Archive for August, 2007
August 31st, 2007
On June 12th, my grandmother, Mary Bogart, passed away. She would have been 100 on September 20th of this year, and we’re planning to be in New Mexico on that day for a family gathering and memorial service. When our first child was born, he had six great grandparents, all but my father’s parents who passed away my senior year in high school, and now our boys have only their great grandmother, my father-in-law’s mother. I am so grateful they will have memories of all these people. It also means that we’ve had more funerals in the last five years than in any other period in my life. It doesn’t seem to get any easier. My mother asked me several weeks ago to write something for the collection of memories of my grandmother that she’s putting together. This is what I came up with:
This is hard to write. Maybe because if I were trying to describe Grandma to somebody who had never met her, I would start with the story of bringing home a report card in middle school that had five A+s and one A, and showing it to her and being asked “So why isn’t there a plus next to this one?” And maybe that would make it sound like she was tougher than she was. Because I never doubted that she loved me, and in the question about why there wasn’t the plus was the faith she had in me, that I could do anything. And that was a gift. When I tell people about my grandmother I describe coming to visit her in her 90’s and there being an algebra book lying on the table, about her practicing the piano into her 70’s, not because she was going to be hitting Carnegie Hall but because it meant something to her. I tell people that what I learned from her about living a long and happy life was staying active, keeping your mind stimulated, holding to faith, being of service to others. That what I learned from her was that love can be expressed in quiet actions, the baking of birthday cakes and taking of walks, as clearly as it is in lots of words. And yes, she was a tough woman, which has helped me to understand that I can be tough when I need to be, that it’s better sometimes to meet adversity with pragmatism and action than with self-pity, but that that toughness is not exclusive of lovingness. And maybe the thing I would then describe to someone who had never met my grandmother, if I could keep it together, is the gift that came with her slow decline in the last few years of that toughness falling away a little, and how when I last visited New Mexico, we didn’t exchange a lot of words, even though there are a lot of questions I would have loved to have asked her but never did, but I sat and held her hand before leaving and when I got up to go there were tears in both of our eyes, and that there was something there that neither she nor I had the words to express, but it was expressed anyway.
August 29th, 2007
So some days writing seems like something I cannot help doing, something as natural as breathing, something I wake up looking forward to doing, the daily opportunity to capture some of the words and thoughts that have been drifting around in my head. And some days it feels like torture.
The blog seems like an additional pressure, I don’t want to disappoint anyone, I am sure that anyone reading is going to get sick of it and stop reading entirely, and of course, I have the stats chart conveniently provided by WordPress to back me up (would I be happier with it disabled?). Or I open the computer and read a dozen other blogs and either dismayed at how brilliant the brilliant ones are, or at how the ones that are more like social connection-points for groups of friends seem completely alien to me, in-jokes and empathy and support, how BAD bad blogs can be, how I feel boxed in to this tone, this voice, of having a thesis sentence, elaborating, commentating, and it’s as bad as hearing my own voice recorded, as bad as seeing a photograph of myself on one of my picky days when all I can see is blemishes and hair sticking out funny or not liking the way that shirt fits — a photo, that left for a year or two I might pick up and notice how happy we all look in it.
And I am still here trying. I do know that it’s a cyclical thing, too, that rough spots are followed by easier ones, that on the days when I cannot get a sound I like out of the violin or viola, I still practice, though I might work on just the most basic stuff, saving the expressive bits for another day. I also am willing to experiment a bit with tone, and keep pondering appropriate blog-fodder: I surprised myself writing “the most personal writing is not about our medical histories or our sex lives, the things that would hurt other people to read, but the stuff that tells you what it feels like to be me” in a comment-conversation and I am still pondering that.
What has it felt like to be me today? I guess I am muddling through the “doing it imperfectly because there aren’t any do-overs” with parenting — my kids deserve someone more patient and perhaps willing to spend more hours coloring and playing board (bored?) games and go on nature walks and, and, and… well all the things I wasn’t doing when I was reading this great “Reader’s Manifesto” in the Atlantic Monthly, an attack on the pretentiousness of American literary prose that makes me feel better about the books that have left me cold. But it’s a long article and the kids were pretty much playing video games while I read it and I wasn’t thinking about them at all. And they were playing video games while I wrote my morning pages. And while I sorted through the papers on my desk for any important back to school notices and answered emails that date back to when we were camping. And talked on the phone with my best friend. And I wonder if I’ve crossed the line from “valuing self-sufficiency” to mostly-benign neglect. And I know that once school starts we’ll be back to virtually no screen time Monday – Friday, that I still read to them, with them every day, practice with them happily, that they are, fundamentally ok, but it still feels like I ought to do better.
Being me today involved going to the back-to-school picnic potluck (are potlucks going to be obsolete when everybody’s dietary restrictions finally explode into our consciousness?) and after going through the line to get my food sitting down at on of the only spots open, at the end of a table next to two women who clearly knew each other and were gossiping about who was there and who had just gotten married and whose daughter was starting high school… and Raven put down his plate and popped back into line to get some food for the shorter members of our family, and I sat there and ate and these women didn’t acknowledge my existence and I didn’t see any easy opening there. So when I looked over and noticed my oldest son sitting by himself eating, I jumped up and ran to him. And he really didn’t seem able to go up to any of the kids from his class and start a conversation, or maybe just wasn’t that interested, and I didn’t want to pressure or push, but I worried a little when he describes himself as a “loner” because really, he’s also a kid who knows how to be a great friend, has these leadership-y abilities to come up with cool games and organize the kids around him, has this lovely moral reasoning ability and personal code of conduct. But, ack, what was the model I was providing him? I couldn’t bring myself to talk to anyone there. Actually, the population of parents of gifted kids that this was, seems a bit introverted and eccentric generally, anyway. But we ate as a family except for the second-born who was joyfully greeted by all of his friends, and after eating Raven decided this was boring and not a good use of our time. And the oldest son and I didn’t argue.
Being me today felt like Portland hitting 95 degrees after yesterday’s was 85 and the day before 76, was just uncomfortable and cross and sticky, and after the fiasco of the picnic we couldn’t stand coming home to the house without air conditioning, and since it was going to have to be done at some point we might as well go get school supplies at Target. Which was air conditioned. But out of pencils. And pink erasers. And the little personal pencil sharpeners on all three boys’ lists. The denuded bins, the pawed-through stacks, misplaced crayons in the spot where pencils ought to have been, cardboard displays falling apart, and empty shelves seemed to be echoing with contempt for people who put this off to the last minute. Like, a week before school begins. Or maybe it was just making more room for Halloween candy.
Being me today felt like the only real redemption was to cross the parking lot and go into Barnes and Noble where Raven and I could switch off turns in the children’s section: I found Wislawa Szymborska’s Poems New and Collected, and Mark Helprin’s Winter’s Tale, he got Twyla Tharp’s Creative Habit and Madeline Bruser’s The Art of Practicing. And being me today felt like that redeemed the whole rest of the day.
August 27th, 2007
Dear Person Who Has Been Slipping My Children Behaviorist Theory,
Please stop! I don’t know who you are, but there is clear evidence that someone has, behind my back, been spoon-feeding the precocious darlings some B.F. Skinner. I expect any day, to be rifling through their backpacks and find a pamphlet “Training Your Parents in 10 Easy Steps” with beginner level steps like:
1. Wait for the moment when the parental unit is clearly relaxed and not thinking about you and choose that moment to torture your brother until he screams loud enough for the neighbors to surely contemplating calling Child Welfare.
2. Make it clear that the person who does most of the picking up in the house understands that the inevitable consequence of time spent with a computer is a bucket of really tiny lego pieces dumped in the kitchen.
3. Try getting up before your parents are awake and entertaining your little brother by flushing toys down the toilet, and then say “But we were playing quietly so you can sleep because I love you!”
4. The phone ringing is your bell for snack time.
5. If you behave atrociously enough at the grocery store, then your parents will find themselves willing to make catsup soup for dinner rather than take you shopping.
6. The sound of the vacuum cleaner is your cue to do science experiments in the bathroom sink. Clean-up in the bathroom is your cue to take crackers into the living room.
7. Sleep deprivation is your friend. Your parents will have neither judgement nor will power left when they are tired enough.
8. There is no reinforcement like intermittent reinforcement. So some days give your mother an hour of reading peacefully while you play sweetly with your brothers, and other days every time you see her glancing longingly at the book discover an “emergency”: scream about a bug only you can see, worry about volcanoes, lose your favorite toy dinosaur (bonus points for down the toilet) experiment with ways of pouring your own cereal, milk, and just for variety’s sake, try sweetening that cereal with maple syrup, making sure that it’s conspicuously all over the kitchen.
9. Make sure you reward behaviors you want to encourage, so every grudging concession to letting you watch tv or play video games that she swore would never enter her house should get her an hour of sanity-saving peace, quiet, and order.
10. If you slip and let her find the pamphlet, for all of our sake don’t let her have time to blog about it, because we surely don’t want word to spread. Remember, loose lips sink the Lego ships that you built with all of the coveted red bricks that your brother wanted.
See, I’ve been reduced to trying to write cutesy parenting humor, because every other serious thought I’ve had in the last three days has been interrupted by calls to referee who-started-its and the dread sentence, rising on a wail “But it was an ACCIDENT!” I know a sense of humor is the most important tool I have in parenting, but it feels like such a damn cliché, and it’s been done so much better already. But then, maybe I am just subject to forces much bigger than I am.
August 25th, 2007
…but all of my writing energy went into my (sorry, a little derivative) list of fifty things you might not know about me, set up as a page off my really boring about page, and, dammit, that’s what you should read if you’re going to read something I’ve written today. If wordpress even lets me publish it. Wordpress did unexpected server maintenance last night and has done funny things when I try to save this this morning. We’ll see.
The exciting news is that I am typing this sitting on the new sleeper sofa that just got delivered, out in my studio, so now we are ready for people to come and stay with us. Of course, we’re still at only one bathroom. And there are six of us. So you might not want to stay for a really long time. But I like the sofa well enough that I am considering letting my husband and kids have the house and moving out here by myself.
August 23rd, 2007
Regardless of my determination to disregard my blog stats, I do find the search terms entertaining, like these from the last twenty-four hours:
hallmark breaking up cards 2
hire a potty rainer 1
pleasing my husband 1
chutes and ladders 1
glossy magazines are good for kids 1
and I can only imagine how disappointed these searchers must have been, because what I have to offer in any of those areas is so… limited. If, on the other hand, you want advice on firing your violin teacher, I’m your woman.
August 21st, 2007
So enough gets said about how nothing happens in poor holday-less August. It’s strange, my kids still have two weeks of summer vacation, even though it feels like all of our friends have gone back to school. And I’m not in any rush to have them out of the house again, we’ve got our rhythms down and are happily co-existing, trying to balance the electronic media with page-time, trying to find things we all like to eat that are not peanut butter and jelly, carving out time at playgrounds after dinner when it isn’t so hot and I can sit and talk to my husband… I’ve even managed to put out of mind the encounter early in the summer with a classmate of my eight-year-old’s describing the binder with her summer studies in it, a section for Spanish, another for German, one for anatomy and one for algebra, and they had just finished tennis lessons and why wasn’t I signing up X. for lessons? (went home repeating to myself “this is not a race. this is not a race. this is not a race.” and was reassured that another of his classmates has taken to calling once or twice a day to chat about Pokemon and computer games and a game for the Wii he saw an ad for on television that he thought X. would like). But the last week has been ever so amorphous, and maybe some structure in all of our lives (I say writing after midnight) will be a good thing. But no, uneventful is sort of good. In a nothing to write about sort of way. I am just going to have admit I have had a harder time getting myself to blog because I had been missing the unreliable narrator’s regular posting, and so to find two new posts tonight and be all celebratory about it… I push aside Barry’s The Great Influenza and the exciting history of medicine and feel inspired to put my own words up.
And it doesn’t have to be deep thought, the words don’t have to be perfect. I like when there’s an idea-reason for a posting, I have been thinking about the mixed blessing of the sort of desensitizing and acclimating we’re always doing, that we become accustomed to things that seem at first unbearable, or, on the other hand, grow to take for granted things that had seemed completely wonderful, and I understand at one level why things have to be that way, that you couldn’t walk around being amazed all the time at how bright colors are, how delicious some smells are, and so on. Like how your short term memory has to clear some stuff out to make room for other stuff (but which stuff and how seems more complicated than any simple model/metaphor). But at the same time, it makes it feel like pleasures come with expiration dates. There’s something I could write about.
Or about a conversation I had with a computer developer friend of Raven’s about technography, which he described as the translation of ideas into images, using symbols and metaphors to help facilitate communications, and musing how, as a person who swims in words, there are many things I understand better with a quick sketch, and how this has me experimenting with taking notes where, if there’s a list I break it out into a vertical list, and if there’s a clear metaphor of journeys or outgrowths or hierarchies or webs I try to put the ideas into relationship with each other on paper instead of describing it — and some things that I had felt stupid reading because at the end of four sentences I’d have to re-read to understand what I’d just read, became a little easier to penetrate, and so I wonder about being a visual person when I know I am a word person and wondering if that distinction matters at all.
I could write about the whole family going roller skating yesterday — the two older boys can get around just find on skates, the two younger ones, not so much, and were happy hanging out in the carpeted section where there were several arcade games (that they seemed to not notice weren’t really doing much without coins put in). The skating rink had a wurlitzer organ with a live organist playing old-fashioned music, giving it a transported-back-in-time feel, and there weren’t the pig-tailed, short-shorted skating divas I remember from roller skating in Dallas, the girl who was the limbo champ, who won every race…just a rather elderly man moving with surprising grace, a handful of pretty competent skaters, and then many who I tried not to be right behind when their arms started windmilling, small boys making up in speed what they lacked in control and hurtling across the floor and collapsing just in front of me.
But no, I am writing because my friend is back, and how unexpected and wonderful it is to have this friendship that is mediated entirely through blogging, that we wouldn’t know each other were we to bump into each other on the street, and yet, I am so grateful for the encouragement and so happy watching the positive developments in her life, and having that conversation gives me a sense of connection in a world where I don’t get to have conversations about ideas so very often.
August 17th, 2007
It’s funny, how, except for the occasional babysitter and the year of teaching the youth class at Sunday school, my life has had very few teenagers in it since I was one. It’s sort of a shock to be around them and have them move around you, not acknowledging your existence or at least your personhood, segregating themselves — and I find myself tempted to get in their faces “I remember being just like you.” Which would be about the worst thing, I think, I could say. Because the essence of youth is thinking you’ve invented the whole experience.
Still, a recent dose of being around some Bahá’í youth, and having a facebook account, which seems a little like eavesdropping in a playground for teenagers, and the fact that my son going into sixth grade has put him, in our Bahá’í community, officially in the ranks of the ‘pre-youth’ which seems completely impossible because I am just too young to be te parent of… Anyway.
I surprise myself missing the intense yearning to change the world, the burning passions, the deep loyalty to friends, the sense of endless possibilities. I miss staying up all night talking because no responsibility was more pressing than the need for connection. I miss the slight ambiguity of male friends with whom there would never be a romantic spark, and yet these aren’t the friendships I have as a married woman, associating primarily with other married women and avoiding even the suggestion of confusion.
A sentence in the unreliable narrator’s blog “the flavor of that era in my life—young, uneducated, thrashing around, putting up with a lot more than I should” resonates, though. I miss the possibility, but not the uncertainty. And though I know people who have prolonged their youth well into their thirties, there does seem an allotted number of days in our lives to each of thesee stages. I can as easily miss the sensuality of my children’s infancies, or the imaginative reach of my own childhood, totally ignoring the painful aspects of sleep deprivation or having almost no voice, the horrible uncertainty of making mistakes I didn’t even know existed as possibilities, picking my way between social/parental land mines. Some days I look forward to the possibility of wisdom and maybe stature, the wry and gentle humor, feistiness and patience, I see in the faces of the women ten and twenty years older than me whose lives are no longer bound up in the lives of their children. But then, I already ache anticipating missing the boys.
So it is possible that for me, right here, right now, knowing exactly what I know now, is a fabulous place to be: Raven makes me feel beautiful, my children all still want to be with me, but allow me to sleep through the night peacefully, I am as strong as I have ever been and more confident, we are getting better at having friends as a couple, and the friendships I have maintained from my twenties have been tested and are strong. I wonder if my youthful self would despise the settledness,the settled for, the settled down, the compromosided complacence and concessions to a practical life, mortgage and minivan, but, no, this is what I have always wanted, and I am proud of the commitment, the work it represents. And of course, if you mention to me the fact that in approximately twenty five and a half months I will officially be the parent of a teen-ager, I clap my hands over my ears, squinch up my eyes and start singing loudly.
August 17th, 2007
So a few weeks ago, I was listening to a free iTunes U lecture, Penn State’s Dan Hade on children’s literature, and he referred to a book that puts forth the theory that there are only seven basic kinds of stories, which thanks to the internet, I am pretty sure was Christopher Booker’s The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories. I probably won’t read it, I was able to read enough reviews to realize it doesn’t do what I want it to do, (the Telegraph describes the venture as ‘procrustean’ in his disregarding deep differences between similar events in different stories; others charge him with disregarding major works of literature that don’t fit his theory.)
What a strange and sweet thing, I waver between being desperate for that grand unified theory of literature and psyche and being grateful for the universe of possibilities that don’t fit into any theory.
I remember the wonder in high school of learning about the remarkable predictive power of the periodic table of elements, to see how the elements fell into families: gasses here, metals there, fitting the pattern described by the number of electrons filling the rings, predicting perfectly the way they interacted with one another… and in college I started wishing for some systematic table of human elements, that would explain and predict how we relate to one another, how our own component parts work together or don’t. That this seemed like what the Meyers-Briggs personality inventory was aiming for, why people read their horoscopes, buy decks of tarot cards, discuss archtypes, find satisfaction in Kohlberg’s stages of moral development and Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. It seems like an ancient longing, for a working model of the psyche, think of Plato, and the allegory of the charioteer in Phaedrus.
Of course, I have to relate this desire for a sytem of the human soul to my parenting. Growing up Bahá’í meant being free of the original sin concept of trying to scrub your blemished soul; in fact, Bahá’í theology generally describes a more positive model of the universe, with life’s purpose being spiritual development, where evil is the absence of good, so the good is what you can describe positively, and there is no sin, per se. I don’t think this is just semantics, that instead of talking about gluttony talking about healthy restraint, instead of lust, describing chastity, instead of greed, generosity. One book I’ve found useful is The Family Virtues Guide which describes a way of calling out the virtues when you see them in your kids’ behavior, and helping them identify the ones called for in, um, those teaching moments that come up. So, instead of saying “Stop lying!” you might try “It’s important to be truthful. Can you think of some of the reasons why? I’d like you to be truthful with me now.” What I really like about this is that the stories in my kids heads of who they are can be “I’m a person working on truthfulness” rather than “I am a liar.” I like this approach enough that for my god daughter’s blessing (Christian, by they way, and not Bahá’í) I gave her a set of virtues cards, described as 52 “virtues valued by all cultures as the content of our character.”
So of course, I am thinking about the periodic table of elements and wondering if the virtues come in families: would flexibility, detachment, and humility hang out as far as possible from idealism, perseverance and determination? Would patience be a bridge between them? What wisdom do you need to decide between two virtues that appear to be opposites of one another? Does each virtue have a shadow-side: unity that should not be confused with conformity, perseverance not edging into obstinacy, flexibility not giving way to wishy-washiness?
The thing is, as paradoxical as conflicting virtues seem, I wonder if some of them fit the sort of model of the resolution of humility and confidence: that mastery of anything, doing it again and again until you trust your muscles/intuition/coordination perception of pitch happens in such a way that your focus is outside of yourself, and you know that what you’re doing is a result of some magical combination of hard work and whatever natural gifts that you can hardly take credit for, and that it’s about the doing, and not about you, and, furthermore, others before you and certainly others after you will be better than you, so there’s humility. That people who seem arrogant are often the least secure, so afraid of being seen through, worried that they’ll be seen through or found out, perpetuating a fraud.
It’s not a grand unifying theory, exactly, but I wonder if may apparent paradoxes aren’t resolved by shifting from focussing on an event to focussing on a process, that confidence at the moment of a single event, placing the bow on the strings of your violin with fifty people watching, comes with the sort of humility of Buber’s ‘thou’ addressing of the violin as a whole process, that long-term ‘process’ determination may encompass flexibility in the short term or a single event, because even the things we want most seldom come in in the form we expect them. Does event vs. process work for justice and mercy?
Oh, I’ve meandered, I waver between finding the virtues a lovely model for describing the project of being human, and wondering what simplification they gloss over. And maybe this is the result of that bifurcated longing for structure and predictability and the comprehensibility of a working model and the deep hunger for the freedom of being more than the sum of parts, of being able to soar through endless possibilities, to be surprised by perfect books that don’t fit expectations of what stories should do. That’s not paradoxical or anything, is it?
August 6th, 2007
Listened to this lovely story on NPR about how having four children — and being able to send them to expensive private schools, hire consultants for potty training and teaching them to ride bicycles and buy fancy vehicles in which to transport them — is a symbol of status in some communities. I tried to keep it in mind as I sent my husband off to San Francisco for a conference on Linux, and spent the day trying to pack and ready the house so I could take my little status symbols camping for five days and not come home to a house where my feet stick to the floor from those same status symbols pouring their own orange juice. I tried to keep it in mind when I found myself having a full scale temper tantrum because the older status symbols wouldn’t put down their electronic babysitters when asked politely and put away their own laundry or interact with the younger s.s.’s so I could turn my back and not find that the younger s.s.’s had dumped the laundry I had just folded in preparation for packing all over the floor so that they could run around with the laundry baskets on their backs like turtles or slide down the stairs in the laundry baskets or do whatever other wonderful creative things you never see kids in Pottery Barn Kids catalogues doing with playdoh up their noses and so on. Remember when you could carry around a ridiculous little dog in a handbag as a status symbol? I am having fantasies with rhinestone collars.
I’ll see you sometime early next week when I’ve recovered from camping.
August 5th, 2007
The last few weeks every day has felt like an anniversary of sorts. Tuesday, July 18, 2006, we drove into Portland as a famiy. Or, caravanned in, me driving the minivan with two kids, him the Civic with two more. We’d spent the night in Boise, the night before that just outside Salt Lake City, the night before that near the Grand Canyon, after leaving my parents in Albuquerque. I’d had one brief weekend here, before, looking at a school for the kids, seeing neighborhoods and deciding if this was really something I could do, but I think the commitment had been made as soon as we realized we could leave Dallas, we could live anywhere…
Why Portland? There are so many little things that go into such a decision. I always liked the pine tree on the license plate. Had a college roommate from Oregon. Had had a wonderful trip to Seattle but were daunted at its size. Scientifically, we made a spreadsheet of all the potential places we could move, with a score on its assets and drawbacks, proximity to family, the mountains, which I’d missed achingly in Texas, proximity to an ocean, something I’ve never had, climate, culture… and then we massaged all the numbers to make sure Portland won.
The kids immediately decided Portland was friendlier. I don’t know what convinced them of that, since Texas is an overtly gregarious place. Maybe it’s the subtler approving nods when they tear down the streets in costumes, the cars stopping for pedestrians, the non-competitive atmosphere they experienced at school, the fact that I feel safe with them on bicycles even though our street is busier than the street we lived on in Dallas — people are looking for bicyclists. I think for me it came the moment we were eating on the patio of a vegetarian restaurant and the three year old sneaked off around a planter, proudly relieving himself and watering the plants, and I was dying of mortification and imagining being asked never to return, when to my surprise the other diners just laughed and smiled and said they wished they could have gotten away with it. This is very Northeast Portland, I think. I try and warn the kids about broad generalizations, but I know what the reaction would have been had this happened in Dallas. And this event marked what I can only explain as a period of feeling slowly unfurled, that I could be who I was and parent the way I believe in parenting without fear of censure or of offending people around me — this tremendous atmosphere of live and let live was so liberating.
We’ve become friends with another family that has made the same Texas to Portland move this summer, and that’s provided a nice opportunity to show off all we’ve learned about fitting in here and to reflect on what this last year has meant. Each of us, except perhaps the baby, had close friends in Dallas it was painful to leave, and yet no one has ever voiced any regret about making the move. We’ve argued whether there’s a dark side to Portland; that the slightly anti-authoritarian bent of northeast Portland and the live and let live attitude might be part of the problem with neighbors having drumming and howling at 3 a.m. solstice parties, or the neighbor who hired two guys to scrape paint off her badly peeling house, and left all the paint chips lying in our yard and today we tested them and discovered they’re positive for lead which sent me into a small tizzy. Not everyone is considerate and there are some interestingly conspiracy-minded people willing to talk your ear off. There are days when the ‘more organic than thou’ parenting dynamic feels a little stifling. Plus, my children can get their vocabularies more colorfully enriched just walking along Alberta Street than FCC guidelines would allow in their living rooms. But they’re smart kids who know not to use all the words they learn.
Maybe the biggest drawback is that living in a community that is generally more like-minded than what we had in Dallas, we can take it a bit for granted, both in the echo-chamber effect of thinking everyone must now be trying consciously to reduce their consumption of natural resources, etc., and in the sort of casual way you can bond at the park with another mother and then never see each other again. In our old life, these connections would be so precious and rare, you’d cleave to each other like survivors on a desert island. So for all of the casual connections I’ve enjoyed, there’s been less intimacy, but that could also be about the time friendships take.
This sort of cross-country move is terrifying in its own way. As much as I can complain about ruts, I like routines and knowing what to expect, being able to rehearse difficult things in my head before I have to do them, the drive, the parking, the walk, who I’ll see, what I’ll say… And for the last year everything has been new. People at the preschool here don’t know about the years of service and volunteering I did at the last preschool (which was actually a little relief, since I was asked to do less, but on the other hand I missed the respect). I didn’t get to go to the midwife who delivered my last two sons for my annual check-up, had to find new dentists and doctors and babysitters and places to buy cat food, there was no detail I could take for granted. I spend hours on the phone to Texas. But I think to have known that the challenge was there and I was too scared to face it would have been more uncomfortable than the risk involved in moving. Finally, doing a family bicycle ride along the Historic Columbia River Highway State Trail and being overwhelmed at the sweetness of the air, the breadth of the river, the height of the trees, the joy of being in mountains, all I could ask was what we had been doing wasting all that time in Texas.
