat worse. But Aunt Marion was so mad. When she asked Jake what he was thinking, he said the soap had smelled better than her breath -- he thought it might help!'"

Beth, Emily and Elsa laughed and shook their heads.

"Yeah, soon. Okay. Will do, love. Bye." Esther snapped her phone shut. "Lee says hello to y'all."

"Hi." "Hello to him." "Hey."

"But did I tell you about Sharon and Jake?" Esther asked and then launched into the welcoming silence. "So, Nick and Julie wanted to visit some of Nick's friends from high school, and they asked Sharon to baby-sit. Lee and I had to help his mom with some house stuff --"

"--How is she?"

"You know, not bad, considering. The doctors say she's okay to be up and about again, but she's taking it really slow --"

"-- Well, that's probably wise --"

"-- Wouldn't any ninety-nine year old need to take it slow? --"

"-- You'd think! Anyway, so Sharon wanted to take Jake to pick up some lunch and she needed his car seat. She asked him about it and he said he didn't have one. Well, obviously that's wrong."

"He lied right to her face?"

"Isn't he only four years old?"

Esther laughed and nodded. "Yes! So, she said, 'I know your parents have a car seat for you.' And he swore, 'No, no, auntie, they don't.' So Sharon said, 'You guys drove all the way from Los Angeles without a car seat? I don't think so, Jake.' But then she said he stared her straight in the eyes and said, 'But the car was too full. So I had to just lie down on the floor. So the police wouldn't see.''"

Beth's mouth dropped open.

"Essie! He didn't!" exclaimed Elsa.

"Sharon had to call Julie to ask!"

"Wow, that kid," said Emily, shaking her head.

---
To be continued.

The days I hate

2007-11-30T14:06:00.000-08:00

This afternoon both of my girls are refusing to nap. That, in itself, is annoying. I have a million things to do that I can only do when they are asleep; and I count on some brief spell of common nap to organize my mind -- as well as my house, my life, etc. When I'm really lucky, I even get a spell of time to write.

Today I'm just out-and-out stealing it. Dee is crawling around on the floor under my feet while I am typing. I took Dee out of Kay's and her room because Kay was climbing up into Dee's crib every time I left the room. And then smiling at my rising temper which, of course, sent it right into overdrive. Nothing like proving to my two year old daughter that she is more in control than I am to make me lose it altogether. I slammed the door after rudely dumping Kay back in her own bed again, while saying to Dee "Let's go have some fun while your sister is alone in here."

So, (a) I was spiteful and out-of-control, (b) I used Dee against Kay, (c) I made napping a punishment; and (d) I even lied to Dee, who is, as I write, grumbling about the lack of attention I am giving her.

Bad, bad, bad, seriously BAD mommy!

I suck. I feel exactly as tall as a deflated balloon.

Someday in the future -- with the convenient gloss-over of hindsight -- maybe I'll reminisce about days like today with a compassionate smile. The steam hissing out of my head will seem, then, almost funny -- maybe? This tight knot of anger and frustration and impatience will -- if I remember feeling it at all -- seem a little histronic, a kind of missing-the-point of these special dear years with my girls, right? I mean, so what that they'll run out of clean diapers tonight? So what that the dishes pile up in the sink? So they miss a nap... really, what DOES prevent me from just laughing with Kay about it all?

I don't know. But I feel defeated and sad and wish very much I could just start the day over. I hate days like this.

The 'Stone

2007-11-12T09:16:00.000-08:00

This morning we bring "That's the Job" to you on-location at Mama's favorite writing spot: the 'Stone, as I call it.

I first came to the 'Stone with my mom in the early 80's. What I remember about it is the smell of roasting coffee beans and the strange yet friendly voice of the fellow behind the counter who'd had his voice box removed due to throat cancer. I gathered from my mom's interaction with Lee that she frequented the place during her mysterious adult-world days. Lee may even have been the proprietor for all I know. But whether it was a place where you could sit for a coffee and pastry, I honestly don't remember. I was not a regular back then.

The espresso drink craze didn't catch on until I was in high school a few years later, and if the 'Stone caught that fever, I have to say, I don't know. I worked at one of what were considered by my peers "the two" coffeehouses: Robi's and Java City. Back then, nearly every coffee drink order we took was half a teaching experience (imagine having to explain to more customers than not, "A mocha is like hot chocolate with an espresso shot;" or "Espresso has a much stronger coffee taste than regular coffee."). We had to learn it all, too, of course. I was at Gelati Robi's, which aspired to be an authentic Italian coffeehouse -- and some of regulars were indeed old Italian men who would sit out front all day playing chess, arguing politics, making inappropriate -- if appreciative -- noises at every attractive female who passed by, and consuming vast quantities of espresso (with a little bit of lemon zest). They had no patience for American baristas who couldn't get the foam to milk ratio right on a cappuccino.

I worked at Robi's the summer between high school and college; it was an education in itself and I loved it. Robbie, the owner, was good to work for -- he expected us to know the business and to treat it like our jobs depended on its success (which they did). He could be tough, but he also knew how to give a compliment when it was earned. And he paid way better than Java City. Of course, Robi's is gone now, while Java City has gone on to become a national chain.

In fact, the 'Stone now belongs to Java City. To the corporation's credit, in my opinion, the sign still reads "Weatherstone," but it's a Java City store.

I've got nothing against Java City, anymore. Before I worked at Robi's, my friends and I were Java City regulars. The original store sits on a corner not far from here that used to be in a very quiet part of Midtown (it's now one of the hipper corners). There's a huge sycamore or elm on the corner; the roots were high enough to serve as benches. We'd stay out 'til curfew drinking our sweet milky coffees and smoking clove cigarettes pretending that we had some idea of who we were and what we were doing while internally churning with jealousies and insecurities about which of us the boys in our group really liked. I was happy to turn my back on Java City when I started at Robi's and put some distance between myself and those strangely painful yet electric evenings. With a lot of hindsight, those memories amuse and touch me much more than they hurt.

I "discovered" the 'Stone myself now over seven years ago. I had just separated from my first husband, Jeff, and was living alone for the first time just three doors down the street. I loved my apartment -- I still long for it at times. It had crown molding, built-in cabinets, and exactly enough space to feel like I could stretch, but not get lonely. And, Weatherstone became like my front porch. Whenever I needed to be in the midst of people, but not necessarily in connection, I would bring over my journal, some poems to work on, or a book to read and set up shop for hours. There were probably 20 or so other regulars doing the same thing. We came to recognize each other enough to nod or smile, but we were all using the 'Stone as public private space, so we weren't about forming friendships. All that energy went toward the baristas, who were funny, flirty and good at their trade.

At one of the uglier moments in the process of finalizing the end of our marriage, Jeff brought the woman who had been the straw on this camel's back to spend an afternoon at Weatherstone at a time I still believe was calculated to coincide with when I would be here or see them. Friends, and my brother, saw them here, but I didn't -- I didn't even know about it until enough later that it just seemed pathetic and had no power to rouse my anger, or my grief. It still galls me a little, however. While Jeff's incursion was ultimately harmless, it might very well have robbed me of a sanctuary I have been otherwise unable to replicate. I'm so grateful that I didn't see them and lose the sense of safety and belonging that I still feel here.

It hasn't been a seven year love affair, however. When Skip and I coupled up (after I'd been in my apartment a little less than two years), I moved into his house in another area of town. Leaving my apartment, I left the 'Stone, too. It's only been since the birth of my daughters that I have rediscovered it. My mom, who lives just a couple of blocks away, takes the girls three days a week, and I come here for a coffee and to journal.

It's an ideal writing place for me. If I lack inspiration, I need only look around. The 'Stone is full of Midtown characters. I'm partial to a few them: the older Hispanic man, always clean and sober, who pushes a cart around town full of cans and bottles. He comes in for a coffee, speaks to the only Spanish-speaker behind the counter, and then takes his coffee across the street to sit a stoop and sip it awhile. We are on a wave and smile basis. Is he homeless? Is he just supplementing his income? On occasion, I've seen him run into other folks who collect trash but who aren't quite as upright, and always they greet him so warmly: hugs from the ladies, big hearty handshakes from the men.

Then there's this a big bear of a man who wears an outfit that, in my ignorance, I would term casual California Hassiddic Jew. He's at least 6'5" tall and 3' across the shoulders and he (always) wears an apricot-colored linen tunic over raspberry colored linen trousers -- the tassels of a prayer shawl hanging below the tunic's hem -- and a straw fedora from underneath which long white curls hang down either side of his face, draped over his large bush of a white beard. He and his midrash partner debate the concerns of the day from theological perspectives over tea and almonds.

I also hold a great tenderness toward a trans-gender woman whose body is slight and whose mannerisms are entirely feminine, but whose prematurely balding head and dark stubble give away her biological character. She is often at work over a complicated beading project.

None of us talk to each other, and whenever I overhear conversations they are engaged in, I suspect that is for the best. We aren't the stuff of friends. But we are each other's friendly, familiar faces, and that is a treasure in itself.

The baristas here all know me by name, and my drink order (a small decaf coffee, half-full; I fill the rest with non-fat milk -- it is inexpensive enough that I can indulge it guiltlessly every day if I like), and we smile at each other and exchange kindnesses. And this is all I want and need from this place, socially. Because I come here not for the coffee, and not for conversation, but to write.

I am hard-pressed to define what makes the 'Stone so conducive to writing. It is almost always noisy -- and sometimes very noisy (like now, when the lunchmeat slicer is going). Sometimes there are as many distractions as inspirations. I often see familiar faces and am troubled until I can place the face (occasionally, I even see old Robi regulars). The music is inane and often unfortunately contagious.

I attribute the magic of this place, at last, to conditioning. I write here. I know that I write here. So, when I'm here, I write. Whatever the explanation of that mystery, I'm happy for it.

Recently, I've been wondering at what age my daughters will become aware of the time I spend here and what that will mean to them. I've watched mothers with young children here before and been reminded of how impossible it would be to do much more than attempt to rein in chaos if I brought my own. That will change as they age, of course. But as tempted as I sometimes feel to bring them into this part of my world, I also recognize that while not as injurious an incursion as Jeff's might have been, having them here could threaten a delicate thing. It is too precious to me for that. (Which I suppose is evidence that I do protect my time to write.)

My computer battery is about to give out -- an artificial, but probably none too soon, pressure to conclude. So, I sign off, sitting alongside a huge picture window, watching the wind whip yellow and orange leaves in big goofy airborne loops against a gray sky, sucking down the last of my (second) cup of coffee, and counting my blessings. Thanks for reading.

Where do you write?

Woman's Work

2007-11-09T15:02:00.001-08:00

Today, it's Kay to whom I'm listening on the monitor as I sit down to write. On Fridays, Dee goes to grandmother's house for the afternoon so that she can have one-on-one time with my mom, and I can have one-on-one time with Kay. On Fridays, after her nap, Kay and I launch out for some special outing or another. She didn't get to go to her very-loved swim class last night, so my tentative plan is to take her to the gym to swim this afternoon. This plan hinges on two things: (1) that she take a nap, and (2) that she wakes in time to make it feasible before we reconnoiter with Dee.

As I write, Kay's been in her bedroom for an hour already, resisting a nap. Mostly, she's been playing quietly. I checked on her a few minutes ago and reminded her that the sooner she goes to sleep, the sooner we can have some fun together. "Yeah!" she said and crawled into bed. But ever since I closed the door, she's been working one of her fake wailings -- the one that sounds as though she is half-listening to it herself to see how well it passes for the real thing. I'm not a fan of the wail, but I can't help but be amused by her. At last, it bores her and she's quiet. Only time will tell, however, whether that means she'll fall asleep.

In the meantime, I'll see how far I can get.

I want to address a comment on my last post by Sheri: "(and why the parenthetical about being a SAHM and a feminist??? not opposing things...)"

I wholeheartedly agree with this. The comment I made in my last post that elicited this response ("[me] who considers herself a feminist (stay-at-home-mom though [I] be)") was borne out of a reaction I had to a book I read while resting my back last weekend. The book, Dispatches from a Not-So-Perfect Life, by Faulkner Fox, as it is about her experience of early motherhood, was one I very strongly related to, but as it characterizes her as a feminist, I was feeling that I fall short. Sheri's comment turned up the volume on my own inner voices also protesting that sentiment, however, and got me to thinking about what exactly I might have been reacting to.

One of the things that I must have mentioned several times to Skip -- since he said so -- is how confronted I felt by Faulkner's own commitment to writing as a new mother. She frequently referred to the importance of honoring the legitimacy of her work as a writer as part of the feminist identity she sought to maintain as a mother. I've already lent out this book -- a clear sign that I loved it -- so I can't refer to examples of this and I'm a little anxious that really what I'm describing is my impressions of what she actually said, which may be more personal than accurate. However, I am sure, because this dug a deep groove into my brain, that she and her husband arranged their lives to provide her with four hours to write, in isolation, every day.

Now, I would love to have four hours to write -- especially in isolation, because as she described of herself, I also need room to write. It may not make sense; I mean, I'm just sitting at a desk with computer or pen in hand, and I don't need silence or even to be alone. I've done some of my best writing in noisy cafes. But I do need a lot of emotional elbow and leg room and most often, that requires physical distance from my loved ones. Not acres, but certainly a separate room and the promise of some stretch of uninterrupted time to occupy it.

That said, I realized as I read this book that I would not seek to arrange my life or ask Skip to rearrange his to allow myself that. There's certainly writer's insecurity involved in that fact (don't get me started on how depressed I was by Faulkner's encounter with a counselor who told her that most of the new mothers she counseled thought of themselves as writers); but in my bones I know I am a writer -- I may not ever be a commercially or critically successful or even moderately-achieving one, but I must write, and as far as I'm concerned, that makes me a writer. If I take a hard look at the question, I even feel that I'm enough of a writer to deserve the time to write, and I think that's where the crisis of feminist credibility came in.

You see, despite that, as I said, I know I would not arrange my life or ask Skip to rearrange his to gain myself four hours to write a day. And at first, recognizing this fact, caused me some fear that I just don't take myself seriously enough because I'm a not enough of a feminist. I began to worry that having become a stay-at-home mom had corrupted my sense of empowerment in and entitlement to the world of work. The comment in my last post stemmed from this place. From the sneaking suspicion that "good" feminists do both: they have work -- things to do that truly are of the world of work -- and they "stay-at-home" with kids.

This isn't where I'm going to make the case that staying at home with kids is real work. No one who is has spent any significant time alone with very young children alone (did I mention the alone part?) could possibly doubt this. Of course it is work. And it is truly fully occupying. But I will argue that staying at home with the kids is not a way of participating in "the world of work."

And, what's more, I'd argue that no one should be striving to make it be.

See, here's where I have finally come to on this issue: The reason that I wouldn't want, right now, to have four protected hours a day to write as a way to develop myself as a writer, which would almost certainly entail the expectation of seeking paid publication, is exactly that it would put me back into the world of work. And I didn't and don't absent myself from the world of work because I don't feel empowered in or entitled to it -- it's because I don't like it.

I chose to stay at home with my kids for a great variety of reasons, and certainly among them are "nobler" ones having to do with believing this is good for the girls, etc. However, also prominent among them is this fact: I am not a work-er. I just never have been. I don't necessarily wear the mantle of slacker proudly, but really, I like controlling the pace of my life, the activities in which I engage and having the freedom to do nothing. Being a stay-at-home mom is not totally compatible with these ends, but it is SO much more so than any job I've ever had. I choose to be a stay-at-home mom because I can and I want to -- mostly because it gets me closer to this ideal than anything else available to me right now -- and that is as empowered and entitled a statement as is necessary to prove my feminism to myself.

Even if it is kind of ridiculous.

Kay wakes. Gotta go have some fun.

Step on a crack...

2007-11-05T14:04:00.000-08:00

On Saturday morning I got up from the toilet and turned toward the sink to wash my hands and oh.my.god. I fell to the floor, my back seizing in vicious spasms. I lay there until my husband called out, “Hey, what are you doing in there?” And then I rolled over and bravely tried to pull myself back into an upright position. He saw me hobbling out of the bathroom. “What’s up?” he asked.

“Um, I think I threw my back out.”

“Oh, well, what do you want me to do?”

Saturday mornings are usually his time to take care of the girls. Ordinarily, I would have just gimped my way back to bed and he would have taken over with the girls no questions asked. However, once a month, Skip goes to the local homeless shelter to help prepare a meal with a bunch of people from our church who then also serve it. It’s a little thing, but it matters to him; it’s a way of putting more than just our money to work. It feels real.

Skip also has a chronic back condition and he gets migraines. This particular Saturday morning he was on day two of a migraine headache and his back was hurting. Per normal he was acting as if nothing were wrong. In fact, I’ve watched him grimace and strain through all kinds of activities that serve our family or me just because that is part of what it means to him to be a man. I accept that it is sometimes hard to know what it means to be a man in contemporary society, especially when coming from a more traditional family and yet having a wife who considers herself a feminist (stay-at-home-mom though she be) and two daughters who expect and require a lot of emotional availability, equal respect, etc. Since his definition of manhood poses no conflict to co-parenting, or to viewing and treating each other as equals (albeit with different strengths), I’ve come to appreciate and accept his chivalry.

Why exactly I thought what was called for was for me to be “the man,” however, is harder to explain. “He does it, so I’ll do it,” I thought. “It’s only two hours. I can get through two hours. I’ve given birth to two children, goddammit; I can do this.”

I told him he should go.

For a while after he left I was convinced I could just muscle my way through the morning and that would be that. Maybe I wouldn’t be the most fun ever, but I could keep the girls occupied enough, I thought. However, not ten minutes after he left, I realized he’d forgotten his cell phone and my resolve withered. By the time he got home, I was lying immobile on the playroom floor whimpering with each new spasm, while Dee wailed with boredom a few feet out of reach and Kay had made a game of jumping over me to run through the house unsupervised.

(Running through the house unsupervised is how she recently broke her collarbone. That is something about which I’ve been meaning to blog, but well, haven’t. Specifically she was jumping off the couch and took a bad fall; I felt terrible, but that’s a different blog. She got a bad ow-ie. When I told her I also had a bad ow-ie, by way of explaining my back, her eyes grew big and round and in a hushed voice she asked, “What were you jumping on? )

I spent the rest of the weekend in bed, at both his and my back’s insistence. Which meant Skip was left to do all the childcare (except breast-feed and occasionally entertain Dee, which I could do from bed), do all the weekend chores (laundry, shopping, yard work), and prepare for – and host -- a previously planned 12 person birthday/dinner party (which I lamely, literally, attended by reclining on the couch the whole time). I’d tried to talk him out of the party, or at least to encourage him to let another set of friends host it instead, but he wouldn’t budge. “That’s not what you do to a friend who’s had the worst year of his life,” he said in his clenched-jaw don’t-argue-logic-with-me;-I’m set-on-my-course way.

Last night as he crawled into bed, landing with an uncharacteristic groan after a long soak in the spa, I said, “You’re my hero.”

“Don’t exaggerate,” he said grumpily. “I’m not a hero.”

When I started to write this morning I thought I was going to write about how awful I felt letting him do everything. How lying in bed, mostly unable to move -- a fact sufficiently acutely proven to me every time I tried – I nevertheless had this nagging shameful feeling that I was shirking my duties. Skip’s back was hurting, and he had a migraine headache. It really wasn’t fair for Skip to have to do it all – and if he were me, he couldn’t have done it all. But Skip, hell, he even took the girls to the zoo on Saturday and to playgrounds both Sunday and Saturday!

I tried a couple of time to put words to the knot of gratitude and shame I was feeling, but Skip would just tell me to take it easy, pointing out that I can’t do my job with my back out, while he can do his desk job, so my recuperation had to take priority. “Nevermind,” I‘d rejoin, “that you are doing 'my' job with your back out.”

“Well, my back always hurts,” he’d reply.

I have the feeling that there is a lot of fodder here for an analysis of male-female dynamics and specifically how those play out in my marriage. There’s a story here too, about the insanity of feeling guilty for being injured and needing sometimes to lay low, especially when it is easy to do so thanks to willing and gracious help.

For right now, I will say this: whether or not he’s a hero, he is a good man.

Just one thought

2007-11-02T16:47:00.001-07:00

I've been thinking so much about this that I just want to get it out there, even inelegantly -- as this may well turn out to be.

I think when you have a job in addition to "parent," then something else does the work of holding some space open for you to maintain a connection with your sense of self. When "parent" is the whole way you have to describe what you're doing with your life (since typically no one answers the question, "what do you do?" with answers like "I notice the way the light changes with the seasons; try to journal as often as I can; read a lot of really great books; think a lot about God, both what "God" might be and about my relationship to it; alternately cherish and dread my daily existence, though more cherish than dread; and, keep trying to get better at being the mother, friend, and person I want to be"), it takes initiative to create and protect that kind of space, because parenting can eat up everything you are if you'll let it.

For the last several weeks, I've been trying to let a new thing grow up inside me: A conviction strong enough to act as a talisman against the fear otherwise, that while my children's needs are primary, one of their chief needs is for me to be (and to feel like) a whole person.

It's a good sign that I've got poems sprouting again. They may be very lightweight as Poems go, but they come straight out of my intact whole self --- even when they are about parenting.

Learning Curve

2007-11-02T15:24:00.000-07:00

It was just the day after
I'd lightly said,
"They do have a survival instinct"
when I caught you
running through the house
     with
     long
     scissors
in your mouth.

An old draft

2007-10-17T14:38:00.001-07:00

I've had this one email sitting in my "Drafts" folder for very close to nine months now. It isn't addressed to anyone -- I really am not sure who I thought I was going to send it to anymore. It's a description of the Friday before the Sunday I went into labor with Dee. She was 12 days late on arrival, 10 days that Friday. I'd had an appointment scheduled with my regular OB, but then her office called to say she was sick. I could have let it go at that -- the office staff apparently had not planned to reschedule me. But instead I mentioned that Dr. W had said she would have wanted to send me to fetal testing if I still hadn't delivered by this appointment. I gather that they took another look at my due date then and got a hustle on, shimmying me into an extra end-of-shift appointment with an OB I'd actually actively been avoiding seeing (despite my OB's practice's policy of having all pregnancy clients visit with all of the OBs -- just in case your own was unavailable at "go" hour).

The email describes that -- fateful -- appointment. I want to delete the email from my folder, but not lose the story, so I'm posting it here:

Today was a tough, rocky, and exciting day. Dann and I were in doctors' offices or the hospital for over 5 hours -- and very much on an emotional roller coaster a lot of that time. First, the fetal testing that we had done today was very positive. Lila is active, reactive, and has plenty of fluid in which to move -- and all indications are that she isn't too big, etc. I am also still very healthy -- my blood pressure today was termed "ideal" by more than one nurse. As some of you know, Dann and I had hoped to wait as long as possible for spontaneous labor to begin, so we viewed this very hopefully.
However, it has become routine practice for OBs to induce in the 41st week of gestation, and the doctor we spoke to today (our first meeting with Dr. Graves, since our own OB has contracted "walking pneumonia"), gave us a brutally hard sell on the dangers of waiting any longer. At one point he actually demonstrated the rate of fetal deaths after the 56th day with a dramatic upsweep toward the ceiling. Dann and I happen to have been doing a lot of research into latest practice/theory on this subject, however, and knew he was greatly exaggerating his case -- 1 in 1,000 births doesn't really suggest a vertical line to me. But whatever. In any case, he made a strong push for us to induce tonight. However, upon pressing, he reluctantly agreed that our due date may have been 3 days too early, so, the Monday-Tuesday induction is kind of a compromise.
Just in case we sound as though we're playing dice with Lila, I want to assure you that Dann and I actually took him very much to heart and had a chance to talk for quite awhile just the two of us before making any decisions. However, for what it is worth, he really was kind of alarmist. Case in point: he also insisted that I am not at all dilated or effaced and though initially he had offered to "strip the membrane" of my cervix, announced he was unable to because my cervix is so closed. In fact, he said, because of how unprepared my cervix is, I'm probably going to require a C-section with induction. HOWEVER, after we had agreed to induce on Monday night -- a decision which seemed to satisfy him, actually -- I asked if I needed another Strep B test, since the last one was 5 weeks ago (that's how long the results are considered good) -- which he agreed that I did. Since he was unable to perform that test without a nurse (his nurse had left for the day), we were seen by another doctor (Dr. Kim) for the Strep B test, who also checked my cervix, and pronounced me 3cm dilated, 50% effaced, and who then proceeded to strip the membrane. (I've been cramping ever since, which is oddly reassuring.)
Our prescription for the weekend is lots and lots of walking and lots of sex. :-)
Ironically, if we go into labor this weekend, we will be delivered by Dr. Graves. But really, that's okay. We're just ready to meet Lila.

Of course I did go into labor that weekend -- Sunday morning, as a matter of fact -- and indeed, Lila landed in Dr. Graves' hands -- which despite my having arrived at the hospital ready to push, he had still stuck up into my body as far as his elbows to check her position (which
was fine). I'd hate him, but I can't. At least now I can erase the email.

Sleep training is good for blogging

2007-10-03T14:58:00.000-07:00

I am killing time between "check-ins" with Dee, who is ostensibly learning to put herself to sleep. So far, so bad. She's been screaming for over a half hour, despite my "check-ins."

Sleep training sucks.

She just discovered a toy in her bed, I can hear her playing with it. She's -- oops, was -- distracted momentarily from screaming and I can feel my blood pressure dropping a little -- if only temporarily.

The emotional tether by which I am bound to her vibrates so violently, so insistently, when she makes sounds of distress that it feels like physical pain to me. When I was "sleep training" her older sister, Kay, I sobbed hysterically right along with her (if in another room). With Dee, I still feel the anxiety of letting her suffer, but two years of life with now-toddler Kay have also taught me that my daughters' cries will not kill me -- or harm them. It's the things that make them cry that matter.

Dee is in her crib. She's safe. She's not too hot. She's not too cold. She knows where she is. She knows I'm nearby. And she's sleepy and it's time to sleep. She is crying because she thinks she needs me to sink into dreamland. But, she really doesn't. And the sooner we both learn that, the better for this whole family.

Oh, my baby, I am so sorry there will be times when you are scared and confused and feel deserted. But you aren't. You aren't. Here I am, not 10 feet away, ready to leap into action if anything bad happens. Loving you, loving you, loving you.

She's quiet now. Really, she is. It's a miracle.

Earlier today I was having one of my three mornings a week to myself and journaling. Journaling is a lot like blogging except that there is no expectation or possibility of interaction with a reader. If I happen ever to have any readers at this blog, then chances are that you probably understand this concept without my further elucidation.

I only mention it because today, as I often do during a lull between thoughts while journaling, I read past entries. Today I was reading about the first days after Dee was born. And just now, thinking about the difference in sleep training Kay, and sleep training Dee, I am reminded of the deep knee to the gut feeling I had that first night we brought Dee home, realizing that I was never going to get to be the same singly and exclusively devoted mother to Kay again, and further that I never would be singly devoted to Dee.

Even on these afternoons when Kay is with my mom, when I always think that I'm going to pore over Dee the way I used to with Kay, I don't. More typically, I take her along on whatever errands I've decided must be done, or move her from room to room as I straighten, or answer email, or fold laundry, etc. I study her so much less intently than I used to study Kay. By the time Kay was 8 months old -- the way I remember it now, anyway -- I was totally tuned into what skills she was developing, what her most recent accomplishments were. I'd seen every first. With Dee it just isn't that way.

I treat Dee more like the companion her sister can be -- less like the slowly unfolding miracle that a baby coming to her personhood can be. I was awestruck by Kay everyday, aware of each incremental movement toward a new milestone. Dee still hits me like a bolt of lightning on a regular basis, but more because "suddenly" she is doing something new like it is old hat. Paradoxically, I think of her as more of a baby than I remember thinking of Kay. Sometimes with Kay I was so eager for each new development that it was as though I could her at the next phase easier than I could see her where she was. With Dee I chronically fail to recognize how far along she really is; I see her as younger than she is.

I worry that these differences will add up to something harmful to one or both of them. That the way I treat one is not enough like the way I treat the other and that I will nurture rivalries between them that will cause their hearts to doubt my love, and my heart to ache.

Suddenly, Dee is awake again. Crying. Both our hearts ache right now. And right now, I can fix that. Bye.

24-7

2007-10-02T20:04:00.000-07:00

So, I like to say that I work 24-7, which amounts to a 168 hour work week, and there's truth in that statement. I mean, I never stop being a mom -- defined for these purposes as the most responsible party for the care of my children, regardless of whose company they are in, both because it feels that way and because society (however much more enlightened we are than we were 50 years ago) says so.

But I've been thinking about it and when I define my job as a "stay-at-home" parent, my actual on-duty and on-call hours add up to something closer to 150. Eighteen hours a week both of my daughters are physically in someone else's immediate care, either my husband's (their father), or my mom's. And of the 150 hours that one or both of them are directly in my care, approximately two-thirds of that time they are also "directly" in the care of their father, and thus I am assisted. This includes nighttime, of course.

If the time my husband and I sleep, and/or our children sleep (including during the day), can be subtracted from that total then it comes out to something more like 80-90 hours a week (depending on much they sleep). And, if only the time that I am alone with one or both of them while they are awake can be counted then my workweek is really closer to 30 hours a week. However, I'm going to argue that anytime I am alone with them, whether they are awake or asleep should count, because I am still the primary person on-duty -- which puts me safely over 40 hours a week.

It's a full-time job.

That arithmetic is so wholly unsatisfying. But why? Why is it more satisfying to believe or suggest that I work a longer work week than other people do? Since when did the number of hours a person works become the measure of their contribution to the world, the measure of their worth? Or more pertinently, since when did I start believing it?

It is a weird thing to choose to be a stay-at-home mom, as a progressive feminist. I am alternately defensive and proud of my decision, alternately convinced it is proof of how far women have come that I am welcome to choose it and worried it is a personal failure to claim my "liberation." And then, to have two daughters! I frequently worry about what I am teaching them about what they should do as women -- my goal being to teach them that what they should do is whatever makes them happy.

And that's the nub right there. This makes me happy. And isn't that what I believe really matters? Whether I work 24-7 or really something more like 30 hours a week, who cares? I have found my right place for right now. I'd like to think that's what we're all aiming for -- that it is the only kind of success that ultimately matters. I think it is.

That said, you'll note, that I'm not changing my description of this blog. 24-7, that's my story, people. Because it sounds so good.

An Introduction

2007-10-01T15:14:00.000-07:00

This will probably be short. It's taken me a couple of hours to set up this blog -- and my youngest daughter's nap is soon to end. It's a Monday, so her big sister is with my mom. This is one of the easier days -- one of the days when I get to focus on just one of my children.

Allow me to introduce myself. I am a 38 year old "stay-at-home mom" -- a title I chafe against, but which is common parlance for women who spend their days with their children, trying to keep them alive, teach them something worthwhile, have some fun, and prepare them for the world they live in. We don't spend that much time at home, honestly. And, for me, this choice had much more to do with wanting to stay-away-from-the-office, than planning to stay-at-home.

I'm a very ambitious person -- just not professionally. I want to live as though my life matters, as though life in general is miraculous and worthy of awe everyday. I found that hard to do working at a desk, wearing hose and heels, attending meetings, and giving only my brain anything really interesting to do all day. These days it's my brain that gets the least work, I admit. But my heart, soul, and body are thoroughly engaged in the work before me now. It's not always a comfortable thing -- quite often it can be mind-numbingly repetitive, bone-achingly exhausting, and breath-takingly heartbreaking and humbling -- but it is something a lot closer to what I'm aiming for out of life.

My daughters Kay and Dee are 19 months apart -- at this writing 27 months old and 8 months old, respectively. Kay is testing every limit I never knew I had and Dee is teething and on the brink of crawling (which is also to say that she is not sleeping anymore). Sometimes they nap at the same time and I indulge the fantasy that I have something to write about -- that I can write. That's when you'll find me here. When their naps end, it might make for an occasionally abrupt conclusion -- and I won't be writing every day -- but I'll always be back eventually.

I hope you come back, too.