Honoring a Promise

I am a meme-killer. I tag people who are offended or don’t respond, even though I was flattered and honored to be tagged. I still carry shame that I was nominated on the always entertaining blog, From Stage Dives to Station Wagons, in August as a blogger that kicks ass and because it happened while I was on vacation followed by weeks and months of my husband (and tech support) being immersed in career transitions, I never managed to get the badge posted to my own blog. But it’s funnny, the dimension added to a friendship when you both have blogs. When I moved to Oregon my friendship with Jenny had to be done mostly by phone, and then she started blogging and leaving comments on my blog , which, while it doesn’t replace the phone, allows us to...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Sep 28, 2008 | 3 comments

Attention Deficit Disorder

So Rainer and I went to the zoo today with friends. Søren asked why Rainer was getting to have all the good times and I answered that four weekdays out of five, the highlight of Rainer’s day was getting to walk to school to pick his brothers up from school, so let’s not go trying to tally up who’s having the better childhood. Not the point. The point, actually, is that the more time I spend at the zoo, the less I like people. I hope T., the friend we went with, wasn’t too put off by how completely misanthropic I was by the time we left the place — in fact, I think one of the secrets of our friendship’s success is that she was pretty similarly frustrated by the same things I was. What I saw that I had never seen before was...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Sep 23, 2008 | 4 comments

Cultivating My Inner “So What?”

Sometimes when I am trying to understand what my kids need I have these insights into my own needs, and it can be so startling. Take my five year old. Lately it’s felt like it’s impossible to discipline him because when he’s done something wrong he get so upset at the idea that I might be angry that all of the energy I want to spend on the message about what is and is not acceptable behavior is diverted, instead, into reassuring him that it’s ok, I still love him. If I respond with any tinge of emotion to anything he’s done wrong, be it pushing a brother, getting in trouble at school, or not responding to three or four requests that he pick up/get dressed for school/come out to practice/get ready for bed his face just crumples...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Sep 19, 2008 | 10 comments

Words Fail

Some mornings I sit down to my morning pages hoping that I will end up with a beautifully coherent set of words which can be neatly transcribed into a blog entry and bam, one stone, two birds, and more time to spend arranging dinosaur stickers with Rainer. This was such a hopeful morning, but alas I have only this loosely connected set of thoughts. 1) In a phone call wherein she tried to school me in the basics of music theory, my sister patiently explained that music has a vertical component, harmony, and a horizontal component, melody, which delighted me. I had never heard it put that way before. Of course days later, background characters having some conversation that was completely incidental to the plot and main characters of some movie or television show I...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Sep 17, 2008 | 4 comments

Exquisite Corpse

Jenny points out that it is past time for a new blog post, and she is, of course, right. But the inside of my head is not yielding pretty blog posts. And I muse on how the thread of comments gets away from me, here, until I have to strain to remember what the women coming and going, speaking of Michaelangelo could possibly have to do with Things You Can Tell Just By Looking at Her. Since I live to entertain, however, I offer up here, as an experiment, my best first line. The way an exquisite corpse works is everybody then adds on to the story looking only at the line above their own. Unmoderated comments means you’re on your honor because they get published as they get written. Trying to flirt, Miranda Hobbes texted “I like my men like life itself,...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Sep 15, 2008 | 13 comments