Archive for April, 2009
April 29th, 2009
So I made it through the last reading of the un’s post-apocalyptic feminist literature course (cheating slightly and not re-reading McCarthy’s The Road because it’s still fairly fresh from last fall’s reading; on the other hand, I could count two extracurricular readings in Doris Lessing’s Mara and Dann and Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress which would have happily coexisted with the rest of the reading list.)
It’s a semi-serious joke that I’m homeschooling myself towards the MFA that I won’t go into debt for (and this makes me wonder what value it would have) while Raven’s trying to get a new business going, but I am not required to write a term paper (nor for that matter, to grade it!) Still. Watching the world go a little nuts over swine flu this week (maybe not the world, so much as the social media that are my portal to the world most days) I am still sorting my response to a semester of imagining the end of the world.
Honestly, the feminist writings threw my kilter just a little more, becoming lenses for examining my own choices, the compromises that have re-shaped my world view since the last time I read a lot of feminist theory fourteen years ago. And part of me wishes I did have to write a term paper just to get my responses all sorted out. I think the thing I find most frightening is thinking I have made decisions out of honest consideration of our circumstances, of what is in my children’s best interests as well as my own, only to find out I was frightened of trying for something bigger, or that it was the path of least resistance in the face of institutional sexism so deep that I was merely reinforcing it. I have an unwritten blog post on not being defined by reproductive status that I am afraid remains unwritten while my children and their schools consume a good part of my energy for thinking, for writing.
What about the end of the world? The lens I haven’t been able to set aside is the Bahà’í promise that we are part of an ever-advancing civilization. I worry this sounds completely implausible in the face of all the evidence to the contrary, the sense of environmental, economic, or medical doom looming. Honestly, I love living in a community where sustainability is on everyone’s lips, where ideas of peak oil and reducing your carbon footprint are given serious consideration, especially if it’s the only alternative to living as if the world were created for our rapacious consumption. But I also try to balance that against the ease with which I could slip into fear and hopelessness.
The most recent copy of the parenting zine hip Mama had an article, “The Year of Living Fearfully,” by Erica Etelson that broke my heart, about having spent a year of her young son’s life experiencing such anxiety about peak oil that she couldn’t be the parent to him that she had promised herself she would be, that she experienced the pain of seeing her kindergarten-aged son worrying about her.
It resonated with a conversation with my father about the reversal in the expectation of each generation that the next will somehow have a higher standard of living. I suppose I don’t feel capable of calculating which generation has had it best; I might envy some of the freedoms my parents or grandparents had, but I also am impressed at all of the knowledge that lies at my children’s fingertips and their skills at accessing it.
But even if we were to bomb ourselves back to the stone age next week, I think what I feel is a responsibility to improve my children’s ’spiritual’ standard of living, by which I suppose I mean a degree of self-awareness in interacting with others, a rootedness in how deeply loved they are, a degree of reverence for the mystery around them, and a host of qualities like compassion, kindness, generosity, patience, perseverance, and an ability to think for themselves balanced by the expression of respect for authority. And while my valuing of all of these things are rooted in my own Bahà’í identity, seeing those values reflected in most of my parenting cohort does give me hope. My reading of the Bahà’í notion of an ever-advancing civilization is that material progress has to be balanced by spiritual progress, and that the two together will enable us to solve the problems that we face as a global community. More, that the equality of men and women (and the eradication of racism, and the elimination of the extremes wealth and poverty) is seen as part of the spiritual advancement of our civilization helps me throw my belief behind it.
And I have veered away from the specifics of the post-apocalyptic readings, the way that Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland immediately threw me into skepticism of any utopian project and whether the Bahà’í project is a utopian one, to musing on Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker’s storytelling as an unreliable transmission of culture. Skipping entirely Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and questions of sincerity of belief in one’s own utopian project not protecting one at all from its aftershocks. Or the two Californian books, Carolyn See’s Golden Days and Jean Hegland’s Into the Forest which were both so perfectly set in California that they reinforced my hypothesis that we like the apocalypse as the last remaining frontier when one can go west no longer, not to mention both having qualities of the Lifetime movie vicarious experience of the unthinkable that we watch and cling to as if they were evidence that we would be among the select to survive. It was Harpman’s I Who Have Never Known Men read right before Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress that convinced me that I lap up the post-apocalyptic eagerly as metaphor for feelings of inexplicable desolation and isolation, sometimes finding the fresh start and sometimes mere survival of hopelessness.
So no term paper, but a quiet celebration that I have made it through all of the readings, often with no one to talk about how it was all affecting me (for example, cleaning out the pantry in a battle against pantry moths, I would look at a can of food with an expiration date last summer and think that after the apocalypse I wouldn’t give a damn about expiration dates.) But noticing friends’ Facebook statuses reflecting real anxiety about swine flu, I think I have gotten something else contemplating the end of the world as we know it, a reinforced sense of how I can consciously choose hope, and also compassion, not out of naive optimism but because that choice matters. Very little in the post apo reading was more horrifying than Dave Egger’s account of the Sudanese war refugee experience in What is the What. We sort of know that the world cannot continue indefinitely as we have known it, but the unknown aspect of how it will change is frightening. The fact that a car accident is more likely to kill one than the swine flu is small reassurance, given all of the different ways that human beings inflict suffering on one another. But the only way I know to fight against the horror is to try and bring my children up with kindness and compassion.
April 26th, 2009
There it is, in the 31st line of Francis Thompson’s Hound of Heaven “With thy young skiey blossoms heap me over” I have never seen the word ’skiey’ before and besides loving its challenge of pronunciation — it doesn’t roll off your tongue does it, with its two syllable that have a hard time distinguishing themselves from each other? — I am delighted that it means exactly what it sounds like, it is a real word, and I immediately start looking for ways to use it.
The problem I encounter is how nothing strikes me as particularly skiey. The sky is so much its own thing, the closest most things get to resembling the sky is in color, but then it doesn’t take much attention to realize that there isn’t a single color by which I’d characterize the sky.
Maybe, I think the problem is that I am a person who scurries, eyes downcast, generally lacking the spiritual wherewithal to contemplate vastness or meteorological temperament. It could be that the sky is lately representative of all the directions from which grasping talons could without warning descend.
(This shows up in my morning pages and I am delighted to have something that is neither laundry list nor complaint, that doesn’t worry about one of the boys, that reminds me I like words as words even before they are freighted with things to tell. Raven, sitting next to me on the bed where I use a lapboard to write in my journal has reached out, maybe tentatively because I have been a little prickly the last few days, and in one of those startling moments when you realize how you are feeling first of all by noticing your own body language, I realize my shoulder has relaxed, muscles melting under the warmth of his hand: the prickliness isn’t there this morning!)
Skiey, has this other dimension then, possibility and boundlessness, the limits on possibility are as laughably small as my own scurrying figure. The changes of the sky carry the astronomical regularity of the sun’s minute by minute, month by month, tracing out the planes of the ecliptic, but also the chaotic change of dramatic switchings from dark to light and back again as winds from far off gorges chase clouds down the valley where this city perches. I resist with all my might the cheap metaphor, the unforgivable conceit, but note that I can relax where the sky touches my shoulder as if it were my husband’s hand, reassuring me of this connection, not scared off by my prickles.
I worry about words facing extinction, wish someone maintained lists of endangered species that I could do my part for by bringing them slowly back into more common usage, but consideration of skiey makes me think that I wouldn’t want it to be too common, exactly either, that the things I want compared to the sky are rare, special.
April 17th, 2009
This morning during a rushed phone conversation with a friend who, though she lives only a couple of miles away, I keep in touch with more electronically than in person, we both noted that we realized the other had been having a rough time recently, we need to get together and talk.
This sort of thing is always a little uncomfortable, of course. I race back through my Twitter stream making sure there is nothing indiscreet, and I suppose it’s much more about the blog. And I start thinking about caveats: I don’t blog when I am off having a terrific time do other things (because I am off having a terrific time doing other things!) and being able to blog when I am feeling frustrated/lonely/overwhelmed does help. I try very hard not to violate the privacy of anyone around me, and worry about anything reflecting on Raven.
I have no real idea who reads this except for regular commenters, most of whom I talk to or communicate with outside of the blog so they know that after a rough patch things do get better and easier. But then I see somebody I haven’t seen in months and get a sympathetic “everything okay?” and have the strangest feelings. It’s not that there’s any one thing I’ve written about that I regret, but I worry about a cumulative effect. I suppose this is why blogs get password-protected: you worry less about being misconstrued. At the same time, I worry about living in a world where people don’t talk openly or honestly about the things that are hard for them, because there is nothing as horribly disempowering as feeling like not only do you have problems, but you are the only person in the world with these problems. And what I love most about blogging tends to be the conversation, the insight, the sharing, the not being alone with the hard stuff.
Still, I feel like I ought to make it known, somehow, things are good here. Not easy, but good.
April 17th, 2009
The dreams I most hate waking up from are the ones where I am being ardently pursued, romantically pursued, not chased-by-a-bear pursued, and am being told of how fabulously desirable and so on I am. The dreams bear no guilt, are not about wanting a romantic relationship with anyone not my husband, don’t feel like a betrayal, or even a reflection on my husband busy doing those husbandly things like earning a living and so forth. They have no bearing on the actual and unbloggable work of relationship, and in all of my waking moments, the mature trading-in of the unsustainable pursuit of being pursued for the stability, the security, the sometimes even harmony of being in a family feels like I got the better half of the deal.
Still, some mornings I hate waking up.
And of course feeling middle-aged and staid and domestic, the weird invisibility of motherhood in the Charlie Brown imagery of faceless legs and muted trumpet voices, which seems to have as its questionable alternative a new cultural paradigm of MILFs and this image of the destructive, selfish egocentric mother who keeps thrusting herself in as the center of the story of her children’s lives. I wonder vaguely if I should go find examples of either of these mother images, or non-images, to illustrate what I mean, but they seem universal enough I’ll trust you to find them. The point more is that while I question the sweetness of dreaming of courtship when I am happily married, (have I internalized some objectification, that I don’t want to pursue, mind you, only to be pursued, and this makes me question my own feminism) I also question what the story is of being a mother, how it can be appropriately told because it is neither about me, however much it has changed me, nor have I become invisible, even though sometimes I feel like what my children most need is for my presence to gently recede.
Also I observe: we now use “mother” and “parent” quite happily as verbs. But what is the verb for actively working at the partnership of marriage, of trying to grow and nurture, create that “fortress of well-being”? I married him once, but have found that the being married is so much more actively regularly re-committing and examining, is coming up a little short and apologizing and trying harder, and getting scarily vulnerable and trusting, and maybe no verb could capture all of that. But then does mothering actually capture the tenderness and the frustration, the humor, the pride, the fear, the realizing what you have been doing isn’t working and it’s time to humbly ask for help, try a new way of doing things?
And then I am thinking about Martin Buber’s whole I-Thou thing and the fading into the background of my self as I address myself to parenting and that’s not exactly how it is, and there’s also the helplessness of everything I cannot do for my children, and it occurs to me that when we use parent as a verb, in that sentence the parents are subjects and the kids somehow the objects. And the relationship I have with my kids, while asymmetrical, isn’t like that. Anymore than being married is like being pursued.
I have been preoccupied by this NPR story I heard on how in languages with grammatical gender, the gender of the words affects perception of objects. Which kind of bolsters what I already knew, that the words we use matter. And if I were ever to have an institute it would be the Institute for the Responsible Use of Metaphors. So people like that parenting ‘expert’ who talked at our co-op meeting last night wouldn’t describe one child in conflict with a sibling as a “victim” (it’s my ambition that in my house, there are no victims, because that story seems harmful to both parties). And so it matters to me that I find a way both truthful and loving to talk about motherhood and marriage, about daughterhood and sisterhood and friendship. And when I get all disgusted with how seriously my blog seems to take itself, how dreadfully earnest the tone can be, I have to remember that this pursuit does matter. It’s easy to veer, in talking about these things into something soft-focussed and pastel and sentimental or just go straight for the diaper humor, and yet the truth is somewhere between those, or encompasses both and goes beyond them.
April 10th, 2009
If Tam Lin has a lesson I suppose it is that we must hold fast to our loves no matter how monstrous they grow.
Oh, Janet, or Margaret, however you are remembered — your green kirtle persisting better than your name (that ought to tell you something)
You were no doubt strong as well as tenacious — did it not occur to you you might be merely persisting in folly?
As for me — well, it’s my experience that sometimes it’s better to leave to the faeries their playthings.
April 6th, 2009
even the best moods lately (seriously I don’t know how long, now, I want to say forever, or at least all spring, because mood is so perspective-distorting maybe I just mean this weekend) have this little vein of frustration pulsing, that things are almost great, but something is off. just deleted a long post I spent an hour on because re-reading it there was too much self-importance definitiveness which reminds me of going to St. John’s and being told in a conference at the end of the first semester that I needed to unlearn all I had learned in high school about writing an essay, that they didn’t want me to have the arrogance to think I was going to come up with anything new or definitive to say about Plato, that what they wanted was to see some process of me interacting with Plato. We blame this particular conference, by the way, for my endless “it seems to me” positioning myself next to statements with a slightly equivocating glance to see how you’re reacting, if you approve, like those violin lessons that were less about playing the violin than playing my violin teacher’s face — oops, her eyebrows went up, oh dear, ah, now her eyes are closed, chin points, watch the intonation, there I have arrived at that phrase okay. And now it’s so hard to keep my face neutral while my children play. what was I saying? The best moods, the satisfaction of outside-work getting the yard a little less shaggy looking, of soaring down a hill on the bicycle with Aodán right behind me, of hearing one of the boys joking kindly with a younger brother, have only this superficial satisfaction, because, alone after putting them all to bed, I still find myself suppressing the urge to slam things and holler bad words. I want to be around somebody in so great a mood that the great mood rubs off on me, only it seems like grumpiness is more contagious. I promise myself that if I hang in there it will get better, but secretly? I have my doubts.
April 1st, 2009
Morning pages the last few weeks are marked by a sort of increasing desperation, if you can have a desperation of apathy… that nothing seems worth writing about, that no ideas are coming, that the whole exercise seems pointless and frustrating and a waste.
Not that there haven’t been similar dry spells. This is six years of a habit, one that has seen me through adjusting to having a third child and then a fourth, from feeling every moment of my day is devoured by a baby’s needs to feeling entitled to a certain amount of quiet each day when they are in school. I have talked myself through the growing discomfort of day after day of abortive ideas, feeling deep doubt about what on earth I think I am doing. I know to answer myself with all of the patter from the stack of books on my shelves professing to be about the craft and practice of writing, about my obligation being to show up, that the habit makes room for when the ideas do show up. Other dry spells have been followed by periods when the insights and ideas and sheer deliciousness of the words seem hardly to fit between two pasteboard covers. But such days don’t come if I just give up and walk away from it all right now.
Still. It feels like punishment. Punishment for being arrogant back when Dana directed me to the Elizabeth Gilbert TED Talk, for being all “yeah, yeah, yeah, she’s clever and funny and likable, but all that about ‘it’s just your job to show up willing to write not, judge it or take it all too personally, think you’re all responsible for it’? everyone knows that.” Punishment for some lack of compassion, for being half-present to the kids, for being so arrogant as to establish a habit that is, frankly, doing little for me lately except making me irritable and frustrated with the house, with the kids. It carries over, nothing feels right for the blog.
Gilbert is talking about the fears and anxieties attendant on writing. I don’t know if I have the self-knowledge to identify the fear going on here. That this feeling will never go away?
__________
And a dream. I have had vivid recall of dreams lately, and even though I honestly believe I know exactly one person capable of recounting dreams in an interesting way and that for the rest of us, relating dreams should be, if not illegal, at least blanketed in caveats, this one still seems pertinent.
It was one of those dreams where I am back in college, defined less by actual classes than the sort of institutional living, long corridors and beds with grey wool blankets. And somehow at this point in my life — the point, maybe where two life paths diverged, the me that was to become a housewife somehow got to be in touch with the me who was going on to be a brilliant academic and poet. And our communications became the focus of my life, I looked forward to them, and I admired this other self so desperately, her intelligence, her way with words her confidence and unwavering assuredness. And somehow — I don’t know if it was an imbalance, but it started affecting my life. Returning from a visit home, the airplane I was a passenger on lost power, this great hulking bird gliding into grey mist, and I sat, strangely fearless, watching the lights flicker and go out. And then the connection started manifesting as a wasting disease, medical tests showed my blood thinning. The man I was dating was angrily worried about me, and there was a point in the dream when I didn’t have the strength to make it down one of the long corridors by myself, but was leaning heavily on him. And yet, alone in my room, the first thing I did was re-establish the connection. We were doing a sort of chat on my computer, but because of the interdimensionality of the whole thing, if we both typed at once our messages would cancel each other out, so we learned to each use only half a screen. I did realize I was going to have to make an unfair choice between living and this cherished other self, but the weaker I got, the stronger she was, to where she could enter my reality and flip the pillows over, noting the different arrangement of the beds in my room. And this is where I woke up rather than dream my own death.
