Not too long or too deep or too edited…

… we’re just keeping up a habit of blogging, if not daily, than more frequently than waiting for the perfect subject to hold forth upon and the time to edit and shape it and get bogged down in perfectionism. I endure the pain of seeing typos, homonyms that slip past the internal spell checker, though I correct them later when I find them. I remind myself that this IS hard, the singing loudly enough to drown out the internal censors, who natter away about how this really is not interesting to ANYONE and whom do I think I am fooling, exactly, that I OUGHT to be embarrassed to be putting this sort of practice writing out there for anyone to read, that everybody will read it, that nobody will read it, that this is but one more step to dying one day alone...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Jul 24, 2007 | 1 comment

Left and Bereft…

And my husband is off to New York again, a red-eye, leaving in about half an hour. I have been trying not to fall into the pattern where the day before he leaves I am tense, grouchy, and not even conscious of why until I realize I am wondering whether I will be able to hold it together while he’s gone, that I will be completely netless. Among the hardest things to leave in Dallas was the network of people whom I could comfortably easily ask for help, people whose kids I had watched at night when there was a trip to the emergency room for back pain, the child whose father was undergoing treatment for lymphoma and I could happily offer to take over her mother’s mornings working in the co-op preschool when she needed it, the economy of favors that...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Jul 23, 2007 | 1 comment

Tragedy of the American Mother

Ok, y’all, bear with me as I launch into what I hope is as close to a rant as I get on what is really important to me… At dinner last night we were in a restaurant crowded with families and so we ended up in a back banquet room where another family was already eating, and so we sat, relatively quiet trying not to listen to them, a dilemma of not wanting to invade their privacy, but not wanting to talk because we realized how little privacy there was, and their conversation was… invasive. Except it wasn’t even a conversation, it was a mother holding forth to a captive audience. I know the ages of the kids in the family because the buffet charged by the age of the guest, so there was a 10 year old son, an 11 year old daughter, and another...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Jul 21, 2007 | 2 comments

Tired

I love and hate the structurelessness of these summer days, because I like seeing the patterns that emerge when they’re not imposed from outside. There are things that I am not exactly rigid about, but that are pretty much essential components of a complete day: writing in the morning, practicing with each of the three music students, time on the elliptical listening to my favorite podcasts, reading out loud to them before they go to bed… In my determination to make blogging a habit I find it works to set aside time after I get the kids in bed, though it is easy to spend way too much time playing onFacebook, reading other blogs, looking for a perfect sleeper sofa to go in my studio (in gleeful anticipation of October’s visit from my goddaughter...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Jul 21, 2007 | 0 comments

Overheard in my morning pages…

I listened yesterday happily to a Fresh Air interview with Natasha Tretheway, Pulitzer-winning poet whose experience was biracial and losing her mother at 18 when her stepfather murdered her, and the questions and answers were both so unflinching, the questions we want to ask but fear are not polite… a good interview. But uncomfortable, in the sort of slamming up against the frailty of our mortal boundaries, that happens with violent death. How thin is the bone protecting our defenseless brains! the integrity of the tubes of blood coursing through our bodies, the tireless pumping of the muscle that is heart: it all seems so improbable and terrifyiing to rely upon. Even the hardened atheist materialists among us breathe faith that all of the...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Jul 19, 2007 | 1 comment