May 19th, 2009
I don’t remember how I was, but it was an age where I remember grown ups being faces hovering far above the legs at my eye level. It was the boredom of mothers shopping, my mother and her best friend together, shopping taking twice as long as it normally would because it’s also now a social occasion and I’m not getting anything and my mother is paying attention to her friend and not to me and they are engaged enough in conversation not to pay attention to me listening. And my mother’s friend in the middle of some longer pointless story is describing a child who cried so hard she threw up and this, this is Information to me. Throwing up is the mark of real sickness, it’s the least pleasant sensation I know, but also, it’s the claim on real sympathy. People have to be nice to you and nobody can be mad at you when you are sick. And thus the next time I am in trouble it seems obvious to me that the trick is to keep crying until I can throw up and then they will have to be sorry for me.
Only it never worked. I got dry and empty too soon and it was no good trying to force the tears and the observation of myself crying was not conducive to getting good and worked up.
May 18th, 2009
All along, I think, I’ve been trying to parent with compassion. Trying to listen to what the kids were telling me, what their frustrations were signaling, what it felt like to be struggling and learning like they were. Maybe not all of of my on-the-spot reactions have been perfect, but I’ve been able to pretty quickly recognize the blessedly infrequent melt-downs as signs that my kids either needed rest or food or a change of environment or that they were struggling to break through to a new stage of development and it’s helped me be a little more patient.
But this twelve-year-old stuff is different, because I look at my kid and I see myself at that age, remember this as a place where the divide opened up between my insides and my outsides, between the way I intended things and the way they actually came out. This is the age where I would try to be sweet, try to be good and be so irritated that minutes later I was again fighting with everyone in my family, the age where labels of “sensitive” and “princess” were sort of teasingly given, only they still chafe like scratchy tags sewn inside tight shirts. This was the age when it felt like something was really wrong with me, that things weren’t ever going to be okay, the age when I ached with being misunderstood. It was the dawning of self-consciousness, of looking around at how everyone else was doing things and realizing I didn’t measure up, that my clothes were wrong, my body awkward, the braces, my skin…
So when my sweet first-born does start doing the things that are tormenting his brothers — teasing or taking things — it isn’t that I see him as blameless. I see his threshold for tolerating them acting like, well, themselves, doing things that shouldn’t bother him, but do, tremendous crimes like chewing wrong or licking their drinking glasses, lowered, see how this builds up into the explosion when he tells a brother to stop, the brother screams in indignation, it escalates. And I haven’t figured out how to make the conflicts, torturous as they are, go away. But I know that I cannot tolerate how much it hurts him when he feels like everyone in the world is against him. I don’t want to endorse his prickliness, but I think he needs someone on his side. Of course he seems to recover much more quickly than I do, I’ll still be brooding over a conflict when he’s moved on to another mood entirely.
We go for walks. He talks about feeling excluded at school — not actively excluded, just more, not-included, and this one I remember too, feeling like everyone else was spending all of their time with everyone else outside of school and I never got to see anyone. That I was safe, sure, invisible, on the fringes of a large group of safe friends, but it was not the same social order I had known before and I wasn’t sure how to navigate it. I wish I could hand him the books that helped me survive it all, but he hasn’t found his way back to books that way yet. (Anne Frank that’s what he needs! And then maybe Catcher in the Rye before it’s assigned in school and an English teacher has the power to ruin it for him.) He’s got music. I miss him when he retreats into headphones, but I’m so grateful he’s found something he needs there.
At his cello recital I watch the high school seniors play, seeming like grown-ups next to him, five years older, the assurance they project, their comfort with themselves up on stage. I sort of long to see him safely through to that point already, to skip all of the agony between here and there — except, of course I keep being hit with how quickly it’s all going and how I don’t want to miss a second of it. It’s the knife-twist of birth order, everything is the most intense with him, his capacity to surprise me, my anxiousness about the next stages, the blind spots I’ve got, the tremendous amount I still have to learn, the difficulty in untangling myself from him.
I write things down, partially I want to convey this amazing unfolding to the grandparents, aunt, uncles who don’t get to witness it first hand, but also for myself, knowing I take it all for granted but I won’t remember this stuff clearly by the time I’ve been through it three more times. He’s so quick-witted, he notes a traffic sign “Construction Zone Fines Double” and says “Sometimes life is like a giant board game.” That he combines a wit( which I’m not completely recapturing here) with a serious-mindedness, a commitment to justice and projects and idealism seems to me the loveliest combination of qualities. I am simultaneously charmed and exasperated by his insistence on wearing the same corduroy jacket and hat all year, regardless of the weather. And touched that he wants to wear fingerless gloves like one of the cellists in the band Apocalyptica, which — oh it seems like the marker of a new kind of having a hero for him. A year ago everything was superlative “best movie ever” “favorite place to go for dinner” and since his birthday it’s all just “it was okay.” He is cool. Or he wants to check what all of his friends think. And yet he does think for himself, is independent-minded. None of this captures him, of course, but I don’t stop trying. I hold on in order to let go.
May 15th, 2009
There’s a precarious moment, a moment when I feel I wobble on a quarter’s edge, ready to fall to either exuberance or hopelessness, and I’m struck that while the exuberant rush of feeling I can do anything, the giddy excitement, may be more fun than the gloom of realizing nothing I have done matters and I’ve done it poorly, too, neither extreme is reality, or — because I am clever enough to come up with tremendous evidence in both states supporting the position — it’s that each is only a filtered version of reality.
What I think I fear most is having the exuberance carry me to the fabric store and pick out yards of gaudiness that I can get home and be too inspired to even find a pattern for before I find myself weeping in the scraps of cut-up fabric, each representing the age-old feeling of having a notion of a finished product that I don’t have the skills to quite manage, the picture in my head that my hands cannot fit to paper, the idea I don’t have the words to express, the sense of being mired in patterns of amateur ineptness, the paint turned to mud, the paper wrinkled and distressed and overworked beneath my grubby, sticky hands. What was in my head was so glorious, and what is in my hands so tawdry.
And sometimes it occurs to me that mood is a wind, and that with a little knowledge of my own sails, beating to windward is possible, I can sail close-hauled and advance against the wind, something that seems impossible to my land-lubber’s mind. If the exuberance is a running position for the sailing, almost dangerous in its speed, then to despair is to be in irons, and all I can do is “push push pull pull” easing myself into a position to catch the next wind with a small daily discipline, a walk, some music, another attempt, a fresh piece of paper.
May 15th, 2009
Girl Friday
Friday Refrains
Refrains, Discreet
Discrete Objects
Objects to Change
Change Jingles
Jingles Campaign
Campaign March
March Born
Borne Aloft
A Loft Garret
Garret Retreats
Retreats Advances
Ad Infinitum
May 6th, 2009
why lately I’ve had a little Aristotle obsession going? It isn’t the specifics of what Aristotle believed and wrote most of which are a little fuzzy after a decade and a half, so much as the encompassing scope, the willingness to pick up a part of the universe and start cataloguing and generalizing and explaining that this is how it is, moving along from natural science to rhetoric to logic to literary criticism.
I wasn’t consciously thinking of Aristotle, either, when I started classifying the way objects get invested with meaning, rising up, as it were, out of the sea of functionality to be briefly invested with symbolic value before sinking back into pure functionality. I have a pair of socks whose meaning ought rightly to be, you know, they keep my feet warm. But the ways they get invested with meaning seem to me to be these:
1) origins: The socks are made from wool of sheep grazing on my grandfather’s farm
2) intention: My grandfather worried about my poor cold feet and gave these socks to me telling me he wanted my feet to be warm
3) sacrifice: My grandfather gave up his morning cup of coffee from Starbucks for a month to buy me this pair of socks
4) star power: My grandfather saw a pair of socks like this on Kate Winslet and decided they’d look good on me, too.
5) association with an event: I wore these socks the night that my grandfather and I went to dinner and he met my future step-grandmother.
6) flattery: My grandfather told me how the color of these socks set off the color of my eyes so I feel pretty every time I wear them.
7) irritation: These are the socks my grandfather keeps leaving on the floor that I have to put in the dirty laundry whenever I am straightening the house, and man does it annoy me.
8 ) guilt: These socks are itchy and I only put them on when my grandfather is coming to visit and he asks if I like them and I lie and tell them they are the best socks ever and then he knits me another pair.
The thing that gets to me though, is that if a pair of socks can be brought up out of the sheer functionality that makes them socks to be given meaning, we do the opposite thing with people. They may wander through our lives with all of the story and associations that would make every single individual worthy of long contemplation of just the sorts of questions you would ask to unlock all of the stories that this person has inside of them, but pragmatically? The story needs to recede into pure functionality so you can get the check deposited and the line of twenty people waiting behind you for their Friday of evening to begin can move forward, even though the bank teller might be able to tear your heart open with the story of the first time they lost a pet.
It’s harder, maybe, being the mother, and feeling consumed by my functionality in other people’s lives. I don’t expect my children to wrap their minds around my full personhood, even though I was delighted when my twelve year old did ask “What music did you listen to when you were my age?” Maybe that particular question felt laden with my awareness of his awareness of the divergence of our stories: I had a story before my children existed, they are developing their own stories in which I hardly figure.
I guess were I feeling more rigorous about filling out my own personal philosophy I might question the opposition of function and symbolic meaning, thinking à la Virginia Postrel, that the best gifts are both useful and have a pleasingness, of aesthetic and symbolic dimensions. chilled, I put on the socks from my grandfather, noting like Pablo Neruda how my feet seem unworthy of the “woven fire of those luminous socks.” I end musing about books, which carry all of the externally-granted symbolic aspects — my grandfather recommended it! and just looking at the cover I can feel the prickle of grass under my legs, just starting to sweat, smell the freshness of the mowing, see the shadows of leaves dancing on the page as I lay under the tree at my grandfather’s reading it — and then build worlds of inner significance, too.
