OleopteneA blog for Mara Collins

Center of Gravity

January 28th, 2009

A week without posting and my blog looks all reproachfully at me. It isn’t that I am not writing, it’s just that the stuff in the paper journal seems to belong mostly in the paper journal, even though it will probably come out at some later point because it does that, but in a form that is a little more comestible. And when I go all vague and stuff like that? Saying “working stuff out” I worry that sounds like I’m trying to be more mysterious, like the girls in middle school who would explain that they had to have lunch without me because they had things to discuss that weren’t for me to hear, and you know, now I know it was probably pretty insipid stuff, about which boy passed a note or which girl said something stupid (me?) but I was dying then. And it’s not like that. It’s not interesting or uninteresting, it’s just my stuff to sort out. And the blog is never going to be the place to do that. I feel more patient with the paper journal process now: I show up and write every day and some days are full of brilliance and connections and some days, I just shrug and tell myself, well if I don’t show up every day then the brilliant days aren’t going to happen. But the blog carries a different responsibility, and I don’t know how to be regular and honest and not walk through my life as if I were mining it for blog material.

Okay, and also this: I think one of the reasons I go blog-aphasic is because of this performance issue: I think about what I am saying not in relation to its truth value so much as effect and how I imagine it being received, the more for the different people I know are reading who come from all sorts of places all over my life, people to whom I relate very differently. It’s not that I am dishonest or concealing my real self from any one of them, it’s just that truth-seeking is different with each of them, and there is the way I feel chameleoned into being different people in different contexts.

Apparently this question of self and relating others is the one I am working on right now, which, you know, marks a change from the “hey, who’s going to give me permission to write?” question, but, still,  I get weary of it, fear everyone else gets weary of it, like I’m one of my children playing on one of their charming toy musical instruments that plays only one note .

One of the concepts I struggled to understand in Physics 101 was the fact that an object’s center of gravity could be outside of the object itself. And I start feeling like that when I am trying to calculate effects, like my reference point should be within me and it has moved somewhere outside my perimeter. So how do I reclaim my center? Lately it’s been by walling myself in with towering stacks of books. And feeling guilty if I’m not as present as I would like to be for my family.

Still, and maybe this is its own post, I feel like I should tell you about the co-op preschool, the one I fell in love with last summer that then turned out not have an opening after all, and then turned out not even to have a waiting list, and still visiting it convinced me I didn’t want to compromise on the preschool experience Rainer was getting. They called a week and a half ago, a family had had to drop out, were we still interested? And of course we were. Rainer jumped in as if he had been there all year, and I got to go be a helping parent Monday, and I cannot tell you how lovely it is because it is precisely about what the kids need and not what the adults need (I gloat, marvelling, when a kid is hungry they get to EAT, without some line about waiting for snack time.) And I can imagine that the kids exploring as they will — the odd object going in a mouth, paint on clothes, them pouring liquids that overflow a little — this could seem chaotic, make a germ-phobic adult very uncomfortable, and yet the teacher is tuned in to the kids’ feelings, and when a conflict comes up is there on the floor sitting, listening, asking questions, because what she sees as the point of the whole thing is teaching them to solve problems. Which, oh, if she only did that for grown-ups, you know?

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