A few minutes before the next big thing

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

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

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

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.

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.