Repurposed
September 14th, 2009
In my head is a long list of the various purposes a blog can serve: updating people who care about the things going on in one’s life, keeping a record of one’s thoughts and feelings in a more searchable version than the towering stack of notebooks, a way of curating the life of the mind, keeping a place open for drawn-out conversations with friends whom one might not have the opportunity to have many in-person conversations, practice with putting one’s more polished writing out for the scrutiny of others. I think my blog has taken turns with each of these, but the dormant blog is none of these, right? And the irony is that it is a positively received entry that sometimes scares me into silence because I imagine the next thing I write will be so disappointing in comparison.
Still. I summon the patience with myself to put to it once more, not apologetic, not even with pure presumptuous gratitude that anyone is still listening, but with the courage to reclaim the blog because I do still need it.
I walked Rainer to school for his second day of kindergarten this morning. Friday the parents of kindergartners seemed terribly marked, I described a cloud of anxiety hovering over all our heads, but maybe it was just that only the parents of kindergartners were walking their kids in to class on Friday. I count on my fingers, four preschools, five elementary schools — we’ve done being the new kid thing a lot now, and you would think it would be getting easier.
I didn’t cry until we were almost to the car Friday morning, and Raven quizzed me on what it was — the end of an era? worry about him? anxiety about the quiet in the house? And each of those a little — I miss all of my kids’ baby selves, I still will fold one of Rainer’s shirts and marvel that it is like a miniature of a full-sized human being shirt because I interact with him as a person and don’t always register the smallness of the package that full-sized will and personality come in, if that makes any sense. And not being there to speak for him, to help make sure he is understood, because it still requires a little work to understand him sometimes, the baby speech belying the startlingly clear mind he has. There’s guilt that I am not quite sure in the confusion of adults and children which adult is the teacher, but I trust that with time it will be made clear — the thing that matters is he is comfortable and happy saying goodbye, happy to see me when I pick him up, even if he doesn’t have a lot to tell me about his day.
And how do I feel? Loving and solicitous, holding my hand out to the car, Raven managed to ask what I planned to do with my day while being reassuring that I don’t need to give an account of the hours to myself unfolding all of the sudden, that I don’t need to rush to make any plans for the rest of my life right now. And that reassurance would have been crippling if he didn’t already know the paths my brain treads well enough to know that I would need it.
And to some degree, there are elements of my life that stay the same all year round. I feel like I mention these too often, but I have a hard time explaining myself without them, and the embarrassment is fearing that I sound like I think everybody should have such things or that I don’t know how to function without them, when really, they are just about an ongoing attempt to figure out exactly what works for me, the balance of head and body, inside and outside, self and other, habit and freedom. I cling to the routines of journal and exercise and musical practice, trying to give myself the structure on which I recognize myself as being very dependent, without becoming so rigid that I am breakable and brittle. So I struggle to make this transition work. All summer the knowledge of fall’s quiet house loomed, that I was on the one hand aware of how much I was craving some quiet and on the other hand terrified it would be a pressure to do something, be something, that I would rattle around, clean obsessively, watch the home shopping network for hours ordering thousands of dollars of things we didn’t need or decide to become the queen of Facebook and see if I could make thousands of new online friends to keep from feeling alone. Or something. Rashly agree to chair the PTA, volunteer to work in the school five mornings a week.
It has been thirteen years since I have had regular hours of quiet and not attending to needs of small people. Even now I sort of glance at the phone expecting a school to call and tell me my kids are being sent home for a week for having lice or terrible behavior or some such. I pinch myself to make sure it is real. I make myself a deal. I drop off Rainer at 8:45, am home by 8:52. Between 9, then, and noon, I lock the house and hie myself out to the studio where there is no internet connection, no housework. I can read, write, compose a blog entry, listen to music — and that’s about it. At noon, I am free to meet people for lunch or jump on the elliptical, throw a load of laundry in, do grocery shopping or go to the library until I pick Rainer up at 3. In other words, half my time I will dedicate to space for words, and the other half gets rendered to Caesar. Or something. We give it a few weeks and see how it goes.
September 17th, 2009 at 9:22 pm
Hooray, and at the same time, where are the appendages which you have become accustomed to shepherding around like so many rebellious bits of self? How is that long-anticipated empty space, which will never be empty because you have little room for emptiness, if I may be allowed to say that? Do the aforementioned selves, those four selves which have halved and quartered you, have they noticed that they are not home, that they have left you alone for the first time, really? Did they notice? Is there a little leaking of air, a kind of slight deflation when they come home, that the full emptiness is gone for another day? Or does their return home bring a new kind of fullness to your newly formed container of Mara-ness? What shape are you now? Do tell…
September 19th, 2009 at 7:41 pm
It must be really, truly strange. But how wonderful, Mara, that you have this time for words and YOU again! I’m so excited and pleased for you and eager to see what will come out of it. Do keep us posted, and be forgiving of those of us who (tho we have no appendages) are still struggling to find the time for promised words : )
September 20th, 2009 at 4:26 pm
How was the first week, dearest?
I loved this, by the way: “…because I interact with him as a person and don’t always register the smallness of the package that full-sized will and personality come in.” It’s not the same at all but I will say that sometimes I’m startled by the smallness of the Brujo’s laundry. I think of him as so enormous, all drumming and passion and rage and vocabulary, and then I look inside the little t-shirt and it says, “SMALL.” And I think, oh my goodness, he *is* small! (He’s only, like, five-eight.) But is also, as Mandarin says of very fluffy cats who are suddenly wet and bedraggled and embarrassed, revealed to be just “a little cat in a Big Cat-suit.”
I would envy your four hours in that unplugged studio—if, that is, I didn’t know how exactly hard they are to create and inhabit and not evade.