I do all my own stunts

Break over!

2008-02-18T21:49:00.004-05:00

Six weeks is a long-enough break, don't you think? It's been wonderful, honestly, not to feel the pressure to blog when I just didn't want to. But I find myself wanting to again. So hurray! Break over.

But not here. This year, my word (finally!) is forward, despite what Ed said of the word making him think of fascist youth marches. Forward. Not looking back, not trying to be what I was, not trying to get back all the things I felt I was losing in the move, but going onwards, moving forwards and up and away. I might be about ready to do that.

And I'm going to do blog forward on a new and shiny blog I'm calling Making It Up and it's here, at my very own site: francescaamendolia.com/blog. Please come over. It's probably going to be almost exactly the same as it was. After all, it's still me.

But not Stuntmother any more. She's lovely and I adore her, that cupcake making, baby-rocking, play-dough rolling, half-smiling, half-screaming diaper juggling piece of me. But she belongs to something that's receding into the past. And I'm going forward. Making it up as I go along.

Where I'm going is not where I've been

2008-01-06T17:39:00.000-05:00

I've been thinking a lot about what has changed for me about blogging. For two years, blogging here was something I did naturally, readily. It took no effort, gave me much pleasure. Here I thought things through, connected to others, made friends, shared stories and reached further into the virtual world than I ever had before. I loved that this was a diary I was keeping faithfully while I had failed at dozens of other diaries I had tried to keep throughout my life. I had always wanted to be a journaler -- like Madeleine L'Engle, like Anais Nin, like Boswell. For a while, here in this blog, I was. It was the most intensely satisfying activity. Then something changed.

For a long while I thought that the intense sadness I felt about leaving Philadelphia was interfering with my blogging mojo -- and all my other mojos for that matter. I tried to give myself space to be unhappy, to not blog if I couldn't manage to face yet another day of writing about the slough of despond I felt myself in. I tried not to mind that the magic was gone. But it was. And I began to feel like a liar, struggling to write what had once come so easily.

Recently I've had another thought. I have, all my life long, cared far far too much about what other people think of me. In fact, especially at times of great stress or unhappiness, there is a voice in my head which is something like the omniscient third-person narrator of a book. That voice is the voice of the "audience," the world out there watching me. It's no good telling me not to be so bloody self-centered. I'm not really, not that way. But I judge the value of what I do and who I am via the reactions of other people. Which is why, I think, blogging has been so successful for me while journaling was not. The audience made it real.

Well, it occurs to me that I am in the fix I am in (in short, that I am not sure where my life is in the midst of the lives around me) because I care more what and who are outside me, rather than what is inside. So I end up moving away from where I really wanted to be, because I had never managed to stand up and say -- not to myself, not to anyone -- this is what I want. Because I don't know what I want. I know far better what other people want from me.

So. As this new year comes and I emerge slowly from the cracking shell of unhappiness I have been in, I think it's time to try and change that. I will find out what I want. I will find out what my own voice says.

And to that end I have started keeping a journal. In a book. With a pen. I carry it around. I write weird things in it that I wouldn't write here. And things that I would. But then I can't check back to hear the love. To see my reflection in the mirror of this community. I have to be all right with there being no mirror. Only with myself. The book is quiet. It doesn't praise me, judge me, agree with me or pat my hand. It doesn't challenge me or push me. It waits for me to do all that for myself. Which considering how old I am, it's about time I did.

So I suppose what I'm saying is that, for now at least, I'm going away. I'd rather say that outright than just drift away. What I am going to regret most are the connections I have here. I will miss you very much. And you should email or, you know, visit! Or you can come over to the knitting blog (Two Sharp Sticks) which I share with a friend and which I have also been neglecting. I will be contributing over there a few times a week, because (I hope) that's a different type of blogging, one that won't twist its fingers into my hair and pull me away from what I need to be doing right now. I'm also Twittering every so often (link in the side bar: twitter. com and I'm stuntmother) which means if you're really keen to know where I'm at, you can check in on my 140 character summations of existence.

We'll see. I know other bloggers who have said sayonara and almost immediately come back. And I have this idea that maybe once a week I'll scan the weirdest page from my journal and post it here. Although isn't that frankly just the love-hungry faded star in me, longing for acknowledgment?

And since I don't exactly know how to close, I'm just going to fade to black.

She turns away from the camera (and now we can see she's wearing a snazzy new pink hat she just knitted because man, the house is cold). She opens a still new looking black book , thinks for a moment, then takes a pen and starts to write. The light fades.

All right, just stop.

2007-12-13T08:46:00.000-05:00

So unfortunately feeding my sense of impending doom doom doom, with a capital D and a very loud OOOOOO, I've just learned that one of my favorite authors, Terry Pratchett, has been diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimers. You can read his statement here, which, like so much of what he writes, is intelligent, phlegmatic, funny and cuttingly real.

I'm not sure how they diagnosed him, since a neurologist friend assures me that a true diagnosis for Alzheimers can only be done via autopsy, but still. And his optimism -- or determination -- to carry on for a long while yet exhorts me to adopt the same positive forward movement. And perhaps much of what could be hard and dooooom-riddled can be otherwise with a better attitude.

Still, I would really like the crap to stop and something very very nice and long-lasting to happen. Not just, you know, tickets to Spamalot or a nice sunny morning without too much work to do (although that would be nice too) but something big and nice. Daniel to stop fighting at school. Ed suddenly getting a to-die-for job in Philadelphia. My asthma improving. Friends moving in next door. An invitation to direct for the RSC.

My computer having not lost the last two days of work. Breakfast.

Only now

2007-12-11T22:19:00.001-05:00

Part of the power of NaBloPoMo ending was to send me shrieking from the computer. It's a truly odd juxtaposition to last year's early December posting when the month of posting so energized me that I wanted to carry on and on. And it's a good reminder in how things change, even the things you think will always be the same.

This too shall pass, my mother used to say. This too shall pass. Sunny weather and rain, good times and bad. At first I found it a sterile saying. A platitude. And then I realized its power for hope and held it to myself when I felt lost and afraid. Much later I learned that it also holds within it a warning not to rely on the good moments remaining forever. They too are fleeting. This thought holds within it both halves of all possibility. All this shall pass. Someday, it will be different. Not good, not bad. Not worse, not better. Just different.

Things are so different now then they have ever been before that I am truly, for the first time in my life, fearing the future. I never did. The future always held promise and potential. Now I am scared of it, fearing it holds sadness and loss. Part of this is the slow evaporation of my mother. To watch her dying by infinitely small degrees (because Alzheimer's is a disease -- and one that will kill her eventually) and to not yet be free to talk about it, to look ahead and know that before this mourning can possibly end there will be terrible, terrible times, makes the future seem bleak beyond all description.

Yet this too shall pass. All things will. And I am both hopeful and afraid.

Only now, at the end, do you understand the power of the Blog

2007-11-30T23:45:00.001-05:00

Another guest post from Stuntfather

Last day of the month of enforced daily posting. Since y'all (it would have been youse, but we left Philly and out here it's definitely y'all for the second person plural) gave me such good feedback on the last post, I've grabbed the wheel again and am steering this blog off down a different bumpy road.

November: one of the wackiest months in our married life, I'd say, certainly our parental life, with the hordes of visitors, me conferencing and burning non-existent candles at ends they didn't know they had to get the bloody dissertation revisions done, Stuntmother performing daily miracles and nightly collapses... I won't be sorry to see the back of this month. But it had its moments, and the struggle itself is worthwhile (insert Camus here? What? I have to do it for you? Eh bien, "La lutte elle-meme vers les sommets suffit a remplir un coeur d'homme" and if I've remembered that correctly at a distance of 20 years y'all owe me a beer). Thanksgiving brought happiness to our visitors, I think, and showed what this house can do when full. Christmas could be spectacular. Or just cozy. And either way it will be good.

Three generations of the family went to a planetarium show tonight and to look through a large telescope at a binary star system and massive globular cluster of 100,000 stars on the other side of the Milky Way. Daniel melted down when we had to leave, and that became the consuming thing in the moment. But I look back now at me, my parents, my children, and the big universe out there, and don't care whether it all makes sense or not. This messy November has been what it has been, every day is what it is, the world turns, and tomorrow there will be fresh coffee. And Stuntmother coming back to me from all youse guys in Philly who borrowed her for the evening.

Last year Stuntmother was musing on strategic undergarments for reptiles

Further aging

2007-11-29T13:24:00.000-05:00

Further to the aging theme, I was watching a BBC Lord Peter Wimsey mystery from 1973 and there was a party scene and do you know, everyone at the party was over forty. And they were all having fun! Looking pretty! Chatting and flirting and drinking champagne.

Then this popped up over my Gmail:

Pablo Picasso - "It takes a long time to become young."

Well, yes, Pablo, as it happens, I agree. But something happened between the early seventies and now, or between the 1920s and now, depending on how you look at it -- the triumph of youth culture. The pressure on us to remain young despite the natural, and in some ways, welcome process of aging, maturing, growing up, is immense. Lord Peter Wimsey today would at the very most be a lusciously ripe thirty something, not a greying man in his late forties or early fifties. It's a shame.

Except for a few aches, you couldn't pay me to be twenty again. But I would like there to be a space in the world for fun, glamour, romance, high-jinks and long parties for those of us leaving all vestiges of youth behind. The space that there is, is shrinking. And it is time to resurrect it.

Last year I was both mother and motherless.

Aging

2007-11-28T23:36:00.000-05:00

A while ago I went to the doctor because I thought my asthma was getting worse. And I had (or had just had) bursitis. What is wrong with me? I asked. The doctor shrugged. "You're just getting old," she said.

I have an aching wrist and a cut on my hand that is taking a long time to heal. I can no longer entwine my fingers and bend over and have my arms loop over my head. I used to be able to do that. I could do all sorts of things that I didn't think were hard at all that are now impossible. I can't hold my balance the way I once did. My neck gets sore. My eyes get tired. My lips crack.

I'm going to yoga and what I don't know is how much is recuperable. Can I reclaim the (limited by my basic structure) flexibility I tossed away through years of blind inactivity? Can I reclaim the lost lung power? Can I push away the pain in my wrists? Knit together the diastasis of my stomach muscles, long after birth? Or am I aging past these things?

Aging is not something I want to fear, but I want to balance what I should cling to with what I should gracefully surrender. What goes on each list? How can I decide? I suspect that the neck pain, a long term legacy of a car accident in my early twenties, is here to stay. Surrender headbanging gracefully. All right. The wrist pain is new, perhaps due to too much laptop use at a bad angle. Fight that! If I can choose well, I will have more energy to fight the good fight, rather than flinging myself against the brick wall of the inevitable.

But what about my dreams? Some dreams I think I do have to gracefully surrender. No chance I'll be in the RSC now. Nor will I dance. I am unlikely to live on a yacht or learn to speak fluent Dutch.

I can hear all your caring comments now, urging me to never give up on dreams, and you're quite right -- as far as it goes. But I think some must get cleared out of the way so that I can see the future spreading out before me, not cluttered with might-have-beens, but with maybes. If I can choose well, I will have more chance of fighting gracefully, rather than tripping over my somewhat wretched, aging feet.

Last year I was considering my place in the blogosphere.

Not exactly complaining

2007-11-27T20:30:00.000-05:00

Last night, I crept to bed with my goodies and then fell asleep, sitting up, with my tea in my hands and my knitting on my lap. Literally. When I woke up I had to mop up the cold tea that had spilled all over the duvet. This evening, I fell asleep in yoga class (during corpse pose, but even so). In the library, I faded out, staring at the bookshelves and came to in a panic when I realized I had only put 15 minutes on the meter.

So it's 8:30 and I decided I would not try and work, but would instead go off to bed. Then I realized that because of NaBloPoMo, I had to blog first. Oy.

So I'm not complaining, but nor am I doing more than this little sneeze at the computer. I'm going to make tea, drink it (standing up, perhaps?) and go to bed.

Last year, I was ranting at and on the radio.

What we must

2007-11-26T21:58:00.000-05:00

A girl's gotta do what a girl's gotta do.
Being taken to bed: one hot water bottle, one heated rice pack, two heated foot warmers, one cup of Tension Tamer tea (love that stuff), one mini pumpkin pie I made with the leftover pastry and filling, one After Eight mint. And a book on tape. And knitting. And the heater hasn't set off the fire alarm for the first night since Ed and I started sleeping in the guest room (having vacated our own room for his parents) so the room will be WARM. And so will I.

Needs must.

Last year I was also eating a mini pumpkin pie. (I got the dates wrong yesterday.)

Oh, and send a psychic welcome to little John Phileas who was born early this morning to my dear friend. Welcome to the spinning world, little one. We're glad you've come.

Holidaaaay

2007-11-25T21:44:00.000-05:00

So, while the last few days didn't FEEL particularly like holidays, they clearly were, certainly compared to now when it's 9:45 at night and I'm trying to work when I'd like to have a drink, put on my headphones and go knit. Oy. Of course, I'm not working, but blogging. Still, the point stands that I'm not on a chaise longue with someone feeding me grapes while I listen to Dirk Gently on the Ipod. I'm sitting on a folding chair at the computer, feeling cold and crabby.

Ed is also back at work, marking papers. In this fine neck of the woods, the children have tomorrow off. Because it's the first day of hunting season. Of course. Naturally. If I had wheels, you'd see rubber on the road and a receding figure in the distance. Instead, tomorrow Ed will be at work and I will be driving two children and two in laws to Hershey to see if we can tour the chocolate factory. It might be fun, of course.

It would also be fun to be in Bermuda, having a massage on the beach with a margarita near to hand.

Oh, don't mind me. I'm crabby about in-laws. Today, my MIL cooked a butternut squash up for lunch while we were all at meeting and then offered me ice-cream for dessert. My ice cream, dammit. My Stephen Colbert birthday ice cream. In my freezer, in my house.

Last year, I was escaping New York.

Today is your birthday!

2007-11-24T23:23:00.000-05:00

My birthday, in fact. 39. It's a good number. Much better than 38 which seems sort of aging and hunched. Smells of mothballs. Thinks about string beans. 39 sounds more like martinis, filterless cigarettes, sonatas and long chiffon scarves. I'm looking forward to it.

But while today is my birthday (evidenced by Helena calling me "the birthday woman" all day and Daniel working out that I'd be only about half a year old on Pluto) I'm not having any of it. I'm not celebrating my birthday when my parents decided to leave the day before because their first born's birthday wasn't a good enough reason to stay another day. I'm not celebrating my birthday with in-laws in the house. In-laws (well, the mother) who closed the aging and somewhat sticky shutters in the living room (open because I love light and couldn't care less about privacy) because "I think it's foolish to have them and not use them" and who supervised my reheating of the left-over T'giving meal, saying things like "Did you put the mashed potatoes in the oven like I told you to." Ah, yes. Good times. Although I should just add that the mashed potatoes were sublime three nights in a row, due entirely to this

an early birthday present from a lovely friend who clearly knew better than I did what cooking Thanksgiving for 14 would be like. It's silver! It's a gadget! It's a silver gadget! I love it! It completely riced those damn potatoes. And Daniel loved them.

Anyway, it's not really my birthday. Or perhaps it's half of it. There was breakfast in bed and BSG Razor on the tell tonight. But there might be a party later.

But writing this down, it occurs to me I do this--try and declare an "official" birthday--every year. Somehow I'm never quite on top of my birthday for the real day and feel the need to postpone some of it until another day when I might be ready to get down and boogie. Maybe it's more this pushmepullyou thing I do when I think that it's not that important really, I'm not that important really, and then halfway through think goddammit, I am that important really, where's my fireworks. I should just get on board and plan my own party because I clearly want one. Next year, I will.

Thus, I prove that 39 does not leave me without things to learn, either about molecular biology or my own warped psyche. And that's actually a good feeling. I'm not old. I'm just me. Just growing up, moving on, overcoming and looking up, same as always. Still moving uphill because there is no downhill on my road.

Last year, it was coincidentally also my birthday.

Gratitude

2007-11-23T19:23:00.000-05:00

Ed's right, that the post below embarrassed me. Perhaps it shouldn't. I mean, I did work hard to make my mother's first Thanksgiving away from home a nice one. And Ed's parents were sort of Thanksgiving tourists. I wanted to make the experience nice -- for everyone, kids included. Still, I think he might have had a little too much pie. Or wine. I'm not all that.

But I'm thankful for him too. And I'm really trying to accept compliments gracefully instead of folding up my face like one of these dogs and muttering.
It's honestly easier to be nice to people than to let them be nice to me. Even if I don't make that face, I feel all sort of wrinkly inside. But I am trying to be thankful, because a little gratitude would not go amiss right now.

I am grateful to all of you who hang out here. I am grateful for your comments, written or not. I am grateful for the opportunity to expand my own circle of connection through this space. I am thankful that recently, despite what I feel is spotty blogging and some less than stellar writing, some of you have offered me the huge lift and compliment of blogging awards. I have been remiss that I have not announced them here. But like that darn post below this one, I feel a wrinkly inside accepting the compliment. But I will:

A long while ago, a wonderful blogger, Nancy Bea, whom I admire very much, not least for the fact that she blogs a combination of beautiful words and beautiful images while parenting with such grace, offered me the Thinking Blogger Award. Nancy, thank you. I try to be a thinking blogger -- as well as a thinking and thoughtful person more generally. That this effort comes across to you means much to me.
Then, a little more recently Hope, of Hope Radio, gave me the Be The Blog award, and said some very nice things too. Hope, thank you. I've been enjoying getting to know you too:

Then most recently, NYJLM passed on a roar for powerful words, which also means a lot, since she's a powerful writer in her own right:

Some (all?) of these awards require that I pay them forward, which I will soon, but for today, I wanted to think quietly about being grateful, about being gracious and for saying thank you. (Also, Helena is in the bathtub roaring at me in her own brand of powerful words -- I'm camped just outside the bathroom door with the laptop -- so perhaps I'd better get this tired girl to bed.)

Thank you, to all of you, and to Stuntfather, for being the strong voices, raised fists and good hugs in my corner. Your support soothes the varicose veins of my soul.

Stuffed! (A guest post)

2007-11-22T21:47:00.000-05:00

Today's post brought to you by Stuntfather.

She's a miracle. Seriously. The first Thanksgiving we've hosted since Cairo (and that was of necessity not the classic Thanksgiving), and the first major social event in the new house, and it all went as close to perfectly as anyone could imagine. Happy children, well-fed adults, the juiciest turkey in history, piles of all the good stuff on the side, many pies, some very drinkable wine... And in the middle of it all, Stuntmother doing all her own stunts in her own way, totally in charge, making it all happen. (Looking pretty hot, too)

It is really not easy to take a mix like we had here today - three generations, two national cultures, one stressful time of year - and produce so many happy people. There wasn't a whole lot of the official ideology going on - pilgrims, God and country, exploited natives - but insofar as this is a celebration of family and other good things in our lives, we gave thanks in style. And so do I, for the amazing woman who will be utterly embarrassed by this post. She'll just have to live with it.

Planning that turkey thing

2007-11-21T23:11:00.000-05:00

All right. This is rocket science, really. I'm working out the plan for what to cook when tomorrow because today I have had an entire day of "helpful" people (who are pretty helpful really) asking "What can I do? What can I do?"

I hate that question. I don't KNOW! If I knew what you could do I'd be DOING IT. Figure it out!

Still, lots got done. There is lots left to do. And now I need to drag my sorry self to bed.

If this weren't NaBlowhatsit, I wouldn't have inflicted this on you, but would have kept on planning in a obsessive sort of way. I'll thank me tomorrow.

Last year, I was practicing gratitude.

They're heeere

2007-11-20T20:12:00.001-05:00

Almost. They're coming. The latch is lifting. The door is creaking. The footsteps approach. The time is ...

actually, they're all late and I'm getting jittery. If yer inlaws are going to descend, at least they could descend on time!

(Fingers crossed. Details tomorrow.)

Last year, for some reason, I was getting all aerated about Tom and Katie.

Weaning

2007-11-19T21:36:00.000-05:00

When I first had Daniel, I couldn't remember how anything ever got done. Not laundry. Not cooking. Not reading, sleeping, showering, talking or thinking. Nothing. I just sat and fed him and walked him around and sometimes I ate a piece of bread or if a nice friend came over I ate lovely sandwiches and grapes. Right from the beginning I had to leave everything I couldn't cope with alone. Then I would sort of sneak up on it and reintroduce one thing at a time. Then when I had that in place, I could put the next piece back in. Like that game you do with your hands when you move one clockwise and one counterclockwise -- it's far easier if you get one hand going and then add the other in. I was still working things in one at a time when we were introducing solids. I found I could cope with breakfast, so we did that. Then when that was ticking along nicely, I worked up to making suppers. I didn't serve the child lunch until he was almost a year. It took me that long to sneak up on that meal, which for some reason completely overwhelmed me. How, I would think in astonished despair, how does ANYONE ever make lunch? I have no idea. Then (clearly) I managed it. And after a while, as parenting grew more familiar, that sense I had that I had to stalk the projects that daunted me, faded.

But now I'm doing it again, this time in my own life. You know that at the end of August, beginning of September, things got really bad. Really really bad. So I retrenched. I pulled back from every non-essential thing in my life. My goal was to make it through each day, to do what the children needed and then to go to bed so that I could try again the next day. That was it. Surviving the day was my only objective -- the only thing I had to do -- not returning phone calls, blogging, knitting, reading, making nice suppers, going for walks, finding happy little outings, eating enough green vegetables, gardening, cleaning the house past essentials or keeping up with the news. Nothing. I pared life down to what I could deal with and then I dealt.

Once things started to get better, I started reintroducing things. So I have recently been known to cook a meal with more than three ingredients in it. I am knitting again, reading the paper. I am keeping up a bit better with friends. I'm blogging. I've hung several dozen pictures. I bought a pair of pants. (Hey, do you know that at Ross, you really can dress for less? Who knew?) I'm managing to have days that are more than survival.

I'm weaning myself back onto my own life. It feels good.

Marathon

2007-11-18T20:57:00.000-05:00

So when we left for Philly, I forgot my medicine at home so by this morning, I wasn't breathing all that well. Even so, when we got to the marathon, I felt the sudden urge to run long distances in cute hats that always comes over me watching the runners approaching the finish line. The marathon (although in some ways, a bad bad thing to do to your body) is such an amazing spectacle of the triumph of the human spirit over the limitations of our bodies. My asthmatic self spends the entire time imagining that I could train for it, make it past the limitation of my malfunctioning airways and soar through twenty-six point two miles, thumbing my nose at the asthma that has always dominated my physical life. Then I come to my senses, as I get out of breath walking to the car.

Still. Maybe someday I will do something that mad. This year, a very wonderful --and heretofore non-running -- friend trained for and ran the marathon. So amazing. What we can do when we decide to. Even all those people who should be home in arm chairs with lap rugs on. Who hobble rather than run across the finish line. The absolute triumph of the will. What we will do, we do.

Last year, I wanted to believe.

Among friends

2007-11-17T21:13:00.000-05:00

Thank you for your solidarity -- and words of support. Today is much better and I am happily ensconced on my friends' couch using their computer. But, like all computers that aren't your own, I keep hitting all the wrong keys which is making blogging rather more treacherous than usual.

I am trying to train the children up to be mobile, weekend away type children. It's working all right although Daniel was hard work this afternoon, like a feral cat trying to mark his emotional territory. I'm wiped out. Somewhere in his genome is a little bit of DNA that suggests a tendency to overreact to every cotton pickin' thing.

So I'm going to knit. Perhaps there will be large thoughts tomorrow. Tonight I'm thinking about tea and wool and soft couches, and three children sharing a room, whispering themselves to sleep.

Last year, I was having much bigger thoughts (and better posts -- so go read them instead of this one). Earlier in the day, I was musing about the line between protecting and overprotecting your children. Then later, I was hoping I might learn to be kinder.

Not ready

2007-11-16T17:32:00.000-05:00

Ed's gone. I'm not ready to be by myself with the children in this big new house in the strange place yet. Don't get me wrong -- they'll get fed, and bathed (maybe) and put to bed and we went to the library for a video for a Movie Night but there will be more yelling than normal. There will be me, right on the edge of everything falling apart. The crust is thinner than I thought. I am only just holding it all together right now.

And tomorrow I will leave, and go where I know people. You do what you have to.

Last year I was living the dream.

This year? Goddammitalltosevenblastedcirclesofflamingfrackinhell.

Leaves; and comes back

2007-11-15T20:42:00.000-05:00

The garden is covered in leaves. Covered. I need to get out there and rake them, but have not adjusted to that responsibility and it's been raining the last few days. I'm not supposed to rake wet leaves, right? Ed was out in the garden at dusk and was surprised that it was positively raining leaves upon him. All around, like large yellow and orange rain drops. Suddenly, he said, I understand why someone might call it "fall."

The leaves are falling. And Ed is leaving. He's on his way to Montreal for a conference. When he returns, he will have his parents with him. There's some grand plan of meeting them at the airport when he flies in and they fly in so that they can come here together.

I'm planning menus and yawning. I'm not really a plan ahead kinda gal, on the whole. As I said once to a friend, I do not read ahead in the knitting pattern of life. Which sometimes throws a large wrench into the works. But this time, there will be five adults all over 65 in the house as of Wednesday (my parents, arriving Sunday; Ed's parents, arriving Tuesday; my aunt, arriving Wednesday lunchtime) all of whom need to be fed. And who will not be happy if I offer them cold cereal and beer. And Ed's going away. So tomorrow constitutes the last few free hours I have. I'm thinking I have to go to the supermarket and make it count! Thus menus. I'm thinking of making lots of soup and freezing it.

I also think I'm planning because I'm scared. These visits are hard, and I'm not really that robust. There is only a thin crust over the seething lava of my upheaval. It's getting thicker, but it's not there yet. Ah, well. It will all be fine, no doubt. Mostly because no matter what days are like, they end. And then there are new days.

Still, time to get in more wine.

Last year, oddly enough, I was also thinking about wine. Mulled wine.

I'm it, I think

2007-11-14T21:12:00.000-05:00

I've been tagged twice for the same meme, once by Radical Mama and once by a NaBloPoMo newcomer Thespac. Hi there, young actor dude! Well, twice makes it a pattern, so I thought I'd better comply.

This is supposed to be seven weird or random things about me.

1. I used to tell taxi drivers in Manhattan complete lies about who I was and what I was doing in NYC and do it in a variety of accents. So once I was a French girl visiting an old American man I had met in Paris, and once I was a Russian emigree who had been kicked out of her apartment and once -- well, you get the idea.

2. Despite the fact that I'm short, I spent years training to be a ballet dancer with a teacher who had escaped from Russia who used to yell at us about our "spaghetti legs", only to have it all go kerflop when by 16 it was pretty clear that I was not going to grow any taller.

3. I used to believe (I think I still do) that if there is a heaven, it will be a place that we can meet and be with all the people we have ever loved, whether or not they are actually real. So I will finally be able to meet Lucy Pevensie, Ozma of Oz, Lyra, Will Stanton and Great Uncle Merry, Jo March, Commander Vimes and all the characters I have loved in all the books I've ever read. I also think that heaven will be all the marvellous places we have ever been or ever wanted to be.

4. I taught English and Drama for two years at the boarding school where Diana Spencer had gone. Also Tilda Swinton. I also taught theater to Tish Potter there, who has gone on to become a successful actress and who is a wonderful woman.

5. I have an uncanny and useful knack for forgetting the endings of books, which allows me to read my favorites over and over again.

6. I walk a very very thin line between tossing two fingers up at the world (or one finger in the US) because I'm gonna do it MY way, walk MY road and to hell with everyone else and wanting desperately to be loved, admired and a functioning member of society who is helpful, friendly and makes nice quilts. It's an uneasy combination that I have grown easier with.

7. I passionately love putting together IKEA furniture.

Consider yourself tagged, if you like. I don't like tagging people lest they feel obligated and I am probably the last folk on blogearth to do this meme, but if you need fodder, please do it. I like to know weird things about other people. And let me know in the comments if you've done it!

Last year I was being grossed out by children brushing their teeth.

Solidarity!

2007-11-13T13:28:00.000-05:00

Ha! Who knew my laundry sluttishness was in such good company! Go laundry sleepers! I do confess once, in college, to slumping ON TOP of the clean laundry for a midnight nap. I was writing a paper and just fell backwards like thiiiiiiis, well, you know.

Today has been a rare day, a day with no work. Of course, that also means no money and I don't care! A free day! Hooray! I'm building a bed and planning menus for the long long inlaw visit. (Hey Charlotte! I don't know what it is with in-laws and meals either. My mother would also be happy with toast and my father brings his own roast beef.)

I accidentally have this subscription now to the Cooks Illustrated website. (The accident is that I took advantage of their free trial and forgot to cancel before the fourteen days were up. Hmph. Now I am going to cook every damn recipe on the site to make it seem worthwhile.) So I've been trawling it not simply for Thanksgiving recipes, but also for recipes for every single day they're here. If I can actually plan a menu (and a shopping list) I might make it through the next few weeks sane.

Of course, I also have to do something about the huge wet blanket of leaves all over the back yard. I'm thinking my next place will be an apartment. And now I'm going to the library! Every day should be like this! Lots of coffee! And exclamation points! Books! Knitting! Blogging! Assembling furniture! Sunshine! And no damn work!

In a lovely juxtaposition with yesterday, last year at this time, Daniel was planning to start his own brewery and had developed a menu of beers. None of which, I promise you, had more than say 5% alcohol in them.

Ed's writing. I'm quiet

2007-11-12T22:26:00.000-05:00

Ed is downstairs writing. The children are abed. I met my deadline (mostly) today and now have to fold four loads of laundry before sleeping because I've done my trick of dumping all the clean clothes on the bed so that I must fold them before I can get into bed. While I sometimes think that I should just crawl into bed anyway (hey! all those clothes will keep me warm) I don't think that Ed would be too thrilled to come upstairs and find an enormous heap of clean clothing on the bed and me, mole like, burrowing beneath them.

Perhaps a small glass of something will make the time fly. And the clothes fold themselves.

Speaking of which, absinthe is all legal now, you know. (I'm not going downstairs to pour absinthe, though. Probably ginger wine or port. Anyway.) A writer in today's NYTimes came over all lyrical about it, in an amusingly un-Timesy sort of way. So many writers, poets and artists have fallen under its thrall that the drink suggests mad genius. It does seem a wonderfully romantic thing to drink and I'd be more inclined if it didn't taste of aniseed. Although if it makes the clothes fold themselves, I'll drink it happily.

And while we're (I'm) ranting about alcohol, what's with the 12% alcohol beers? I've been to nice local people's houses twice in central PA now and both times they could not offer me a normal beer. Either sparkling beer water or Mad Elf. Seriously. What is with that? 12% is wine, people. Malt liquor. Mad Dog. It's not beer. If you want to drink for the drunk, go ahead but do it on something that's supposed to have heapo alcohol in it, like moonshine. Or gin.

Last year, Ed was just leaving on the interview that eventually brought us here. I can hear my apprehension in that post. It's deeply unsettling to read it and then to look around me. But I'm getting used to that feeling by now.

Gearing up

2007-11-11T21:24:00.000-05:00

Ed's parents are coming from England in about a week and a half. My parents will be here at the same time and my Aunt Maureen will join us as well. Which leaves us rather short of beds. We've also been short of bookshelves to the tune of six large boxes full of books lurking with increasing menace. I had been hoping and planning to use other people's trash to fill some of our furniture needs but there have been two problems with that -- one, unlike Philly, people don't throw out good stuff around here because the garbage trucks won't pick up big stuff and two, time is marching on and we can't ask Ed's parents to sleep on the floor. So yesterday, we took a little trip to the Swedish Mecca of Flatpack.

All right, it wasn't a little trip. It turned out to be a whole day long lollapalooza, with a mission to Trader Joes thrown in. And we returned with bookcases (2); beds (2); mattresses (2); tiny doodads that will miraculously make our house and stuff so insanely tidy and groovy that nothing will ever get messy again (10,000,000).

That's what I love and loathe about IKEA. You go for bookcases and suddenly you're holding a mug, three magnetic dog tails, an umbrella stand, two plastic boxes with wheels and matching lids, a small lamp shaped like a mushroom, four picture frames, an embroidered pillow, a plant, something made out of wicker and a silver something you're holding because you don't know what it is or what it does but it's so shiiiiiiny.

Some of that stuff has turned out, over the years, to be the most useful stuff in our panoply of stuff. Like the snowflake-esque card holder which we use to display any pretty cards that people send us, photographs, to-do lists, inspirational quotes, invitations and bills. Or the long baskets which we've had for ten years which have held (in turn -- not at the same time) groceries, magazines, toilet paper, hats and gloves and bicycle helmets). And I love the feeling when you return from IKEA that NOW that pile of magazines has its own happy home and they will live in it stylishly, subtly, instead of slippery sliding all over the floor. I know it's an illusion of order, but it's an illusion I embrace. I want that moment of glorious tidiness. I love that moment.

I need a lot of those moments as I prepare for the invasion of the in laws. In the many years since we first met and they loathed me, things have eased up a great deal, but these visits are never easy. Ed's mum will find fault with things, because that's what she does. And there will be proper meals to prepare all the time. A house to keep tidy. Children to keep orderly. Visitors to entertain with visits to local attractions that I don't know what they are yet.

And Thanksgiving dinner to cook. For the first time since 1998. Hoo boy. I might need another trip to IKEA before then for more magic organizing chatchka. I need all the help I can get.

Ooh, I've been forgetting to link you to last year. Damn. All right. This time last year I was reveling in how close NYC was to Philadelphia. Now I'm going back to fix the other posts.

Daniel takes over

2007-11-10T23:17:00.000-05:00

You know Daniel's obsessed with the solar system, right? Did I tell you about our mad weekend trip to Boston to see the scale model of the solar system up there? Would you like photos?

Daniel decided that what this small town needs is its own scale model of the solar system. So he wrote a letter to the president of Ed's new college and explained his idea. He included diagrams. References to other scale models. Possible scales the college would like to use. And he explained that it would be a good way for the college to do something for the town. He said that local stores might get more customers from all the people who would come to see the solar system. Then he sent it off. We tried to prepare him for polite refusal, possibly a letter explaining why this couldn't happen but thanking him for his idea.

Instead, the president invited him for a meeting and said that Ed could come too. So the pres and Daniel jawed about solar system models and now the president is sending the project proposal over to the physics and astronomy departments. He thinks they should make a model of the model and see what they think. Daniel is already imagining a medal. A plaque. Perhaps, he thinks, his picture in the paper.

I'm pretty proud, truth be told. Only I'm scared too. It still might all go kablooie and Daniel doesn't deal well with kablooie. (Still. It's all kinda cool, right?)

Last year I was celebrating the fact that blogging is my muse.

Times are tough

2007-11-09T22:48:00.000-05:00

First, we couldn't find the winter jackets. Then, when we did find them (in a box in the garage, goddammit), several items (including a few handknit items) had been chewed to pieces by a mouse who is clearly going to have a very warm and fluffy nest this year. Apparently, mice prefer 100% natural wool, no superwash, thanks. So everything that could get thrown in the washing machine did and things that couldn't, went to the drycleaner. And other than a few things including a pair of gloves and a nice little mini-poncho I'd knit for Helena, in the end, all was relatively well.

But the lack of cold weather fostered our denial for so long that our younger child has nothing to put on her feet but white sandals (and a pair of sneakers which she can't get on herself, which drives me crazy). So she's running around the neighborhood in a silk shirt, a shirt, a dress, a cardigan, woolly tights and -- white sandals. It might be time to go shoe shopping.

It's also time to make some heavy drapes for the doors because our next door neighbor dropped by yesterday and gloated (in a cheerful, neighborly way) about our impending heating-bill shock. How bad could it be? Let's just say that he laughed when I admitted my worst fears and tripled the number I thought we could not possibly exceed. I'm still reserving hope because we have the thermostats between 63-65 for the day (as we have done for years) and drop 'em to 58 at night (which is going to start even earlier now). But oh boy. I'm still scared.

Time to start knitting more sweaters. Seriously.

Last year I was wishing I was more like Dorothy Parker.

Glimpses of my new home

2007-11-08T20:27:00.000-05:00

Tuesday, autumn came. So I took a walk.And looked at the colors.

And thought about where I lived.
No, it's not England.
I like how this very old lamp has a very new kind of bulb in it. Energy-saving!
Actually, I just like lamps.

You can almost see my house from here.

Last year I was super-blogger and posted twice: once about our kettle and once about how mixed my feelings were about the elections.

The Wall of Tired

2007-11-07T23:24:00.000-05:00

You know how there are some nights when you're so tired at 8 that you could easily collapse but you push on because there are so few hours in the day which can legitimately be called "free." Then there are nights when you can go on and on and never feel tired.

Then there are nights when you're ticking along fine and suddenly wham bang, flat on the floor, eyes rolling up in your head. When in fact, you hit the Wall of Tired.

I just did that.

There are good reasons. One, it's legitimately late. Two, today's circus routine included picking up a hysterical Daniel at school halfway through the morning, while also calling someone to come look at a heater that had begun smoking ominously when turned on, setting off every fire alarm in the house, while excitedly expecting house guests, while not getting any work done or any soup made or anything else except driving furiously down the road, smelling of smoke and wondering how to help the boy wonder learn to keep his temper and then considering how, perhaps, one was not quite keeping ones own temper if one were driving a little too fast while muttering fiercely under ones breath and having to reach deep for any shred of calm.

Yet, the day has ended. And all is (somehow, miraculously) well. And another day I will tell you a little about Daniel's meeting with the president of Ed's college. But for now folks, I have hit the Wall.

G'night.

This time last year I was admitting that while I didn't like high-waisted jeans, that each must choose her own likes and dislikes.

Where meaning lurks

2007-11-06T13:10:00.000-05:00

We've essentially been without a telly for the last seven years. Well, that's not precisely true. We've had a small television that we could watch videos on, and we did, when the moment hit. And Ed and I ransacked Netflix for episodes of Star Trek. But we've had no broadcast television and no cable. And we've been more than fine with that. It's been a happy absence.

But now that we've moved, for my father (who didn't so much ask as insist), and in the hopes of making this house a more welcoming place for my parents, we have caved and installed cable. The children don't use it, and hopefully will not for years, but now that it's there, I sometimes tune into the Daily Show or a TNG rerun and, for my beloved sister, I have tried to catch Dancing With the Stars.

Now, my sister Maria (not the professional dancer but a dancer nonetheless) has wanted to learn ballroom dancing for years. For YEARS. Her husband has not been so keen. Finally, she went off by herself and is learning to dance. She's already performed at an exhibition and is loving it. She has found so much joy in this new pursuit, and while I can't spring up to NYC as easily as I once might have to watch a rehearsal, I can support her in other ways. Like by watching Dancing with the Stars so that we can talk about it.

I've been pleasantly surprised by the program, though, beyond its value as a sister-bonding ritual. Marie Osmond! Jane Seymour! Older women, looking good and dancing their hearts out. Like Bridget Jones, I sometimes feel the need to chant Jane Seymour Jane Seymour or Helen Mirrin Helen Mirrin to myself when I fear aging. And I have loved and adored Jane Seymour ever since high school and The Scarlet Pimpernel. Jane herself seems particularly conscious of her participation in the program as potential role model for older women. I mean, she's 56 for goodness' sake! And she's wonderful! Beautiful! Graceful!

I frankly love to see the routines, the effort everyone puts in, their joy in dancing. I love that they partnered the older women with such gentle, gentlemanly partners. I love that Brazilian race car driver guy and his enthusiasm. It seems such wonderful television in a televisual world that so often seems like a train wreck. Unlike most things on telly, it's something I can imagine watching with my children.

Thing is, meaning and inspiration are everywhere. What somebody sees as trash, is another person's trash-picking treasure. So maybe this is stupid television. But I find beauty in it, grace and hope for my future, wherein I very much hope will be many lessons, adventures and perhaps (oh yes, MizMell, me too) a tango or two.

Last year at this time, I was complaining about images of motherhood.

Two things I have learned in the last ten minutes

2007-11-05T20:32:00.000-05:00

One. That it is gone time to stop eating the leftover Halloween candy. It's making me crazy. It's making me fat. It's making me zitty and crabby and nauseous. And I'm STILL eating it. Sugar is a drug. And I need to stop. right. now. And start feeling semi-balanced and not sugar crazed any more.

Two. That if I am going to eat six miniature chocolate bars in a row (which I am no longer going to do) then I should blog before the sugar rush wears off because now I need to sit in a strange, shaking heap and watch Dancing With the Stars and knit. And that's it.

And about Dancing With the Stars, get that Spice Girl OFF. Please! I mean, Sabrina was all-star and she had to go. Scary Spice is just ugh. Scary. Now I'm rooting for Jane Seymour all the way.

Last year I was thinking about England.

Why you should keep on practicing the piano (tell your children)

2007-11-04T20:10:00.000-05:00

Because you never know. (Wasn't that the slogan for the New York Lotto? Hey! Ya never know.)

The story.

The children (and their parents and helpers) of our Friends' meeting go to an old people's home once a month to lead a service. Today was the first time we'd ever gone and Ed stayed home to sleep off a migraine and to keep on revising the DD (the Damn Dissertation). So the children and I were in uncharted waters and Daniel's not so great with new things, especially when, as he said, they smell a little funny.

But we get there okay and everyone is nice and we realize that, logically enough, most of the service is going to be singing. So that's fine. Singing is good. Only the leader of our little band of Friends forgot to remind the piano player of the group to come along. And everyone was clearly feeling a little unhappy about going a cappella.

I'll do it, I said, wondering if I'd gone mad. And I did. Not well, but I did it. It helped when I knew the song (How Great Thou Art, anyone?) and when I didn't -- well, I kept on faking it.

But boy. It would have been much better if I practiced occasionally. Still. Lovely part of being a grown up? Not caring so much when you're not that good at something. Who cares? I made music and people sang.

Last year I was musing about my (lack of) social skills.

Ho ho hold it right there

2007-11-03T21:06:00.000-04:00

I love Christmas. It's probably my favourite holiday, even more (what am I saying. WAY more) than my birthday. BUT (and this is a big but, almost bigger than the post-Halloween top of my own legs) I am not fond of Christmas arriving in the stores before Halloween has even come and gone. I clearly have passed that prejudice onto my children. In fact, I may have even done so on purpose. Let's not wear the holiday out, people!

So Helena and I were in some craft store and they had their Christmas stuff up. "What," exclaimed the five year old beside me "is the world coming to? Christmas already?!"

I refrained from shouting "Right on, sister!" and just nodded a bit. We found our large pads of drawing paper and went to pay. Then Helena told the lady at the till that they'd put their Christmas stuff up a bit early.

"Ah yes," said the lady. "But Santa needs a lot of help so we have to get started early. It's not that long until Christmas now."

Helena eyed her. "Santa will have to wait," she said, "until after Thanksgiving."

Right on, sister.

Last year I was double posting: once about how our mundanity is our humanity
and then about a deep, disturbing dilemma: cute or scary? We still have the glasses somewhere.

Accepting failure

2007-11-02T19:25:00.000-04:00

I'm not going to make 50000 words, you know. It's just not going to happen. I was pretty sure last week, almost certain over the weekend and yesterday I knew it absolutely. And I thought about quitting altogether. Well, I thought, since I'm not going to hit 50000 words, then I can go watch The Daily Show and eat chocolate.

But then I didn't. I wrote. Not very much -- 500 words or so. But I wrote.

So here's the thing. Is it failing if you're only doing okay? Is it failing if you try and don't make it? Or is that a kind of succeeding? Because trying counts for a lot. In fact, in my world it counts for almost (almost) everything. Trying is the point. If you don't swing, you can't hit the ball. Sure it's nice if you make contact. But you have to swing first. And be willing to miss.

Should I think myself a failure because I'm still lonely, homesick, sad and displaced? Should I be down on myself because my upper lip is violently floppy and because I see last November not as a damn turning point but as a loss? And because I am giving myself time to settle in, rather than rushing onto some artificially constructed equilibrium?

Shouldn't I just keep trying? Knowing that trying is the point.

I'm not going to "win" NaNoWriMo. But I am going to be thankful (to Krista, first, for planting the thankfulness thought in my head) for any moments of grace I have, for the courage to keep facing how I really feel, even though it isn't pretty, and for the resilience which allows me to keep trying. And for believing that the only failure is not trying at all.

Last year, I was thinking about Oedipal Fairs and contemplating possible success.

Slutfest!

2007-11-02T11:00:00.000-04:00

(This was the post that I wrote yesterday that got pre-empted by my maudlin-ness. But then I saw that Radical Mama had had some of the same thoughts and I thought I'd raise a fist in solidarity -- oh and I'll sew you your costume, if you want, sister. Non-Halloween sluts, unite!)

What is it with Halloween costumes for women? My sister and I had a long conversation a couple of days ago about a party she was going to and all the women were planning on being a "cute" (read, sexy) pirate, or a cute witch or a cute vampire or a cute cocktail waitress or a cute whore. All right I totally made the last one up but what better evidence do we have of the feminist backlash than the plethora of costumes for women that spread less fabric over our bare flesh than we would normally wear as underwear? She (my sister) was toying with the idea of going as a naked woman (with a trench coat on) but after more thought, she decided to go as a baseball player. Right on. Then the Excellent Walker got held up outside some NYC party, the very description of which was self-awaredly whoremongering ("'I make the vodka because I like having sexy times with the sexy ladies,' the designer, who dressed as fellow clothier Karl Lagerfeld for the night, explained." quoted from the Gossip Girls.) Um. Okay. But EW said it better than I would have: these days, on Halloween women dress up as male fantasies and men dress up as even more powerful men. A quick look at Halloween costumes for women online results in pages of costumes, most of which are pretty scanty, many of which are straight out of Playboy and some of which straddle the leather line between S and M.

Frankly, as self-aware, self-possessed women in tune with our sexuality, if we want to be sluts or dominatrices, we should probably just do that. But let's not be all passive-resistant about it. And jeez, let's broaden the selection and include a few slightly more creative and well-clothed choices for women -- and, god help us all, for girls. And boys, while you're at it. I know it's too much to ask that Halloween not center around Disney-licensed charactes, but I applaud the girl in Daniel's class who dressed up as Jack Sparrow. She wasn't about to let a little thing like gender get in HER way, man.

Other days

2007-11-01T19:55:00.000-04:00

Perhaps this wasn't such a good idea. I mean, on the one hand NaBloPoMo and NaNoWriMo are things that are very much for me, which is a good thing at this point on the arc of the move. Having supported, accommodated, made room, moved over and generally made sure that everyone else is (more or less) okay, it would be good to immerse myself in a project which is fundamentally selfish. Not in a bad way, but in a sort of inward turning (minus all the depressive angst bit) way.

But on the other hand, taking on these twin projects, as I did last year, brings last year back to mind too sharply. 1 November 2006. Daniel was in a school that finally seemed to love him, want him, do right by him. Helena was happier at school. Ed was in what looked like the final stages of his dissertation. I had found a wonderful coffee shop. I had bought a laptop even. Work was going well. Life was going pretty well. Writing flowed. I felt happy. Contented. Settled.

By the middle of the month, Ed knew he wanted the job here in Carlisle. By the end of the first week of December, he had it. And soon after that accepted it. But as soon as he said he wanted it, I looked up and could see all this order I had finally found begin to dissolve. The coffee shop. The school. The time to write. My life as I knew it.

So in fact, this is a hard day for me. Because last year, 1 November was an almost perfect day. And that is all gone. And I am still far more deeply in mourning for it than I would like to be.

So I had written a sparky post about slutfest Halloween costumes but in fact this was the post that needed writing. I need to know that this is what's going on right now. I need to still say -- I can do this. I can be here, now, in all its relatively lesser perfection. And I can still write. I am still here. I am still me. Finding time for what is important. Making time.

Last year: Time After Time

Halloweee -- oh look, is that more candy

2007-10-31T23:24:00.000-04:00

I've had a fair bit of chocolate (mmm, is that a Snickers? They really satisfy, you know) so things might be a bit waaaaaayhay around here tonight. Mostly, I'm going to take the sneaky way out and show you photos. And while I don't want to be reductionist (or not permanently) I think that the children's costumes are pretty representative of who they are right now.

Take Helena for example. She decided last Halloween that this Halloween she wanted to be a "little bunny." And so she was. Her granny bought her the mask. Her mother made her the costume. Helena sewed on her own tail. She is not any rabbit in particular. Just a rabbit. A little rabbit. A little rabbit who collected all her candy in a carrot she also had her mother make (last night, dammit). She is steady, determined and unflappable. She also likes to be cute and so she is.Daniel finally (after spiraling through wanting to be a television program, an oven, a Martian and Calvin again, decided he wanted to be a black hole that would suck all the available candy into its gravitational well. He wanted people to throw candy into the black hole (that was himself) that would spiral around and land up in a vacuum cleaner bag (because a black hole is a vacuum naturally).

This costume proved to be unmakeable in the Stunt-workshop. In fact, after much tinkering, it still looked way too much like a strange black dirndl skirt. So we surrendered that idea and Daniel decided he could be Space. And carry a black hole. You can just about see it in this picture. Indeed, people did throw candy into the gravitational field and we created a small rent in the space-time continuum for him to retrieve the candy later.

His outfit deconstructs as follows: his head (sprayed red) is a red giant. His body is the solar system. His trousers are stars and constellations with occasional distant galaxies. His flashing sneakers are pulsars and his scarf thing is more star-scattered space. And he carried a black hole.

Complicated, esoteric and deeply quirky. And all about space:
I
carved pumpkins.
This one cracks me up. It's pumpkin pie, geddit? Oh that kills me.

Happy Halloween, everyone. NaBloPoMo and NaNoWriMo start in fifteen minutes! I'm going to bed!

Two posts in one day? No!

2007-10-30T10:58:00.000-04:00

I now post so irregularly that it feels strange to post twice in one day but in fact, it's about to get even stranger than that.

Remember NaBloPoMo last year? The crazy fun thing where you post once a day? Well, I'm doing it again. Along with NaNoWriMo. And everything else. It sounds crazy. Indeed it is. But it's MY kind of crazy and there needs to be a bit more of that around here.

So stay tuned. Not only can you read a new post every day for the month of November (including post-Halloween fall out, Thanksgiving, in-laws visiting, my parents and aunt descending, a quilt in the works and more coffee than can reasonably be produced by a small organic farmer) but I'll link to all of LAST year's posts as well! Two for the price of one! Holy cow!

And if anyone has a good idea about what I should write this year's novel about, I'd appreciate it. I've got nothing yet. Hoping that a deadline will prove as inspirational as it did in college!

Hey ho

2007-10-30T08:23:00.001-04:00

I don't know why I get like this. I mean, it's not like I could do much more without morphing into some Ben Franklin type early to bed early to rise superhuman type being. There are people like that, you know. Who can do ten loads of laundry and actually SORT it on the same day. There are some who can even put it away in the right drawers too. Or there are people who can do the supermarket shopping and land up with something to cook for supper. Or who can manage not to let their houses sink into squalor before hollering "I can't live like this! Who can live like this?" before torturing the entire family with a two-hour cleaning binge. Or who can successfully work, parent, shop, clean, maintain functional relationships with their long-distance friends and still have a glass of slightly chilled white wine while wearing linen and discussing Proust of an evening.

Or even just get through the day being good enough.

Thing is, I fundamentally think that I'm doing well enough, or as well-enough as I can manage this week. But then something will happen or I'll let something slide and I'll then spend the next few days feeling sad that I cannot be good enough to make everything right and happy.

This is a pretty natural place to live emotionally when you have a child who struggles as hard as mine does. The inclination to think that if I, as his mother, would just do this, be this, try this, find this -- then things would be better for him. And that since they are not better, that I am implicated. That I am at fault. That I am not good enough.

Of course, many many posts ago, Krista forcefully reminded me that I am not the keeper of my child's emotional well-being. That's a hard bit of imaginary control to surrender, though. The idea that I might, if I did just the right thing, make him okay. I can't of course. We can't, any of us, make any other person okay just through our own force of will. Or desire to make them so. I have spent my life believing that if I were better, smarter, gooder (you know what I mean), prettier, livelier, holier, nicer -- then things around me would be all right. My mother would be happier. My father. My friends would like me more. My boyfriends stay. It's all an illusion, a dreadful one. A burden. And yet a burden I am frightened to put down. Because then I have to admit that I am not in control of so many things. And that the scary swirling world can visit its chaos, its confusion upon me regardless of me. All I can seek to control, is me. My behavior. My reactions. My well-being.

(Of course, there's still that voice in my head that says -- Yes! Exactly. If you control your behavior and reactions well enough, then you can make your children and loved ones happier! Prettier! More vitamin packed! -- Ack! Behind me, foul fiend! Like I haven't got enough to do today already.)

Making order

2007-10-25T23:22:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, Daniel (and all his classmates and a couple of other adults) witnessed the music teacher collapse in a grand mal seizure. A terrible and terrifying thing for everyone, not least for the teacher who is recovering in hospital (no word yet on why it happened). Daniel ran screaming into the hallway and took an hour to calm down. He wanted to know why it happened, wanted to blame something, someone for what happened. It made no sense to him and therefore he could not cope with it.

Of course it doesn't make sense. That out of the blue, a woman's electro-nervous whatever system can simply seize up. That my mother can't remember my cousin and oldest friend. That Bush is president. The world is not orderly. But it is so hard to cope with that, especially when you're Daniel.

This morning in the car he spent the half-hour drive to school working out how long it would take him to count to a million. Or a billion. Or a quadrillion. Or a thousand. If you counted one number a second. One number every two seconds. If you stopped counting for meals and bed-time. If you didn't count on leap days. If you did count on leap days. If you counted by 100s. By 1000s.

Here at least, he found a moment of order.

I of course, nearly lost my mind as he entertained the idea of counting to a million over the next month.

It's all because we left, you know

2007-10-22T21:28:00.000-04:00

Utter balderdash, really. I mean, I can think of oh, at least half a dozen really attractive people in Philly.

I think it's all a plot to keep Philadelphia a secret. And I say, well done. Keep it up. I'm planning on moving back* and we need to keep house prices low so that I can.

*Obviously not imminently, but sometime in the future. Hell, why not?

The Best Day

2007-10-20T08:16:00.000-04:00

"Today," Daniel announced this morning, "is the best day of the week. Because I don't have to be anywhere, or do anything or go to school."

"Except," I called down the stairs from where I was crouched, sorting through dirty laundry, "except ballet today."

"Oh," said Daniel. "Then maybe tomorrow is the best day of the week."

"Meeting," grunted Ed.

"So WHAT IS the best day of the week then," Daniel howled.

He and Helena started dissecting each day, trying to work out which day had the most they liked and the least they didn't.

"How about," I said somewhat grumpily, looking for coffee, "how about every day is the best day."

"Yay!" crowed Helena.

"No way," said Daniel.

Thing is, I'm somewhere between the two reactions. No, that sounds too balanced. I am both reactions at once. At the same time I believe that every day is the best day -- because it is the ONLY day, I also believe that idea is fatuous word-play and that some days are basically better than others.

The inner struggle endures, although consciously I pull more towards the first. There really is no way to live if every day is not the best day. I was on the phone with my sister last night who had had a rare good day with her step-daughter and how wonderful that was. And how she felt bad that so many days in the past had not been good.

But the only way to parent and stay sane is to always move forward from today, I said. And I believe this utterly. To look back at all time times I took the easy way out, the lazy way. At the times I lost my temper with such insane panache that I gave Mommie Dearest a run for her money. At the times I simply couldn't -- or didn't -- offer what is best in me, but only the minimum to get through that moment. That way despair lies.

Every good day is a beacon of hope that such days exist, every bad a chance to do better. We walk forward into new, blank pages of days on which we can write a fresh story. I know no other way to live but to walk forward into each day, because today is the only day. So it's the best day.

What yoga's telling me

2007-10-16T23:18:00.000-04:00

Yoga is telling me that I got old while I wasn't paying attention.

Yoga is telling me that I have never before had a grippably wobbly belly and that it gets in the damn way.

Yoga is telling me that I have seized up in all sorts of uncomfortable ways.

Yoga is telling me that growing that enormous second child really did do weird things to my hips.

Yoga is telling me that I rarely draw a full breath.

Yoga is telling me that I almost never stand straight up.

Yoga is telling me that knitting (typing, driving, sleeping) screws with my shoulders.

Yoga is telling me that I had better go easy on myself.

Yoga is telling me to push just a little harder.

Yoga is telling me to take it slow, but go deep.

I should probably keep going.

What constitutes a cure?

2007-10-15T23:21:00.000-04:00

When I was a child and my asthma was bad, we'd go to the doctor. Immediately I walked into the waiting room, I'd start to feel better. I'd feel so much better that I would feel bad that we'd come to the doctor at all, that we were bothering the doctor and I'd hold my breath (what I had of it) to make it seem more legitimate that we'd actually come about my breathing. Which is definitely weird, I know. But that's not the point. The point is that just knowing help was available was enough to make me relax, stop worrying and start to feel better.

What it is about admitting that you need help that makes the help so much less necessary? The power of surrendering is amazing. Perhaps there is a small miracle in there -- that the bit of me that hates to ask for help, that needs to be quite all right, Jack, is in fact the bit that most needs the comfort of knowing that it's all right to need help.

Things are perking up around here a bit. Not sure why. Haven't actually managed to organize anything helpful. Just admitted I could probably use some. And there's some very good ice cream in the freezer.

Silver and Gold

2007-10-14T22:44:00.000-04:00

Make new friends
But keep the old
One is silver
And the other is gold.

I can hear my mother singing it now, in my head. She sang to us a lot. Still does. We sang on long car trips. Like in a musical, she would sing her answers to our unanswerable questions.

Some one of these days, you're gonna miss me, honey.
Some on of these days, you're gonna be so lonely...

she'd sing at us, if we complained about, well pretty much anything. Or

Oh (insert child's name here), que linda es la vida, si!

she'd sing to whichever one of us she thought needed bolstering.

In fact, my mother and aunt spent a week as children up in Vermont somewhere singing with the Von Trapp family (one of whom has just died). And life with a singing mother wasn't unlike the Sound of Music. Only in New York, with only three children, clothes from Marshalls, not curtains, no Nazis or Austrian aristocracy, puppet shows or high Cs. So, actually nothing like that.

It does mean, however, that there's a soundtrack in my head for most of life's twists and turns. And the little round she would sing about friendship is in my head now. We have moved often enough that I have friends, people from different times in our lives -- all over the world. They are still friends and one of the alchemical processes which mutate these friends into gold is how long and how well the friendship bears up under the strain of distance. Those friends in Philadelphia are closer in time and space than, say, friends in England or Australia. But they are all now, all those friends from all our different places in the world, old friends. Golden friends.

Here in our new place, there are some flashes of silver, too. That is hopeful, exciting even, the potential, the possible. But oh, the ease and warmth of old friends! Like afternoon sunlight.

My child, my little one, my own

2007-10-11T23:17:00.001-04:00

Daniel is all elbows out and arms waving (yes, both at the same time) in the delicate china shop of the world. He rages, he flails, he breaks things. He is upset, angry and sometimes unkind. He makes teachers sweat. He makes grown-ups shake. We have, over the years, grown easier with that, more able to love and support him, more able to tolerate certain sorts of temper while coming down hard on certain kinds of behavior. And we see progress. We still don't know WHY he is how he is. There may be some magic answer (bipolar? OCD? it's definitely possible) but I am not sure. And it is easier not to think in those terms. It has been, honestly, so much better for us all if we don't see him as a problem that needs solving but as a child who needs loving.

When we see him as a problem, life grows dark. All his episodes, his manias, his obsessions and howls of frustration take on sinister significance. They rack up on some inner chalkboard and each swipe of the chalk pulls us further from him. Trying to solve him, alienates us from him. Suddenly he is the other, the challenge, the problem.

When we see him as our darling, our son, our little one, the sky lightens. Suddenly, it is so much easier to parent him, to set the limits he needs, to negotiate with him well. He behaves far better as well, sensing (like the canary in the mine) that there is enough oxygen for him to breathe, enough love for him to feel safe.

His teacher wants to know how we're solving him. Talking to her is like pounding my head against a rough concrete wall. Pointless. Painful. She wants to know who his therapists are, what traumas he has endured. She wants to know how we handle him so that she can "teach him how to behave." She wants (a month into the school year) to see progress, to know that she is fixing him.

My child, my little one, my own. He doesn't need fixing. He needs to be loved for who he is right this minute.

Today's post brought to you (again!) from the New York Times

2007-10-10T09:31:00.000-04:00

Once, a therapist said that I should feel free to blame my parents for what ailed me. "But," I said, "I don't really think it's their fault. It's just how I am."

"Well then," she shot back, "you can blame them for supplying you with the genes that made you how you are."

Ah yes. Damned either way, those parents.

Well, that could be true, but I'd rather be blamed for my gene pool, over which I admit to having no control, than for my useless, crap parenting techniques. And I have long suspected that certain aspects of my children can be traced to certain, apparently nature-driven (rather than nurtured) aspects of myself or Ed.

Such as being a picky-eater. I am not a particularly picky grown-up (although please don't offer me cauliflower, cooked spinach, okra, steamed squash, beetroot or vindaloo curry) but I was a reasonably picky child. Daniel is also a picky eater and now, according to this article in today's Times, there's scientific proof suggesting that such picky-ness is indeed genetic.

I did know this, sort of, in my sample-of-two study. And it has given me the grace to be more accepting and less bat-out-of-hell motherish about Daniel's (or Helena's for that matter) food choices. Pretty much, if they like it, they will eat it. And if they don't, they won't. And no amount of haranguing from a stressed mother will change that.

And I did go from a person who pretty much only liked what she liked, how she liked it, to someone who eats almost everything (even including the above list, only please not cauliflower). So I think there's hope, and a strongly comforting sense that if I don't fix everything in my children right this freakin' minute, that there's time and more time for them to grow. And some of that growing, they will do entirely on their own.

Whew.

My body's on a journey, just like yours

2007-10-09T08:55:00.000-04:00

I had seen this article (about the "Mom Job" trend in plastic surgery) in the NYTimes a few days ago and meant to write about it then, about how skewed it is that a woman's beauty is so narrowly defined as a pre-procreative body, and about how the patriarchy is insisting in so many ways that women should mold themselves into an almost unattainable ideal (created by them) in order to be seen as beautiful and -- here's the kicker -- worthy. To achieve this ideal requires more energy than most mothers I know have time for. Frankly, I feel happy if I manage time for a shower, never mind a shower in which I actually shave anything and forget moisturizing or tending or preening anything afterwards.

Then, Shape of a Mother wrote about it better than I could and you should all go look at the post here. I know I've sent you over to that website before, but go again. As the author writes, we need to learn to celebrate the art our bodies become as we go through our lives, whatever our life brings, whether children, illness, health, wealth, fitness, trauma, pleasure. Our scars are stories, our wrinkles, legends. Our hair is the magic carpet of our years, our hands the well-used tools of all our crafts.

I am not at peace with my body or what it has become. But I'll be damned if I contort myself, punish myself and pay through the nose to put myself under the knife to erase what my life has made of it -- in order to cling to some artificial ideal of female beauty.

My body is not what it was and it is not what it will become. It is what it is today. Its story is my story. Its life is my life, its strength, my strength, its beauty my own. My body is on a journey. So am I.

Inspiring quotes lead to increased silence

2007-10-02T13:21:00.000-04:00

At the top of my Gmail, along with Engadget news, headlines from the BBC and some other slightly odder things, like an advertisement for a Turkish grocery store with a promise of free shipping (hooray!) and a severely recurring recipe for cottage cheese muffins, I am getting a serious of inspirational quotes.

Like these:

James H. Boren - "When in doubt, mumble; when in trouble, delegate; when in charge, ponder."
Luc de Clapier de Vauvanargues - "The maxims of men reveal their characters."
Henry Youngman - "If at first you don't succeed... so much for skydiving."
Michael Crichton - "I am certain there is too much certainy in the world."
Michelangelo - "Genius is eternal patience."
Babe Ruth - "Don't let the fear of striking out hold you back."
Dick Cavett - "If your parents never had children, chances are you won't either."
Paul Engle - "Wisdom is knowing when you can't be wise."
Jimmy Buffett - "Indecision may or may not be my problem."

After all these I felt so inspired, even uplifted that I thought I would write the blog post to end all posts, filled with wit, wisdom and observations about life, parenthood and aging that would reduce all readers to tears of passionate understanding. But then I got this quote:

Abigail Van Buren - "The less you talk, the more you're listened to."

Ah, I thought.

The rest is silence.

Wha time izzit?

2007-09-21T20:14:00.000-04:00

I was trying to blog about a Bavarian politician and then I fell asleep at the computer. So rantings about marriage will have to wait until I've had some sleep.

Word to the wise? After almost five years of almost no exercise at all, don't do two yoga classes in one day. And if you do do two yoga classes in one day, despite my advice, pretend you're sixty and stop trying to keep up with the teacher.

ow. ooh ohh ouch.

I no longer have muscles. I have formerly fit flab pockets. They don't know Warrior Three from nuthin.

Unexpected Acceptance

2007-09-20T20:52:00.000-04:00

There is nothing so hard that there is not some good that can come of it. And one thing that is gleaming brightly in the greyish cloud of these last few months is discovering (again) how much we are all in things together. There is nothing I have shared, either here or in the 3-D world, not about moving, nor sadness, nor a lack of desire to create, nor my mother's Alzheimers, that has not been met with compassion and cries of "Oh I know just what you mean." This blog has at times been more a mommy-blog than it is right now. Then too, I mostly found acceptance, laughter and camaraderie of the sort that made it easier to go on. That I am not the only crazy lady out there allows me to be easier on myself.

Yet it is astonishing to me (which it clearly should not be) that the more I talk about my mother's plight, the more people I discover who have been or who are in the same boat. The comfort that brings is huge. That this is not some untrodden, silent path but a road many of us are walking together. (Sorry about that random, unprovoked metaphor change. It's like the obligatory half-tone key change in an eighties ballad.) I suspect, since something like half of people over 85 have some degree of Alzheimers, that it is a road that more of us will land on in one way or the other. This may be scary -- but it is also connecting. What my mother is going through, what her family is going through, is well-trodden territory. All around me are stories, advice, compassion, connection --

And this is why, in the end, I blog. To connect. And I am so very very grateful that all of you are there to connect to.

There's no I in fun.

2007-09-19T22:43:00.000-04:00

All right, so who stole me and replaced me with this substandard, cranky ass, lazypants, no good fer nothing but eating too much peanut butter laced ice cream, Target on sale PJ wearing non-posting, boring ol' whiny fuddy duddy who's all moan moan moan and no amusing anecdotes about boys in ballet class or Junie B. Freakin'Jones.

Seriously. And why didn't you tell me, you very nice bunch of loyal despite all provocation blogfriends, that my granny pants were showing?

I had a look at an old blog post and man almighty it was a fine piece of blog-type dribbling. I hain't done nothing that good since I found out I was moving and my head disappeared up my sad sad soggy navel. That was a too sharp moment of that was then and this is your stretchmarked ass. Not fun. It's definitely time for some margaritas and Sex Pistols karaoke round here at the old StuntFarm.

It's not like that's news to me exactly. Yesterday, the NYTimes Crossword puzzle (which yes, I am now doing like it was medication) was looking for a three letter prefix for tonic and you know I yelled GIN and started to write it in before any non-alcoholic brain cell could wake up and say whoa. (In fact, they were looking for "iso" which made me feel guilty that I wasn't exercising WHILE doing the crossword. And yes, that's how bad it's got that like some crazed Wall Street blue-shirt, I suddenly considered doing the crossword while exercising, and perhaps while also calling my broker and drinking something with spirulina in it.)

Of course, I'm all for the idea that there's a time for this and a time for that. A time for gin and a time for (iso)tonic but I'm thinking that maybe it's time to make a small gesture towards foregoing grumpy, and bringing on the party. My deepening frown wrinkles need balancing with a new set of laugh lines. To keep the balance.

PS. To those of you whose blogs I have not haunted recently? It's not you. I haven't been on a good blog-crawl in way too long. It's hard to read blogs when your head is firmly and deeply embedded in your ass. But I've got a flashlight now, and a small, slightly smudged map. So I think there's light at the end of this, um, tunnel.

Starting fresh

2007-09-12T22:06:00.000-04:00

As much as I complain about New Year's Eve (which I do) I like New Year. I like the sense of clean page, like those brand new marble notebooks we'd get at the start of the school year. I still love them and have to resist buying them. Blank pages are such a perfect pleasure. No blots yet. No imperfections. All things are still possible. Loveliness is still possible.

I like looking at the year before me, thinking "In this year might be great things, good things." In fact, I like it so much that I wish it happened rather more often than once a year. Today I've been thinking about Rosh Hashanah, particularly the custom of casting away the old year's sorrows and wrongs and how fresh that must make one feel. So ready to go forward. And then there's Hallowe'en into All Hallows, which used to be the first of the year.

While I don't really like the thought that every day is the first day of the rest of yer life (because sometimes you really do have to embrace the past goddammit because otherwise how do you know where you've come from), it's not such a bad idea to take stock and move forward sometimes. To shed the clinging shreds of what no longer fits.

So tonight I'm thinking of casting off old sorrows, and making way for new things. Making room for them to come in.

(And of course, it's also the first night of Ramadan. Ramadan karim!)

Being where you are, when you are

2007-09-11T17:13:00.000-04:00

I am noticing that in my mind, I am often elsewhere and elsewhen. I am remembering being in England. I am remembering being in Philadelphia. I am imagining future visits. I am in New York, worrying about my mother. I am dreaming about old friends. The Zen Buddhism advice to be present seems so simple and is so challenging. And yet, how displacing to be other than when and where you are. It takes you so far away from now, which sometimes is nice, like right now where here and now feel uncomfortable, unfamiliar and wrong. But how will here and now ever become comfortable, familiar and right if I don't actually sit here, making a space that I fit into.

I've shot back to Philadelphia a few times since we've moved. It's more comfortable to drive two hours each way and to spend some time in a familiar space than to sit here where I don't know anyone and don't know what to do with an off day. Still, as some confusion just illustrated to me, pretending I still live there doesn't work, no matter how familiar it seems. There's no way to spend a day's visit the way we used to spend a day. Visiting somewhere is different from living somewhere.

So in order for me to happily visit my friends in Philadelphia, I have to not live there. I have to be here and now. I have to let go, be gone, even though I am scared that if I am really gone, then the space I fit into there will close up behind me and that there won't be any space for me at all, anywhere. Not here, not there.

Still, it has to be risked. I have to be here. And now. Because otherwise, it's not really living at all.

How many strikes, Yogi?

2007-09-03T21:31:00.000-04:00

In baseball, three strikes and you're out. Which seems harsh to the seven-year-old batter because you know, if you keep swinging, you'll probably eventually hit the darn ball. But if you only get three chances, then well. Huh. Phht.

I'm thinking though, that three strikes and then out would be kind of a relief when it comes to parenthood. I mean, I keep missing that darn ball and I'm still not allowed to go and sit on the bench and have a rest, even a sulky one. No. I have to keeping standing up here, trying to keep my eye on the ball, holding the bat steady, keeping my nerve, focusing my thoughts. Hoping that this time I won't screw up.

But I do. Swing. Swish. Strike 131, 893!

And again. Swing. Pop. Foul ball. Strike 131, 894!

And again and again and again.

I'm tired of getting it wrong. Of trying to do it right, keeping my chin up, hoping I'll not lose my temper, get too tired, forget to pack snack, answer big, important questions flippantly because I'm not concentrating, cut bathtime short because I'm ready for bed, lose track of time, drive too fast, silently will my child to chose short bedtime stories because all I want to do is go somewhere quiet quiet quiet and not, for ten minutes in a row, do anything wrong at all.

I want to be benched. I want to be thrown out of the game. I want to kick dust in the umpire's face (Strrrrrrrrrrike 183, 905!) and get ejected. I want to do something where the stakes aren't so damn high all the time. Like flower arranging. Or skeet shooting. Or international diplomacy.

I want my own frailty to not matter so much.

Still, I'm up here swinging. (Swish.) And swinging. (Swish.) Because I do hit the ball sometimes, if only rarely in any sort of grand way. And there's no way to do that, except by keeping my nerve. Eye on the ball. Level bat. And swinging.

Whose brain is melting?

2007-08-31T20:54:00.000-04:00

I've always been a little, um, too tuned in to how other people are feeling. After watching a whole lot of Star Trek TNG, I happily decided that, like Deanna, I was an empath and doesn't that sound groovy and like I'm so, like, in the flow man? And I don't have to wear pantsuits either, which is a huge relief. Or you could, as a therapist once did, call it codependent. Which sounds a whole lot less groovy. But several years ago, I decided I was fed up with being the crazy one so now I've decided I'm sane and empathetic and someone else can be the pet overemotional looney. Or no-one can. That's fine too.

So in normal life (ha!) I'm much better at tuning out the wants-and-needs-of-others static than I was a child. And I no longer have to feel crabby just because everyone in the house is crabby. I can go be cheerful somewhere else. Or vice-versa.

But whenever I'm with my mother these last few months, something odd has been happening. I feel foggy, forgetful and absent. I feel nervous and strange. I forget the names for things. I lose my keys. I wander in a purposeless daze around the house. It might be simply the stress of facing up to what's happening. But what it feels like is empathetic dementia. Which is almost as scary as the real thing and makes me want to do ten crossword puzzles every day.

Empathetic dementia. That could have been a whole episode on Star Trek. Where someone you love is losing her marbles, so you spill all of yours out of the bag and watch them all roll around on the floor together.

Virus attacks via Blogger

2007-08-30T09:12:00.000-04:00

Just read this article on the BBC website. Apparently, a group of hackers are using Blogger to lure readers into downloading worms. Just thought it was worth drawing your attention to. So don't click on random links without being sure what they are. The one above is okay, though. Really.

Mwa ha ha ha.

No really. This is the link spelled out, if you'd rather:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6970368.stm

Now tell me what I'm going to do today because I have no idea.

Pockets of time

2007-08-29T19:53:00.000-04:00

Thank you for all your opinions and reassurance. After much searching the web and quizzing people, including several long phone calls with my mastergardener aunt, we've determined that it's Boston ivy, because of the angle at which new shoots grow, and because of the little sucking pads by which it adheres to the wall. And anyway, no rash yet. So I'm feeling better.

This week is a little betwixt and between. Ed has started work. The children have had little get-to-know-the-classroom sessions at school but won't start until next week. Daniel is beside himself because the science teacher has agreed that he can build a scale model of the solar system at school and he's hysterical with delight. And needs to start school RIGHT NOW.

I too am looking for a rhythm to carry me through the next little bit. When school starts, when I have work days, when we have a schedule, when I know what's for supper more than three minutes before suppertime, I think that I'll be able to inhale more deeply. Right now there are just pockets of time, like potholes, waiting for the rain to come and fill them. I don't know what to do, other than the routine work that each day requires: laundry; food; tidying. These pockets of time scare me when I look at them from too far away. They look like empty seas, and I have no water to fill them. Close up, it's easier to make it from one puddle to the next, making it through. I want to do more than make it through, but right now I'll take what I can get.

Poison what?!

2007-08-27T20:41:00.000-04:00

So I'm freaking out a little. I mean, I grew up in NYC and while we had a yard, we did not have anything growing in it that we did not plant. One year, my father planted cucuzza (a sort of italian squash) that took over the whole side of the house and gave me nightmares for a whole summer, but that was as wild as it got. (The nightmares, if you want to know, were about tendrils of viney plant creeping through my window and winding me up in a tangled, twisted hold before turning me into an evil plant person.)

This yard does have stuff we didn't plant and none of it's edible. And it has poison ivy. I hate poison ivy. In fact, let's be frank. I hate pretty much all ivy, but poison ivy naturally has a special place in my zone of ivy hate. There is definitely a little patch of it on one side by the fence, but then there's also this. Dudes, help me out. Is this poison ivy?
How 'bout another photo?
I know that whole thing "Leaves of three, let it be" and that's fine and dandy when you're someplace else that you can leave and never go back to. This is the fracking back yard, dammit.

I hate the idea that nature is leaking on me, oozing on me, dropping spiders down my neck, winding bats in my hair and making my skin erupt into huge rashes. I'll let you know how nasty my rash gets, goddammit. (Although I did wash when I came inside from snipping through the damn vines of evil so perhaps there's hope.)

Still moving

2007-08-25T11:26:00.000-04:00

In the airport right after we had landed -- a little late, and so very late at night GMT that every time we stopped moving, Helena laid down on the floor at our feet and went right to sleep -- Ed said to me, won't it be nice to get home.

Yes it would, I said, but we sold that house. Now we just have to go where our stuff is.

(Don't tell me that I'm unnecessarily crabby about the move and that poor Ed doesn't deserve my griping. One -- I know that. And two, I crab very lovingly and apologetically.)

Now we are where our stuff is and it's a little more like home. There are fewer boxes. I have walked to the farmer's market and bought feta cheese from a chatty goat farmer named Dottie. Ed has been to work. The children have dug a large hole in the garden (to see what was there, naturally). The sense of living in someone else's house is fading a bit, which makes waking up in the morning less strange.

While I am grateful for the lessening sense of alienation, I am unwilling to let go of my internal disruption just yet. I have been joking about having a mid-life crisis, but whatever name you call it, I am at a crossroads. The physical move perhaps hastened my arrival here, but I was coming to this mental intersection all along. The sense of unease I have is important to me now, because it is the fire that will keep me from setting up my rocking chair at the crossroads itself, instead of moving down a path.

There's a bit in one of the OZ books where Dorothy arrives at a crossroads like a great wheel. And whenever she steps into the center of this crossroads, all the roads spin around her like a pinwheel, so that she's not sure where she came from, or where she ought to be going. Meet my head.

So I am still moving. And will be even after the boxes are all unpacked and freecycled. I am moving because my younger self is giving way to an older self who needs to arrive, who needs to be welcomed. And I am sorting through my inner stuff, packing some of it away and cleaning off other bits, making ready the rooms, laying the table. I want to be ready to move on, to not hold fast to what is fading.

I am not sure where I'm going, only that I must must go there.

Calling for Mommy

2007-08-23T21:12:00.000-04:00

I recently called home and spoke to my mother. We chatted about this and that, what the children were up to and how we were settling in, now that we're back from the UK. Then I asked to speak to Dad. My mother put the phone down and went to get him. He came on the line.

"See!" he said. "I knew it was Francesca. Your mother said it was Christina."

My mother picked up the other phone.

"Don't be ridiculous," she said. "Of course you're Christina," she said. "You're the one with the two little ones."

"Yes," I said. "I'm Francesca, the one with the two little ones." I laughed a bit, trying to make light of it. "But I answer to anything, really. Hey you is fine."

My mother laughed a little too. And hung up. I finished with my dad and hung up my end.

Then I sat in the chair, holding the phone. And what I really wanted to do was call my mother, to tell her that my mother didn't know who I was all the time and that it made me feel sad. I wanted her to comfort me, to tell me that it would be all right and that she would be there for me.

How stupid, I thought, as I clenched my hands around the phone, keeping myself from dialing her number. Knowing she wasn't really there any more to answer my call.

Peeking out

2007-08-01T08:28:00.000-04:00

Shh. I'm not really supposed to be here. We're at my in-laws and they can't remember how to let us onto the internet with our own computer so we have to borrow theirs (with attendent shifty looks and restrictions) and only for a few minutes at a time. Also, they're always around, looking over your shoulder while you're online so no chance to compose long thoughtful posts. Or to use the phone without being overheard. Or to speak to one's child (or husband) without interference.

It's not great, to be honest. I mean, there's no actual violence being threatened but yesterday I succumbed entirely to the immense psychic onslaught and spent the whole day in a black, bleak pit of unassailable despair. It wasn't until I blogged at myself (formerly known as writing in a journal) that I found out why and now things are a bit better.

And oh, the stories I could tell you but that's all we have time for, folks. Send thoughts of healing calm this way. Between moving, the crap news about my mother and this, I've run down the emotional well-being tank quite considerably.

Pattern making

2007-07-24T03:21:00.000-04:00

People search for patterns in the chaos of this random universe. Clouds make pictures. Inkblots too. We see patterns in the squares of pavement, in the throwing of dice. Chaos is untenable. Randomness, unthinkable. How can we go forward trying to make sense of what is wholly without sense or order?

Yet chaos has order, is beautiful. There are patterns so perhaps we do not so much impose patterns on chaos as subtly discern, subconsciously or not, the existing pattern, latch onto it limpet-like. Perhaps there is order to be found and all we do is find it.

Not that I think that's what I'm doing now, exactly, but it makes it sound better than simple grasping at proverbial straws. Watch this:

Instead of returning to England (or staying in Philadelphia) when Ed finished his PhD, we moved to (south) central PA, a place neither of us had ever intended to go, and which I actively resisted going to. We traded in a smallish, but much-loved Philadelphia house for larger house in a small town, farther from my parents but only by an hour.

A week after we move, my mother is diagnosed with Alzheimers (at long last). She has clearly gone downhill quickly in the last few weeks and suddenly what was a niggling worry is now a family crisis.

If I had just moved to England, I would have been distraught past all imagining. How would I have managed to be present, to help, to support, to just deal. Clearly, staying in the United States for the time being was a good idea, even meant to be.

AND (I only just managed to reframe this one) we have not seen my mother very much these last few months because visiting her in NY had become stressful and unpleasant. Without understanding why, I knew it was too much for my parents to have the children visiting. So I asked my father at the end of last week what we should be doing. Should we, I asked, come and visit more regularly?

No, he said. We need to come see you. It's better for your mother.

And now I live in a place that they can have their own room. Where I can put cable television into their room for my dad. In a house that can absorb two more people without cracking. In a place that has a slower pace, where my mother and dad can walk to the grocery store and to get a coffee and come back to sit in the garden. And I only live in a such a place, we could only have afforded such a place, because we moved to a small town. In Philadelphia, there was no spare room and the house felt crowded as soon as they arrived. And it was down the Jersey Turnpike, which my dad hated driving on.

So maybe that's why I'm where I am right now. Or at least, it makes where I am make more sense to me in the wider context of my (rather than just Ed's or the children's) life.

Order from the chaos. A reason for what seemed not right. It makes it a little easier to be where I am. It makes what's happening to my mother (which is its own brand of unsensical and chaotic and unreasonable) a tiny bit easier to bear. That I live in a house they will be happy to come to. That I am a drive, not a plane ride away. Maybe right now I am where I need to be.

(Except that it's even easier to write that last sentence because I'm in England on holiday right now and as happy as a pig in mud, I tell you. I did mention we were going, didn't I? Oh. Oops. Well, we're in England for the first time in years and it is insanely good to be here. But it will be okay to be home again too.)

Lying Fallow

2007-07-18T19:46:00.000-04:00

I appreciate all your kind words and support about my mother. It is hard to write about, not just because it's hard (which it is) but because my mother is perhaps the most intensely private person I have ever known. And I am not. So I need to talk about it. She would want me not to. I don't know which line to walk.

For that reason, and for many others, right now is a fallow time for me. Unlike the summer green all around, my inner fields are dark and frozen. Words don't come easily. No accidental poetry, no glimmers of new ideas. I don't want to knit. I read, but don't write. I plod, not dance. It's hard.

I want to write that I believe that fallow times are necessary, that fields and sleeping seeds draw strength from the rest a long, cold winter grants them. That the rest is necessary to grow once spring comes. That the plants will grow better for not being forced before their time.

I want to believe this. And perhaps I do, somewhere under the cold crust of my winter-sleeping self. But right now, I just feel barren. I feel like spring will not come back.

But that is the lie of every winter. That somehow we need to beg the sun to return, that if we don't beg hard enough, it won't come back, that the winter will stay. But the sun returns, almost whether we will it or no. As my mother would say, has said a hundred times: This too shall pass.

All things pass, sun and rain, snow and warm, good and ill. All things pass.

Fear

2007-07-11T16:10:00.000-04:00

When I was a child, I was scared of things. Dogs. New staircases. Talking to relatives with too-loud voices. I was scared of ghosts and monsters and the oogieboogies who live in closets and keep the doors from closing right. I was scared of having no friends at school, of being teased, of getting lost. I was scared of wild animals and tame ones. I was scared of heights, of riding a bicycle without holding onto the handlebars, of drowning.

I learned that many of these fears are only of what MIGHT happen. I might fall off the bicycle and hurt myself if I don't hold on. A dog might bite me. No one might like me. The ghosts might scare me, the oogieboogies take me.

I remember though, when I realized that one of my fears, one of my strongest fears, was not a might. Not a maybe. It was only a when. One day, my parents will die. One day, I will lose my mother and my father. I was young when this came to me, that one day, without doubt (unless I died first) I would have to survive my parents' death. It was like I was suddenly breathing desert air. Hot and dry, my breath burned in me and it was as if the world hardened around me. Suddenly all my fears were both inconsequential, and more powerful. My fears were not just imaginary bugbears for me to overcome. What I feared, might be. Would be. And I would someday have to deal.

My mother is not dying. She is not dead. She is, however, disappearing. She has early-onset dementia. And I am losing her. Have been losing her now for a few years and now it's clear that she is not coming back. And the air I am breathing burns me.

Whose house? New house.

2007-07-07T22:20:00.000-04:00

I'm still feeling like I've snuck into someone else's house (with a truckload of my crap) and that any minute now they're going to come home from holiday and get really shirty with us. And then what am I going to do with all these half-opened boxes?

This might explain why I've been attempting to assert ownership of the house with a screwdriver. Some people might, I don't know, actually unpack. I unscrew things. And then screw other things in. Sometimes I use a drill. Thus, I let that house know that I own it. It's like peeing on it, only neater.

Another way we've been announcing our ownership is this:Hey buddy, those are OUR flowers. And we can cut them if we want to.

Small moments and large

2007-07-05T09:02:00.001-04:00

Alimum's comment on the last post served to remind me of something important (and something I need to be reminded of often at the moment, as I sink into a self-pitying stew of moving angst). That while I fret over minutiae, big things are happening in the world out there, terrors and suffering and strife but also, happy endings.

Alan Johnston was released yesterday.

Thank god, thank goodness. Thankfulness abounds.

The pleasure of small appliances

2007-07-04T19:06:00.000-04:00

So here we are in our new town and we saw the parade (which was clearly a mistake) and we went on a tour of the old prison (quite interesting) and we've been to Target twice and now we own a dustbuster.

I know. It's all go, mile a minute, wild times in Central PA.

But the dustbuster is making me happy out of all proportion to its size or vacuum power. We're not a one hundred percent, do or die Montessori household but it's nice when the children can get their own breakfast, pour their own drink, reach their own jacket. We try to work on the whole put your clothes in the hamper, tidy your bed in the morning, clean up your own mess plan. And for years now, Daniel and his parents have been locked in a flaming-eyed row over the post-breakfast crumbs on the floor.

Daniel eats cereal for breakfast but he doesn't like to pour milk on it, and nor does he really like to use a spoon. What he does, then, with this cereal is not so much eat it, as fresse it (which is the German verb an animal eating). And himself, his chair and the whole floor are flooded with crumbs when he's done. We've worked on eating more slowly, more neatly. We've suggested eating out of doors. We've tried place mats, and handing him the broom. We've stipulated that only large, easy to pick up cereal may be eaten. But every day (that we could stand the fight) it's been a battle.

Daniel, are you finished eating? Then come clean up these crumbs please.

AAAGHGHGHGHGHGHHAAAAAHAHAHAHAAAAA, was his considered response.

Now, we own a dustbuster and the children are positively falling over themselves to clean up crumbs. Montessori through mini-appliances. Next up will be some sort of crock pot so they can make supper.

Life is good. And when you've just moved, you take all the good you can get.

Moving Right Along

2007-06-30T18:52:00.000-04:00

Right now life feels like a car accident when the policeman says, "Move along now. Nothing to see here."

We've moved. There might be photos sometime soon. Right now there are boxes and crazy children and more boxes and a July 4th parade in town that involved saluting and flags and a minister blessing the proceedings. I may be a godless Yankee heathen, but that particular combination of patriotism and God really makes me retch. And there were girls with batons and hairpieces. Fake hair stuck on the heads of children. Including toddlers. I had to be held down.

And more boxes.

Sad

2007-06-21T23:55:00.000-04:00

I'm feeling sad. Not so much mad, or in denial or resistant or rebellious any more. Just sad. And tired of course, but mostly sad.

My friends are sad too. I'm sad and they're sad.

I'm in my house being sad. They're in their houses being sad.

We're all sad. But we're doing it alone. Which seems, well, sort of sad.

I was thinking that since we're all sad, then we should all get together and be sad in sad company. It would be more efficient. More concentrated. Not all this spread out sad effort but really pulling for sad together.

But then, we'd be together which would be less sad. We might have a hard time staying sad. In fact, we might be downright cheerful. And there might be sidecars. Or g&t. Or large cups of sustaining tea and possibly even cake. It would be even harder to be sad then.

But later, we'd have to go home. And then we'd be sad again. Apart. Alone. All feeling sad. All sort of parallel, NYC windows, pull out for the long shot, Woody Allen sad. Pull the shade down sad.

Which, I suppose, has a sort of heart-tugging, semi-literary, French film, deep-n-meaningful pathos about it. All of us, ultimately, alone. Our emotional struggles. Our lives. Our sadness. Alone. Not just alone. Isolated. Estranged. Islands. Rocks.

Mm.

Screw pathos. Wanna come over? I'll make cake. And we can cry if we want to. It'll be our party.

Ticked off

2007-06-17T07:36:00.000-04:00

We went walking in Delaware yesterday and in the parking lot, I pulled a large (dog, I think) tick off of Helena's leg.

Tick, I thought. Mm.

As a fairly die-hard urban inhabitant, there are certain public health concerns that I have more or less ignored. Ticks. West Nile Virus (although from the size and enthusiasm of the massive skeeters we get in our back yard, I probably should worry more). Whatever that horrible disease you get from breathing the air above mice poo in campsites. This is not necessarily bright of me. It's not like I've thought it through. It's just that you have to pick your enemies and my enemies have been solidly in the camp of urban pests. Serial foot-fetishists. Muggers. Bad drivers and especially those people who use up two parking spots. Jehovah's Witnesses. I've found it hard to get worked up about things you can catch being in the healthy outdoors since I don't go there too often.

But still, ticks are weird and when we got back from Delaware, I checked the children.

Three of the tiny evil bastards. Each. I pulled them off whole and crushed them between my nails before I read that you weren't supposed to do that. Ooops. Then I flushed them down the toilet and staggered around feeling squeamish. Ed and I tick-checked each other but we seem to have got away scot-free, which I find hard to believe but I've looked and I don't see anything but of course I'm freaked out. And in the meantime my children have been bit. by. ticks. Which carry Lyme's disease. Which is bad. And now I'm (sort of theatrically) half-convinced that we're all going to get it and that we won't have the bullseye rash to warn us and that systemic devastation will ensue. All because I thought it might be nice to practice the pleasures of living somewhere out in the green and pleasant landscape.

I felt terrible and confessed to Ed that if I had known that it was some crazy tick season I wouldn't have let us all wander around that park. I'm the American. I feel responsible for protecting the family from all threats on this side of the pond while he has to field the threats on that side (of which there are none, frankly, except maybe stinging nettles). And I felt bad.

No, he said. In this new phase of our lives, we are both strangers in a strange land. We'll learn together.

I felt a little better but last time I was a stranger in a strange land and dealing with a parasitical foe, I had amoebic dysentery twice which is not something I'd wish on anyone.

Evil, malicious, blood-sucking little fiends. I hate 'em. I'm staying on the patio from now on, with a Mojito maybe, possibly even under mosquito netting. I'll take foot-licking crazies any day over tiny ticks, smaller than freckles, that can make you that sick. Blah. My tendency is to get all Felix Ungary about it and start hyperventilating. Unlike Felix, at least I don't worry about things until they happen to me.

But it's all about the devils you know. These little devils seem mysterious and threatening to me.

What is left is right

2007-06-15T13:40:00.000-04:00

Earlier I was thinking about what is left when you take away the signifiers: place, shoes, community. Part of what makes this interesting, I think, is that we rely on signifiers not just to tell us who ourselves are, but who everyone else is.

Glasses: smart
Pink hair and docs: punk: rebellious: angry: tough
Knitting: loving: crafty: traditional (though that is changing)
Station wagon: cheerful: reliable: parent
Mother: cheerful: reliable: patient: station wagon

It's why (I think) we tie pink ribbons round the bald bald heads of newborn girls. We need a signifier, something to tell us who this creature is.

But like the pink ribbon, any signifier is as limiting as it is useful. More so, because they're so often wrong. They lull us into thinking we know something about someone when we really really don't. If you take off your Docs and put on strappy sandals, does that change you? Or are you still a crap-kicking hard-arse in strappy sandals? If I move out of the city, am I no longer a city-girl? We think because of the short cut signifier that we've got someone nailed down and we don't.

What if, without all the little handles we strap onto ourselves and the people around us, we existed without handles. What would happen? Would we be more free to be contradictory, to embrace all the parts of ourselves that don't add up neatly into a Hollywood whole? Maybe.

I've noticed (have you noticed) that as I age I get more resistant to change (and I've never been that good at it). My parents are almost solidified. I wonder what we have to do to stay flexible, to be willing to embrace change and difference as we age. Shedding some handles, some need for others to have handles must help. Without all those protuberances, we slide more easily into the available shapes without scrapes or bruises.

Maybe what will be left when most of those little handles are stripped off, is right.

The elephant in the room

2007-06-13T22:35:00.000-04:00

It's astonishing to discover that while neither of us exactly knew this, while neither of us thought there was anything quite so tangible between us, that the dissertation's finishing is a little like escorting a large elephant out of the room and finding that there is in fact room to breathe.

Or even more like discovering that you think you've been sitting together on the couch, but that in fact, the dissertation has been wedged between you like a duenna, smacking you on the wrists if you try to hold hands and making fierce faces at you, like this:All right, so she's not on a couch, but imagine that she is and you'll get the idea. So really, shoving her out the door and into the road has been quite a treat.

Of course, the departure of the dissertation has removed the last imaginary barrier between us and actually leaving and if you thought I'd been neurotic before, well... well, I was but there was clearly further to go.

Yet there are better places to go too, because now I'm not moving alone. Now the elephant is gone, the old italian chaperone has been banished and Ed and I are suddenly moving together which sounds -- and feels -- a whole lot nicer.

Ultimately

2007-06-11T19:00:00.000-04:00

Yesterday was a normal day. At this, the end of the maniacal last week of school, the house was in such chaos that I thought about torching it. Instead I cleaned it. Tidied. Did laundry. The children played, bickered, slumped. We brought Ed cups of coffee and restoring chocolate. We harangued him about when he was going to finish and interrupted his work to show him things. We made cookies which I managed to seriously undercook (must address this issue in future). We ate supper, did a tiny bit of gardening, restored bad moods and planned today's outing. We figured out Skype enough that Ed's parents managed to chat with their grandchildren and a lot of waving went on. Ed rescued a library book he had borrowed for a blind scholar who had misplaced it these last two years, which means that when the day comes, he will be able to graduate. He returned a box of books to the library. We tucked the children in. I wandered the house by myself for a while, moping. He emerged from the computer room.

He emerged.

Can you see where this is going?

Not an ordinary day at all. The day he finished. The dissertation is done. It has been sent off to the committee. The computer is closed for the summer. The dissertation is done. The Ed is back in town.

Not an ordinary day at all. Daniel has declared 10 June, for now and evermore, Finishing Day. There's even a certificate.
He did it. The beast has been vanquished. This chapter is complete. The dissertation is done.

Belonging

2007-06-10T16:03:00.000-04:00

We -- my sisters and I -- grew up in Queens but without a truly New Yawwwk accent. Our mother had been a speech teacher (and had other ideas besides) and was pretty fierce about the right way to tawk, I mean talk. I was teased throughout school for pronouncing the second t in twenty. We had perfect phone manners. We spoke in grammatically correct English, which made school a doddle. Predicate nominative? No problem.

Brrring brrrring.

Hello?

Hello, can I speak to Francesca?

It is I.

When my middle sister went to a nice college in Massachusetts, she acquired in addition to big hair and really good nail polish, a Queens accent. She told me once that there was no way that she was going to be mistaken for some New England Catholic schoolgirl. She was from New York, I mean Yawk.

I have always been a city girl, with city girl smarts and city girl shoes, even if my accent wanders across the Atlantic and my taste in vacations runs to the rural. Imagining our new country town life, I'm wondering if my hair is suddenly going to get pinker, my shoes stompier, my accent more Cagney and Lacey. I don't want to sport an attitude, but the urge to define myself in opposition is hardly less strong as I age.

Yet, as a wonderful conversation with Liz showed me, I am a snob. Hell, I don't mean to be, but somewhere deeper than the level I normally think with, I believe that civilization and city are synonymous and that out there in semi-rural PA, people vote for Bush and shoot small animals for fun. I'm not proud to discover that this is what I think and I'm trying to shake it off like a layer of dandruff on the shoulders of a cheap polyester suit.

Moving strips you of those cheats that help you know who you are: this kind of house, in this kind of place, with these kinds of posters and this kind of food. We all have these accoutrements of identity and many we carry with us, but some we leave behind when we abandon one place for another. No longer belonging somewhere, no longer rooted in, surrounded by, defined by a place or a community, we are only ourselves, what is there without those trappings. It can be sobering. It can be liberating. I am not yet sure what is left. It will be interesting to find out.

The Prodigal Writer

2007-06-09T22:28:00.000-04:00

These last few weeks there has been little in my head but this fantastically dull refrain (try it to the tune of Frere Jacques):

I am moving.
I don't want to.
Save me please.
(Eat more cheese.)
What's so wrong with Philly
That I can't stay here. It's silly.
Eat more food.
Sulk and brood.

All right, that's not really what's been in my head, but it's pretty close.

Then today I was at a baby shower and almost everyone said something like this to me: "So, hey! Two weeks to go! Aren't you excited!" And the more that I patiently explained that I was not particularly excited and the more they cheerfully urged me to look at all the multi-wowed bright sides, the moodier I felt.

Then Ellen put her finger on it. "Thing is," she said (and I'm paraphrasing but only a little), "that I know you don't want us to point out how fine it will be, and I know that you know it will be fine, but sometimes when something is not fine, and you talk about how not fine it is, or write about how not fine it is, it makes it more powerful. It solidifies its not-fine-ness."

Which is why I haven't been blogging. I have been resisting solidifying its not-fine-ness.

Because, you see, there's lots of fine around. This blog is one piece of fine. You out there, nudging me along are too. Gelato in Manhattan? Fine-o-rama. People other than me having lovely, sweet-smelling babies - doobedoobedoofine. Fine times at Ridgemont High. All Quiet on the Western Fine. Fine little monkeys sitting in a tree. So much fine. So fine.

Which side of sanity?

2007-05-21T10:45:00.000-04:00

A long time ago I read some self-helpy type book which airily promised that if you were truly open to the universe, if you truly and honestly asked the universe for what you needed, then the universe would provide.

Well, all right then. The universe has been duly notified. I want, oh say, $250000 so I can buy a small apartment or trinity in Center City (or Fairmount or Queens Village or Fishtown or Northern Liberties -- I'm not picky) so that I don't really have to move. I mean, I'll move anyway. I'm not leaving Ed or the children or any such crazy thing. An apartment (even a nice warehouse conversion with big windows and maybe a courtyard garden) doesn't really sit on the other side of the equation with them (except on very very bad afternoons). But still. I could come back. Weekly. Go to the theater. The Art Museum. See friends. I could find new restaurants now that my children are finally old enough to be cheerfully left with a sitter and we will both be employed and thus able to afford to eat out. I could still be here.

I'm pretty sure the universe is not going to arrange this for me, but the fantasy has grown out of control. I spend the drive to Daniel's school trying to figure out why I don't have a quarter of million dollars saved up so I can do this. It would, I reason, make good financial sense to invest this money (which I don't have) in real estate instead of leaving it wherever it is (which is nowhere because it doesn't exist). I wonder about whether I should have the mail forwarded or just leave it there. I debate the wisdom of leaving it unrented vs. renting it for a couple of years to offset the mortgage. I consider the tax implications of owning a second property, as well as the moral and social implications of taking up more space on the struggling planet. I think about whether it would have a fireplace.

And then I remember that I don't have this much money, am unlikely to EVER have this much money and that all these issues are therefore completely irrelevant. And I wonder about my sanity that I can spend so much time thinking about this imaginary scenario, particularly since it makes me feel more cheerful than just facing moving, and I resolve to stop thinking about it. It's impossible, I think. You don't, if nothing else (I tell myself sharply), have any money.

And then I start to scheme about how I COULD acquire the money (up to and including bank robbery and insurance fraud), and it all starts round again.

No, no! Wrong Dorothy!

2007-05-18T10:07:00.000-04:00

I found this little device (called gnooks) via The Bookish Girl in which you type in three names of writers you like and it will (apparently) suggest other writers you might like to read. Well, hooray. Give me some of that! I need a new read.

But no matter who I type in, it tells me to read Dorothy L. Sayers. Hmph.

Un/fortunately

2007-05-17T21:04:00.001-04:00

Yesterday, Daniel came home from school talking about Fortunately/Unfortunately stories. We made some up over supper and they're quite good fun. They're also reasonably evocative of my comme-ci comme-ca mental state. Like this:

Fortunately, having almost finished his PhD, Ed got a great job.
Unfortunately, that meant moving.
Fortunately, it meant moving to a lovely town and a nice new house.
Unfortunately, that meant leaving Philadelphia and selling their pretty home.
Fortunately, their friend's sister wanted to buy the house which made it all very easy.
Unfortunately, Francesca had pretty much no desire to move at all, so there.
Fortunately, she's a pretty reasonable woman.
Unfortunately, she'd recently started questioning the ultimate value of being reasonable.
Fortunately, she hadn't yet made up her mind to be unreasonable.
Unfortunately, this made her even more dissatisfied and confused.
Fortunately, she had chosen Action as her word for 2007, which meant that all sorts of things happened no matter how confused she felt.
Unfortunately, no matter how much action happens, her feelings are still stuck in November.
Fortunately, she's been through tough moves before and is still around to talk about it.
Unfortunately, she's getting tired of moving.
Fortunately, she's not yet got arthritis.
Unfortunately, she has got bursitis
Fortunately, that's what Advil is for.
Unfortunately, the move is going ahead no matter how I feel about it.
Fortunately, I'm certain that I will ultimately be all right, no matter how I feel right now.

A Room of My Own

2007-05-13T11:36:00.000-04:00

A few months ago, I hit a(nother) crisis point. It was perfectly clear that at his current pace, Ed was going to be writing the dissertation until doomsday. I had tried to be hands-off. Really. I had tried dispassionate distance. I had tried pure bloody-minded blindness. But now we were faced with moving and I got, um, proactive.

There is no higher good, said I, than finishing the dissertation.

To that end, we surrendered evenings together. We surrendered weekends. I gave him my work day. I willingly surrendered the time. It's just for now. It's to help us all to an end we all need. He would do the same for me. But what this has meant is that I have been on family/house/moving duty something like ninety percent of the time. And the dissertation is now almost done so it's been worth it. Definitely. Definitely. Yes.

What is also clear is that it's taking a toll on me. For in this pattern we've adopted (to the greater good of finishing a PhD), there is no room of my own. I have never (except when we had just moved and Daniel was a baby and those were dark days indeed) felt so much like a helpmeet and so little like me.

Things are easing up a little now. But what I am learning is that a room of my own is not about physical space or even free time. It's about there being space in my head for fluffy or furious pursuits of my own. If there is no room in my self, there is no blogging, no writing, no deep breaths, no strong singing voice of this woman I am, instead of the roles I am.

I honor the mother in myself this mother's day, as I honor the mother in my friends, my own mother and those around me. But I also honor today the women we are, outside and inside our motherhood.

Urban Planning

2007-05-03T21:19:00.000-04:00

My cousin and friend, the wonderful Ellen of Excellent Walker, has a great, cozy, cleverly designed small apartment, the sort of apartment that when you walk into it, you immediately unwind. The sort of apartment that constantly surprises you with how big it feels, despite how small it is. And I'm not the only one who thinks so; despite a last minute entry, she's up for Apartment Therapy's "Smallest Coolest Apartment" award. Which is deeply deeply cool.

There are, to be sure, lots of small, cool apartments in the contest, but how can you pass up a chance to vote for an apartment with a handmade Murphy Bed? Go here and vote for her, or rather, for her great apartment.

Really, a vote for Ellen's Murphy bedded apartment is a vote for fairies, free theater and yellow daisies. So please vote. And do it today because the contest is over tomorrow I think.

YAY!

Bloggers blog. Writers write. Bears bear. Bees be.

2007-05-03T19:22:00.000-04:00

My bloglines has something close to a thousand unread posts for me to catch up on. All of you, bloggers I know, bloggers whose blogs I actually comment on, bloggers whose blogs I merely haunt wraithlike and undeclared, have been writing up a maelstrom of wonderful words while I have been wading through minor floods, fixing the kitchen sink, driving long distances and painting walls at 11 pm. This is what happens when you're gone for a while. The world floods with words.

Of course, this is what we do, bloggers all. We write. Long posts or short, deep and meaningful, short and sweet, YouTube finds, poems, photos, thoughts, one perfect quote. One earthshaking thought. Or a knock-knock joke invented by the resident seven year old comic. We write.

This is not incidental, especially for those of us who have harbored secret (and not so secret) desires for the writing life. That more days than not, we are crafting words and letting them go for the world to read.

It can feel overwhelming, this deluge of words from the unedited masses. So many writers! Flickr is like this. So many photographs! And not just snaps, but piles and piles of photographs which skulk at the edges of art, or even more than that, land splat in the middle of art, drinking martinis and wearing shades. Yet, these snippets of art are just some person with her camera, just some bloke with an eye for color.

Does it devalue art or literature, to have all us peons typing away, snapping away, cheerfully, purposefully flinging our unexclusive, unpriced art into the virtual world? On the contrary, this is the best of what the internet can be, that the multitudes of writers and artists and beauty makers can now ply their soul's trade without stopping to pass through the needle's eye of editor, agent or seller. Of course there is dross there. Of course there are sentimental, badly focused, badly framed photographs, blog posts which make no sense, drawings of puppies with strangely large eyes. Who cares!

Artists all. Writers all. My world is richer for the flow of your words, your art, your music. Flickr is a storehouse of stunning beauty and so is the blogworld. I may not, especially now, always write to tell you that you moved me, spoke to me, lifted me past my tired and tiring life. But I am always reading, and always grateful.

Feeling like an onion

2007-05-02T20:07:00.000-04:00

Feelings, or perhaps better, states of being, are like onions, circles upon surprisingly sharp and tear-sharp circles of emotion.

So here I am. The top layer is an efficient, cheerful sort of person, tootling along, how are you, just fine, doobedo, go here, go there, get thing, do that, upsadaisy, nevermind.

Under that is a thick layer of unhappiness. This I doesn't want to move, doesn't want to leave this house, this street, this city, these friends, these circles of living, this life. This I is in deep mourning and in deep deep resistance.

Under that is an almost equally thick layer of cheerful pragmatism. What cannot be cured, must be endured. This I absolutely accepts the decision we made and feels confident that we made it together, as a couple. This I is looking forward to a change, to a new sort of life. Things come to an end, and that is all right and while the flow from phase to new phase can be stormy, it will leave me feeling renewed, refreshed and pared down.

Under that is a lonely I who gets very little time for herself, who rarely reads a book except while cooking dinner, doesn't find time to blog, to knit, to think in an unencumbered place. This I is angry and getting seethingly impatient.

Under that is a selfless I who loves that I am there for the children and Ed, who wants to do the best that I can do, who wants to stay patient and and loving and present and who will, in the end, do whatever it takes to support the family as it moves.

Under that is a little girl who wants her mother to come help. Who wants her mother not to be so suddenly, strangely aged. Who wants a lap to sit in, a shoulder to cry on, a rock to stand on.

Under that is a rock in her own right who knows that she has never fallen down so hard that she has not got up again. She is proud of her strength in the face of what assails her. She knows her courage and has faith in it and in the return of sunlight at the end of winter.

All these feelings are true. They are all honest. They all coexist, round and round like intermingling layers, which is where the onion analogy breaks down, because they are not arrayed in neat rows, like the earth, from crust to core. They are far more lava-lampish, goblin gobules of emotional states.

How am I? Fine. Really.

Content

2007-04-25T18:23:00.001-04:00

I am discontent. Yet, I am content with my discontentedness. This, I think, is better than being discontented with my contentedness.

You?

Wonderland

2007-04-24T07:47:00.000-04:00

I find this unbelievably compelling. To step into a drawing, those colours, the light, the simple wonder of it.

Take a moment to look. It's worth it. Is that really what the world looks like in their heads? Can I go there?

Little drops

2007-04-23T18:55:00.000-04:00

You have probably heard that BBC reporter Alan Johnston was kidnapped in Gaza City six weeks ago and is still being held prisoner. He is, by all accounts, a fair-minded and good reporter. His colleagues and neighbors speak of him with respect and affection. People throughout the Palestinian Territories, Israel and the world, of all religions, are pleading for his release and the BBC is hosting a petition also calling for his release, so that we can add our voices to theirs.

Take a moment and sign it.

The world is filled with bombs and death and hunger and unhappiness. It sometimes feels foolish to worry about one person. But worrying about one person is a way to chip away at the vast mountain of wrong.

I hope he comes home.

The comfort of stuff

2007-04-16T19:21:00.000-04:00

In general, I'm not a huge victim of consumer capitalism, but there are times that try my non-shopping soul. Moving. Pretty much every time I've moved, I have acquired some large stack of something of dubious usefulness. Leaving for Cairo and diplomatic wifehood, I bought fify linen cocktail napkins. They are really very nice, plain white linen cocktail napkins, but dude. Cocktail napkins. What was I thinking. Leaving Cairo saw me in a fabric store I really liked walking out with ten yards of a very cool cotton curtain fabric. Again, nice, but ten yards? Why ten? Why not two or twenty? What mythical windows was I curtaining? What was this fabric going to be for me, thousands of miles away from the life I had been living?

I'm feeling the urge again now. I have a sudden hankering for quirky fabric and good notepaper. I'm not sure why. I rarely write letters anymore (oh fie on thee, thou varlet email). But I am fantasizing about truly nice, heavy cream paper with an elegant, yet very subtle border. Perhaps it has our new address on it, perhaps not. Perhaps this stack of paper is 4x6 cards you can scrawl a little note on. Perhaps it is sheets of paper worthy of sonnets sent to secret lovers. And quirky fabric, until you make something of it, is just a Thing. An object that takes up space and gets dusty. I am not fond of Things. I much prefer stuff.

Stuff (unlike things) might be pretty but is fundamentally useful and useable. A pitcher you can put liquid in is stuff, not a thing. A china figurine of a dog is a Thing. Boxes you can throw change into or earrings or matches is stuff. A plant pot (with a plant it); candles that you really burn; mugs, hats, sparkly rings and yarn in the middle of being knit up. Stuff. It's that William Morris adage that I love: Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.

It is strange how the acquisition of stuff is comforting. A suggestion of preparedness? (Curtains? I got 'em. A sudden cocktail party for fifty? Check.) A sense of ownership, control? A resolidifying with matter the evaporating life, quietly disappearing into boxes?

I'm resisting buying things or stuff, for the moment. Now it's almost a game, wondering what it is that will slip past my guard, that I will suddenly find myself owning. That will be the strange comfort of this move.

There's No Place Like Home

2007-04-15T14:43:00.000-04:00

Something I didn't know the first time I left the continent was that sometimes, often even, the road home evaporates behind you and there is no going back. Learning that was bittersweet. I didn't want to be back there. I wanted to be where I was, where I was going. Yet I missed the idea of home and I imagined having a new home someday, a place I was settled. A house maybe. Countryside around it that I would grow familiar with. Friends, old and new, nearby.

Coming to Philadelphia was accident. Expedient, but accidental and yet I have grown to love it. I would have an easier time leaving it if I were headed back to England. I always thought that was what was going to happen. I had always thought that this time here was temporary. A visit. An adventure. Not so. This has become life. We are not visiting the United States. We live here now.

It is strange how often I need to learn something I accepted as truthful and liberating twenty years ago: that oh so often in our lives, we are led where we did not mean to go. I did not mean to move to central PA. But I am going nonetheless.

The challenge now that I see before me is that I have spent too much time already waiting to arrive at the mythical destination of "home." I have put off deciding what to be when I grew up (hello, pushing forty now). I have put off forming truly sound long-distance relationships with the friends I expected to be moving back towards. I have put off deciding who I am, remaining instead in flux, in almost unnoticeable movement from there to somewhere else, with here a constantly changing point. I look ahead and I don't see a destination. And I very much need to stop waiting to arrive there. I need instead to have a life that I carry inside me, an identity independent of place. I have shirked my responsibility to myself by not building that life more definitively and now we are moving again and I am feeling lost. All the shoring up of my foundations that I built these last six years here is shaking.

Billy Joel wrote that his lover was his home. And perhaps that is to some extent true, that where Ed is, that is home. Yet again, that is something external. I want to be my own home, my own garden. I have to take my courage in both hands like flowers and plant that garden now, and stop waiting to arrive.

Dancing family

2007-04-12T09:43:00.000-04:00

My sister is a dancer. A wonderful dancer. Check out this review, praising her latest performance, and it's no more than she deserves, honestly. She's worked so hard for years and deserves every ounce of success she ever has. And if you 're in New York and want to see her dance, she's going to be dancing at the Joyce Soho from 18-22 April. My daughter is a dancer. A wonderful dancer. She works so hard in class and concentrates and never talks or plays. It is odd yet wonderful to see a four year old trying to lengthen her neck to look swan-like. There may come a day when we stop ballet and move over into a less skinny-crazy kind of dance, because she's never really going to be an ectomorph or whatever those really ethereally tiny ballerina bodies are called, but right now she's loving it and I love that she's doing something she's so happy about.

Make Your Quaker Happy!

2007-04-07T11:47:00.000-04:00

You know how Gmail raids the content of your emails to give you targeted advertising? (And I love Gmail enough to forgive them for this). Today, I had this (prompted no doubt by all the blogging and thinking about religion):

Free Video Training For a Quaker! Earn your Quaker's Love Today!

Wow, I thought. The Society of Friends has gone all strangely proactive. And training too! How to sit quietly. How to recognize the true movement of the spirit. Wow, I say again. And earning my Quaker's love? Odd, but potentially useful. Out of complete curiosity, I clicked the link and read this:

Imagine! Earn your Quaker's love in minutes - never be bitten again! Stop your Quaker's bad behavior---instantly---and have him joyfully talking politely instead.

Which would have confused me even further, except for the handy visual aid:
Ah. Quaker parrots. All is clear.

Chocolate Saviour

2007-04-06T09:29:00.000-04:00

(I was going to title this, Saviouring Chocolate, but thought that might be a bit weird as a mental image to carry around on Good Friday.)

So as the last post might suggest, I am probably not the acid test for what might offend the Catholic Church, but this hoopla over the chocolate Jesus statue has flummoxed me. I mean, don't you have some poverty to get worked up about? Some really horrible wars? Something? But I'm also confounded because I think the sculpture sends a very powerful Easter-as-religious-holiday statement that I would think most Catholics could get behind.

So what is Easter about? On the one hand, it's definitely about spring. Note the bunnies, the chicks, the eggs. Sex. New life. Getting jiggy in the spring amongst the tulips. Eostre (Easter) is a mother-goddess (see Neil Gaiman's American Gods, if nothing else). So Easter is a ritual of rebirth, breeding new life from the dead land.

Not unakin to this is the death and resurrection of Jesus, which, for Christians, is really what Easter is about and the eggs and bunnies and things are incidental, much like Father Christmas. Yet as far as capitalism is concerned, Easter (and Christmas and oh so many holidays) is about consumption, including the consumption of chocolate. It's hard to draw a connection between Jesus' crucifixion and chocolate. As Eddie Izzard said (and I'm paraphrasing a bit here), "Well children, we eat chocolate at Easter because it's brown and the wood of the cross on which Jesus was hung is brown. And there were bunnies playing at the foot of the cross..."

Insofar as chocolate eggs and Peeps are distractions from what is, for many people, the true meaning of the season, then the chocolate Jesus is a striking juxtaposition and comment upon the layers of this holiday. What do you believe in, it asks? God? Chocolate? Is this a season of consumption? Or of faith? Of life?

Of course, the answer might very well be "I believe in chocolate," and that's a good answer too (particularly on Thursday nights when you're worn to a nubbin and the week is not yet over). And no matter what the answer, the question is worth asking. Not just on this day, at this season, for this holiday. But for every holiday. Every day.

What do we believe in?

Losing my religion

2007-04-05T09:16:00.000-04:00

While I am clearly either outright or passive-aggressively resistant to memes (sorry all you (all right, two) taggers out there. I love you and your blogs, and I am trying to do the right thing but it's not working yet), I am equally clearly not above stealing other bloggers' fun and interesting ideas.

So a few days ago I read on Radical Mama about the religion test and how that was how she discovered that she is Quaker and how her sister just found out that she's pagan (but maybe Quaker too). Mmm, thought I. I could use that sort of insight. I mean, I've just finished reading Eat, Pray, Love (which was surprisingly good) and am feeling inspired about the idea of becoming more inspired.

So I took the test and it turns out I'm either Unitarian Universalist (mmm), new-age pagan (ur), or (ta-da) Liberal Quaker. Which is the answer I'm remembering since that's the answer I wanted. (Oh biased researcher! Fie on me!) What was most interesting to me was that at the very bottom of the list, well below Scientology, Islam and Latter-Day Saints, well below Orthodox Judaism and Ba'hai, even below Jehovah's Witnesses, lay the faith of my ancestors, the faith of my family, the church of my childhood: Catholicism. Bottom of the list.

Logically, this is because of my responses to their questions about homosexuality and abortion. Emotionally, the impact of looking at the positioning of this religion (geez, below Hinduism and Seventh-Day Adventists!) is to show me how far my beliefs fall from the faith of my forebearers. And yet.

Yet this does not illustrate how my heart tightens when I walk into a Catholic Church, how easy I find it to cry during the invocation of the saints, how the smell of the incense makes my soul lift, drawing my thoughts to the divine as the smoke curls upward.

It is a lesson in the deep lines that our childhoods score on the paper of our self. Sometimes they're hard to see, overlaid by the color of so many experiences, the scribbling of adolescence, the layered brushstrokes of long relationships. But if you splash watercolours over that paper, somehow it finds its way into those lines, revealing their permanence.

I am not Catholic. I do know that. But how I think about god, about the world, about morality and guilt and good and evil and right and wrong and tomorrow and hereafter, all that is informed by the faith of my parents and Easter Sundays at church, the vigil, the cries of the congregation playing the part of the crowd, demanding that Pontius Pilate crucify Jesus.

Easter is approaching and my deeply un-church-going children are thinking of chocolate. That might be enough for now, but I think there might be something missing. Not guilt, no no. And not the censors burning or the priests in their purple stoles. But a sense of that which is larger than ourselves, the turning earth and the ties that bind us to what has gone before. I don't think the only source of these thoughts is religion, but it's one of them. And clearly, something needs to be done about the Easter equals chocolate thing, not least because Halloween also equals chocolate, Valentine's Day equals chocolate, Christmas equals presents (and chocolate), birthdays equal cake, presents (and chocolate). If they have to have any church, not sure I want it to be the church of small, gaily wrapped chocolate.

April Fooling Around

2007-04-01T09:23:00.000-04:00

I like the idea of April Fools. I love the little internet fools that lurk, ready to spring (Gmail paper, anyone? -- you can only see it if you're signed out) I like the ones that show up on television (like the spaghetti trees that was perhaps the first April Fool's television joke). But I don't do them myself -- in person -- because, like most practical jokes, the laugh is at someone else's expense. Someone specific. Some one person, not the whole crowd of us, all laughing sheepishly together.

One year (years and years ago) I April-fooled a good friend. I called her at college, sobbing and gasping.

What? What happened? What is it? she cried.
It's... it's... April Fool's Day, I sobbed hysterically. And then stopped dead. And giggled.

She was maaaaaaad. And rightly so. I'd scared her plenty and for a moment she'd really thought something was horribly wrong with one of her best friends.

Um.

I had intended to be funny. She had been scared and was left feeling betrayed. I apologized several (million) times. But it wasn't a minor hiccup. It took a few weeks for her to forgive me and for things to go back to being okay between us.

The learning curve in how to get along with others is sometimes slow and long, and sometimes sharp as knives. That hasn't been my only razor-sharp lesson in how to hurt someone without meaning to. But like most of those lessons, it's stuck. So no April Fools from me.

News

2007-03-30T15:12:00.000-04:00

We found a house. (I told you that, right?) Here is a photo of the back of the house. (I can't really show you much because it's not my house yet).
We've sold a house. (That's the news.) Here is a photo of it. Be impressed by its tidiness. That took two weeks to accomplish and is a total fake.We move out the last week of June. We move in the last week of June. This has all been, for all intents and purposes, remarkably smooth and straightforward. A friend's sister is buying the house and I am happy that someone I know (sort of) will have it because it is our first house and I love it.

But I am sad because now I really have to move. I know it was always a fantasy, but somewhere in me I thought, maybe I will get to stay here. Maybe I will get to keep my little house. Now it will be someone else's little house. But moving on will be fine too. And someone else's house will become mine.

Goodbye winter

2007-03-26T21:42:00.001-04:00

Ice, originally uploaded by Stuntmother.

Good bye winter, with your long cold fingers and red raw nose. Good bye winter and your dark days and long nights. Good bye winter and your insistence on wool shawls and extra socks. Good bye winter and your sad winds crying and the sharp ice sleeting. Good bye winter and the grey dogs howling and the furnaces purring. Good bye winter and your sad storytelling and your dead leaves blowing.

Hello spring. Welcome. Come in.

Selling Houses by the Square Foot

2007-03-18T22:48:00.000-04:00

Apparently, house prices are set by the square foot. How nice the square foot is matters some, as does where the square feet are located but in the end, the price is worked out with simple multiplication. This many square feet x the value of a square foot in that neighborhood = house price. Square feet are now more expensive here than they were five years ago and although five years ago we managed to get ourselves 1400 of them, if we were on the market now (in the financial position we were then) we'd only be able to buy about 650.

And what are these square feet? A place to put your books, your table, your head. A place to close the door on and be glad in the stillness. A place that keeps the weather outside and the warmth in. A house is shelter, safety. A house is respite, a holt.

But when you're swinging your machete through the jungle of the housing market, a house turns from a shelter into a list of numbers, digits that dance their little calculated dance from column to column, minueting their strange and confusing routine. A house becomes a commodity, a price, a deal. Having to sell a house takes what is simple human need and turns it upside down and shakes the spare change from its pockets.

This little house is our home, but it is also a sum of money that we will trade for a new home. Yet, it has no value at all until and unless someone else wants to trade their money for a new home for themselves. And in the end, what we all want is a quiet place to put our books, our keys, our head.

I am bloody well I

2007-03-17T10:10:00.000-04:00

So (as I mentioned earlier) I gave up on that misguided (but intriguing) notion of posting as my might-have-been selves. Something about it was too disconnecting, too discontenting, too much like living in some constructed other time and place. Perhaps it was an excuse not to be here and now, because I am finding this time of transition very unsettling and unhappy. I don't mean that I am despairing. But I am mourning. And I am angry because I know that what needs to happen is not to change anything, but to walk through the sadness until I arrive at a more balanced place again. And I don't want to. But I am. And in the end, in the final, bitter or sweet end, I only want to be me. Only here. Only now. No matter what.

But the dabbling of my blog toe into the waters of maybe and once upon a time showed me something else, something crucial to why I have been fidgety about blogging at all.

One of the most soul-absorbing (and soul-dismantling) aspects of parenthood (for me, motherhood) is how it virus-like invades all pieces of who we are. Working mother, sleeping mother, writing mother, loving mother, angry mother, cleaning mother, cooking mother, mother out-on-the-town, mother fucker, mother drinking "mother's little helper," crashed-like-a-bad-souffle mother, cool mother, hip mother, stay-at-home mother, teaching mother, wow! you don't look like a mother-mother, soccer mother, ballet mother, stage mother, unhinged mother, mother of all mothers-mother.

And now I find that my blog is being written by a mommy-blogger.

I started blogging because Ed was away so much and I was tired of talking to myself. And while some of the things I said to myself had to do with parenting or the children, many of them didn't. The blog was a refuge for me, a piece of identity to cling to that was separate from my motherhood, from my children. I, astonishingly, have whole thoughts that have nothing to do with children or parenting and yet here, I found suddenly that I and my little blog were mommy-boxed. Amazing. Astounding. It snuck up on me. It sneezed on its hand and then shook mine.

I in no way want to suggest that mommy-blogging is anything but an admirable, amusing and important form of the art. I adore parenting blogs. I truly think that we need to share our stories, make sense of our lives and muse upon the political and social implications of this pretty basic of human activities. But just as I do not want my motherhood to define my life, I also do not want it to define my blog, especially as this was created to be a retreat for my adult mind.

So I'm shaking off the chains that bind. I am a mother, sure. No getting away from that or escaping how much that absorbs my thoughts and heart. But especially in the face of this move, in the face of all that is asking me to be loving, supportive, self-sacrificing and patient, I have to try and hear my own voice shouting hoarsely in the wilderness. And then I have to write from that place.

On the Economy of Books

2007-03-16T13:43:00.000-04:00

I've been worrying about money. Moving house is expensive and there are many little things (and not so little things) which suddenly rear up and demand money.

It therefore makes no sense that I should swing into a used bookstore and collect and armful of books in twenty minutes flat. But I love books. I love to buy books, read books, borrow books, appropriate books. (If you lend me a book, better make sure I really really understand that you expect it back. I grow attached to books the same way that ivy grows attached to buildings.) But I also love to lend books, give books, impose books on people. Read this! You will like it!

In fact, part of the armful I collected at the bookstore were various books I thought other people would like -- this would be just right for Miranda. Oh, I bet that Richard would want this. Ed must have this, he's been working so hard. Kate needs this. Then I surveyed the large stack of books I had acquired. The bookstore I was in was not a cheap place and some of these books clearly fell into their more expensive "vintage" category, which means dusty, crumbly hardbacks of uncertain age. I couldn't possibly drop fifty dollars on books on a whim. Sadly, I divested myself of Andrew Marvell's poems, of The Moorchild, of Captain Underpants' Extra Crunch Book o'Fun 2 (hey! we're an eclectic bunch!), of a couple of plays, of a hardcover copy of Good Omens, of Galileo's Daughter. I held onto a collection of Carl Sandburg for Ed (who has been working hard) and a couple of small books for the children. And for me, a book by L.M. Montgomery (who wrote Anne of Green Gables) that I had never heard of: The Story Girl. About a girl who tells stories and lives in Carlisle.

Someone came to look at our house and asked if we were leaving the bookshelves. Well, we mused. Sure, if you would like them. Oh no, she said. We couldn't possibly fill up all those shelves. And as I walked home with my much reduced stash of new used books, I thought of all the boxes of books I have just packed and hidden down the cellar and at my parents' house, just to make the house look less ramshackle and untidy. And I thought about how I'm worried about money. And I wondered where we would be able to put these few books since there is now not a shred of shelf space left. But then I arrived home and Helena curled up on the couch and had her new book read to her four times and Daniel disappeared to his room for an hour with his book and Ed read poems and admitted that he had never known how much he needed Carl Sandburg until now and the sleet poured down and the furnace hummed and I felt richer than Midas. Richer than Conrad Black. And twice as lucky.

Ferrero Roche? Oh Ambassador! You are spoiling us!

2007-03-12T09:03:00.000-04:00

So before graduate student idealism and penury, Ed was a diplomat. And let me tell you, this sort of thing? Happened all the time. You could hardly move for naked diplomats in bondage gear.

Okay, not really.
Well, only on special occasions.
Fine, not that often.

(Once in a while.)

(Actually, never. Scout's honor. Really.)

It was, however, a strange life. And there was plenty of drunkenness. Honestly.

I want to believe.

2007-03-07T19:06:00.000-05:00

I don't really believe in horoscopes but I read Crazy Aunt Pearl and she's always got a good story and she writes horoscopes once a month and then this month she wrote this about my sign for the coming spring.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22 - Dec. 21)
I wrote your forecast last this month, usually I write Cancer or Capricorn last. But Sag has an interesting chart (say that like you mean it and you, too, can be a prognosticator) for March and April. Maybe it's because my own family is coming out to visit that I get a family vibe strong over here, but ya'll will have family either in your hair, on your mind, in in your house for some or part of this time and they will teeter between driving you insane and making you insanely happy to have them. Also, after the solar eclipse on the 18th there's the big ol' spring equinox on the 21st and after this turning point, and it is a turning point not just on the axis of the planet but on the axis of your well-being, you are off and set for a REALLY REALLY good rest of the year. It will be in so many ways what you've been looking toward for all these long months, what you've been hoping for and praying to happen. It's like the calmness you really wanted and wished for your home life will truly, really, madly materialize and you'll get the small, calm center you held out hope for. I feel really excited about Sagittarius in '07. I will even share my Year of The Pig with ya'll.

And let me tell you, I want to believe. I really do.

Non-working mother? Ain't no such thing.

2007-03-04T15:53:00.001-05:00

The only way we can define any mother (or parent) as non-working is to limit the definition of work to a capitalist one: that work really means paid work. No salary, no work. Screw that with a rusty, pointy fishhook.

So here's my plan. I'm going to hire myself as a full-time live-in nanny. I am now getting paid a very reasonable $55,000 a year to work six days a week, twenty hours a day. I do have to work like a mo-fo to afford myself and when I'm done I don't have a dime left over, but I'm worth it. How many people can expect to have a nanny who can order wine in six languages, who has an MA in Medieval Women, who has an employment history which includes a stint teaching English and Drama at Lady Diana's old boarding school in England, and who agreeably does laundry, the grocery shopping, the sweeping and cooking, as well as minding the children. I find myself quite reliable, if a little hot-tempered sometimes, but I'm quite happy with my performance so far and think it's likely that I will have a long and happy working relationship with myself.

Sorted.

This emerged from a sudden rush of irritation towards Linda Hirshman but frankly, there's just no arguing with such divisive, elitist crap and I don't have time for a truly comprehensive, vitriolic yet witty rant. Karrie and Alimum are also writing about it. Go read them.