What’s About Me and What’s About Them

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...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Feb 27, 2009 | 5 comments

Found Object

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...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Feb 27, 2009 | 2 comments

Re: February

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...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Feb 27, 2009 | 5 comments

Art Found Wanting

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...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Feb 15, 2009 | 13 comments

Bearably Unbearably Likewise

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...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Feb 13, 2009 | 4 comments