I was talking about this with my friend Sarah, today. She doesn’t have comments on her personal blog, and she told me that some people don’t consider it a real blog if you don’t have comments. But then she blogs for a living on other blogs and the comments there are enough to erode one’s faith in humanity, long ad hominem arguments, people getting entrenched in their own positions and so on.

That of course of has never happened on my blog. My readers, both of you, are much too civilized for that. In fact, the joy of blogging has been the thoughtful comment, the delicious conversation. So turning off comments feels perverse and self-sabotaging even by my own crazy standards.

I’ve missed my blog. Even with the regular journal writing I miss the spot to have my thoughts composed and set out and polished a little, presented. But when Sarah generously gave me a shout-out on UrbanMamas it made me freeze up. People were looking at my blog. They were going to be expecting something.

Which is why, right now, I kind of have to close the door and pretend you’re not there. I am haunted by the image from Margaret Atwood’s Negotiating with the Dead, that reader and text and writer form this triangle, and there is no connecting writer and reader only the connection that each has with the words. And when my brain gets all abuzz with the droning of little envy bees and competition bees and the crowded field and the feeling of my own voice lost in the crowded hive, the only redemption I have found is to retreat to the private world of words.

In college I was dating a guy who adored Alice Walker and got tickets to go hear her read and afterwards dragged me to stand in line to get an autograph and it was utterly disconcerting after the deep intimacy of having her poems in my head to be standing face to face, flesh to flesh with this very real human being who didn’t know me from Adam.

I think also of Salinger. Who lives in my head as loudly as any writer does. And was the first writer with whom I had to experience the weird relinquishment of understanding that other people had a claim to him just as I did, that the girl I thought the biggest phony in high school was as busy relating to Holden as I was, and how strange a jealousy that was! And that I interpret (though of course your are free to otherwise) his reclusiveness as an attempt to be a real person rather than succumb to the dangers of believing in the hype. And that there is an odd redemptive experience of being grateful that that private experience of me as a reader alone with his books is not even one I can be jealous over, it simply is.

And finally, I think of privacy. Not as in the keeping of my secrets, my family’s secrets, but what it is to be public versus private. That on my worst days Facebook is redubbed Jelusbook because it is where I can go for tangible, objective evidence that everyone has more friends than I do, that the the friends I have prefer their other friends to me, that there is something just lacerating about every act of friendship becoming a public act. That if I pitch my voice differently with my children when I catch someone listening to us, especially when someone smiles appreciatively at something particularly adorable Rainer has said, something fabulously witty Aodán has said, some deep observation Xander has made, some incredibly thoughtful Søren has done, then how can my behavior to my friends not change with the apprehension of audience?

I love the internet. I am always dismayed at how quickly the conversation becomes this over-simplistic reductive internet good vs. internet bad one, but I still wrestle for a healthy relationship to it. I love the worlds of inexhaustible information available at my fingertips, and have found wonderful and deep friendships that are independent of geography. But the friendships, once formed, deserve a degree of privacy.

So, I will try to get the backlog of thoughts I have that I have wanted to polish and articulate and layout slowly queuing onto the blog (or, for how backlogged I feel, I want to spell it queueueueueing). But for now, if you feel compelled to talk to me about it? I’d really love an email. And of course, I reserve the right to change my mind.

I line the fears all up to face them down: I’m scared of causing anyone any inconvenience, scared that I will be unavailable to drop the kids off at school or pick them up after, I am scared of the dentist being irritated somehow that popping out this filling I’ve undone some work of his, nervous about missing the high school redesign meeting at the school district main office, nervous about having no excuses and having to go to it (new building, I’m unrehearsed on where I park and how I get there and mean secretaries who could stare me down in unfamiliar corridors). I’m anxious about discomfort in the chair. Anxious that the I’ll have to live with the discomfort until after the holidays. I’m worried I’ll be yelled at for not calling the dentist yesterday. Worried about losing the tooth, about how that has to be another stupid intimation of mortality, as if I needed another. I’m worried about how much it will cost. It’s hard to go back to sleep.

I wake up again at six, my stomach still tight with all of the anxiety though I practice the breathing I did with Dana at yoga yesterday, inhale broadening exhale deepening and it is not so bad. And awake, I might as well write. But the moment the iPhone struck seven (if it rings, then surely it strikes?) I call the dentist’s office, tentative, “I think I lost a filling?” “Can you come in right now?” “Oh, yes!” Raven doesn’t hesitate about taking Rainer to school, so I throw on clothes, make Rainer’s lunch for him, race out.

And when I get home I finish writing. My lips are rubbery and it’s startling to look in the mirror and lok — normal, my jaw not distended or bloated. And my head is full of my “excruciating sensitivity” that the dentist walked into the room where I was waiting with all his bluster and impatience, and I had this feeling I get where I think I could be a human sponge and absorb all of the stress in the room to be carried out and safely wrung out elsewhere and why do I do that?

I was everyone in the room: my Hermione self, wanting the dentist’s pat on my head “what a good patient you are!” and the hygienist/assistant (you never find out what some people’s job titles are and I worry about accidentally using a wrong/insulting one, calling a flight attendant a stewardess or something — but her role! I know her role!) who has three kids with three different father and quietly takes the dentist’s impatience, the sharpness in his voice when he asks for something a second time, only I imagine how one day she won’t, and she won’t even know why. And so during the periods of waiting for my mouth to get numb and for the new filling to set or whatever while the dentist is off doing something else I joke with her and sympathize with her in that mother-to-mother way, emphasizing how we are alike, trying to relax her.

Back on my back, eyes clamped shut against the three sets of hands coming in and out of my mouth, trying to soften in the places where I want to strain and resist and tighten, I was also the trainee, more fearful, I think, she still hasn’t worked out how to seamlessly stay out of the way while having the mindreading ability to have exactly the tool he needs at the ready before he asks. And I’m even him, I resonate with the impatience, the stress, maybe, of being a small business owner, the economy perhaps, one pressure, and changing technology — he’s said things that make me think he finds computers irritating. It’s really important to him that people think he’s smart and he’s given monologues on anthropology while his hands were in my mouth that I honestly enjoyed. I imagine he is surrounded by women who sort of cater to him, the hygienists and dental assistants, receptionists, his wife of thirty-five years, their daughters, but that catering carries a reciprocal sort of responsibility for them all. Of anybody I’ve met in the last fifteen years, he seems to embody patriarchy, and I’m shocked that this summons only sympathy. And, that, yes, I trust him as a dentist.

I absorb it all and I come home and spill it out. My tongue tries to get reoriented to the changed contours of my mouth and there’s still a dull ache, I’m sharp with my kids. But I should sleep better tonight.

And that movie, the current intense reading of the novel Juniper Tree Burning, the realization that there is a whole subgenre of hippie childhood memoirs, the running interest in the sort of history of the assumptions behind families that Stephanie Coontz writes about, has my journal all filled up with what the myth of the normal family means to me, and the way each generation gets to believe it is inventing a new way of doing things beyond the previous generation’s notion of normal, about the hubris of believing that I can intellectually, carefully select my own norms as the ones most rational, most conducive to health and well-being, shaving my legs but not wearing high heels (even beautiful two-toned strappy ones) forgetting to bother with makeup, but having fun with henna in my hair. I still carry hurt feelings that a friend looked at the clothing rack we put up in the bedroom to make up for the single solitary small closet we have and helpfully started telling me how to put drywall up and make a new closet in that corner (which two months later? I know I need to get over as I know no offense was intended, at all. Just. She couldn’t live as we do. Advice not the same as a referendum.) And still I dwell on the inscrutability of all our strange little domestic sine qua nons and the traditions we are able to shed without tears, the convictions behind such things as the proper way to load the dishwasher, toilet paper over vs. under, how the bed is made, and yet being able to joke about antimacassars or the plastic coverings on furniture in the homes of elderly relatives. This summer’s reading of Paul Fussell’s Class convinced me some of it is a class inheritance, but so insidious we don’t ever really get to free ourselves from it.

And then. There’s the whole family thing. I’m still feeling mellowed and grateful from a lovely visit with my parents over Thanksgiving. And the night before Thanksgiving we did a birthday dinner for Søren and got to introduce my parents to a handful of the people who are sort of my family of choice in Portland, the ones who love me, love my children, and show up when need them, and having all those people in a room was particularly sweet.

So I share with you, from my journal on Thanksgiving morning, my own private Thanksgiving fable, the persons in it resembling in no way any relative of mine by blood or marriage, living or dead:

Thanksgiving, the holiday for which my cynicism cannot bear to show its face, that to be thankful seems finally to be our best human state, our most human posture, the pausing for breath and appreciation, surcease from want, from fear, thanksgiving its own springboard into acceptance, things not as I planned them, but as they are, and this holiday as one in a string of a lifetime of Thanksgivings.

The earliest childhood family dinners were all wrapped in the joy of your cousins to play with and adoring adults paying attention to you, and maybe getting older there was creeping awareness of tensions and how much work the whole thing was and how brutal the boy cousins’ fights could seem, which, after a couple of years, yielded to a gentle fantasy of families like on television or in the movies, a mythical family in matching sweaters who all small nice and are nice to one another, belief that around other dining room tables gathered collections of even just normal people, not so flawed or idiosyncratic, without gaping flaws, insensitivity, dinners characterized by the complete absence of anyone talking too much, alcohol-induced oversharing, or hidden barbs. It occurs to you that even as a little kid you saw bluff heartiness like a neon sign, something missing here.

Perhaps in college there was a friend close enough that you got to spend Thanksgiving with them, and at first they seemed perfect, but maybe you suddenly catch her mother trying to embarrass her father or one of them cannot let got of little things, is too precise with the table settings. Maybe you even miss your own family. Maybe it’s the year you take Psych 101 and get excited about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and you slowly realize the the human fabric is woven with a pattern of warps and holes, and the gaping flaws, that if they aren’t universal in their expression, point to a universal underlying neediness, that the terse, purse-lipped aunt with the disapproval lines where other people have laugh lines and the uncle who works a little too hard to get everyone to like him (and pulling his finger is never going to work on that count) the odd collections of bragging or insisting on being an expert on everything that otherwise nice-seeming people will bring to the table, are all expressions of the need for love, security, approval.

You may even get just a tiny bit depressed at the futility of transcending the crazy family behaviors that are at once embarrassing and exasperating, especially when you realize it isn’t just your family. The loss of the mythical normal family is a little painful, because, then all you can aspire to, really, is a more benign form of crazy, right? You still love your family, that’s never really been in question, but the love is a sort of instinctual, habitual showing up at the ritualized occasions, and their very familiarity lies somewhere between comforting and constraining, especially when they refuse to see you as the person you really are, they keep wanting to remind you of your seven-year-old self, and at the end of weekends in childhood bedrooms or on fold-out couches you escape from their world back to your own with more relief than regret.

And then you meet someone, and you know he’s not perfect exactly, but you like who you are around him, and he makes you laugh. And he forgives you all the ways you’re not perfect. And he even likes your parents. And for not being perfect? He seems to have escaped many of the flaws that you see in the rest of humanity, has an attractive confidence, is kind and moral and would never cheat on his taxes, and the attention he gives you is flattering. Your infrequent quarrels are followed with a demonstration of a commitment to working it out, to honesty, to letting himself be vulnerable.

Then he gets a job offer far from where you’ve been living, and you must decide quickly, is this a person you can make a life with, and it occurs to you, really, that you cannot imagine life without him. You marry. You move. This is followed by a lonely Thanksgiving when it is just the two of you because you cannot afford to travel to your parents’ home or his, that year, and you are left trying to gamely establish a sort of tradition of your own. And you miss your childhood holidays, have a nostalgia for them, which surprises you. And then, out of nowhere, there are your own kids, and you are so busy being adequate to their needs that you scarcely notice that your traditions are busy growing up, right alongside your human offspring.

But then, one year, Thanksgiving comes again and you slow down enough somehow to notice everyone sitting around your table, your children, your parents, traveling to visit you, uncomplaining about the foldout couch bed you’ve made up for them, and normal is never even the question, nor do you spend time dwelling on how each person isn’t perfect, because you are so grateful for each person there, for the time you get to spend expressing your love for them, for the fact that they see your flaws and love you still.

Tofurkey and turkey, side-by-side then, I hope the feelings from Thanksgiving last longer than the leftovers. and I send my appreciation to everyone who keeps showing up and reading here.

* He is thirteen years and eight weeks tomorrow. Which means I ought to be getting used to this word soon, but it’s sort of like practicing saying “my husband” or writing your married name, which, actually, no wait, I didn’t change my name. But you know what I mean. It still feels new and strange.

God grant me the serenity
To 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 keep finding myself frustrated, wanting to change everything, and bewildered at it all?

And I steal a little bit of her answer:

So I was thinking last night, It’s called the serenity prayer because anyway for Westerners/North Americans, serenity/acceptance is a lot harder than “courage” (or anyway the desire to change everything within arm’s reach) and “wisdom” (or anyway our belief that we’re right about what we know and should have our way)?

One of the wisdoms of DBT is that you can’t even change anything until you first accept it the way it is. I.e. how can you change your situation until you accept that every time your husband comes home drunk he will hit you? How could Rosa Parks refuse to give up her seat unless she fully accepted what was going on, what it meant, what the consequences were going to be? So I think of it sometimes as, God grant me the serenity to accept the situation exactly the way it is, and the courage to get myself out of the situation when I need to do so for my safety and sanity, even though it is going to cause all KINDS of problems and be terribly inconvenient and oh, I’m not even WORTH making such a big fuss, I should probably just hush and suck it up for a while longer, it’s not that bad….

And how lucky am I that I get to have conversations like this via email? And I keep thinking about this and keep thinking about it, and finally decide that what I love most about her response is that it points for me towards this notion that maybe wisdom and courage and acceptance/serenity aren’t all that distinct from one another. That sometimes it takes courage to squeeze your eyes open a little and un-flinch your shoulders and realize that the situation you’re in hasn’t left you on the floor half dead, which might be a first step towards accepting it. As much as we’d like to think that wisdom sits back in reserve picking out the situations for changing, the situations for accepting, but I have yet to meet native wisdom like that, and it occurs to me that even if God is granting you the wisdom, it generally comes not as a lightning bolt, but from experience, from trying to change some situation that it turns out you can only accept, from trying to accept some situation you really need to change, and oh, but it takes courage to make a mistake, dust yourself off, and turn it into wisdom. Courage is sometimes the willingness to keep trying and maybe be wiser the next time. Or the time after. If you can accept that, what can’t you accept? And then the way acceptance is a part of courage, that willingness to be seen fallible and imperfect, to accept yourself as fallible and imperfect so that you can take a risk.

My sister and I were having a conversation about how differently my various children go about music lessons and practicing, and how my six year old right now doesn’t like making mistakes at all, and doesn’t take risks — if something is challenging and new he does this little retreat, “I’m much too exhausted to do this right now, I had such a long hard day” and this sometimes requires all of my patience to keep coaxing him, to keep emphasizing how much he is doing right. But it’s good for me to see this because I think it’s familiar, that this particular form of risk taking is awfully hard for me too.

(Synchronistically? My friend Patrick just posted this on the idea of artistic risk. Great minds and all, right?)

And I think this underlying idea of risk has been nagging at me a lot lately, that I will fall into doing what I know I can do okay and doing it over and over and over again, and I think it has something to do with my perception of feeling stuck, and even though the things I do with love all involve this element of risk, of laying bits of myself open to the world, whether it’s parenting or music or writing, I’ve wondered how to become more okay with risk. Maybe today it starts with the serenity prayer.

[The funny side effect of all these thoughts is that 'oatmeal' is transformed in my head to 'tao meal', and my stupid pun-loving brain turns it to eating curds of way.]

I’ve spent so much time this fall feeling stuck. I wrote so diligently, got so much done in September and in October I crashed. November’s come and I see people on Twitter talking about doing NaNoWriMo and I feel angsty and lost, and that would have at least been a direction, given me a mission for every day, meeting the word count. I worry about my value as a person getting nothing done and probably need that reminder about human beings and human doings even more frequently. And the thing about the stuck state is you cannot remember a time not being in the stuck state nor imagine a time to come after it. It feels like you’ve chosen the wrong way and you cast about eagerly for other paths that might be more productive. I think about resumes and job listings online, investigate what I would need to get certified to teach even though I don’t want to teach.

But there is maybe this other solace of stuckness, that I still adore words. Music is fine and breaks something loose in that wordless place in me, dismantles dammed up feelings when my plains are parched and cracking. I spend too much time creating playlists or obsessively listening to the same album over and over again. Visual stuff I want to hoard and collect, my camera on my phone is cluttered with images of the different colors of leaves I see on those morning walks, the pretty colored bottles in the window of the sake bar around the corner, these strappy two-tone high heels in a little boutique two doors down from that, green and black and suggestive and nothing I could imagine wearing, but I have a crush on them anyway, the rain drops strung on spider web, the texture of the cloud cover racing across my skylight and I joyfully spin in my spinny office chair staring up at it when I am at my worst stuckness.

But finally it does come back to words.That they have sound and meaning and subtlety, that we can be pensive or wistful or contemplative. Conflagration! I love conflagration this week. And cerulean and celadon and cerise are all so much more vivid than the actual colors they describe. When I cannot write anything else word lists suffice. I think of the six weeks between my sophomore and junior years of high school spent doing trail construction in the White Mountains and living out of a backpack and the greatest hardship not being the absence of a mattress or a hot shower, but missing having a dictionary.

So if my way has to include a stuck-feeling patch, I may not have a lot of faith in myself to keep on this way, but I do have faith in words, that they matter, that they manage to cross the impossible boundaries that keep us all separate and apart. That the words want to be written, stories want to be told, and it’s not all about me.

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 paper and fuel for the fire in the woodburning stove in the studio. Smoke pouring out the chimney alarming some anonymous neighbor yesterday so that firemen knocked at the door, and I had to say, no, no, everything’s fine, it’s just doing what fires in woodburning stoves do. I still feel a little guilty about the bother, the alarm, the smoke.

My truths misplaced. I try to remember what I was thinking, what it was I needed to tell you.

My hours misplaced. My voice misplaced.

Both seem to land in hours where I guiltily practice the violin, benefitting no one, the doing it for the love of it itself when it will never be for performance or money, and the feeling that this time is stolen from the housework, from the helping with homework, from the practicing with the boys, from writing, and from the employment I haven’t sought. The things that I cannot get into words that are in my fingers when I get the notes right. The love it takes to do something imperfectly because, helplessly, I cannot help it. If I sneak away and practice by myself then when it is time for the boys to practice I can empty myself to really listen to them.

Silence creeps in to my Twitter and Facebook accounts. I don’t know how to have a voice light and casual and fitting in 140 characters and still truthful. But tentatively, I want to reassert that voice, to say, no wait, I’m still here. I continue reading your updates, and it would feel creepy skulky-stalkerish or shy wall-flowerish not to at least have the courtesy to say, yes, I’m listening.

The maternal mmm-hmmm. Keep talking.

The brilliant feminist mother blog blue milk had this talking back to the story of the Little Mermaid, and especially the giving up her voice to keep her man aspect of it, and I think about the struggling we do in silence as well as the struggling we do against silence, and how privacy morphs into shame and I decide I’d better see if I still have any voice at all. And the thing about the mermaid story is that when I found after years of immersion in the hard isolation of caring for tiny babies that I needed to write again, first in journals and slowly in the first version of the blog, it felt to me like I was reclaiming my selkie skin. Which is maybe the grown-up version of the Little Mermaid when she tries to reclaim what was lost? This divided self thing makes truth more complicated, surely. But a voice is too high a price to pay.

I am woken by absences and reach reassuringly out; I am still here. And I break the silence, carefully, not wanting to be alarming. I am right where I need to be.

I think I’ve stumbled across resolve, some small sureness, that paradoxically throws everything into question.

I am startled when I am overtaken by a strong opinion or moment of resolve, which, really, shouldn’t seem like such a big deal. I think there’s even an old expression about opinions being like a part of an anatomy which every one has one. And it’s not as though I never have opinions. I have a friend I didn’t speak to for a year when we were what, twenty or something, because we disagreed over something that was so ridiculous that if I put it down you won’t believe me, you’ll think it’s hyperbole — but, if memory serves? it was over whether pop culture of the ’70’s or the ’80’s sucked worse? And I am so averse to conflict that I think this disagreement marked the beginning of a period of preferring not expressing opinions to fighting over them, and the opinions I hold I tend to hold tentatively, prefacing “of course, you might not feel this way, there are so many other ways to feel” which when you have to put in such an obvious preface, what exactly is the value of it?

The um, James Wood dust-up two blog entries ago? Where I felt practically as if I had started a flame war for merely citing somebody who has different opinions than some people I respect a lot? Yeah. That’s sort of typical. I love goodreads for helping me keep track of what I have read, what I want to read, what friends are reading, but the very act of assigning stars or writing anything like criticism? Freaks me out a little.

This is not something I particularly love about myself. As much as anything delights me about my boys, I love that they comfortably hold opinions different from my own.

And the easiest way to describe what it feels like being me, is that I sometimes feel like water, taking the shape of whatever container I happen to be held in, being as agreeable and as pleasant as I can in the name of getting along, and not at all sure what shape I would have were I not suitably contained.

And then when I am not happy it seems like I have a tendency to wait passively for things to change. Because they do, always. And I don’t know how to be different, only that it’s time for me to start growing here. Which is terrifying, I haven’t a clue how even to start, and all I can guess is that it is like the children’s game of hotter and colder, one has to start moving, slowly but steadily so that as one gets closer to or further from one’s objective, one gets hotter or colder. And it’s the trying to discern for myself what constitutes feeling warmer, it’s like trying to wake up a sense that has been numb. A friend assured me that I don’t have to be able to imagine what happier looks like from right here, and I tell myself that I will just do little works of removing obstacles to the happiness even if I am not sure I believe in happiness.

And this is stinky hard to write about. I don’t want it to be so vague as to sound like cloying self-help nor so specific as violate the privacy of the people whom I am engaged with in this process, but writing about stuff is how I know how to move forward. Silence doesn’t feel right. So I put this up to say, here I am, struggling along, and it might not look so epic from the outside, but as uncomfortable as it is, the notion that I can own this and shift from a passivity to a sort ownership of my own life seems like a good place to be in.

Some days it’s as though the pen cannot keep up with the words in my head, some days there’s a lot of staring into space, adjusting, fidgeting. And I try to figure out the difference, that the easiest or maybe simply the most joyful is the connection of things that becomes a new idea to me, or a recognition of some thought as an old idea in a new form. Some days there are emotions to be worked through, things that when I felt them I might not even have been able to identify exactly because my feelings like to wear masks and I tend to have to take off one after another to get at what exactly what I felt. It turns out righteous indignation is indeed rare, and fear doesn’t like to be recognized at all. But I don’t suppose that this is the bulk of the journal either. Stalling for time I catalogue sounds, dogs and birds and the neighbors’ fountain, rustles of leaves, and the heaving sighs of busses at the stop a few houses down the street. So is the different between a fast three pages and a slow three pages only the level of detail?

I should never run out of words, I suppose if it is so, because there is always more detail to cover. Only it starts sounding like an English 101 paper attempt to bulk up the word count, the inventory of items on my desk, the tedious recounting of things that don’t change, feel as if they will never change, houses passed walking Rainer to school with Christmas lights out in September or already fully decorated for Halloween, interesting plants I don’t know the names of, what I heard on the radio, what I read before falling asleep, the weather, the annoyance of power tools buzzing and the behavior of people parking on our street in front of my house, details that don’t mean much to me, watchfulness without any real object.

And I think what I try to make my way to, however slowly is that the factor in the number of words for a day may not be detail but attention. Minus a sensory deprivation take, can one not assume rough parity among days for the number of details present? Or that details are mines which this casual habit of three pages a day is in no danger of stripping bare, that the presence of details is, as a matter of functioning, emotional truth, if not mathematically accurately, infinite. Or that fractal-like, the closer one looks at a detail, the more detail there is to it?

I try not to go all tree-falling-in-the-woods-with-no-audience but what is a detail unlit by attention? Can attention create details?

I hold my pen posed above the paper, thinking, one second, two, three, it plunges back down, onward, leaving the messy trail.

And it’s not that every detail has equal weight. Time is a detail, but a tyrannical one. The amber translucency of the honey in a jar on my desk from doctoring tea for my sore throat is a more pleasing detail, less startling, less interesting — everyone knows the color of honey, I have no new take on describing it. I want a detail that is unexpected. Deviant.

I play as if I could create a taxonomy of details, the idiosyncratic, the personal, the universal, the artificial, the red herring, the negligible, the trite, the repetitive, the sensory (could I invent an abstract detail? what about something statistical that you do not perhaps experience directly?

And where does my attention go on the days when I struggle to put a single word more down? Is the attention vested in a day any less fixed than the hours? Or do I hide it from myself when my attention is spent on envy and covetousness and feelings of deep inadequacy, the days when I suspect I am a better friend when my friends are having a hard time than when everything is going well? Days when I get that seventh grade feeling that the rest of the world is having a much better time, having a party to which I am not invited?

Mara Leah Collins is vaguely disappointed but cannot name what it was she was hoping for.

Mara Leah Collins thanks you for playing.

Mara Leah Collins is disturbed at her tendency to compose Facebook updates throughout the day, the clever completions to “Mara Leah Collins…”

And I attempt not to bore you or myself with another exploration of my complicated feelings about social media though, yesterday I resisted the urge to put links on Facebook to the two radio stories — On the Media ran back-to-back stories on the first American Internet addiction treatment center and on a documentary about a guy who correctly guessed where the Internet was going, how our usage would increase, but also who cracked up attempting to life his life entirely exhibitionistically on-line. The filmmaker urges us all to hold something back.

The update on my first week of having Rainer in school is that it slowly dawned on me that the number of things I have to get done each day, the loads of laundry, the meals, the running and emptying and reloading and running again of the dishwasher, has not diminished at all, and if I have ambitions for Getting Something Done while the house is quiet, I must be strict with myself about using the Internet, which will take as much time as I will feed it, but sometimes doesn’t leave me feeling any more deeply connected. Which, I don’t know what I mean by deeply connected, but I think it has to do with thoughts that don’t fit neatly into 140 characters.

For instance.

September 20 is my half-birthday, the earth as far as it gets from the position it was in relative to the sun when I was born. Not that the solar system has ever returned to the place it was when I was born. Not that I think my mind really does well trying to grasp absolute cosmic distances or place as something fixed. I am pleased my desk is right where it was yesterday.

But if you think about it yesterday is all relative too. On day to hold a washing of sheets, a bringing myself out to write, too much time on Facebook, even. Yesterday as a spin of earth on its axis in addition to its moving nearly another degree on the arc of the ellipse it travels around the sun, which is traveling its own lonely cosmic path out from the center, the dance going on even when we cannot hear the beat. Yesterday the first rehearsal of the season for Aodán and Xander’s orchestras, Raven patiently chauffeuring while I got on the elliptical and listened to podcasts.

Yesterday was crowned with dinner with friends, but its vividest moment from today was when I squeezed out some time to read James Wood’s How Fiction Works and paced the house looking for a quiet place to read, with Raven working upstairs and the younger boys playing video games in the living room, so I sat at first against the wool by the back door, coats and backpacks hanging from hooks around my head, but eventually sprawled on my stomach in front of the book, reading about use of detail, and Flaubertian tricks of taking in details that couldn’t all be happening at the same time by one person, the encompassing repeated actions of women yawning and street sweepers sweeping, dirty children fallin and crying, and the discussion of ’significant’ details and the ones that lounge about for mere verisimilitude, citing some Roland Barthes.

At this point I lay bathed in an ocean of details, the reflected boundary line between trees and sky in the rainwater on the porch boards as I looked out the cat door, water filling the tarnished copper bowl fireplace with the charred wood in it starting to float, puddles on the cushions of the seats on the chairs, chips in the painted floor of the hall, fresh new skin growing where blistered skin peels off between my thumb and forefinger, souvenirs of last weekend’s yardwork. And at the same time, I am pricked by the need to whip out the iPhone and add Barthes to my goodreads reading list. And also a few other books run into in other places, discussions I habitually lurk at the edge of, wary of contention and being overly-sucked-in.

And when I finished reading Wood and went upstairs, opened the computer — there in my blog feeds pops out, from a friend of a friend’s blog Barthes again, lovely, copied into my journal. And I remember another Barthes link from a friend’s Facebook page a week ago. Mercury in retrograde, or whatever. Last week I wondered if I was being haunted by John Keats.

If I look up from reading and writing I get discouraged by all that I do not know, the unread canon, the knowledge that there is no catching up. And I suppose that, absent a systematic approach, one really can do worse than to trust the serendipities that thrust the same name in one’s face three times in an hour. Yesterday evening at dinner with friends, I’m telling her how Wood’s discussion of ‘free indirect style’ helped me understand something that was wrong with what I was writing, and I suddenly remember her husband was an English major, and I blush that things seem like big revelations to me that he can take with an “of course” attitude (not that he is ever anything but gentle and courteous, it’s all me and I feel so underqualified).

But before the conversation moves on there’s this moment of talking about having always read for pleasure, without paying particular attention to how things are put together and how they work, I have sometimes a fear that a newfound attention and knowledge will diminish the pleasure, like knowing how a magician’s tricks work. No, no, we agree, knowledge of what a writer is doing in a passage can only enhance our appreciation. But I think about it more today. What if it were like having perfect pitch and suddenly finding poor or merely out-of-tune performances intolerable? I remember a stage in playing violin when my own insecurity made me listen mostly for other people’s mistakes. But my listening seems to have grown again more generous, perhaps from the daily work with the boys, and I find I have more of an appreciation for other players exactly where they are at. I don’t know to what degree a magnanimous appreciation is based in knowledge, in disposition, or in willingness to be generous. In any case, I hope I am read generously, kindly. I rely upon it.

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.