Archive for February, 2009
February 27th, 2009
What is lost, sitting in the principal’s office is an arrogance, that other people’s children get in trouble, make mistakes, but not mine.
Were one of my friends to call up and agonize over a child getting in trouble in school I would not hesitate to point out that this happens to the best of parents and is not a reflection on the job she is doing. But secretly? I think I had believed it wouldn’t happen to me, I never got in trouble as a kid, and my own kids are so GOOD, each of them.
I am dismayed at my own desire to say the correct thing, to get the consoling pat “you are a good mother,” even if it means selling my child up the river a little, that before I can even get to the misery of his that led to the mistake he made, I must untangle my own guilt and blame and frustration and fear. We are in trouble. I want to set out the evidences of all the things that I have done right, to prove how smart I am, how psychologically astute and politically correct I am, that I am someone who doesn’t get in trouble. And this child of mine, I want to protest — other parents have always wanted him to come play at their houses because he is so problem-free, he has exemplary manners and is caring and generous and easy-going. The defensiveness — he isn’t a problem! — reminds me of the Ross Greene thing that assorted friends have been finding helpful in The Explosive Child and Lost at School — the gentle reminder that kids have problems, but kids are not problems.
I know better than to have bought into that, and still, it’s ingrained. I have been studying a course in Bahà’í children’s education and love that my tutor asked me “What’s boredom?” because I started thinking about all the obstacles to engagement I can remember experiencing in a classroom, all the inexpressible needs that came out as boredom, not, apparently deficiencies in me, bored, but failures of the environment to meet my needs.
I don’t expect schools to meet my kids’ needs, honestly. I see an overworked teacher with 25 small people to pay attention to, so it seems like I ought to send them off to school with all of the sort of validating and positive messages I can give them, all of the problem-solving techniques I can teach them, all of the self-awareness I can instill in them in order to armor them against a sometimes dysfunctional environment. More, I am grateful that school is working for each of them as much as it is. But it is painful to confront the fact that for all my thinking this and feeling this I cannot protect them from the mistakes they make, the problems they have, the learning they must do.
I sat in the principal’s office waiting anxiously to be called and thought about Repat’s struggle with Sontag writing about how her child recedes when she is not with him, and the ever-more to be written about how motherhood fits into the rest of the picture here (like: am I dreadfully over-identified with my children that my response to my children’s problems is so layered with feelings about myself when my husband seems to leap admirably to the child and his needs?) There is more to be written when I have another quiet moment to myself (now dictating the frequency of blog entries, apparently) about rejecting either/or mentality when it comes to motherhood and writing and the constant search for balance, but my aftermath this morning is that I must confront being fallible as a parent but this being the high-stakes stuff it is, I don’t get excused from continuing to show up with all that I am and all that I have, the intellectual and emotional responses together, and struggling the struggle the best I can. Not getting punitive with the child, nor defensive with school administrators and teachers nor casting about for other people to blame.
February 27th, 2009
I’ve gradually started using the little notepad function on the iPhone instead of relying on the grubby scraps of post-it notes that collect in pockets, purses, and the glove compartment. I have a note of movies I want to see, a living grocery list that I try to keep current as we run low on things and I re-stock, a list of books to check for in used bookstores and the library, games and exercises for practicing with the kids that didn’t make it into their practice notebooks, a list of things to be done, divided into the short term, the medium term and the long term, organized by how much time each will require, the balancing of urgency and importance, and, among all of these useful ones, I find this one, typed in the middle of a furious cleaning of the kids’ play area –
February 27th, 2009
It is not a month for dramatic haircuts, dramatic departures, or anything else you might regret when you are less itchy and the sun has come back. It is a month for enduring, rather than for bold new ventures, a month when you must bracket the thought “I cannot stand another second of it” with the realization that by the time you utter it you are almost through. It is a whole month when you are ready to shed your restless skin, the longest short month of the year, a month when every arriving phone call is potentially fraught and dreadful, when what you want to communicate clearly comes out all mangled.
My only tips for survival are to be mindful that it is only February, that annual misery, and buying yourself daffodils can be an act of hope, and music helps.
February 15th, 2009
5:30 on a Sunday morning and I am not sure what I am so desperate for that I am impelled out of bed, not sure what wanting there is that I can write about that won’t sound like an indictment. But it’s myself found wanting. And the unbearable prickliness I feel, the fleeing that I cannot be what anyone else wants me to be right now. And to the child who wakes before 7 and thinks that this is a lovely time for some one-on-on bonding, I owe some apology. But I hide in my headphones, and almost cry with the sweetness of the Beethoven Pastoral Symphony. I think Beethoven is the patron composer of those of us who have a hard time brooking the divide between the insides of our heads and the outside, our surliness and difficulty getting along belying tenderness and awe that we struggle to unlock.
There are words I bite back, unable to figure out which facts are truth and which are propaganda, but unwilling to remain silent because that doesn’t work for me, I try to focus mostly on where I am found wanting. I tend to flop between extremes of unhappiness, the one where everything that is wrong is all my fault and the one where I am so completely powerless a victim of all the circumstances, including my own clumsiness in expressing what I am wanting. And I remind myself that becoming reconciled to my own shortcomings is not the same as becoming resigned to them.
Reading the New Yorker profile of Madeleine L’Engle yesterday I found myself mostly terrified that having a beautiful understanding of how people work does not imply any real self knowledge. And terrified that a writing habit will hurt the people I love. I try not to get sucked into either/or, but sacrifice is a reality. Even writers who create worlds with magic have to create the equivalent of laws of conservation of matter and energy because the world’s most boring novel would be “He waved his wand and everything was better, the end.” And it’s not that I think that conflict is inevitable so much as I think that it’s where meaning is found.
So I continue with the finding wanting, pursuing truth over neatness, even if it’s a truth that makes me cringe and duck and want to hide.
February 13th, 2009
Reading to my older boys, only hours to go before Raven arrives back home, and my iPhone beeps with an Twitter text message: a plane crash. Go on reading, superstitious that this means everything is normal, or drop everything and rush to CNN to find out more? Which would you do?
Settling down now to make myself write (I can I must I will I do) (I shall. But no one says shall anymore, or only ironically, playfully. Even if it’s correct. Or not. Prescriptivist or descriptivist? And what if many of the voices in your head are only echoes centuries old?) Do I expend my defiance on language, the ostentatious word, the word that brooks no mincing? Or is defiance a limited resource to be meted out for deeper darkness, myths of monstrous women who have limits to how they love their children, whose love does, in fact know bounds? Or does the defiance of choosing exactly the word that fits not equal a defiance of all the other expectations that Lilliputians use to tie their Gullivers down?
I treat my discomfort with Of Woman Born by returning to my battered copy of the Norton Anthology of Poetry, turning to the Adrienne Rich I do know, Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers, Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law. I wonder at the lengthy footnotes the editors see fit to append (really, explaining the Furies?) and how grateful am I to rely more on hyperlinks and less on footnotes? But thinking of footnotes dislodges this, stuck in my head from reading last week, Joseph Brodsky, in the essay about Anna Akhmatova, The Keening Muse:
No one absorbs the past as thorougly as a poet, if only out of fear of inventing the already invented. (This is why, by the way, a poet is so often regarded as being “ahead of his time,” which keeps itself busy rehashing clichés.) So no matter what a poet may plan to say, at the moment of speech he always knows that he inherits the subject. The great literature of the past humbles one not only through its quality but through its topical precedence as well. The reason why a good poet speaks of his grief with restraint is that, as regards grief he is a Wandering Jew…
…If Akhmatova was reticent, it was at least partly because she was carrying the heritage of her predecessors into the art of this century. This obviously was but an homage to them, since it was precisely that heritage which made her this century’s poet. She simply regarded herself, with her raptures and revelations, as a postscript to their message, to what they recorded about their lives.
I’ve been apparently trying to attempt some sort of literary gavage this week, heaps of books are scattered around my room, not returned to shelves, one footnote leaves me chasing down something I read once, like I’m on a literary scavenger hunt, and there’s this dreadful sense of never enough time, that I am always compromising, always sacrificing (today the boys practice the four of them together without me so I can type madly and try not to be late to a dinner reservation with Raven and the members of his new company, that guilt less than the betrayal of not getting the words down). The last few months it seems like I have re-awoken desperate to make up for lost years of reading. Not that I ever really stopped.
I don’t explain the urgency. Except it’s like time and housework, there is no progress bar, no percentage completed, and though the days I have to do it are, like those of everyone on the planet, numbered, I don’t know the number do I? So I proceed along the line, unable to keep all that has passed nor anticipate all this coming, but it this act, this moment, this engagement with this poem, this essay at hand. The trickier implication is that there is nothing to wait for. This is that moment you’ve brought in the mail, realized that nothing in the thin handful of envelopes and flyers is going to change your life, that your life changing has been put off another day, and it’s not even that you necessarily want your life changed, it’s that the anticipatory lift is followed by slow deflation.
But there come times — perhaps this is one of them –
when we have to take ourselves more seriously or die;
– Adrienne Rich, Transcendental Etude
Taking myself seriously seems so terrifying and exposed, even in the relative safety of my blog, I want to be able to hide behind “But of course I don’t take myself that seriously!” but I cannot, I will not. And part of taking myself seriously is being willing to go through awkward stages, the too earnest vulnerability, the experiments that fizzle, the embarrassment of realizing I’m being imitative without even realizing it. Am I reading voraciously so I can be aware of what I am recycling?
What broke this week was this feeling of trying to remain concealed. When we moved to Portland there was this feeling of — at least as far as parenting goes — no longer having to conceal who I am — that other people just didn’t seem all that bothered about how my kids behaved when they were tired, whether they had been breast-fed, cloth-diapered, attachment-parented or home-birthed — which could have been Portland’s relatively laid-back live-and-let-live style, or could be the liberation of my children being a few years older and those decisions not seeming so identity-forming. The only way I could describe what I loved about living here at first was “I don’t feel like I have to wear a mask.” Which may be unfair to the large metropolitan city we lived before, or not. Maybe we just moved to a place where more people were making the same decisions we were because what we really want is communities of conformity. Or maybe you do start internalizing the tight non-smiling smiles, the non-verbal aggressions of people in restaurants and parks, raised eyebrows and back-handed compliments (Well you certainly have, um, energetic children, don’t you?).
How long and painful was the process of learning to conceal my vocabulary after being teased for how I put things? Why did I internalize that, why did difference have to be shame? I mostly remember the pleasure of swearing and shocking people who had categorized me, dismissed me, and getting the glimmer of language’s power. And I mostly don’t say “fuck” in my blog, because… I want to be sensitive and not offend. Because I reserve the saying of it for the people with whom I am close and safe, who know that I will use it for effect and not because I don’t have other ways of saying things. But am I ashamed of saying it? I think people who get too worked up about it are missing a point about the real power of language. The things we feel shame about aren’t always the shameful ones. But concealment seems to keep pointing at shame, and if I want to find a healthy place between repressed prude and libertine, it’s not going to be by feeling like I must be concealed. I don’t think there’s even a word for this state that is neither of the two extremes, about having my energies and powers somehow my own, directed in a channel of my choosing, frank but also sensitive.
I still get a little annoyed when I want to describe something as permission-giving, because I don’t know what I am still doing, with all of this urgency, waiting for permission. Have I gone giving away my power again? But maybe one of the lessons that’s been waiting patiently at the door is not to underestimate the power of any sort of community, that even a raised eyebrow or gentle teasing at a word chose can stand as a stiff rebuke, silence me the next time I go to speak, until I find myself suffocating in a cocoon I’ve had to build in order to insulate myself for my own becoming.
A rush now to get out the door to be on time for dinner with Raven, because his plane wasn’t the one last night that struck a house. There’s a randomness that our lives continue forward while those of some forty or fifty families are utterly different today from yesterday. Somehow it all seems connected, this, the urgency, the need to push on, to risk, to speak, to break silence and burn burkas, to weep for the families of the seven Bahà’ís in Iran on trial for espionage, even though I haven’t enough words to go into how that affects me.
February 12th, 2009
The thing about not blogging? Is that it seems to add a layer of unwanted meaning to everything I am not saying.
Phone call with Jenny on her birthday and she answered some question of mine with silence, and that became the running joke of the phone call, as in, now I will list all the ways you bother me: (insert just the right amount of silence, and we both start laughing at the same time). We fantasize going on some silent retreat together, but if we cannot do that, we can call each other and not say a thing. Silence is okay when there is someone laughing on the other end.
Not so much when I start wondering what is being concealed.
Some silence is waiting out the soap opera in my head because it gets so three-hankie melodramatic and a couple of hours later I have made myself laugh again. I think this is one of the price tags of Raven traveling, just not having a reality check, someone to say “Nope, pretty sure that elongated bump you’re feeling in your chest is a rib and not a tumor, and I have no reason to believe you’ll be dead before any of your children have even graduated from high school.” Which yeah, maybe saying out loud, instead of stewing in silence, might be, well, useful.
Another silence is taking on the wrong book on a vulnerable day; I re-started Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born and there in the first chapters where she has bits of her journal from early motherhood, wondering that, as a writer, she’s not a ‘natural mother,’ I do the thing where half of me is “yes, me too!” and half of me is “wait, I love my children, love being with them, and I think I am good at it, does that make me less of a feminist/writer/person with any ambition at all?” and I know that’s exactly the point/not the point, that she spends the rest of the book trying not to define women by reproductive status, separating the institution of motherhood from the state of motherhood. But today, I wasn’t coping well with motherhood or with writing. I had an extra hour of Rainer being at school because he gets lunch on Wednesdays, and I promised myself I wouldn’t waste a blessed moment of relief from motherly responsibility, no, I’d go out to the studio and work on revising stuff, undistracted by internet or the many surfaces in my house wanting vacuuming. Only: out in the studio I couldn’t stand the written stuff I had to revise, and I paced, and I noticed things out there needing vacuuming, and by the time I had to pick up Rainer I hadn’t just vacuumed, I was busy scrubbing the toilet. Which convinces me that the problem is not about not having time to myself, but running away from myself, going silent when I finally get the time.
The thing I keep getting clobbered with, though, is how monstrous things get with the not-saying of them. The day before Raven leaves for four days I don’t want to be reproachful or shrewish or unsupportive or ungrateful, and all the things I don’t want to say are causing me to bite back “But I am really going to MISS you” and how scared I am sometimes about being able to keep it all together when he’s gone, and of course it doesn’t sound so monstrous now, like it did in my head, but I was running around slamming things and not being somebody anybody would be likely to miss, but would rather be relieved to get away from, and it takes me, I am so slow, three days before I can sort out properly what it was I really needed to say.
And this is the thing about having the blog, I guess. Because it’s there, thoughts get sorted into appropriate for blogging about or not. I cannot just forget about it, pretend it’s not there. I try to do the sorting on a basis of “if this is something I struggle with, somebody reading might also struggle with it, and then breaking the silence doesn’t help just me.” Even if I wonder when I run into someone in my real life who also is someone who reads this stuff if it’s giving a strange picture of who I am (especially in February! February is historically difficult) (also, please note, it’s easier to put down the struggles than the triumphs because God forbid I should sound gloating or like I actually have anything Figured Out.) But even, lying here alone, before hitting the “send to weblog” button, not knowing that whatever small audience this has hasn’t given up in disgust, I know that silence is my enemy.
February 4th, 2009
So I am not alone in my current preoccupation with loneliness, which should probably come as no surprise at all. Still I found this interview in the January edition of the Believer with Thomas Dumm about his new book, Loneliness as a Way of Life interesting enough to alleviate the sadness that my loneliness doesn’t, you know, make me special.
Except, I really am at my limit of being able to think about this and write about this. It’s drowning everything else out, not because I am lonely, but because I just would like not to be so incessantly conscious of myself. And the things I do during the day, the social networking, the blogging, the reading self-conscious fiction, even the parenting and the conversations I have with myself doing homework, offer no relief… I went to see Revolutionary Road by myself this weekend and all I could get out of it was “we were supposed to be special.” No relief there. Actually, the best relief I’ve found is is doing music with the kids.
I put up, on facebook, my list of 25 things about myself, mentioning how the internet sometimes feels like a giant narcissism machine, because it doesn’t feel right for me to be all the time going on about how myself, the way that will inflate my sense of self-importance until, quite seriously, I can be making up the bed and start trying to come up with a cute facebook status update about it, which, no, the world does not need. But my friend Wende, who has a track record of calling me on it when my self-deprecating edges into not being kind to myself, pointed out that things I have written about myself have been helpful to her, and also questioned my notion that facebook and the sudden presence in your life of people from all of your different pasts can make reinventing yourself impossible.
This was my answer to her:
Oh, thank you for the thoughtful wall post. I think this is possibly a blog entry, but I wanted to answer you specifically — that I worry about narcissism being toxic not because of what YOU will think of me but because it opens up the cracks where self-loathing comes in. Trying to give you the condensed version of what my morning pages were all about this morning…
When we give a kid encouragement, the current thinking seems to be, you give them something concrete on what they’ve just done just now… Not “you’re such a good artist” but “I really like all the different colors you used in that picture and how well you captured the shape of the tree.” Sort of like correcting behavior? Not “You’re so selfish” but “When you grab the toy from your brother he is sad and I don’t want him to be sad.” One kind of attention is affirming, but the other kind… when someone tells me I am something, even something good, like a good mother, a little voice in my head thinks of all the times I have messed up as their mother, that you don’t know about — but if you point out how I just listened to my kid, that’s encouraging and it builds evidence in my head for my being a good mother.
I do in my heart of hearts believe that if everybody spent time writing and examining their own feelings and actions the world would be a better place, but the writing I am thinking about would have to be more like examining behaviors than labelling selves — the self is a squishy thing that, when we pin it down with a label, comes oozing out somewhere else. And I feel like when I am writing about myself and my experiences, if I keep it at a level of seeking universal truths through examining my experiences, that is, if the me part of it is less important, it is useful, but if I start coming up with labels for myself, good or bad, that’s the narcissism creeping in, I end up really struggling against the self-hatred. It isn’t that I hate myself, mind you, it’s that I’ve woken up too many mornings regretting having talked too much the night before, I get weary of my own voice. I cannot silence the stories I make up in my head of how other people are perceiving me.
And this is apparently all I’ve been writing about and thinking about lately, I only just made the connection to “labelling” this morning as I was thinking about why it was hard to reinvent myself on Facebook. The thing is I can remember perhaps teasingly or lovingly being labelled as self-absorbed or the walking dictionary, can remember having it implied I was more interested in ideas than people’s feelings, being told again and again who I was — the smart or bookishness somehow implying some other deficiency — and how it shaped how people treated me, and how I reacted to them. But in new situations, with new people I was free to try different strategies for connecting. I know that my Meyers-Briggs profile is very different when I am parenting than when I am an employee, and even the label is a projected one, I think of how often we become what people expect of us.
Anyway, I’ll try to mellow on the self-deprecating, and I do appreciate your calling me on it, I always find your notes so supportive and loving and appreciate them so much.
Lots of love,
Mara
