Loneliness

Ok, forgive the blog-nature of making everything that happens in the lives of everyone around me somehow about ME, and please trust me when I say I really am not the world’s most solipsistic person. My best friend, J., 2000 miles away in Richardson, Texas, gave birth to her fourth daughter on Monday, and if you want to see pictures of all four perfect and beautiful girls, you should check out the blog of J.’s sister-in-law, a professional photographer who captures the girls’ overall gorgeousness quite amazingly. And though I got to talk to J. briefly while she was in labor Monday night, and her husband called to tell me when the baby was born, I finally got the detailed story in a phone call yesterday. Like most of our phone calls, there were...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Aug 30, 2008 | 9 comments

Children from Porlock

Almost a year ago I wrote this little bit on trying to write when I get interrupted regularly, and I was thinking about that when the unreliable narrator asked me about multi-tasking yesterday. I was chatting with her while buttoning a child’s shirt and I don’t think she was asking if my kids were coping with getting mere shreds of my attention but, since I was having a good morning I told her that the multitasking that is the fabric of my life is, at its best synchronistic, things working in parallel to one another. Today, I was exhausted, tired from staying up too late reading, frustrated at how inefficient my own distraction was making me, completely unable to process the interruptions and the answer I would have given her about how the...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Aug 26, 2008 | 3 comments

Amateur Demographers

n one of those “duh” moments I realized this week that everybody has different models for how people work and interact. It may be as simple as categorizing people by their interests, (Totally Breakfast Club, “You see us as you want to see us… in the simplest terms and the most convenient definitions. You see us as a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess and a criminal. Correct? That’s the way we saw each other at seven o’clock this morning. We were brainwashed.”) Or explaining somebody doing something by their astrological sign, or their Meyers-Briggs profile. Raven explained that he sees people as interacting with others either in a performance mode, an interview mode or an exchange mode, which is a really useful...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Aug 21, 2008 | 12 comments

Practice Mute

I got a practice mute this week for my violin and viola. Its metal heft perches on the bridge and keeps the voice of my instrument a whisper that only I can hear, so I can practice late at night without disturbing neighbors or children. It surprises me, the need to practice for myself after practicing with all of them. I am practicing with four boys now, most days. With several weeks when both teachers are on vacation we’ve been missing days here and there, and not beating ourselves up about it, either, even though a little voice in my head nags me about the importance of consistency. Rainer, who is four, just got his tiny violin a few weeks ago, and we squeezed in one lesson before his teacher left for a month’s vacation, so he and I practice rest...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Aug 17, 2008 | 2 comments

Mustering Words

Looking for any explanation for having been unable to bring myself to keyboard since I got back from Bahà’í camp a week ago, and they all sound like excuses. Spending a week with a hundred and fifty Bahà’ís and having the kids go off all day to their classes and activities so I had lots of time for prayer and reflection was wonderful, but it’s not what I write about here, I feel completely inadequate to writing about my religious life, and in a society where religion seems to divide people up all the time, where people are prone to shoving their beliefs down other people’s throats, I tend towards caution, wanting you to know that I don’t judge you on your beliefs, that I am going to look for all of the things we have in common...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Aug 16, 2008 | 1 comment