At least I am not the only person in the world capable of embarrassing myself in print, right? I keep thinking I am going to be struck by inspiration and write something brilliant, but instead I am spinning this week. My losing streak has continued; as I was getting on the airplane Sunday I realized my grandmother’s wedding ring was not on my finger. That was devastating. And we now have a missing lunchbox, misplaced homework, and it’s a long and tedious story, but the loss of all of the stuff that was on my iPod, which was mostly backed up but not completely.
I’ve been widowed a bit, by the Halo 3 release, only it isn’t as annoying as other video game releases that have left me feeling abandoned. I want to say maybe we are getting the knack of this married thing and communicating a bit more openly, and so more than ever things just are what they are, not potent symbols of unspoken looming things, and it probably helps that he did 99% of the parenting work while we were in New Mexico and I am getting ready to go Friday on a Bahá’í women’s retreat and so there really is no need to try to figure out the accounting of who owes whom what. Maybe it helps that we agreed on a couch at last and this is the only image I could find of it on the web but we’re actually getting two armless loveseats because our living room is very small and with a fireplace, built in bookcase and piano, that is what (I hope) will fit, and also it’s purple, no, aubergine (and I have a whole rant stored away on why we don’t actually use color names when describing catalogue items, as if ’seaside’ were more descriptive than ‘teal’ and maybe I’ve done that already?). Also, the order takes up to eight weeks, and I have my fingers crossed about the loveseats being here before my parents and sister arrive, eight weeks from today, for Thanksgiving.
A funny story that might have gotten a blog entry of its own, only it’s late and I am tired: we no longer proofread our oldest son’s homework, because, frankly, he’s smarter than either of us. We’ll read things he has written and nod and smile. But he had a project he was trying to finish quickly before school on Tuesday morning, where are all of the kids in his class are doing presentations on a presidential candidate, and he and a partner had been making a poster of John Edwards, with pictures and so on, and he decided to google “John Edwards quotes” to put onto his poster and apparently, stuff like:
I think that the majority of messages are validating messages to confirm the survival of conscious. And many times that validation message is negative or sad.
John Edward
In my experience victims are more concerned with helping their families understand that they are still connected to them. In some rare experiences information comes through that helps understand what happened.
John Edward
Information comes through to me in 3 basic ways seen, hearing, and feeling the energy of the person that’s crossed over. In which it is a symbolic type of language.
John Edward
didn’t strike him as strange things for a politician to be saying. Until he was presenting it in class. Apparently it made the substitute that day smile, however, and he got a chance to go to the computer lab and look for some different quotes. And now he knows the difference between John Edwards and John Edward, and thinks it’s a pretty funny story.
I really cannot believe I am signed up for this retreat Friday. It’s about five hours away, and I don’t know anyone else going, have no idea what to expect, and it’s pushing my introvert’s comfort level a little bit. Plus when I get home, I’ll have about twenty-four hours to catch my breath and do laundry before heading to the airport to pick up my best friend and my eighteen month old goddaughter from Texas, with whom I’ll have two days to play before we start Art and Soul on Thursday. Which is also a little terrifying. This seems like a crazy ambitious number of things for me to try and wrap my mind around, so I am really focussed on just what needs to be done each day.
So yesterday’s memorial to my grandmother was pretty amazing. I think waiting three months after she died was lovely for having allowed time for reflection, for having let her not being there sink in a little. My parents collected stories from anyone who was willing to share a memory of my grandmother, and put them into a lovely booklet with a photo, and that wouldn’t have been possible if we’d been doing this in the days after she died. And it was meteorologically perfect: the skies opened up and poured down on us as we walked from the chapel to the grave to place flowers and sing happy birthday, and that felt just right, though in true New Mexico fashion we got an hour or two of lovely sunshine in the afternoon, which allowed my husband to take all the kids out from underfoot for a rousing game of four-square. That gave me a chance to become reacquainted with my cousins, surprised at how much I like them as adults, how I see things I have in common with them and recognize a sort of inheritance from this woman who made sure her kids had music lessons no matter how poor they were, who valued education and books and learning when sometimes just surviving must have seemed precarious.
Still, there was this faint theme underscoring stories, particularly from the relatives of my parents’ generation, that whenever they were having tough times, they had only to think of how much tougher my grandmother’s life had been. She was born in a shack in the Oklahoma Territory in 1907 and snow came in around the blanket they had stapled up for a door, she was the only one not sick in the 1918 flu pandemic and was thus responsible for chopping wood, getting water, feeding and caring for her family, when she and her husband left prospectless Oklahoma to go pick fruit in California (and she has remarked that the Dust Bowl was worse than portrayed in The Grapes of Wrath) her husband was tubercular, so she was doing the picking for both of them and her children were beaten up by the other children because, among the migrant pickers, Okies were at the bottom of the pecking order. It’s suggested they may have had to get to Albuquerque on foot, she, her husband, and two little boys, hoping the high, dry climate would be good for her husband’s tuberculosis. They had a daughter, and then she was widowed. And the famous story is how she’d walk across town just to ask if there was cleaning to do, and that if she complained to her own mother, the response she got was “You may think you’re badly off, but at least you don’t have to pay somebody to do your cleaning for you.”
All of these stories, the Poor Mary stories, make it sound as if her life were a rebuke: you complain because the air conditioning isn’t working in your car? Don’t you know your grandmother walked from California to New Mexico? How could you complain of lost video games when you’ve never had snow coming in around the door! But that just wasn’t what my grandmother was like. In fact she was very reluctant with the stories of her life. What those stories mean to me is that our inheritance is one of the tenacity of life, and of love. That the existence of all of us who are her descendants is owed to the strength she showed, the persistence and determination, her indomitable faith. Rather than invalidating the difficulties and frustrations of our lives, there’s a gentle reminder that we have undoubtedly inherited the strength and courage to endure much, much worse. And I suppose that I have used that strength and courage trying to get better as a wife and mother and writer instead of picking grapes, picking cotton, and I am grateful for that.
Today it was my son’s portable video game case with a bunch of cartridges in it that left home in Portland and didn’t make it to Albuquerque; Saturday it was a stuffed dragon of his younger brother’s that I had endowed with enough anthropomorphized sentiment because it — named Turnip, by my three year old, Turnip, he’s got a gift for names! had accompanied Rainer to preschool on that first insecure day, had been kissed goodnight — had endowed it with enough something that the idea of just buying a replacement felt guiltily wrong. Turnip set out for errands with us, and was unfindable at bed time, and several phone calls did not reveal it to have been turned in anywhere.
Other stupid losses — the couch last week decided it had been jumped upon one time too many and gave up the ghost, the frame collapsed, defeated, so we have no place to sit in the living room and I spent yesterday — instead of packing for our trip today, obsessing over how our living room doesn’t work, and is too cluttered to be comfortable, a tiny room designed only for sitting, no piano, not the library I have taken as some concrete manifestation of my identity and moved faithfully from one home to another over the last twelve years, certainly not for a television. And with terrible reluctance I toted books and bookcases down to the basement where I can still easily access a book I want, but maybe there will be a little more room to sit in the living room. But it feels wrong, like I am doing it so we can have room to watch television, which just seems shallow and lame. And we are still in negotiations about how to replace that couch. Small house, big family, what I really want is a place where we can all be together, not the kids off in their own rooms, all of us withdrawing, because I fear the day when they really don’t want us all to be together, it seems like this dreadful looming inevitability.
But I know it’s not about the couch. I get all fixated on arranging and cleaning the house when other things are out of control, because — well I just do. The universe isn’t that big and bad and scary if my cd’s are in alphabetical order with genres that only I can really define.
And I must admit I go out to check under the seats in the rental van and find myself, ack, reciting:
One Art
by Elizabeth Bishop
The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.
–Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
I’ve been dreading coming to New Mexico, because even though my grandmother died in June, so long as I wasn’t here I could continue without it being truly real, she wasn’t a part of my daily life, I didn’t get the daily reminders of grief, the rending of the fabric of the everyday. But, now that I am here, and seeing her empty house, seeing cousins who belonged to my childhood, allowing for the overlapping of griefs — that the person she was to me was just slightly different than the person she was to my sister, to this cousin or to that one, and the collection of all of us coming together with our memories and our stories of who she was makes her absence this more concrete thing — I’ve been worried about it being overwhelming. Worried about responding appropriately. Worried about what I will feel, and about what I might not feel.
She would have been one hundred tomorrow. We had a birthday dinner for her tonight, but it was hard to imagine how it would have been — she would not have liked being the center of such attention, of so much fuss. She had a way of not quite pursing her lips, blinking behind her glasses, nodding her head, patting your hand, that seemed to acknowledge your need to connect but still gently deflect the attention. I look at the collection of people here to celebrate her life, and wonder if we form a crude outline of the things she believed in, faith in various forms, the commitment to musical education, the books always at hand, the working hard and not feeling sorry for yourself…
The funny thing is that my response to all of the conventional expressions of condolences have been “Well, it’s sad missing her, but she had such a long, such a wonderful life, and even her death seemed to be happening at a time of her choosing, waiting until my parents were done with their school year, and it was gentle and peaceful. And this period of decline wasn’t frightening like I thought it might be, it was this grace of someone whose spent her whole life taking care of others allowing herself to be taken care of…”
The moment of loss isn’t what makes me crazy, the tug and the tooth not there in just a moment, it’s the adjustment, the tongue unable to stop tracing the new contours of the mouth, the new dawning of each implication of the loss. If everybody here tomorrow to memorialize my grandmother is bringing with them a tiny piece of who she was to them and we’re all together and then we disperse and then this person my grandmother was really becomes past tense, and it’s awful.
But maybe with some bawling and hugging and going ahead and really feeling it, I’ll be able to go on and deal with the things my kids keep inadvertently leaving behind and forgetting, the things I cannot control, stop looking at furniture catalogues like porn, and be ok with loss since there is no way to prevent it.
Raven realized we could host my blog on the server where he’s hosting his other stuff for just a small amount more, and since I am finding I am more into this as time goes on, rather than less, and committed to it and everything, he stayed up late last night moving everything over, and it necessitated a new theme, which is hopefully even a little more readable and eye-friendly.
Trying out MarsEdit instead of ecto for composition, still not sure I like it any better.
It’s a strange gift, being married to such easy fabulous tech support, since the computer skills I was so proud of before marriage have atrophied tremendously, but I’ve been saved such a multitude of headaches and he has found so many easy solutions for the things I want technology to do in my life, so that I can live rather on the surface of it. Part of me screams out “Be careful! You’re getting too dependent!” but, to be honest, our lives have become so symbiotic and intertwined and so on, that depending on him to tweak my blog really is the least of my worries, and I can just be grateful, because he is so amazingly supportive and it manifests itself in a hundred different ways every day. And hey, he depends on me for a few things, too.
I hate spending more time on how my blog looks than on what I have to say but I am irate that wordpress is destroying all of my paragraph breaks… This has finally driven me to compose in ecto, but I’ve been lazy figuring out how to insert links with ecto. Final straw this morning was just going back in to add a tag on an old post and that edit including, against my will, the destruction of the carefully constructed paragraph breaks. Going to have to call in tech support on this one, but if you’re reading this, I am doing my best!
Lately I’ve been sensitive to this sort of back-handed compliment, “Wow, four kids. I’m sure I could never do it, it would make me crazy. You must just be a sort of natural at it.”
It’s not just the assumption of what four kids is like — I think that as we are reaching certain hallmarks of self-sufficiency — all of them able to eat by themselves and out of diapers, getting closer to the fourth being able to dress himself (and brothers able to help him through the tough spots), two of them able to do their own laundry, prepare lunchboxes, read out loud to the younger ones — and their all getting along pretty well most of the time, well able to entertain one another, this is the least work I’ve had to do since starting the whole parenting gig (hence even the attempt to write regularly!)
More rigorous self-scrutiny. I’ve wondered if this comment bugs me because it re-opens old wounds of feeling like people are putting me in this “other” category so they don’t have to address me as a person, can dismiss my feelings. Many years ago I took a prenatal yoga class which involved a lot of support/sharing before we got into the moving our bodies — and I remember talking in the group about flylady.net, which, I told another overwhelmed expectant mother, may look like it’s packaged for someone you’re not, but contains tools, like building routines, doing things fifteen minutes at a time, breaking overwhelming jobs into small steps, that are useful to anybody trying to maintain a home. Two years later I was back in prenatal yoga, the teacher had suddenly become all evangelical about the flylady, and she as much as told me that when she’d first heard about it she’d assumed it was for people like me, you know, housewives, and she had dismissed it.
But you know what? I’m over that, actually. If this were all the “you must just be a natural born mother, unlike me” comment was, I’d just file it under the “dumb, insensitive things people say.” Yeah, they’re missing a whole lot of who I am, my other talents and abilities and interests. Their loss. I am proud of the job I am doing and believe that it does matter. A lot. And it feels good to write that because one of the ways I would magically change the world is to make the idea that the work of making new people and keeping households running matters universally acknowledged and so fundamental to everybody’s world view that it started affecting national policies and the way we run our society. And I realize that I am starting to truly internalize it, the way I want to internalize the “health at every size” ideas so eloquently set out at Kate Harding’s Shapely Prose. And internalizing it is, no doubt, necessary before I can do anything to make it real in the world.
So I hate the idea that motherhood is this in-born, natural capacity one either has or one doesn’t. Because it gives people who are finding it hard an out — an excuse. Maybe the most useful aphorism I’ve gotten from my twelve stepping friends is “You cannot judge your insides by somebody else’s outsides.” I’d like to suggest that a little intimate conversation would quickly reveal that we all find it hard, though we are encouraged to make it look easy and natural and not let the fraying seams show.
If I consider myself a pretty good mother, most days, it’s because I’ve done work at changing behaviors of my own that weren’t working, done work at finding models of connecting with little kids and gently getting them to do the things you need them to. I’ve read carefully, and, dammit, I’ve practiced and practiced and practiced.
Have I experienced some ‘natural’ advantages? My parents were pretty good models, though I don’t do things exactly the way they did. I’ve been pretty confident about the whole project, some lucky combination of faith and temperament. I’m married to someone who is supportive, and shares my vision of how our family is going to work, most of the time. That all helps, along with the willingness to look for the resources we need. But I think the single thing that made a difference was a sense of the importance of it. You meet people all the time who are great parents even though their own were everything from apathetic to abysmal, people who seem to have been told by the whole world that their efforts are worth little, people who haven’t had a lot of models for the kind of parent they want to be, people with crappy partners or no partners at all, but they’ve decided that bringing up their kids well is the most important thing they can do, and they work to do it well.
I am surprised, writing this at the size of this soapbox I’ve climbed up on. I don’t think of myself as a judgmental person. All the issues that news stories and magazines have told us divide mothers, work or stay home, breast or bottle, co-sleep or cry it out, I advocate for people figuring out what works for them. I think it’s really arrogant to presume one solution would work for everyone.
If a friend wants advice, I usually ask a lot of questions, trying to figure out what their own gut feeling is, because trying some solution because somebody else tells you should even when you’re not sure is generally courting disaster. If it’s something like “How long should I let a baby cry before picking it up” you can get “expert” answers from all over the spectrum, but the baby will pick up on ambivalence if you’re feeling conflicted about the answer. Honestly, lots of different approaches work, but they work best when you’re confident and consistent in them.
I try to be a friend the way I try to parent, calling out the strengths, the things I appreciate, because if we build each other’s confidence we are bound to be better parents, better people. And I don’t really believe in criticizing or pointing out failings, because people are aware of those themselves when they’re ready to deal with them. So it is startling to have this judgmental thing bubbling up. I feel strongly about people who just give up on themselves, on their kids. There is no such thing as a natural-born parent, and if you are finding it difficult, if you are having issues, it is your responsibility to start looking for some answers.
Dear internet,I’m searching for the word for how when you walk into a room and there’s a bad smell and then a few minutes later you don’t smell it any more. For how you become acclimated to certain sensations so they no longer register in your consciousness. Because I am worried about the emotional equivalent to that. Happiness shouldn’t be so transient, right? And for grief to gradually wane seems like a betrayal.
This first week of kindergarten has been exhausting, the long day leaves Søren just ragged, I drive him home and he gets irrational and sob-y over things that wouldn’t normally throw his little extroverted self for a loop, like not being able to sit next to his only friend in the class — in the world! — at the lunch table. I suspect that it’s exhaustion, that the long days and the overwhelming new schedule, this huge place and the inability to guess what’s going to happen next, thehundreds of faces he’s never seen before, the teacher he doesn’t yet have a relationship or trust with — they’re all just getting to him. That it will get easier, soon. I mean I know that, but of course I second-guess myself because I am still me — did we push too hard? Is he too young? Why didn’t we wait another year? What if this is it and he hates school forever? But, no, he’s ok, the situation is ok, I’m ok…
His best friend in Portland was in his class the first three days, a child whom we met through the Suzuki teacher-who-must-not-be-named, but her mother has pulled her out of the kindergarten class, because the kindergarten teacher didn’t speak Spanish very well. The mother, one of my good friends, whom I admire and trust, is a native Spanish speaker, and her daughter is already brilliantly, fluently bilingual. And I understand her frustration, but don’t share it. It’s just sort of one of those weird fate things to be going through this with this friend, because she was frustrated with the violin teacher months before I was, and stuck it out because she trusted me…
This is how the school is set up: there is a class of native English speakers who are learning Spanish as a second language, and a class of native Spanish speakers learning English as a second language. And when the kids achieve a certain degree of literacy, reading and writing in their native language, they get switched over to the other language, so when he can read and write in English, my son will begin learning to read and write in Spanish, switching to the other teacher, the one who teaches in Spanish all day every day. So, right now he’s getting some Spanish vocabulary from somebody who doesn’t speak Spanish perfectly. I have to admit, she still speaks better than I do.
I am doing that thing where I feel guilty for not being as upset by a situation as, in my head, a ‘good mother’ would be… I am grateful he’s getting even inadequate Spanish. My sixth grader has so far gotten NO second language instruction (I suppose you could count the sign language in his kindergarten…) Still Søren, my kindergartner, is devastated to have his friend leave the class. Sigh.
I know the school isn’t a perfect situation. None of my kids is getting a perfect education. But you know? It’s good enough. They’re being taught by people who are not perfect teachers but who care, who show up and do their best, who are sacrificing and not making much money for the hours that teaching just requires, and it’s a hard job. And I don’t know if I am accepting it because I’m such a glass-half-full person, or because I have a lot faith in my kids and how I’ve raised them and in the universe to provide the things we need the most or if I am just lazy/exhausted/stretched thin with four kids . Does it sound like a rationalization if I say I am trying to put my energy into things like making music with them, sharing a love of books with them, having fun bicycling and hiking with them, working at marriage and at being the kind of family I want them to grow up in?
Here’s my little philosophy education curse kicking in, too: I have to ask myself what my reason is for sending my kids to school. My father sent me a copy of John Taylor Gatto’s Dumbing Us Down last spring right before he retired from teaching high school, and a lot of Gatto’s arguments about the destructive power of schools to crush kids’ spirits and curiosity and teach them all of the wrong things, do make sense, but it still doesn’t fit exactly with how I am feeling: I liked school, my kids like it, and it’s good for them to be exposed to world views and communication styles and ways of being besides our own. They are smart enough to sort out what they want to keep for themselves. I send them to school so they can experiment with self-hood in an environment besides our family, and we get to see the sixth-grader developing this intense moral reasoning and code of loyalty and justice, a willingness to speak up for the things he believes in, our third-grader happily fitting in with a bunch of smart and personable good friends, writing really creative and imaginative things, and for how sort of dreamy and distracted he can be at home, it’s surprising to see that in the context of school he comes across as pretty disciplined and diligent; who knows what I’ll see the other two do?
I don’t pretend that education and schooling are the same thing. So it makes sense that the point of education is not the same as the point of schooling. I know I haven’t yet come out and stated “I believe the point of education is X, the point of schooling is Y” I just have a sense of them being different. I am pretty sure that the point of education is not getting into the right college, getting the right career, making more money than you need. In fact I think the question of the “point” of education is about as meaningful as the “point” of food — we’re naturally inclined towards it, it serves to enable us to do scores of other things, and it’s enjoyable in and of itself. Maybe I just feel fortunate that the schooling hasn’t gotten in the way of the kids’ educations so far? And the air I am breathing as a mother is trusting myself, that if and when a problem comes up, we will move to find the best solution we can for our child. And that right now I am not taking melting down every day after school as an indication of a real problem.
“…because contrary to the wisdom of the bumper sticker, it is not enough these days to simply ‘question authority,’ you’ve got to speak with it, too.”
– Taylor Mali, my new YouTube fascination, and the best distraction from the heat, the exhausted and whiny kids and their incomprehensible homework, the kitchen I’ve got to clean so I can make dinner so I can clean it again, and my frustration with a day that started out with such promise!
this is the only image I could find of it on the web but we’re actually getting two armless loveseats because our living room is very small and with a fireplace, built in bookcase and piano, that is what (I hope) will fit, and also it’s purple, no, aubergine (and I have a whole rant stored away on why we don’t actually use color names when describing catalogue items, as if ’seaside’ were more descriptive than ‘teal’ and maybe I’ve done that already?). Also, the order takes up to eight weeks, and I have my fingers crossed about the loveseats being here before my parents and sister arrive, eight weeks from today, for Thanksgiving.
