My heroes, their teachers

I’m really going to miss Ms. Patti and Ms. Human. I hate May. It’s not the weather, which is lovely, even with the heat starting to get oppressive. In May, I still find something romantic, in a Southern gothic way, about the heat and humidity, though the sentiment inevitably disappears by late June. It’s not the inevitable overscheduling, as everyone tries to cram everything into the last few moments of the school year, picnics, parties, and performances of various sorts, though there are a few signs that no one in our family is getting enough sleep, except Aodán, who very possibly only needs four hours a night to perform cheerfully. Actually I should be grateful because May seems to mark the end of the cold/flu/earache/strep epidemic...

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Posted by Mara Collins on May 16, 2003 | 0 comments

Gratuitous Cute Baby Pictures and an Identity Crisis

Maybe there’s never a more dramatic shift in your identity than going from being, you know, just a person, taking care of yourself, to being, wow, a mom. But even after doing it for six and a half years, I don’t have it all sorted out. Maybe the greatest surprise with bringing home a third child was that I was plunged once again into a struggle to make my own identity clear to myself. This is nothing new — there is nothing like gazing with love and adoration into a newborn’s face to make my quirky little brain say “hey, there, how about graduate school now?” But it makes absolutely no sense. I love being at home with my kids, I’ve chosen this, I believe in this, I believe it is the most important work I can be doing. ...

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Posted by Mara Collins on May 14, 2003 | 1 comment

Six Year Old Particle Physics and Four Year Old Theology

It is amazing having small people believe (almost) everything you tell them, kind of a scary responsibility. Last night as we were saying prayers before bed, Xander reported that his friend Daryl had told him there was only one God. Being a good monotheist, I had to tell him I agreed with her. But, he asked what about Zeus and Athena and all of those guys? Oops. Aodán has been doing Greek mythology fora while and I never thought about what Xander was making of it. Xander has clearly been trying to figure out what things are real and not for several months — Santa Claus, leprechauns, the tooth fairy. And since he watches more television than he might if I didn’t spend significant chunks of time feeding a baby, changing a baby’s...

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Posted by Mara Collins on May 13, 2003 | 0 comments

Birth Story

My account of Søren’s birth, including a few pictures but not the really graphic ones…. The day before my son Søren was born I had been 40 weeks and 5 days pregnant and not very comfortable. I’d just lived through three weeks of uncertainty and several false starts, the conviction that this pregnancy couldn’t possibly go so long, and worry that I wouldn’t recognize real labor for all of the false labor I was experiencing. I had woken up 3 days shy of 38 weeks pregnant with regular but not terribly uncomfortable contractions that got me pretty excited, and an examination showed that I was 2 cm dilated. And that was three weeks before. Up until that point, it had been a great pregnancy. The unknown baby felt like...

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Posted by Mara Collins on May 12, 2003 | 0 comments

Birth as an American Rite of Passage by Robbie Davis-Floyd

Ok, it’s only one of a huge stack of books next to my bed So I’m reading Birth as an American Rite of Passage by Robbie Davis-Floyd and staying up too late every night engrossed in it. I started out doing Julia Cameron’s Artist’s Way a few months ago and my morning pages got me reflecting on spirituality in my life and somehow I stumbled across Carol Lee Flinder’s At the Root of this Longing: Reconciling a Spiritual Hunger and a Feminist Thirst and Sue Monk Kidder’s Dance of the Dissident Daughter and they got me questioning some of the basic cultural assumptions about spirituality and God, but it wasn’t too radical because as a Bahá’í I’d sort of already made peace with the idea that God...

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Posted by Mara Collins on May 12, 2003 | 1 comment