Archive for June, 2008
June 25th, 2008
Driving in Portland, I occasionally glimpse a steep, hill-side narrow street with tall buildings, and, as intriguing as it looks, I don’t turn down it because this way it can remain in my imagination a portal to similar streets I walked a decade ago in Prague. I look for strings of continuity to the person I was when I walked around Prague (we never had a car, nor needed one) and they are hard to find at first. The baby always strapped to my chest is now almost as tall as I am, and has three younger brothers. And though the odd Czech word or name of a subway stop will rise unbidden, it seems like it all belongs to a different lifetime.
My first response to what it was to me to be in Prague (twelve years ago we went, next week, and ten years ago we came back, next week) is to reference the movie Lost in Translation. I saw that and was a little spooked at how it captured the girl with the newly minted philosophy degree come to a city where she doesn’t speak the language with a new husband who has a job and place to go every morning. That was me, minus Bill Murray and plus the six months along fetus in my belly.
I don’t think I have a coherent narrative of what those two years were, more these impressions of reading voraciously (I can still map routes to the two bookstores, U Knihomola and The Globe that sold overpriced English books) walking and writing, and throwing myself down canyon-like narrow streets of tall, gorgeously historic-looking buildings, taking random turns trying to see if I could get good and lost but inevitably arriving at a landmark I knew. 
Of the earnest attempts to learn Czech being dishearteningly not enough. The disapproving looks I got for strapping the baby to my chest and roaming instead of protecting his delicate spine and confining him to lying flat in a large prom, confining myself to where I could walk to with a bulky pram that one person could never get up or down stairs unassisted. Being told, always, that the baby was cold, and needed another layer of clothing, when he was in fact, quite happy and content and showing no signs of hypothermia.
We lived in two different attic apartments, and I spent lots of time staring out over the rooftops of Prague, horror struck about envisioning accidents where a child falls out these high windows, not yet quite trusting myself as the mother responsible for protecting him. I remember walking through a graveyard on all-saint’s day, my four week old son strapped to my chest, feeling so far from where my grandparents were buried, feeling this deep empathy for the graves not visited or decorated by any living family, wondering if there were no family or if they had emigrated, as my husband’s grandparents and great grandparents had. I remember marveling at the care taken of these graves by a supposedly atheist people, and feeling so displaced and mortal and just not rooted. An upstart, with little sense of my own history, and the whole new baby, who was a new generation displacing my generation, not quite responsible for the passing on of my grandparents six years earlier, but somehow connected to it, turning my parents into grandparents.
It’s very hard to separate out my state, newly wed to a man I had known exactly one year, and getting used to the idea of motherhood, giving up roles of student, employee, daughter and sister, from my experience of this alien city. It was my first experience of living in a big city — Albuquerque when I left was a city of about 600,000, Prague’s population was closer to 1.2 million. That so much of Prague for young, hip American ex-pats was about smoky bars and drinking, artistic experimentation or capitalist expansion, and the ex-pat mothers I got to know tended to have at least a decade on me and thus intimidate me.
Some of the negatives were so vivid and are so much closer to hand than the great experiences, the one time I boarded a bus with the baby, following usual procedures of public transportation, sitting, and having the bus drive say something I didn’t understand over the public announcement system, having everyone turn and look at me, until, cheeks burning, I decided to get off the bus at the next stop, feeling helpless and teary. I don’t think I thought the hardness of all the adjustment was peculiar to being in Prague, it just did the pathetic fallacy thing of reflecting how hard things were inside me, the things given up, the being unsure if I was ready for this new life. It echoed the vertiginous free-fall feeling I experienced the weekend when my parents dropped me off at college for the first time with time for orientation before classes started and there were whole mornings and afternoons when not only did I not have to be anywhere in particular, nobody was asking me to account for myself or let them know where I was and the freedom was truly frightening, paralyzing.
I have said that it was probably the best thing that we could have done for our marriage, to move to a city where we had no one to turn to but each other, where phone calls to our parents or friends were costly and had to be carefully timed across the time zones, not to be made in fits of frustration. The internet was a primitive thing, the dial-up connections slow, email a new marvel, the digital pictures we put up of our new son cutting-edge, Amazon an expensive last resort for getting English reading material. My mother-in-law would video tape and send us American sit-coms which were this sweet relief. We had a pediatrician who spoke English, but her receptionist really didn’t so making an appointment was always a test in my understanding of time and date, and when the baby seemed sick, it was easier to thumb through Dr. Spock than call anyone, so we early on developed a sense of ourselves as the experts on our son, doing what worked for us without realizing that there were labels for different child-rearing philosophies. It’s easy to look back at our time in Prague and wonder at all the things we were almost blind to, just as I wish I could re-do my first year of college. I wish I could see the imprint that the experience left on me, it might have left me stronger and more independent, but, on the other hand, it might also have left me a little more tentative and doubtful.
June 22nd, 2008
Jenny of Jenzai Studio and my real life bff tagged me with the six word memoir meme. Thus –
Here are the rules:
1. Write the title to your own memoir using 6 words.
2. Post it on your blog.
3. Link to the person who tagged you.
4. Tag 5 more blogs.
I won’t cheat and use the one I came up with in February. Instead, going off one of my favorite comments recently, here are my six words:
Striving for Strenuous and Muscular Kindness
And now I tag:
1) Raven
2) The Unreliable Narrator
3) The Almost Right Word
4) Nolan
5) Katie
June 16th, 2008
Mother’s Day, it turns out, is relatively simple for me. A well-deserved nod to the noble sacrifice, the giving over of identity, the universality of being the bearer of life. Then Father’s Day comes. Raven has taken Xander to a birthday party this afternoon — the mother of the birthday boy apologized to me, “I’m sorry for scheduling this on Father’s Day!” and I was quick to reassure her that our family life does not rely on a calendar to tell us when to appreciate one another, that Father’s Day just seems like a good day to avoid family-style restaurants where you see dysfunctional extended families spending obligatory and uncomfortable time together eating overpriced food served by stressed out waiters, when people spend $4 for folded pieces of cardboard to express threadbare sentiment. Or, maybe I was less cynical sounding, and just said, “Really? No big deal.”
And yet. Søren sits working hard at a card for Raven, because it is important to him, because he can, an expansive card, in matter-of-fact five-year-old generosity, two sheets of paper taped together to create an airplane with detailed windows and wingflaps, “We all love you, Dad” written on the back. I wonder if the association of Raven with airplanes in his head will be bittersweet for my oft-absent beloved, who is so celebrated on his return. I will call my father tonight, a little envious my sister got to go out to breakfast with him and my mom. And after two weeks of being the sole grown-up in the house, I cannot help acknowledging how our family balance relies on Raven and me together, our complementary values and ways of doing things. I resolve to look at the holiday with a little less of the cynicism (inherited, quite honestly, from my father!) and without the hydra of resentment about the unglamorous work of parenthood so seldom falling evenly, a resentment that seems to sprout new heads every time I think I’ve slain it. It isn’t today, resentment of my husband who is supportive in ways I didn’t know I needed support, who is giving in ways I didn’t know people could be giving. No, really, it’s resentment of the model of family given over to us, that the work cannot be shared evenly, two people working half-time cannot earn what one person working full time does, of the assumption, however correct, that I will always drop everything for the darlings, that the socializing of men doesn’t make them — well, like mothers. No, no, I will, I promise myself, think on these two important fathers in my life and acknowledge the gifts that each has given me as mother, as daughter.
I aspire to be my mother’s daughter, I rattle off the qualities like a shopping list — her resourcefulness, her sense of humor, her patience, her honesty and fairness, her assertion of her own needs in balance against those of others that has never gotten in the way of her generosity. She is a person who is always identifying what needs to be done and doing it. There is nobody on the planet I admire more, her company is easy and comfortable, and the only people who are bigger fans are probably my sister and father. But the inheritance from my father? I trace back to the squeak of the stool I perched on in his woodshop and the smell of sawdust and the conversation, the conversation as I trailed him up mountains, the conversation that picks up easily now that I can phone him during the day when kids are at school, in his first year of retirement. My father’s review of papers I wrote for school and of letters to my grandparents with helpful suggestions were how I learned how to write. The books he loved became books I loved, the music he loved became music I love. He sat in the car while I was in doing violin lessons, made sure my sister and I always had good instruments. I’ve always been proud to be his daughter, wanted to make him proud of me.
It’s not a clear division, that my mother taught me what I needed to be a mother, that my father taught me what I needed to be the writer and the person I am, because my parents parented together, made the major decisions together, and shared the work of raising children, as Raven and I try to. But I have different relationships with the two of them, and treasure them both. One of the more helpful things they told me after we had children was that the children did not need us to parent them in exactly the same way, that so long as Raven was consistent parenting as Raven does and I was consistent parenting as I do, the boys would be ok. I think that gave me some help in stepping back and letting the relationship Raven has with each of our sons develop independently of me, to recognize the gifts he has to offer them.
And that’s the other thing about Father’s Day — gratitude to the father of my children. I’ve never met anyone like him, and he makes me a better person. We are different people, with different things to offer as parents and spouses, and somehow that works for us.
June 13th, 2008
Ellipses are the opposite of an exclamation point for me, a tentative trailing off…
Right? Annoyance at myself to sound so adolescent girl insecure, asking for approval and validation, so unwilling to assert myself.
I notice I am writing in my own private journals with too many of these trailings off, and suspect that it is psychologically indicative, the way it is when I get too carried away with parentheticals, completely unable to proceed in a linear fashion from one thought to another, instead having branched and nesting ideas.
On the other hand, perhaps the punctuation just indicates a sloppy habit. I can re-write in short, snappy declaratives. I experiment with it here.
The second week of parenting alone is making me a little crazy. It’s the third day of summer vacation. We haven’t yet landed on the right balance of structure and flexibility. I berate myself. It is 1:30 in the afternoon. I haven’t accomplished even one of the things I consider my basic goals for the day. Once the berating starts it bleeds over into a hundred different little things. The berating opens floodgates of not-helpful thinking that include, in AA-speak, comparing my insides to other people’s outsides, defensiveness in one-sided conversations with people not even here to hold up their end of the conversation, impatience with my kids and their needs, unkindness to the body in the mirror, paralysis.
I don’t write this to ask for reassurance. I write trying to halt the snowballing of crazy-thinking. I write because if there is an AA phrase for comparing your insides to other people’s outsides, maybe putting my insides out there helps shift reality to “We all have struggles.” I write this so I’ll have a reminder that there are days when I get up before the kids and have done my writing before they wake up, days when my to-do list trembles at the might of my ability to get stuff accomplished, and days like this, which are the opposite, and more days which are somewhere in between. I write to remind myself that the four boys are all safe and relatively entertained and fed and getting along and that is the only accomplishment that has long-term consequences for me today.
I wish I could offer the berating voice a cup of tea. I imagine addressing it, gently, “Oh, buddy. The feeling of not-being-enough-not-doing-enough, that’s a rough one isn’t it?” Which shocks it into silence because it was so ready to fight, and it stammers “But everyone else seems to be managing… There’s a whole world of people out there who are out of their pajamas before noon, I am sure of it…”
I try to treat this voice with the patience I can summon for the kids on the days when I am on my game as a parent. I listen for the things not being said. I hear the belief that somehow I should be earning and deserving. I recognize the fear of unworthiness. I try to give it an action plan. What are the things that HAVE to happen today? There’s a doctor’s appointment. So get everyone dressed, and don’t forget to ask the boys for help getting ready. And then after? I can ask, very gently, if what it needs is the connection that comes with practicing with the boys. I will carefully avoid practicing out of guilt/the money we spend on instruments and lessons/the fear about the boys doing well at auditions for the local youth orchestra next week. Or does it need the physicality of time on the elliptical? Does it want to take the boys to the library to feed their reading habit? Or does it just need to get together with some friends and have the reality check of connecting with other adults? The voice needs to be reminded that if Raven gets home and the house is not immaculate he won’t love me any less.
I don’t pretend I have it all solved forever and ever. It’s amazing how one little crack in the dam can lead to such overwhelamament, but I will get through the afternoon, I think, which is really all that is required of me this afternoon. Knowing that the not-helpful thinking is slipping in, I will be vigilant about examining the thoughts that are moving me, whether they are the helpful or unhelpful kind. It amazes me that I have gotten a little better at reminding myself of what it is I need to function, earliest journals have reference to an internal gyroscope, that will eventually always help me determine which way is up again. But if punctuation is truly diagnostic? Then I just have to monitor my own writing, I suppose.
June 5th, 2008
Truth time: I don’t like the blog entry I published yesterday. I slept badly wondering if I had gotten too far from my own belief in kindness, in looking for the best in everyone, which it turns out, isn’t for the just the moral in some Disney movie I’d let my kids watch, or something to pay lip-service to, while turning around and gossiping with friends in the corner. I see it as a spiritual challenge and conscious choice, a battle fought against the darkness and indifference of the universe. There are more unkind things than what I wrote on Amazon, of course, and actually, the internet abounds with unkindness and cattiness, but that’s one of those things that I find toxic about the internet, people not imagining that what they write could wound, might very well be read by the person who they’re writing about, or thinking that being unkind about somebody more famous than themselves is the way to get noticed. Also, I tried to write about the book, and not the writer, but because the writer was writing about himself it got blurry for me.
Raven’s in London this week. He is going to bed as I get the kids from school, getting up as I go to sleep, and working the rest of the time, so I don’t have my reality check. I feel disconnected from the world of people who are not my children, a little disconnected from myself. And the second to last sentence I wrote about the book, that I found an underlying note of alienation in it sort of resonating with me, may be the most true thing I wrote.
Alienation it turns out is what happens to me when I stray from kindness and from looking for the best in everyone. I start to wonder if my own existential despair is cheapened by being shared with angry, black-wearing adolescents, I start to see the punk rock snarl, the frat boy smirk, and realize they are masks for the Edvard Munch Howl-like expression my own face is concealing with the nicey nice smile I wear dropping off the kids at school. I wonder if everyone around your seems to be living a happy life of television and barbecues and shopping and talking about politics while I struggle to figure out what it all means. I wonder why I haven’t outgrown my existential despair and turned into a grown up like all the grown-ups around me.
And I was ready to weep with relief when words started echoing through my head and I realize that besides kindness and looking for the best in others, I have one other small antidote for alienation in my shelf:
I celebrate myself
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belong to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul
I lean and loafe at my ease… observing a spear of summer grass.
Seriously? I am considering getting myself a “WWWWWD?” bracelet, to remind myself “What Would Walt Whitman Do?” Leaves of Grass is the opposite of alienation. I know it’s a bit tricky to ascribe personalities to those long dead whom one only knows through a handful of poems, but Uncle Walt lives in my head, a mad populist, nudging me “Alienation is too easy. Do better than that. Every atom that belongs to me as good belongs to you.” He reminds me that we are all made from the same dust and filled with the same longings. That life is too short when our pulses all beat a music together, that when we are so connected, when memes spread faster than any epidemiologist could comprehend, what hurts you, hurts me, what I celebrate you celebrate. He makes me see the holiness of the human spirit in even those people who don’t get me, reminds me of that new mother feeling of awe that every human being I encountered was once a tender newborn.
Alienation for me is fear, fear that I am disconnected and will never connect again. It’s being protected, aloof and rejecting the million ways around me to connect. It is pretending that my inability to accept myself at the moment is instead an inability to accept others. And it’s something I cannot afford. So, um, I’m going to go read some poetry for a while.
June 4th, 2008
I do not fancy myself a book critic, really, being much more interested in writing than in writing about somebody else’s writing, and having a predisposition to look for the best in everything and everyone. But having now devoured more parenting memoirs than is good for a girl, I think the world should benefit from my wisdom with my advice to anyone considering writing about how parenthood has changed them.
I am a forgiving reader, and yet the last parenting memoir I tried reading, Neal Pollack’s Alternadad I finally could forgive no more. I forgave him the self-loathing when he is driving to Central Market in Austin, (the yuppie organics high end grocery store where I did do a lot of my shopping when I lived in Texas) in his Volkswagon Passat listening to NPR with the kid in the carseat in back, bemoaning his loss of cool. I forgave him for feeling unable to relate to the other parents at the playground because I’ve had days when the hardest part of parenting is other parents. I forgave him for writing too much about his son’s bowel movements, figuring that that will be for his son to forgive him, someday. I forgave him the preoccupation with being cool, which seems like something you should grow out of sometime in college when you realize that nobody is paying as much attention to you as you are, that people are more likely to remember kindness or passion for a particular subject than they are coolness. I forgave, until a hundred pages in when one chapter just didn’t have anything to do with the one before it or the one after it and there was no point being made I had had enough. Not only had I had enough, I composed a long letter to him in my head.
Dear Mr. Pollack –
Parents, like everyone else on earth, have things that make them unique, as well as things we all have in common. And the tricky thing about writing about parenthood is because it’s new to you, it’s hard not to believe you haven’t discovered something no one else has ever done before. The surprise of having gone from thinking about yourself first always, or maybe your spouse and yourself, to finding yourself responding to your child’s needs and forgetting your own can be so startling that you are sure this must be something new in the world. When you are overwhelmed by the the primal, the fierce protectiveness you feel and the overwhelmingly vulnerable tenderness that lies beneath it like an ice cream cone dipped in a candy shell, it’s difficult to believe that parents have been experiencing this since parenthood began.
I think that the best of parent-writing in fact comes from the belief in this unique new world that exists: you have a kid, a whole human being existing where none did before and you’re facing this challenge, the ways this person will test you, frustrate you, make you feel inadequate, and the fact that you are committed, that you have to go forward, inevitable mistakes and all. Is there a drama greater than that? You’re going to have to get over your own childhood traumas and stumbling blocks. You’re going to face judgement and disapproval and discover for yourself what works best for you and your child, disregarding what your own parents, the neighbors, and the women in perfectly coordinated warm-up suits at the park think. You will be tested in a contest of wills with this small person that proves that will is inversely proportional to body-size, you will make sacrifices you resent, and you may discover your rock and roll lifestyle gets compromised a little. That’s parenthood. Bu the rewards? When you find in your kid this treasure mine of qualities that are better than you or your partner — where could they have come from? And, oh my God, the head relaxed on your shoulder that says ‘I feel safe with you. Thanks for making my world solid.’ The rewards are abundant, even though you’re not doing for the rewards.
There could be volumes of parent-writing just on sleeping children. There is the music of their breath, the open postures, the little butts poked comically in the air, the loosely closed fists, written not in this saccharine Anne Geddes soft-focus, but in hair plastered to their damp heads, their sour-breathed reminders of what it feels like to release all concern and anxiety, the total surrender of their sleep. Parenthood is worth it for sleeping kids alone, but better than that, you get sheafs of paper from kindergarten with ‘I love my dad’ and ‘I love my mom’ scrawled across them. Sometimes, if you’re lucky you get to experience the tenderness two of your children feel for one another, get the startling insight that their squabbling sprouts from their concern, needing each others’ respect and affection. You get to share the things you love best with them, whether it’s a book from your childhood, a movie you loved, a sport or a trail, and you get to see them turn into their own people, whom you can guide but never truly control.
Mr. Pollack, it is possible to write well about parenthood in the same way we write well about any aspect of being human. It’s this thing about language, about communication, using what we share, the words we have in common, this dipper in a the of universal pool to try to give me a glimpse of something that is your unique experience, some sliver of insight or turn of phrase to jet out, arcing elegantly a stream of individuality and uniqueness.
All writing, I think has this struggle: if it’s universal, why bother writing about it, because everyone knows it, but if it’s too individual, how do you expect anyone else to get it? You get hooked on the irony of wanting to be special, just like everyone else. If you manage to navigate the uncomfortable truths about yourself that you encounter trying to write honestly about parenthood, if you avoid the cliches, the lazy shorthands for profound experience, the parenting memoir can be rewarding to read, even for the non-parent, in proportion to the rewards of parenting itself.
Sincerely,
A reader
A friend asked why I spent as much time and energy as I did on a book that annoyed me so much, and I suppose I do appreciate how my own beliefs came rushing in in opposition to what this book didn’t do for me. I don’t like putting a book down until I’ve given it a chance, and I skimmed the last bit hoping it would redeem itself. I think the negative feelings I was left with make me wonder if I am not frustrated by the weird note of alienation underlying the whole book because it resonates a little. Still, I believe in parenting as well as you can and I believe in writing about parenting as well as you can.
