My Own Private Normal

So if I still kept a memory book, there was a day a week or two ago when my teenaged (!)(*) son said something that would surely have gone in it. He uses Twitter, and told me that sometimes when he looks at Raven’s and my tweet-streams he feels like the luckiest kid he knows because his parents are so articulate and witty and smart. Which just shows how low his standards are, right? Only there are days when I think I can almost see the thoughts behind the impassive mask, the “Oh, if only I had a normal family!” Which. It might be half the intense recollection of that age, and half the flash one day of thinking how normal and right that thought is, because it means your family is okay enough that all of your energy isn’t invested in...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Nov 30, 2009 | 2 comments

Revenge of the Unintentional Guest Post

So you don’t need to be in a twelve step program or even have the number of people in your life that are in such programs that I have in mine to have bumped into Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer: God grant me the serenityTo accept the things I cannot change;Courage to change the things I can;And wisdom to know the difference. I excerpt from an email to a the unreliable narrator yesterday: I couldn’t remember the stupid first line of the serenity prayer — what is it we ask for in order to help us to accept what we cannot change? And if we’re asking for serenity, for courage and for wisdom, why do we call it the serenity prayer and not the courage prayer or the wisdom prayer? Is one of the three more important than the others? And why do I...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Nov 17, 2009 | 7 comments

The Way Out of Stuck

I walk Rainer to school past some graffiti every day, OAT, like that, giant block, all-caps letters and my brain turns it into mirror writing of TAO and this becomes my answer in my head to this friend’s voice in my head poking me with her favorite 12 step program refrain about how we are “human beings not human doings.” That somehow the sense of ‘way’ splits the difference for me between being and doing, between static and dynamic. And story lives in the way, always changing, always the same. Of course there’s stuckness, that’s part of what a way looks like, it’s the friction necessary to moving forward. [The funny side effect of all these thoughts is that 'oatmeal' is transformed in my head to 'tao meal', and my...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Nov 16, 2009 | 2 comments

Selkies vs. Mermaids

All of this solitude and greyness and the fear my voice has rusted shut. It isn’t protective silence, or withholding silence, or shamed silence. It’s just silence. I mean, it feels more like a gathering up of the voices in my head, sorting them. Sometimes in silence. Sometimes in music. Only if I put on music time seems to disappear at an alarming rate. Silence the great luxury of the six brief hours the boys are in school. Truth being lately this terribly fluid thing, my truth one moment being the conviction the world is ending, a truth I can wait out, and it gets replaced with a new truth, with hopefulness, like a tree growing out of my chest. Trees arbitrarily becoming musical instruments (if they’re spruce) and sheafs of gloriously blank...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Nov 12, 2009 | 5 comments