Early Memory

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...

Read More
Posted by Mara Collins on May 19, 2009 | 1 comment

Twelve Again

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,...

Read More
Posted by Mara Collins on May 18, 2009 | 6 comments

In Irons

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...

Read More
Posted by Mara Collins on May 15, 2009 | 2 comments

Open Letters

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

Read More
Posted by Mara Collins on May 15, 2009 | 9 comments

Could Somebody Tell Me…

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...

Read More
Posted by Mara Collins on May 6, 2009 | 6 comments