Archive for December, 2007
December 30th, 2007
When the Urban Mamas group in Portland announced on a Monday the week before Christmas that the reading for a the next Thursday would be Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, I was so hungry for conversation about books I persuaded to Raven to pick the book up on his way home from Seattle that night, and managed to finish it by Thursday night. I liked it much more than I expected to, since I picked it up with all sorts of defensive feelings about why my family eats as they do and why it is not going to change. But she makes lots of excellent points, and I think she isn’t saying everybody should try to spend a year eating nothing that isn’t locally grown, but that the benefits to us societally and individually if many people tried eating a little more locally, seasonally, etc. would be appreciable. And because she does write so positively about the deliciousness of local foods in season, rather than focussing on the deprivations and her martyrdom or chilling us with the horrific aspects of industrial agriculture detailed in something like the Meatrix, I find myself looking forward to a new season of farmers’ markets and learning about growing food. At least two of my friends have declared intentions to become locavores, but I think I want to start smaller, with the intention of creating more meals from scratch, figuring out what aspect of being in the kitchen freaks me out: the isolation? the interruptions? the hours spent preparing something new to have everybody in the family push it to the edge of their plates mumbling excuses? the hours spent cleaning up afterwards?
Almost as a coincidental antidote to the Kingsolver, I was excited when then my library hold on Jennifer Niesslein’s Practically Perfect in Every Way finally came through, the Friday following the book club meeting. Neisslein is co-editor of Brain, Child which is the only magazine to which I subscribe right now, and it is no small thing to say that I liked reading the book as much as I love the magazine. It is a lovely answer to all of the books published in the last couple of years that document a writer’s year experimenting with a lifestyle. She documents two years spent committing to various self-help programs, from Flylady.net to Dr. Phil, financial advice to parenting advice, and in the end concludes that the degree of self-absorption it called for was toxic in the dose she got it in.
This is why I join book clubs, though. I want somebody else I know to read this book so I can have the conversations I have been having with the book for the three days since I finished reading it. Like what the difference is between self-absorption and self-awareness, or how much of this idea that we can transform ourselves through simple programs is a cultural artifact. Truthfully, the reason I still have a subscription to Brain, Child is that it isn’t chock full of the sort of articles that begin “10 Easy Steps to…” or “30 days to…” I keep thinking of the book, The Body Project, and wondering what it is that I am susceptible to whole self-projects, crossing the line from turning to a book for advice about a problem or aspect of my life to being willing to follow, carrying a torch (or a pitchfork!) until I have cornered my poor, imperfect self. I carry vestiges of Flylady and Artist’s Way and various parenting books like mismatched luggage, various ‘morning routines’ jostling for precedence. And I am feeling ready to throw all of the processed and pre-cooked foods out of my freezer. Can I learn from Niesslein?
There were whole sections of the book I wanted to underline and put exclamation marked yesses next to (but refrained because it was a library book, after all), so I am surprised that the thing that has stuck in my head and shown up in my daily journal is the experimenting with the idea that this moment right now is as good as it gets. I thought maybe this was a depressing thought, only I keep finding it oddly hopeful and liberating. I suspect that it is in fact a recurring theme for me, how to get present again; how to jump from focussing on the carrots I dangle in front of my own nose because I am worried about losing motivation, to having flow; how to worry less about the fruits of my labor than what the labor itself is giving me right now. It’s about letting go of the fantasy of being thin, letting go of the fantasy of what our basement will look like when it is organized and the floor is sealed, letting go of the anxiety about what I am going to do with my life when my kids don’t need me enough to justify my being a full-time stay-at-home parent, letting go of the shadow better mother who, at this hour would have had the kids all fed healthy, organic, local foods for dinner, have had them practicing diligently at least part of the afternoon, have them all scrubbed clean and in their pajamas and ready to settle down to a family board game with some nice educational component. In short a perfect mother who would have things running much more smoothly around here than I seem to be managing today.
This is that awful time of year when not only are we subject to maudlin retrospectives on a mediocre year, but also to hearing lots of people making public commitments to changes in their lives. In that spirit, here are my resolutions:
1) To be at peace with those changes I cannot control and, more, to be at peace with other things not changing because they are not mine to change.
2) I want the things I put my energy into to be really in line with the values I hold and I am willing to be self-examining for that reason. I hope that doesn’t make me too self-absorbed.
3) I want to make room for synergistic connections, a creative way of making the energy I spend count in lots of ways, like cooking with the kids so that there is the benefit of time spent on my relationship with the kids, time spent on our eating healthy food, time maybe being creative with them, and modeling values for them. I want to let go of perfectionism as a way of driving self-improvement.
4) I want to check my blog stats less obsessively so I keep writing what I need to write rather than what I think will get me lots of hits.
5) I need to proofread more and self-edit less.
December 20th, 2007
As we pulled into a parking space at the mall, I couldn’t believe my ears: my three year old in the back seat sang out “nah, nah our van is bigger than yours” to the car next to us. I know that some of this is just life with siblings, but I do worry that our youngest child is being warped by the micro-competitions happening all day, every day of his life, who gets to the van first, who gets buckled in first, who is first at everything from getting dressed in the morning to brushing teeth at night. Worse, is the anxious gracelessness of his five year old brother calling out, “It’s not a race” if it’s close, and then racing anyway and “I won!” So our family motto seems to be “It’s not a race unless Søren is winning.”
I worry I encouraged this because it was so useful at first to get the kids moving when nothing else would make them move along — innocently, at bedtime, it was “Let’s see if we can get ready before the timer goes off.” But then beating your brother can be so much more satisfying than beating a timer.
I am not sure how to instill better sportsmanship. I try to model it, of course, easy as it is to start comparing free rice scores, I lose frequently and with pleasure at scrabulous, where it is fun to watch other people playing better than I do, I think that marks a change in my own ability to enjoy games with detachment from the competition. My husband, of course, would say I am still competitive. We disagree about whether it is ok to beat a 5 year old at tic-tac-toe (I insist that this is how he learns and I don’t do it on days when he cries easily). Also, I am married to someone who used to worry about other kids’ feelings and make sure they won at tetherball on the playground. And I love that about him. Just like I love that my older kids did chess club last year without ever getting particularly competitive — they liked thinking about strategy, and came up with creative variations, but didn’t particularly seem to care about winning.
The difference between me and my husband is one I used to attribute to birth order (I am first of two, he is third of three) and our first-born does seem a little more driven to win, while our second wavers between jockeying for position with his older brother and a native generosity and awareness of everyone else’s feelings that really cuts the bloodlust. And of course, sometimes, in some games, he just has given up, knowing when it’s a game he cannot win at and refuses to play. Which I think is an important thing for his brother to learn, that games have their own homeostatic balance, that they have to be interesting, that everyone has to feel they have a chance.
Of course, being who I am I have to think about what competition means. And when my two younger guys are racing for the car, with an emotional investment that seems out of proportion to who gets to the car first, I suspect that they are jostling also for esteem, for position in the family, for something that there just doesn’t seem to be enough of for both of them (please let this not be my attention!). And that is what competition at all sorts of levels seems to be about, some scarcity, something you want at a cost to someone else — whether it is a place in an elite school or college, a position in a company, or rank in the family. As a family, we love games, but I am realizing how much I am growing, as I appreciate that the part of the game I love is the interesting part and not the part where there is room for just one winner.
December 13th, 2007
Don’t get me wrong, Annie Dillard’s writing still knocks my socks off, her descriptions of things are powerful and poetic. And I love that about the Maytrees, but I ended up throwing the book across the room last night in frustration with the main character, Lou’s, equanimity.
I don’t usually get violent with books, and I really LIKED this character except for this paragraph where she is working in a nursing home and describes the residents as needing to be special at someone else’s expense, this one looking down on immigrants and that one on tourists, all informed and none of them wise “Their cupidity and self-love were no worse than anyone else’s, but their many experiences’ having taught them so little irked Lou… Even dying they still held themselves in highest regard. Lou would have to watch herself, for this way of thinking began to look like human nature — as if each person of two or three billion would spend his last vital drop to sustain his self-importance.” But I DON’T understand how Lou manages to avoid it — she manages to forgive her husband for leaving her by practicing letting go a few minutes at a time; that is managable. And maybe she is capable of her inscrutable equanimity because of that, but I resent her not struggling.
I don’t want enlightenment like a light switch, I want my own struggles and broken heart and scavenging for the strength to get up and try again to promise hope of bringing me closer. The saints in my head have compassion because they didn’t get to where they are easily. Somehow I feel about Lou the way I feel about a parenting blog I stumbled on yesterday where it seemed that this woman’s children had never misbehaved in any way because she had made all of the enlightened and right choices. Oh, I am opinionated about parenting, but I hope I don’t come off that way.
And so, right now, I just want to say, I struggle. I struggle parenting, I struggle writing, and I struggle spiritually. Yesterday my son kicked a girl on the playground, chased the group of girls that he didn’t know how to join, and I didn’t have an answer. The other child’s father confronted me about it, and for a few minutes the love I feel for my son was completely overshadowed and overwhelmed by shame and guilt, that I was standing, talking to another mother instead of watching my son, and fear that his behavior is a sign I am foundering here, achey with allergies and PMS and the greyness of December, not giving him enough attention among his attention-hungry siblings. And this man put my son on the spot about kicking not being acceptable, which was reasonable, but I felt weird because I smiled and introduced myself to this man before he confronted me, and he didn’t introduce himself back, and my younger son was running off without me, and it was too much to deal with then and there.
And in the car on the way home, my son cried that he hated me, and the way things work is, I’m his mom, I’m supposed to be on his side. And I felt bad, that I had handled it wrong. Because I think deep down I do believe that even when my kids do stuff wrong, they do have a side, their own version of events, and that at five these kids are beginning to be at an age of working things out without as much grown-up intervention. And I blame the school for exposing my son to lots of aggressive behavior and endless tattling… Or maybe it’s growing pains, and adjustment. Maybe I am projecting how I feel like an outsider, still, in this group of parents who all seem to know each other and have endless playdates outside of school. Or maybe it really is my inadequate parenting, and I am intellectualizing when I ought to be on the ground, engaging with my kids, thinking up new games and listening attentively. And I don’t know why I am obsessed with this incident 24 hours later except it isn’t clear to me what happened until I write about it. And this is my struggle today. I got no equanimity, no sage wisdom, only, just because I am feeling bad I don’t get a day off to re-consider what I am doing, how I am doing it.
December 12th, 2007
This morning I woke up to our three year old doing a pitch perfect imitations of his five year old brother’s outraged shriek howl, which is, by the way, an awful way to wake up, but worse was this feeling of, “Oh no, he caught it from him!” If this particular noise is contagious, I expect to be shunned on playgrounds across Portland as I haven’t been shunned since taking a child with a runny nose to preschool.
Still, this had me thinking about how behaviors spread from one person to another. There were several news stories this summer about obesity being ‘contagious’ which were sort of annoying, at the time. Actually, the more I think about them, the angrier I get, because I imagine people getting shunned who are already wrestling with other issues of stigma and shame.
But I do avoid people whose behaviors I am struggling to get over — when I quit smoking I couldn’t be around smokers, and while I am trying to get healthy in acceptance of my body, I don’t want to listen to anyone who talks about food as “bad” or does group-guilt stuff over eating/not exercising, or publicly flagellates themselves for some self-perceived flaw. Of course, it seems like most of the women in my life are or have been capable of such talk at one point or another. So how to be supportive and still stand firm in my own determination to get healthy?
The funny thing is, it was a thin friend who first pointed me at Shapely Prose, and I read over a few entries and thought “Nice writing, good critiques, so glad this is there for _them_” and I ignored for a long time that I am among the _them_, that is people who are not completely able to accept and love their bodies exactly as they are RIGHT THIS MOMENT.
Another ironic thing: I started with completely superficial reasons for thinking body-acceptance/fat-acceptance were important.
1) Whining about your weight seems really boring/unattractive.
2) Hating your body makes you unhappy. When I am unhappy, there is nothing as comforting as food. Hence the vicious cycle thing, and I hoped this was a good place to start breaking into it.
3) I want to be a confident person. Hating my body works poorly with that.
But then it occurs to me that I started with the idea of trying for a little more self-acceptance as a kind of whole other self-improvement plan, there are a so many other valid reasons:
4) Self-acceptance is feminist.
5) A lá Killing Us Softly, I don’t want to give unhealthy portrayal of women in media any more fuel by buying these ideas about how our bodies should look/striving to attain the unattainable.
6) Disordered thinking is contagious, and the defiant inoculating of yourself against ideas that thin = attractive, self-disciplined, virtuous is in the service or public health.
Maybe 6 is really a second part of 5, but I find myself feeling all crusade-y about this, and more sensitive in even my limited media consumption — NPR stories “for your health” that mention obesity epidemics and some of the stereotypes and prejudices that sneak into my own head, that somehow this is the one prejudice that is ok among relatively enlightened and fair-minded people.
December 6th, 2007
When I discovered Tom Robbins as a teenager, the passage that I remember just being blown away by was in Even Cowgirls Get the Blues where he talks about the brain overestimating its own importance because it’s the part of the body that goes around estimating relative importance of body parts. I think the word-generating, word-understanding part of my brain has been similarly carried away lately, since I wrote an unprecedented number of words in November and this week finished reading the 750 pages of Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin, which is LOVELY and funny (and I love the name Abysmillard! And the comical Binky-isms!). And then I started reading The Maytrees by Annie Dillard which I couldn’t read during NaNoWriMo because I always feel like “If I can’t write like Annie Dillard I don’t want to write at all” which is not a thought I am proud of or want to perpetuate, because the world needs lots of non-Annie Dillards.But, basically, it feels like word overdose, and it’s hard to blog when I am weary of my own voice, and it is time to remember the kinds of knowing that there aren’t words for. I went into a knitting shop this weekend to meet some Urban Mamas and my friend Sarah and even though I haven’t touched yarn or knitting needs in — four years? I came home and picked up a ball of yarn just to see if I remembered what to do, and funny, even though I couldn’t have put it into words, or drawn a picture, my hands still knew what to do (in a very limited, I can make squares and rectangles, only, sort of sense, scarves and afghans) but, for this second week when Raven has had to go out of town, I am finding comfort in the rhythm and repetition of the needles clicking and putting down row after row in what will probably be a scarf, because that’s all I know how to do. And, anyway, what it is is really less important than the pleasure of it in my hands being made.And because life is synchronistic, I am busy thinking about non-verbal knowledge and when the violin teacher started teaching our eight year old to read alto clef last night, it was about by-passing the word-generating part of the brain, and going straight to associating a spot on the staff with a spot on the viola. I could feel myself start to get a little panicky, thinking this is less orthodox, this could make understanding theory further down the line more complicated. Except. I trust the teacher. With a conscious willingness to put my ideas aside and do things his way and trust the process. And my son can already can read bass and treble clefs from piano, and has this quick mind, that makes connections that surprise me and I don’t think he will have a hard time understanding key signatures or accidentals. And I could see the wordy part of the brain really messing with the instantaneousness of reading music, and this was, when I think about it, how I taught myself to read alto clef.So there is irony in trying to write a celebration of the non-wordy parts of knowing, but there are things I don’t have words for: what to add to balance the flavor of a sauce, the overwhelming combination of tenderness and safety and self-and-otherness that I feel with Raven, the response to music when I cannot listen to another minute of NPR and another story on climate change, how far I can stretch in yoga and have it still be all right.
December 3rd, 2007
So about a week ago, my five year old son complained bitterly of something I had done and I cannot even remember what it was, just that I offered up in my flippant way: “What you need, kid, is a t-shirt that says ‘It’s All My Mom’s Fault.’” He really perked up, “Yeah, I do!” And I promptly forgot about it.Until tonight. when I was folding his laundry. And found this.
In case you cannot read five year old phonetics: It is all my mom’s fault.Or maybe he was giving me laundry instructions, and it is all my mom’s to fold.
