Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
July 4th, 2008
I am done with self-improvement.
Of course, the marketing forces telling me how many things are wrong with me, and all the things I need to buy in order to at least pass as ok are perhaps more intimidating and pervasive than King George and all of his Red-coats. Those marketing forces wouldn’t have a foothold, of course, but for my long history of being complicit, worrying that I needed to be more critical of myself than anyone else could be, so I could be prepared, could steel myself, before anyone else could point out everything that was wrong with me. My ancient fear that everything that goes wrong in my life can be traced to something wrong with me that everyone else can perceive that I cannot. My history of using commiseration over flaws as a way of bonding, the way women do.
It’s a scary thing to write: done with self-improvement. If I refuse to reinforce the idea there is something wrong with us with my sisters-in-misery, over the size of our butts, the need to have cleaner, more organized houses, or the need to be more patient with our children, will I get stuck with the label of stuck-up that killed my social life in middle school? This arrogance, this chutzpah could end in resentment and alienation, and yet, I want to treat myself with the same gentleness and generosity that I would a friend — there is nothing wrong with you. And there is nothing wrong with me. (Please, listen carefully: I am not saying I am perfect, but I don’t worry about whether you are perfect, I spend a lot more time thinking about the things I love about you. )
I want to declare war on everything telling us we’re not enough. I had thought initially that this was about the body-image struggle that is so on-going, the waters recently stirred by the unreliable narrator’s lovely blog entry revisiting cultural orthorexia and by this stabbing identification when a friend mentioned that looking at photos of a happy time didn’t make her feel happy because all she could see was her body not looking the way she thought her body should look. We got a Wii fit, which exceeded my expectations as something that makes body awareness and exercises with instant feedback fun, and yet when it tells me “visualize your ideal body when you’re exercising” I have to shout back at it “I quite like the body I have, thank you!” which must mean I am making slow progress in this struggle.
It goes deeper. It’s summer guilt at relaxing and reading fluff and just hanging out when I could be filling my own perceived deficits (getting the kids and myself really fluent in a second language! Plant identification! Learning the names of all the stars and constellations! Being able to identify chord progressions in music!) And I finally had this realization that while there is nothing wrong with those things as goals, I am done with perceiving these things as deficits. I have decided I am whole, I am complete, that I have racked up enough small, personal successes in thirty-five years, that setting goals for myself, challenging myself — that’s extra. I am going to acquire virtues rather than eliminate sins.
I finally face the fear that not struggling and striving to improve myself could be the first step into a slow slide into complacency and then apathy. And yet, lately I have been arguing that one doesn’t really improve oneself out of shame and self-loathing or fear, that shame, self-loathing, fear will keep hiding, telling you that everything you have done isn’t enough. And so I am trying to slow down enough to be aware of the little thoughts that come out under stress, and in the stillness here, now, knowing that they will re-emerge, I am arming myself against them. (”One if by shame and two if by self-loathing and three if by fear…”?) But more: that sort of mindfulness? Don’t take it for self-improvement.
July 2nd, 2008
It’s request week here at Oleoptene, apparently.
You want a Prague birth story?
I have given birth three times since then so that first time feels less coherently narrative like, and more an impression, the longest, greyest day… The one thing I remember clearly was what it was to finally and for the first time hold my son, to have that steady knowing gaze, so calm, his eyes holding my eyes, the exhaustion I had been feeling melted away in my transformation into a real, honest-to-God mother, and there was nothing I wanted to do so much as hold him, look at him.
But I can make a story out of it, I think.
I go back to the American obstetrician who ignored me at my appointments and wanted to ask Raven about this brand new internet thing, to get himself a webpage, his nurse lecturing me on weight gain, and how little those things mattered compared to hearing the baby’s heartbeat for the first time, on my birthday, March 20, 1996, which started to make it all a little more real. But I think settling for that moron doctor and worrying about money and the fact that we were living in a city between his job in Los Alamos, 45 minutes away, and mine in Albuquerque, an hour away, and knowing I wasn’t really ready to have a baby and work full-time to pay for daycare added to a sense of not really having choices. And then on April Fool’s Day, Raven saw a posting for the Radio Free Europe job, and I couldn’t have found Prague on a map, but I willingly went along with him deciding to apply for it, though it felt a little like a joke. And then Raven was flying off for an interview and every objection seemed to melt away, there were people at RFE who had given birth in Prague, they could help us find an English-speaking o.b. and by the time it was July our apartment was packed and moved and we were on our way there.
We got in with the doctor fairly quickly after getting to Prague — early enough we didn’t navigate the public transportation very well, I remember it being very hot and walking and walking and realizing we had gone the wrong direction and then walking and walking and walking in the other direction looking for the Ústav pro Péci o Matku a Díte, the Institute for the Care of Mother and Child — where the doctor’s office was. He was a kind man, but clearly overworked, and he spent a lot of that first visit helping us fill out the endless paperwork that seemed to characterize every aspect of life in Kafka’s hometown. Subsequent visits were a little surreal, I’d enter a waiting room full of pregnant Czech women and be whisked in for labwork first because I was a paying customer and they were getting socialized medicine, and still my idea of things like a birth plan were alien enough to make me understand that medicine as a consumer commodity was not How Things Were Done. I remember the lab techs as slightly scary women in short skirts with impossibly long, painted fingernails, communicating with me by gesture and sign language and impatiently taking me by the wrist and leading me where they needed me to go because none of them spoke a word of English and my Czech was not even rudimentary yet.
At a certain point it was discovered that the baby was still breech, and that I would have to have a caesarean, which was terrifying and accentuated my general feeling of helplessness. I must have communicated my panic to my parents on the phone, because my mother went and researched homeopathic options and sent me a bottle of pulsatilla. I then spent hours resting with my hips up on several pillows and my head on the floor, hoping that would help him turn, and even though a week before he was born he was still breech, when I went into labor he was head down and ready to go, so something must have worked.
I think I moved to Prague confident that everything I needed to know I could get from reading the right books, and I chose Spiritual Midwifery by Ina May Gaskin as my source for everything related to childbirth (though a friend had also given us the dreaded What to Expect When You’re Expecting (the Worst)). I don’t know if that deafened me to the information given by the Australian midwife in what was Prague’s only English childbirth education available that summer. She held that childbirth hurt and one should get the epidural, gave us handouts of convenient Czech phrases to use in the hospital, and spent a lot of time showing us how to swaddle a newborn. Still, I went into childbirth convinced that they weren’t labor pains they were labor rushes, and that one just needed the proper attitude.
The other thing about moving to Prague was that Raven’s employer took care of all of the moving for us, hiring professional movers, we just needed to separate out a smaller, lighter quicker delivery by air from the slower, heavier delivery of freight. And nobody quite explaineed to us how these shipments wouldn’t even be leaving the United States until we signed a lease on an apartment, but that once we signed the lease on an apartment we would lose our fully furnished temporary housing. So this resulted in our staying in our apartment with the newly signed lease with nothing but the things we’d brought with us in our suitcase on the airplane — that is, no furniture or dishes or anything. We’d put all the baby stuff into the air shipment, which arrived a few weeks after we signed the lease, but we didn’t have a bed. A friend who worked at a real estate company was able to lend us some foam pads to sleep on, but they weren’t beds, which didn’t lend itself to a comfortable third trimester. All of our furniture and other belongings arrived the day after Aodán was born, and this was only ok, because so did my mother, and she spent the week I was in the hospital after the birth unpacking and putting together the apartment for me.
So the day of the birth? Our due date had come and gone, and finally I awoke one Sunday morning not with contractions but with a bit of bloody show, and I must not have read about that or been prepared for it, because we called the hospital, alarmed, and with nobody who spoke English there, our rough Czech and the word blood got them to ask us to come in right away. We took a taxi, and once there learned our doctor was hours away, there was nobody working at the hospital who spoke English, and there were long forms to be filled out (all in Czech) before I could be admitted. A woman in labor who did speak English, started helping Raven with the forms, and I was taken away from the one person who understood me. I don’t remember everything that followed, but it wasn’t a happy time.
The day was long and grey, a woman down the hall screamed operatically — or perhaps it was several women because the screaming came and went throughout the day. I was showered, put in an awful gown, shaved, had my waters broken, and an i.v. put in before I saw my husband again. Our doctor did show up in the afternoon. I was given demerol, something I don’t remember asking for or agreeing to, but I think some of fuzziness of the day has to do with that, I remember throwing up, being given oxygen. having my life flash before my eyes and when I was finally at the pushing stage having several people pushing on my abdomen (which worked to give me doubts about my own ability to push out a baby on my own in subsequent births). Raven was my only comfort that day, valiant with the back rubs and cheering me on. If I had wanted an epidural we would have had to have paid an anesthesiologist to be on call for the weekend, and anticipating rushes, rather than pains, we didn’t.
The standard of care was three or four nights in the hospital after a vaginal birth, and I might have made more of a fuss about that except for the fact that my mother was busy unpacking my apartment. Aodán had to stay in a nursery, which made him feel less like he was really mine, I felt like I was peeking to unwrap him from the swaddling and examine tiny fingers and toes, and some nurse was always trying to correct my hold when I was nursing him, again, using more sign language and rough gestures than English. The recovery room I stayed in had an electric pump or sanitizer or something on the toilet that was really noisy, so Raven unplugged it, and when my mom arrived and Raven brought her straight to the hospital, jet-lagged, from the airport, and used the toilet the room flooded.
You don’t think you will ever forget any of the details, of course, and then you do. Looking back we were so young and knew so little and still had all of this surprising confidence. I felt like motherhood made me so much stronger that I was willing to face challenges for my son that I would not have for myself alone, to face down calling the Czech pediatrician whose scheduler spoke no English in order to make an appointment, to face down the little old ladies who tried to tell me I was doing it all wrong. I was really fortunate, I think to have a mother and mother-in-law who believed I was capable of handling it all and doing a beautiful job, who built me up with their loving support. The births of Aodán’s younger brothers were, of course, marked by a much stronger sense of knowing what I was doing, of knowing what I wanted and still somehow being able to accept things as they came, especially once I found the world’s greatest midwife, in Dallas. And yet Aodán’s birth was a perfect one, it forged us into a family, a unit of three that didn’t exist before that day, and I remain profoundly grateful for the experience.
June 25th, 2008
Driving in Portland, I occasionally glimpse a steep, hill-side narrow street with tall buildings, and, as intriguing as it looks, I don’t turn down it because this way it can remain in my imagination a portal to similar streets I walked a decade ago in Prague. I look for strings of continuity to the person I was when I walked around Prague (we never had a car, nor needed one) and they are hard to find at first. The baby always strapped to my chest is now almost as tall as I am, and has three younger brothers. And though the odd Czech word or name of a subway stop will rise unbidden, it seems like it all belongs to a different lifetime.
My first response to what it was to me to be in Prague (twelve years ago we went, next week, and ten years ago we came back, next week) is to reference the movie Lost in Translation. I saw that and was a little spooked at how it captured the girl with the newly minted philosophy degree come to a city where she doesn’t speak the language with a new husband who has a job and place to go every morning. That was me, minus Bill Murray and plus the six months along fetus in my belly.
I don’t think I have a coherent narrative of what those two years were, more these impressions of reading voraciously (I can still map routes to the two bookstores, U Knihomola and The Globe that sold overpriced English books) walking and writing, and throwing myself down canyon-like narrow streets of tall, gorgeously historic-looking buildings, taking random turns trying to see if I could get good and lost but inevitably arriving at a landmark I knew. 
Of the earnest attempts to learn Czech being dishearteningly not enough. The disapproving looks I got for strapping the baby to my chest and roaming instead of protecting his delicate spine and confining him to lying flat in a large prom, confining myself to where I could walk to with a bulky pram that one person could never get up or down stairs unassisted. Being told, always, that the baby was cold, and needed another layer of clothing, when he was in fact, quite happy and content and showing no signs of hypothermia.
We lived in two different attic apartments, and I spent lots of time staring out over the rooftops of Prague, horror struck about envisioning accidents where a child falls out these high windows, not yet quite trusting myself as the mother responsible for protecting him. I remember walking through a graveyard on all-saint’s day, my four week old son strapped to my chest, feeling so far from where my grandparents were buried, feeling this deep empathy for the graves not visited or decorated by any living family, wondering if there were no family or if they had emigrated, as my husband’s grandparents and great grandparents had. I remember marveling at the care taken of these graves by a supposedly atheist people, and feeling so displaced and mortal and just not rooted. An upstart, with little sense of my own history, and the whole new baby, who was a new generation displacing my generation, not quite responsible for the passing on of my grandparents six years earlier, but somehow connected to it, turning my parents into grandparents.
It’s very hard to separate out my state, newly wed to a man I had known exactly one year, and getting used to the idea of motherhood, giving up roles of student, employee, daughter and sister, from my experience of this alien city. It was my first experience of living in a big city — Albuquerque when I left was a city of about 600,000, Prague’s population was closer to 1.2 million. That so much of Prague for young, hip American ex-pats was about smoky bars and drinking, artistic experimentation or capitalist expansion, and the ex-pat mothers I got to know tended to have at least a decade on me and thus intimidate me.
Some of the negatives were so vivid and are so much closer to hand than the great experiences, the one time I boarded a bus with the baby, following usual procedures of public transportation, sitting, and having the bus drive say something I didn’t understand over the public announcement system, having everyone turn and look at me, until, cheeks burning, I decided to get off the bus at the next stop, feeling helpless and teary. I don’t think I thought the hardness of all the adjustment was peculiar to being in Prague, it just did the pathetic fallacy thing of reflecting how hard things were inside me, the things given up, the being unsure if I was ready for this new life. It echoed the vertiginous free-fall feeling I experienced the weekend when my parents dropped me off at college for the first time with time for orientation before classes started and there were whole mornings and afternoons when not only did I not have to be anywhere in particular, nobody was asking me to account for myself or let them know where I was and the freedom was truly frightening, paralyzing.
I have said that it was probably the best thing that we could have done for our marriage, to move to a city where we had no one to turn to but each other, where phone calls to our parents or friends were costly and had to be carefully timed across the time zones, not to be made in fits of frustration. The internet was a primitive thing, the dial-up connections slow, email a new marvel, the digital pictures we put up of our new son cutting-edge, Amazon an expensive last resort for getting English reading material. My mother-in-law would video tape and send us American sit-coms which were this sweet relief. We had a pediatrician who spoke English, but her receptionist really didn’t so making an appointment was always a test in my understanding of time and date, and when the baby seemed sick, it was easier to thumb through Dr. Spock than call anyone, so we early on developed a sense of ourselves as the experts on our son, doing what worked for us without realizing that there were labels for different child-rearing philosophies. It’s easy to look back at our time in Prague and wonder at all the things we were almost blind to, just as I wish I could re-do my first year of college. I wish I could see the imprint that the experience left on me, it might have left me stronger and more independent, but, on the other hand, it might also have left me a little more tentative and doubtful.
June 22nd, 2008
Jenny of Jenzai Studio and my real life bff tagged me with the six word memoir meme. Thus –
Here are the rules:
1. Write the title to your own memoir using 6 words.
2. Post it on your blog.
3. Link to the person who tagged you.
4. Tag 5 more blogs.
I won’t cheat and use the one I came up with in February. Instead, going off one of my favorite comments recently, here are my six words:
Striving for Strenuous and Muscular Kindness
And now I tag:
1) Raven
2) The Unreliable Narrator
3) The Almost Right Word
4) Nolan
5) Katie
June 16th, 2008
Mother’s Day, it turns out, is relatively simple for me. A well-deserved nod to the noble sacrifice, the giving over of identity, the universality of being the bearer of life. Then Father’s Day comes. Raven has taken Xander to a birthday party this afternoon — the mother of the birthday boy apologized to me, “I’m sorry for scheduling this on Father’s Day!” and I was quick to reassure her that our family life does not rely on a calendar to tell us when to appreciate one another, that Father’s Day just seems like a good day to avoid family-style restaurants where you see dysfunctional extended families spending obligatory and uncomfortable time together eating overpriced food served by stressed out waiters, when people spend $4 for folded pieces of cardboard to express threadbare sentiment. Or, maybe I was less cynical sounding, and just said, “Really? No big deal.”
And yet. Søren sits working hard at a card for Raven, because it is important to him, because he can, an expansive card, in matter-of-fact five-year-old generosity, two sheets of paper taped together to create an airplane with detailed windows and wingflaps, “We all love you, Dad” written on the back. I wonder if the association of Raven with airplanes in his head will be bittersweet for my oft-absent beloved, who is so celebrated on his return. I will call my father tonight, a little envious my sister got to go out to breakfast with him and my mom. And after two weeks of being the sole grown-up in the house, I cannot help acknowledging how our family balance relies on Raven and me together, our complementary values and ways of doing things. I resolve to look at the holiday with a little less of the cynicism (inherited, quite honestly, from my father!) and without the hydra of resentment about the unglamorous work of parenthood so seldom falling evenly, a resentment that seems to sprout new heads every time I think I’ve slain it. It isn’t today, resentment of my husband who is supportive in ways I didn’t know I needed support, who is giving in ways I didn’t know people could be giving. No, really, it’s resentment of the model of family given over to us, that the work cannot be shared evenly, two people working half-time cannot earn what one person working full time does, of the assumption, however correct, that I will always drop everything for the darlings, that the socializing of men doesn’t make them — well, like mothers. No, no, I will, I promise myself, think on these two important fathers in my life and acknowledge the gifts that each has given me as mother, as daughter.
I aspire to be my mother’s daughter, I rattle off the qualities like a shopping list — her resourcefulness, her sense of humor, her patience, her honesty and fairness, her assertion of her own needs in balance against those of others that has never gotten in the way of her generosity. She is a person who is always identifying what needs to be done and doing it. There is nobody on the planet I admire more, her company is easy and comfortable, and the only people who are bigger fans are probably my sister and father. But the inheritance from my father? I trace back to the squeak of the stool I perched on in his woodshop and the smell of sawdust and the conversation, the conversation as I trailed him up mountains, the conversation that picks up easily now that I can phone him during the day when kids are at school, in his first year of retirement. My father’s review of papers I wrote for school and of letters to my grandparents with helpful suggestions were how I learned how to write. The books he loved became books I loved, the music he loved became music I love. He sat in the car while I was in doing violin lessons, made sure my sister and I always had good instruments. I’ve always been proud to be his daughter, wanted to make him proud of me.
It’s not a clear division, that my mother taught me what I needed to be a mother, that my father taught me what I needed to be the writer and the person I am, because my parents parented together, made the major decisions together, and shared the work of raising children, as Raven and I try to. But I have different relationships with the two of them, and treasure them both. One of the more helpful things they told me after we had children was that the children did not need us to parent them in exactly the same way, that so long as Raven was consistent parenting as Raven does and I was consistent parenting as I do, the boys would be ok. I think that gave me some help in stepping back and letting the relationship Raven has with each of our sons develop independently of me, to recognize the gifts he has to offer them.
And that’s the other thing about Father’s Day — gratitude to the father of my children. I’ve never met anyone like him, and he makes me a better person. We are different people, with different things to offer as parents and spouses, and somehow that works for us.
June 13th, 2008
Ellipses are the opposite of an exclamation point for me, a tentative trailing off…
Right? Annoyance at myself to sound so adolescent girl insecure, asking for approval and validation, so unwilling to assert myself.
I notice I am writing in my own private journals with too many of these trailings off, and suspect that it is psychologically indicative, the way it is when I get too carried away with parentheticals, completely unable to proceed in a linear fashion from one thought to another, instead having branched and nesting ideas.
On the other hand, perhaps the punctuation just indicates a sloppy habit. I can re-write in short, snappy declaratives. I experiment with it here.
The second week of parenting alone is making me a little crazy. It’s the third day of summer vacation. We haven’t yet landed on the right balance of structure and flexibility. I berate myself. It is 1:30 in the afternoon. I haven’t accomplished even one of the things I consider my basic goals for the day. Once the berating starts it bleeds over into a hundred different little things. The berating opens floodgates of not-helpful thinking that include, in AA-speak, comparing my insides to other people’s outsides, defensiveness in one-sided conversations with people not even here to hold up their end of the conversation, impatience with my kids and their needs, unkindness to the body in the mirror, paralysis.
I don’t write this to ask for reassurance. I write trying to halt the snowballing of crazy-thinking. I write because if there is an AA phrase for comparing your insides to other people’s outsides, maybe putting my insides out there helps shift reality to “We all have struggles.” I write this so I’ll have a reminder that there are days when I get up before the kids and have done my writing before they wake up, days when my to-do list trembles at the might of my ability to get stuff accomplished, and days like this, which are the opposite, and more days which are somewhere in between. I write to remind myself that the four boys are all safe and relatively entertained and fed and getting along and that is the only accomplishment that has long-term consequences for me today.
I wish I could offer the berating voice a cup of tea. I imagine addressing it, gently, “Oh, buddy. The feeling of not-being-enough-not-doing-enough, that’s a rough one isn’t it?” Which shocks it into silence because it was so ready to fight, and it stammers “But everyone else seems to be managing… There’s a whole world of people out there who are out of their pajamas before noon, I am sure of it…”
I try to treat this voice with the patience I can summon for the kids on the days when I am on my game as a parent. I listen for the things not being said. I hear the belief that somehow I should be earning and deserving. I recognize the fear of unworthiness. I try to give it an action plan. What are the things that HAVE to happen today? There’s a doctor’s appointment. So get everyone dressed, and don’t forget to ask the boys for help getting ready. And then after? I can ask, very gently, if what it needs is the connection that comes with practicing with the boys. I will carefully avoid practicing out of guilt/the money we spend on instruments and lessons/the fear about the boys doing well at auditions for the local youth orchestra next week. Or does it need the physicality of time on the elliptical? Does it want to take the boys to the library to feed their reading habit? Or does it just need to get together with some friends and have the reality check of connecting with other adults? The voice needs to be reminded that if Raven gets home and the house is not immaculate he won’t love me any less.
I don’t pretend I have it all solved forever and ever. It’s amazing how one little crack in the dam can lead to such overwhelamament, but I will get through the afternoon, I think, which is really all that is required of me this afternoon. Knowing that the not-helpful thinking is slipping in, I will be vigilant about examining the thoughts that are moving me, whether they are the helpful or unhelpful kind. It amazes me that I have gotten a little better at reminding myself of what it is I need to function, earliest journals have reference to an internal gyroscope, that will eventually always help me determine which way is up again. But if punctuation is truly diagnostic? Then I just have to monitor my own writing, I suppose.
June 5th, 2008
Truth time: I don’t like the blog entry I published yesterday. I slept badly wondering if I had gotten too far from my own belief in kindness, in looking for the best in everyone, which it turns out, isn’t for the just the moral in some Disney movie I’d let my kids watch, or something to pay lip-service to, while turning around and gossiping with friends in the corner. I see it as a spiritual challenge and conscious choice, a battle fought against the darkness and indifference of the universe. There are more unkind things than what I wrote on Amazon, of course, and actually, the internet abounds with unkindness and cattiness, but that’s one of those things that I find toxic about the internet, people not imagining that what they write could wound, might very well be read by the person who they’re writing about, or thinking that being unkind about somebody more famous than themselves is the way to get noticed. Also, I tried to write about the book, and not the writer, but because the writer was writing about himself it got blurry for me.
Raven’s in London this week. He is going to bed as I get the kids from school, getting up as I go to sleep, and working the rest of the time, so I don’t have my reality check. I feel disconnected from the world of people who are not my children, a little disconnected from myself. And the second to last sentence I wrote about the book, that I found an underlying note of alienation in it sort of resonating with me, may be the most true thing I wrote.
Alienation it turns out is what happens to me when I stray from kindness and from looking for the best in everyone. I start to wonder if my own existential despair is cheapened by being shared with angry, black-wearing adolescents, I start to see the punk rock snarl, the frat boy smirk, and realize they are masks for the Edvard Munch Howl-like expression my own face is concealing with the nicey nice smile I wear dropping off the kids at school. I wonder if everyone around your seems to be living a happy life of television and barbecues and shopping and talking about politics while I struggle to figure out what it all means. I wonder why I haven’t outgrown my existential despair and turned into a grown up like all the grown-ups around me.
And I was ready to weep with relief when words started echoing through my head and I realize that besides kindness and looking for the best in others, I have one other small antidote for alienation in my shelf:
I celebrate myself
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belong to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul
I lean and loafe at my ease… observing a spear of summer grass.
Seriously? I am considering getting myself a “WWWWWD?” bracelet, to remind myself “What Would Walt Whitman Do?” Leaves of Grass is the opposite of alienation. I know it’s a bit tricky to ascribe personalities to those long dead whom one only knows through a handful of poems, but Uncle Walt lives in my head, a mad populist, nudging me “Alienation is too easy. Do better than that. Every atom that belongs to me as good belongs to you.” He reminds me that we are all made from the same dust and filled with the same longings. That life is too short when our pulses all beat a music together, that when we are so connected, when memes spread faster than any epidemiologist could comprehend, what hurts you, hurts me, what I celebrate you celebrate. He makes me see the holiness of the human spirit in even those people who don’t get me, reminds me of that new mother feeling of awe that every human being I encountered was once a tender newborn.
Alienation for me is fear, fear that I am disconnected and will never connect again. It’s being protected, aloof and rejecting the million ways around me to connect. It is pretending that my inability to accept myself at the moment is instead an inability to accept others. And it’s something I cannot afford. So, um, I’m going to go read some poetry for a while.
June 4th, 2008
I do not fancy myself a book critic, really, being much more interested in writing than in writing about somebody else’s writing, and having a predisposition to look for the best in everything and everyone. But having now devoured more parenting memoirs than is good for a girl, I think the world should benefit from my wisdom with my advice to anyone considering writing about how parenthood has changed them.
I am a forgiving reader, and yet the last parenting memoir I tried reading, Neal Pollack’s Alternadad I finally could forgive no more. I forgave him the self-loathing when he is driving to Central Market in Austin, (the yuppie organics high end grocery store where I did do a lot of my shopping when I lived in Texas) in his Volkswagon Passat listening to NPR with the kid in the carseat in back, bemoaning his loss of cool. I forgave him for feeling unable to relate to the other parents at the playground because I’ve had days when the hardest part of parenting is other parents. I forgave him for writing too much about his son’s bowel movements, figuring that that will be for his son to forgive him, someday. I forgave him the preoccupation with being cool, which seems like something you should grow out of sometime in college when you realize that nobody is paying as much attention to you as you are, that people are more likely to remember kindness or passion for a particular subject than they are coolness. I forgave, until a hundred pages in when one chapter just didn’t have anything to do with the one before it or the one after it and there was no point being made I had had enough. Not only had I had enough, I composed a long letter to him in my head.
Dear Mr. Pollack –
Parents, like everyone else on earth, have things that make them unique, as well as things we all have in common. And the tricky thing about writing about parenthood is because it’s new to you, it’s hard not to believe you haven’t discovered something no one else has ever done before. The surprise of having gone from thinking about yourself first always, or maybe your spouse and yourself, to finding yourself responding to your child’s needs and forgetting your own can be so startling that you are sure this must be something new in the world. When you are overwhelmed by the the primal, the fierce protectiveness you feel and the overwhelmingly vulnerable tenderness that lies beneath it like an ice cream cone dipped in a candy shell, it’s difficult to believe that parents have been experiencing this since parenthood began.
I think that the best of parent-writing in fact comes from the belief in this unique new world that exists: you have a kid, a whole human being existing where none did before and you’re facing this challenge, the ways this person will test you, frustrate you, make you feel inadequate, and the fact that you are committed, that you have to go forward, inevitable mistakes and all. Is there a drama greater than that? You’re going to have to get over your own childhood traumas and stumbling blocks. You’re going to face judgement and disapproval and discover for yourself what works best for you and your child, disregarding what your own parents, the neighbors, and the women in perfectly coordinated warm-up suits at the park think. You will be tested in a contest of wills with this small person that proves that will is inversely proportional to body-size, you will make sacrifices you resent, and you may discover your rock and roll lifestyle gets compromised a little. That’s parenthood. Bu the rewards? When you find in your kid this treasure mine of qualities that are better than you or your partner — where could they have come from? And, oh my God, the head relaxed on your shoulder that says ‘I feel safe with you. Thanks for making my world solid.’ The rewards are abundant, even though you’re not doing for the rewards.
There could be volumes of parent-writing just on sleeping children. There is the music of their breath, the open postures, the little butts poked comically in the air, the loosely closed fists, written not in this saccharine Anne Geddes soft-focus, but in hair plastered to their damp heads, their sour-breathed reminders of what it feels like to release all concern and anxiety, the total surrender of their sleep. Parenthood is worth it for sleeping kids alone, but better than that, you get sheafs of paper from kindergarten with ‘I love my dad’ and ‘I love my mom’ scrawled across them. Sometimes, if you’re lucky you get to experience the tenderness two of your children feel for one another, get the startling insight that their squabbling sprouts from their concern, needing each others’ respect and affection. You get to share the things you love best with them, whether it’s a book from your childhood, a movie you loved, a sport or a trail, and you get to see them turn into their own people, whom you can guide but never truly control.
Mr. Pollack, it is possible to write well about parenthood in the same way we write well about any aspect of being human. It’s this thing about language, about communication, using what we share, the words we have in common, this dipper in a the of universal pool to try to give me a glimpse of something that is your unique experience, some sliver of insight or turn of phrase to jet out, arcing elegantly a stream of individuality and uniqueness.
All writing, I think has this struggle: if it’s universal, why bother writing about it, because everyone knows it, but if it’s too individual, how do you expect anyone else to get it? You get hooked on the irony of wanting to be special, just like everyone else. If you manage to navigate the uncomfortable truths about yourself that you encounter trying to write honestly about parenthood, if you avoid the cliches, the lazy shorthands for profound experience, the parenting memoir can be rewarding to read, even for the non-parent, in proportion to the rewards of parenting itself.
Sincerely,
A reader
A friend asked why I spent as much time and energy as I did on a book that annoyed me so much, and I suppose I do appreciate how my own beliefs came rushing in in opposition to what this book didn’t do for me. I don’t like putting a book down until I’ve given it a chance, and I skimmed the last bit hoping it would redeem itself. I think the negative feelings I was left with make me wonder if I am not frustrated by the weird note of alienation underlying the whole book because it resonates a little. Still, I believe in parenting as well as you can and I believe in writing about parenting as well as you can.
May 28th, 2008
I wonder if falling into formulas of writing doesn’t turn into a kind of block? I start feeling like a parody of myself. Something cute the kids said or did, some piece on NPR, and its application to my life, earnest self-examination, pat little summarization. And when I write about something like the Suzuki Lessons piece, I wonder if I sound as if I think I have all the answers? When my best friend leaves a comment about mother guilt I wonder if I haven’t given a lopsided version of things, that I need to rush back in and qualify how I worry about pushing my kids for the wrong reasons, how the time I spend practicing with them is time not spent cooking nutritious meals and how much self-doubt I go through still regularly? That sometimes I think a little bit less time with me might be good for the lot of them?
Should I, for the sake of honesty, be talking instead about how I get PMS and yell and tell the kids that since I have to spend all of my time picking up after them maybe tonight I won’t have time to read to them? Should I be talking about my guilt that I felt like I had nothing left to give getting involved with a co-op preschool for Rainer, even though I loved the co-oping I did with each of his brothers? Yesterday a friend told me about the preschool her daughter was at with one opening for a four year old, and so I went today and met the teacher and fell in love because she was just right with the way she talked to him, at his level, answering his question “What’s this?” with “What do you think it is?” really engaging him, and I realized he needed that kind of interaction with an adult and I haven’t been giving it to him and the school is an easy bike ride from my house, and it just felt so RIGHT, and then I found out tonight that that space is not available and am a little bit heartbroken? And guilty because I should have planned ahead for the whole preschool thing for him?
I know that in pondering whether blogging about your kids is exploitation I started in with the question of what I find comfortable writing about for the whole world to read, but aside from the moral/ethical questions of privacy and safety, there’s a more aesthetic one. Can I put myself out for commiseration without sounding like I am whining? Can I be proud of an accomplishment without sounding insufferable? If I share the self-doubts am I somehow reinforcing some model of female relating by self-doubt? Can I adore my children without making them overly precious? If my worldview is inexplicably optimistic (really, don’t ask, I haven’t a clue why it should be) and I tend to get more excited about the things that work than depressed about things that seem hopeless, does it make me impossible to relate to? In the end, I guess, these questions are paralytic, there is no sentence I can make up that some little voice in my head cannot suggest a horrible misreading of, so I just have to go ahead and write what I need to write, and trust the reader.
May 26th, 2008
It’s probably clear that being part of my kids music education is a big part of my life, it gets a substantial part of my time each day and I put a lot of time into thinking about it. And most people would probably nod and agree “Yeah, music education is great for kids” and leave it at that, but of course, being me and having spent so much time and emotional energy into it, I am surprised at how it has become a part of my identity, and I have been a little frustrated not to have met other parents doing it with whom I can talk about it. Lots of Suzuki parents are a little strange, I think you sort of have to be to look at your three year old and say “Hey, I have an idea, let’s make practicing the violin a part of our daily routine.”
So when I talk about being a Suzuki parent I have no idea what it means to you. Until my own kids were doing it I mostly thought of those other violinists who were learned to play by ear instead of learning to read music when I was a kid, or the freakishly poised Japanese toddlers on television, and it didn’t occur to me my own kids were ever going to be Suzuki kids. Our first ‘cello teacher in Dallas used the books but not the method, and my own sister used the books as her ‘cello teacher had, in a hodge-podge with her own experiences learning music and pedagogy classes from the university. Then we moved to Portland, and the ‘cello teacher Aodan got was really a Suzuki teacher. We had a mixed experience with his brothers’ violin teacher, but she made sure we were really immersed in the method and all of its implications. My sister got her Suzuki qualifications as a teacher as we started becoming real Suzuki students, and she and I have benefited from the other’s perspective in this process, and it’s something I fits naturally with her more empathetic and light-handed yet serious-about-the-music approach to teaching (should mention here that I really wish we were closer geographically so she could teach my son, but not being so, I am on the phone with her all of the time trying to get from her what Suzuki and music education really is about, what it really means).
This is what Suzuki means to me: making listening to the repertoire a part of daily routine, the parent as practice partner, sitting quietly in the lesson taking notes and then using the teacher’s suggestions to guide practice all week. Progressing through the songs in the books in the order they’re given, trusting that the order has its own logic, and watching my five year old get excited recognizing the piece his brother has already played that he is going to play one day. I think ideally we’d get to be part of more regular group classes, but that hasn’t worked for the younger boys with our family’s schedule this year.
So what have I learned from practicing music with my kids?
1) Modelling is a much more effective way of teaching than lecturing. The boys may need suggestions on ways to tweak their technique to get the sound they want, but they’re smart enough to hear the difference and letting them hear and adjust and work on making their own playing get closer to the sound they hear in their heads is much more effective than telling them what to do.
2) They listen better to themselves than to me, so it is more effective to ask them a question “Why do you think it sounds scratchy?” than to say “Hey, use more speed and less pressure and your sound won’t be so scratchy.”
3) The best practice is somewhere between work and play, it is paying attention to a challenge, and because I am trying to help them meet the challenge, I have the responsibility to help define the challenge in small, concrete ways (”Let’s see if we can do ten bows parallel to the bridge”) and create fun ways of representing the accomplishment — a tic tac toe board they get to fill in, or those little barrel of monkey monkeys hanging from a peg or the music stand. I have to learn to make the challenge appropriate, so it doesn’t feel like the finish line is always being moved further away, which would be frustrating, or that it is condescendingly easy, which would feel manipulative.
4) I am a more effective practice partner when I am matter-of-fact. I will empathize “it must be hard to stop playing while your brothers seem to be having fun, so we can go practice, but we need to get this done.” I try to make sure things that need working on are just things that need working on and not moral failures, even if the thing that needs working on is a more basic skill, like stopping and listening, and making sure that things accomplished are celebrated for the discipline and hard work they represent, not just for the skill they show. I do have an emotional response of course, when a small person shows the determination and faith to turn, by practicing, what seemed impossible into something that is a matter of course, whether it’s the concentration to a balance a small toy on the scroll while I play through Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star, or getting a difficult bow stroke. It is moving. But that’s different than feeling proud when someone else admires or angry or frustrated when I cannot communicate what I need in the practice.
5) When you make practicing a matter of course, like toothbrushing, and you’re there alongside the child, making it good time that you spend together, the chore-like drudgerous aspect of practice goes away, which has made me re-evaluate a lot of the dreaded and drudgerous chores in my life, and how often there is a voice in my head resenting the unfairness I perceive or how I don’t feel like I don’t have time to do the things I want to.
6) That when the ‘cello teacher told me “When someone asks what you’re working on just say you’re trying to improve tone quality and intonation because that is the goal of the every Suzuki student at every level” there was something deeper there than a glib answer. It’s a letting go of the idea of “advanced” and “beginning” because the progress from one piece to another isn’t entirely arbitrary, but has to do with how much more learning the teacher believes can be wrung out of working on a particular piece for that particular student. Different stages are easier for different kids. I was given a gift as a violinist to get to be a beginner again with each of my kids and heal some of the weird feelings I had about hierarchical rankings of which violinist sits in which chair after auditions. Playing with three different boys with entirely different needs in terms of willingness to confront frustration, abilities to self-regulate, natural inclination, and orientation for my approval has helped me to let go of ideas of “natural talent” and realizing potential. I still have pangs when I hear a fifth grader rocking on a piece I played in high school or when Aodan tells me that the youngest violinist in his orchestra just turned six, but to my great astonishment the kids have internalized so many of the good aspects of Suzuki that they will remind me that what is important to them is the enjoyment of playing together.
7) That old “Process not Products” emphasis is everything. If something tragic happened, I would be grateful for the time I spent connected with my kids, making music with them and not be angry that we had wasted all this time and they’d never get to be the musician I was trying to turn them into (I’d be angry at the universe for a lot of other things, no doubt, but not about time spent wasted practicing). It’s not that the results of practicing are meaningless, it’s just that I cannot be oriented towards results, because learning a new skill ends up being a lot like growing something from a seed, long periods of apparent dormancy when progress is impossible to discern and then, over night, amazing shoots of tender greenness. Each of the three boys I have practiced with seems to go through periods of what I call maintenance practicing — where I am satisfied just at not apparently losing any skills, and then there will be a little leap and suddenly we’re at a new level, and I’ve had to learn that these two things are different aspects of the same process, and it happens in the building a marriage, it happens in trying to develop as a writer, it just is how life is.
