Celebration

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...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Aug 21, 2007 | 1 comment

Wasted on the Young

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...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Aug 17, 2007 | 0 comments

The Folly of Metaphor

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...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Aug 17, 2007 | 0 comments

Children as Status Symbols

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...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Aug 6, 2007 | 2 comments

A Year in Portland

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...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Aug 5, 2007 | 1 comment