OleopteneA blog for Mara Collins

Mustering Words

August 16th, 2008

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 rather than the things that divide us. Never mind that that for me is a lot of what being a Bahà’í is about, and there is something peculiar about feeling like my life gets compartmentalized.

There’s reflection, too, on what I am blogging for… a friend is nudging me to write more about parenting and I am wondering if I don’t want a separate, non-personal site for doing that, leaving Oleoptene.com to be all about me, me, me. Or for conversation about things that really aren’t parenting at all. The thing about writing about parenting is trying to imagine a supportive and encouraging tone to take when I believe that any of us could examine the scripts that pop out when we’re under stress, but mostly what any parent needs to hear is “Trust yourself, trust your love for your kid, you’re doing just fine.” What would a parenting blog/forum sound like if it was based on the idea that outside perspective and insight are useful, but every parent is the expert on their own child? I am flattered that this friend believes that there is anything that sets my parenting apart, but am hard pressed to identify what that could be.

So if a friend called this morning and asked what was going on, what would I have to say? Today is a bead on a string with little to set it apart from the bead before, the bead following, but I’m well-content with the shape of the bead, the elements in my days seem more or less in balance, quietly domestic, I hardly feel any urge to leave the house because everything I need and want is already under my roof?

In the cool morning, I write on the back porch, while outside is more pleasant than inside, watch a spider racing on its invisible highway between two chairs, and gently remove the thread from one chair hoping the spider will find somewhere else to be industrious, as everyone else in the house freaks out at spiders. I’ve refilled my coffee cup, checked on the boys, and the most pleasant thing I can imagine doing is trying to count the number of shades and hues of green in the sunlight filtering through the bamboo that borders our yard. Or possibly chasing down the difference in meaning between ’shade’ and ‘hue.’ Or forgiving myself for the various small ignorances that now seem unavoidable, my memory having such limits, my time for reading being, indeed, zero sum, so my best now is to not to pretend to know what I do not, so as to skip the embarrassment of getting caught, worse than the embarrassment of not knowing… (how often have I not lied, exactly, but nodded knowingly because it seemed to be incidental and liable to distract from a telling if I asked for a clarification? And perhaps I made a mental not to myself to look it up later, but of course, forgot to). I keep thinking life is like one of those fantasy books I loved as a preteen where if you keep pausing to go to the glossary and refer to the map, you can so fail to engage that you never get into the book, where as if you nod and move on, immersion and context will be all you need.

I lay on top of the blankets this morning, not looking at the stacks of paper on our bedroom floor, but knowing they were there, and I don’t know if it’s the green humidity and the heat, or just the non-New-Mexican-ness that takes me back to waking up in my grandparents’ house when we would visit them in Connecticut, but I muse on how their lives seemed so much more constrained by rules (papers in the office and not the bedroom, no white after Labor Day, three forks at dinner) that seemed somehow arbitrary but maybe made things more secure, more predictable. I don’t know how much I know about how things actually were and how much is reaching across three decades to an emotional truth, the unchangingness of How Things Were Done in their house, to the more adapting How Will Things Work Best in my own home. There was a ritual to arriving at their house and walking through the house checking that all of the details were just as I remembered them, the angle of the piano to the couch, the small rocking chair, the stack of comic books, the array of coasters. And I see my kids do the same when they arrive at my parents, but would swear I’d inherited from my mother a tendency to move furniture around when other elements in life are not flowing as I think they ought to. Still, right now? Every piece of furniture in the house seems to be just right, and it’s a novel but not surprising feeling.

Picture taken at the Japanese Gardens this week with our friend Todd, who knew us each before we knew each other, with whom reconnecting has been effortless and joyful.

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