cafemama ... lovably behind schedule and out-of-date.
I have, of late, been possessed of a brain burbling and steaming, exploding and imploding, constantly whirring, a laptop fan running overtime. I have started many posts that have not been completed. I am dating them when I began, and releasing them as I can. Apologies.
the writer on pinterest . 26 january . 2012
I open my Pinterest page and I see the day's dreams unfold before me.
On some days the dreams are of kale and pulled pork and sausages; on other days the dreams are of cakes frosted to look like impossibly purple, hundred-petaled flowers and architectural white lace; on still others the dreams are of neat color-soaked outfits, collaged artfully with accessories and three- or four-inch heels. The dreams always are of Ryan Gosling (or someone who is blond and sandy-eyed and gorgeously available to the camera's lens. I do not keep up with the object of other women's man dreams). The dreams always are of wide cream-colored bedspreads and vaulted wooden ceilings and Liberty of London florals and bins and drawers and bookshelves and islands, whole castles of organization, altars to organization in every home's every room.
I too pin things; I too like and repin. The clipboards, covered in the giftwrap I find too expensive for gifts, arranged on a wall smoother than any in my house and holding tiny perfect complementary-patterned paper, perhaps this one is handmade paper (another pin I re-pinned); perhaps that one is a watercolor made by a friend. The bills pinned to one clipboard match the pattern beneath them. None of them look anything like my children's art, intricate and large and requiring one's attention do the quirks and idiosyncrasies. How my nine-year-old makes his "d" like a cursive letter, curlicued; how my six-year-old copies letters with perfect precision from models, but often backward, and stabs every snowflake in pencil on the page, every drop of rain. Were I to make these clipboards they would not be pin-able; they would be covered in fair-trade chocolate wrappers and newspaper travel photos; the wall behind them would stay plastered, pockmarked, its long-ago chosen color; the end result would be chaos and it would take me a month or more.
I think, probably, more. I have painted my living room; have been painting it for over a year; it is still not done. It is lovely and the colors make me happy but it takes such a long time, such focus, this ability to put everything else aside for many hours and work with my hands. Not a talent I do not have, surely; but one which I do not have in quantity. I start, and stop, when someone is hungry or the phone rings or I remember that I must write, must wash dishes, must fold the clothes. And then a month goes by. And I again ready the paintbrushes and the painting clothes -- but not today, another one soon -- and a week passes, and another.
If everything has a time and a place, everything under the sun, perhaps the time has not yet come for me to find the place. I am indeed inspired by Pinterest and when I spend an idle 20 minutes there I find a dozen new things to start. The clipboard wall is a good idea; I'll get clipboards; but first I must take down that stereo and first I must finish the loaf of bread and it is time to pick up my son from school and where has the time gone? To dreaming of white-frosted cakes; to thinking of kale and sausage lunches; to looking with lust at those wide, clean floors. I could make that quilt. I could find that desk at the thrift store. I could choose patterns and colors as she did.
While I was re-pinning that craft project, my four-year-old climbed up onto an unsorted but mostly clean pile of clothes -- some which don't fit, others which I'll never wear -- and yanked at a nail's-full of beaded necklaces. He gave me one, calling it a "bracelet," and then yanked and yanked some more until the relay race medals and the Polaroid camera bag and the beautiful pink beads from my grandmother came crashing down into the basket of unsorted but mostly clean clothes. The nail came loose from the wall, leaving a misshapen hole in the plaster, and I set the beads and the camera bag and the medals and the tissue-paper flowers my six-year-old made for me onto the already-heaped dresser and I sigh.
I help him out of the basket and listen, as he wanders off, singing a song he is writing as he sings, of a fierce dragon and grandpa. He takes scrapbooking scissors out of their galvanized metal bin and kicks his dirty feet on my newly-painted wall. And I do not think, after all, we will make paper out of newsprint and lavender and calendula petals.
I start a new board. It is called, "once I finish my book I will..." and instead of filling the board with things I open the file marked "The Fates" and I write, "I appeased the chthonic gods of public schools with enrollment forms and backpacks and $20 for cafeteria lunch," and I decide I'll send another agent query, today.
gratitude in prospect . november 25 . 2011
It is Friday for history lessons; it is Saturday for gratitude.
Traditions, what are they? How do they miss me so? Sunk in my impulsivity, bound with convention, missing a sequence, longing for order, I spend Thanksgiving day paddling pumpkin through a sieve and chopping sage and thyme beautifully. The turkey goes into the oven at 4; I mash potatoes at 8. I cannot pull Everett away from Minecraft, and Monroe sits on the table eating turkey with his fingers. It is not the Thanksgiving dinner I'd envisioned.
The turkey -- a Parisian recipe, greatly modified but true to mode and style, stuffed with pork and liver and cream -- is delicious, enormous, moist. I have achieved a pinnacle here, though who will know? Not these boys, who simply say that it is delicious and have neither frame of reference nor delicacy of discernment to tell. They eat it, if they eat it, and gratefully eat leftovers too. The stuffing, celeriac and sweet onion and mushroom and carefully-crumbed baguette -- it's something else, it's rare and wild, and only I eat it. The gravy is glossy and smooth. The cranberry sauce, spiked with green walnut liqueur, spiced with vanilla and nutmeg, sparked with Palestine sweet limes, shows balance, sweetness, bitter. A masterpiece.
They are biking in circles around the house, through the living room and dining room and kitchen, tight corners and half-circles and screeches and glee, when I stop them to show the map. "This is India," I say, "where Columbus thought he was."
"They had a rough winter," I say, "they didn't have enough to eat."
"Later," I say, "ironically, the Pilgrims took all their land away."
"We wouldn't celebrate it regularly for 200 years."
More than a sentence is what I will leave, then; more like Sarah Josepha Hale, I will doggedly and redundantly issue my speeches, pretty and impassioned too. As they fall asleep, instead of Harry Potter Four I give them gratitude. "For Clio?" I ask Monroe. "Is he what you're thankful for?"
"Yes: I am glad I haven't lost Clio. He's my stuffed animal pet."
It is a beautiful Black Friday and I do not shop. Instead, I wash dishes and make large messy piles of papers into smaller, neater, more necessary ones. I arrange dry leaves and pine boughs into a centerpiece; I clean the kitchen stove. I take deep breaths and when they make me cough I still fold the laundry and tell myself that it is not true that I hate laundry, and I cough and cough until I gag. When I carry the neatly folded clothes and towels and sheets upstairs I am thrilled and thankful for my large-capacity washer and my soft organic towels and my wool socks and my dry basement and my refrigerator full of delicious leftovers. I am grateful for the future, when I will have finished the organizing of papers and had a ceiling put up in the kitchen and sanded and refinished my splintery fir floors and ridded my bedroom of its hoary, choking horsehair insulation and put up new walls and a closet and found a smooth platform bed that does not have little nails sticking out of it to snag my wool socks and pierce the elbows of jumping-then-falling children. I am grateful for what I have and I am grateful in prospect.
That year, when I have finished the bedroom and filed my papers and polished the floors and put in new kitchen cabinets, I will invite everyone over to Thanksgiving dinner, I will put the turkey in the oven before noon, I will have the boys make paper crafts and I will sit with a tired smile on my face at the dining table and we will say, all one at a time and without screaming or bike-riding, what we are grateful for, and it will be something to be thankful for, indeed.
the ask . october 21 . 2011
To be an army wife is to always be on the ask.
Oh, we have plenty already, we mothers of many small children. Take a six-year-old: on any given Thursday, he may be bringing home a fundraising packet, a school photo order form, a notification of a field trip or lice outbreak. Who knows? It's time for sales, then: raise funds, order photos, sweep hair. For the nine-year-old, asks both simpler and more complex, ask the prescriber for a refill, ask the desk for an appointment, ask the doctor for a referral, ask the babysitter to be here early (or late), ask the school district, "may I please have enrollment?"
No, I may not. Stuck between a rock (home schooling) and a hard place (the inevitable perfect storm of stressors in a behavioral classroom), stuck, I fear, by my bold and intemperate criticism of the school district. Yes, I'd have enrollment, had I not sallied forth with that piece in Oregon Humanities.
Say you have a boy who wakes up in the middle of the night crying. Loud sobs, from quiet breathing sounds to loud wracking sobs in no seconds flat. Say you have two of those, one all the way to nine years old and he understands jokes you wouldn't have understood at 15. He's smart as cookies and whips and he is the sharpest knife in most drawers and he lashes out and swears a blue streak when he thinks he's lost a friend and he cries in the middle of the night. Say you call a school at the end of August with half a hope: that this boy can go to school and do well for once. No, half is far too much; your hope is in the single-digits, percentage-wise. 7%, we'll say. We're good at assumptions.
He can't go back to school, not yet. A few phone calls trickle in but you are always on the ask and you don't call and call and call because it's hard for you, this asking. He'll go to Buckman, you think in mid-September. He'll go to Ockley Green? You ask, perplexed (it's eight miles away, you have no car, and yes there is transportation but -- you picked him up one day out of five in the last year and the one before) in the middle of October.
Time goes on, and you think about your rights to a public school education and somehow suspect that very little good is visited on the child of the mother who marches around town demanding her rights. You walk into his old neighborhood school every day without him and see his old classmates and wonder if he could -- if you could -- ever be a normal ordinary kid with a little brother in first grade and a bunch of friends he's known since he was five, and a mom who doesn't shake, spurt tears, with the very idea of getting involved. She has, you have, we have been down that road before. All those missed PTA opportunities litter your past like gloves on a marathon course. Too much, once you got going, more than you could handle.
What a mother needs is a handler. A doula, all the time. A second-in-command. Someone who can listen to her needs and do some of the asking, or even step in now and again. Call the school; show up out of the misty morning offering to watch the kids while she runs; fold a lick of laundry just because. Take a kid under her wing, say; off to some activity I'll never sign him up for on my own. Swimming lessons. The climbing gym. Karate.
I have never been good at asking for things, at calling phone numbers, at running errands all day Saturday, at inviting people over. I am an "E" with an "I's" anxiety, happy to share my passions to crowds, to millions! but never one for walking up to someone, looking her in the eye and saying, "this is what I need, now... give." Give childcare, give a ride to Vancouver, give chicken feeding and cat-letting-out, give laundry folding, give rights and responsibilities. I build up to it like a 5K race, all jogging and setting deadlines and yoga and high-knees, and I'm really going to do it at 1:20 on the nose, and the time passes and I know I've missed the start again. Do it again.
Tomorrow, again, I'll be on the ask -- the pleas, please, for filling of forms and relaxing of consequences and forgiving of faults. For now, I sit, letting the "i" roll into introspection once more. I don't have to ask this: come, read, fill your heart up, empty it out.
Do it again.
a piece of publication . october 15 . 2011
My work, in a book, is no less thrilling because it is not all mine. It is enough mine.
When I announced I had been named the winner of the 2011 Water~Stone Review Judith Kitchen Creative Nonfiction Prize, I had no idea how long it would seem between such announcement and the publication. I had equally little idea how it would feel to open a fat, lovely journal full of amazing work by other writers I admire and am just discovering, and see my name there, and there, and there again. (And I even saw the proofs of my portion.)
This Water~Stone Review is truly a gem. It is lovingly and carefully curated, and the editing process has been an unusual joy; I felt that my work was being handled not just with care, but with love and deep affection. It is only now that I see the treatment was similar with all these works. I do hope you'll buy one; you can get a copy, here.
good-bye, again . september 24 . 2011
I am, in a word, exhausted.
The leaving at first is a rush and then is sad and then is a focused whirl. Jonathan has left, again, headed toward a sandy, hot base on the Gulf of Persia, where he will drive faster than fast, past luxury cars and camels and discarded, twisted Toyotas and Mercedes. Kuwait.
Truman and I go with him to Atlanta, flying thousands of miles in the space of a few days, there and back, sitting in hotel conference rooms and industrial-carpeted barbecue joints and a fountain wall in Centennial Park and a private booth in a restaurant with two majors in the Army Reserves (Oklahoma, New York) and a sergeant (mine).
When we return I gather the boys one by one, airport, aunt Abby's house, we usher one another into this home now stark and emptied. It is a strange thing to leave one's house, is it not? To stand before your things and stare at them in a panic and think, "all this, without me, until it's summer again?" To shut the door on your own and count on your fingers, four birthdays and one anniversary and Halloween and Thanksgiving and Christmas and Easter, the others too, first PTA meeting and last day of school and the day we get our tax return and, surprise! snow days! -- you are of course out of fingers. There is too much you will miss, it will have to come and go without you, petals gradually falling from the sunflowers until the desiccated heads are blind, seedless; grapes ripening and then being harvested and, some, wrinkling on the vine, until the leaves turn yellow and fall, a carpet of summer's shelter; the rains coming, soaking the sidewalk, soaking the stairsteps, soaking the maple leaves, soaking the as-yet-unstained deck, soaking the dirt. Until it is spring again, and the rains still come but the buds poke out from the maple branches; the sunflowers sprout again, bravely, false leaves wide open like a yoga pose; the nubs of grape leaves sprout on the branches, first brown, then pinkest, then green; weeds and calendula and borage again, in a riot, mint rampaging over everything and flowering into exuberant green-purple, bees everywhere, bees everywhere, it all pushing and creeping and shooting and flowering into the verdant sky. There will be hot days ahead, and cold, and hot again, before the homecoming. How does one do this?
He does, and in his absence I gather my boys for movies and popcorn on the first night and a quiet day of business before the second. I wake up on the Sunday without him and I begin to put it away, the shaving cream and his razor and soap, I change the toothbrush system and re-arrange the spices on the shelf next to the stove and I push his favorite sauces into the back. I do not put the garbage out; I put laundry in the wash; I fold his t-shirts and shorts carefully, and put them all away. In his absence I begin my un-doing, my un-winding, and then again I will wind up, I will do all (that I can), I will walk through and through and through this house until it becomes a tool for me, until it does the work of this life without whine or stumble.
With each leaving there is a holding of breath, and a letting it go. It pulls out slowly, emptying the chest, emptying the belly, and when the loneliness and loss hits you it is a surprise because it was so slow and didn't I mean for that to be cleansing? A purge does not have to succeed a binge; an emptiness does not have to be hollow. The breath comes in again, and in time, the stomach will fill without bile. But the loneliness will return, a punch, a slap, a spin around in the basement while barefoot and laden with clean things.
And what is there to do but to fold and put away? We create ritual out of loss, we create busyness out of absence, we are loud to fill the silence and quiet to calm our racing hearts. We have what we need; we find a rhythm that works, again, we pound out the drumbeat of this family with a discordant echo. Goodbye, again, until it is, again, hello.
my day . september 11 . 2011
I spend the day listening to records of happiness and pain; I spend the day in tears.
But what claim do I have to this day? Here is where I was on September 11, 2001, when the plane hit the first tower: asleep, in the spare room in the condo in Reston I shared with my ex-boyfriend. I had picked him up from the Washington, D.C. Union Station 'round midnight September 10th; I was already half-packed, planning to drive across the U.S., away from him and my East Coast life, in 10 days more.
He called me into the living room, where the television coverage was still confused by this. Accident, yes? Accident: no. With our laptops and television we tensely followed the news for hours, wondering about our business school classmates and friends in the city. Wondering about my ex-colleagues, at Merrill Lynch, only an overstreet walkway from the WTC towers. Wondering about what if -- what if I was still working for Merrill, what if I was coming into the subway stop under the trade centers a little after 9 a.m. as I used to, what if I was stopping at my favorite bakery there in the basement for an extraordinarily sweet pastry and a giant paper cup of coffee. And what of the baristas there? What of the newsstand operator, the sales ladies at the Gap? What of...
We didn't know anything real, for days. Instead I thought to myself that morning, as the plane hit the second tower, as the horrible horrible things happened next -- the jumping people, the goodbye phone calls from the top floors, the plane going down in Pennsylvania, the ways I come to tears still -- "I will never have a birthday again." But what thought is this? Selfish, or sacrificial? Did I give it up willingly; did I begrudge it? I think I gave it without rancor; somehow, besides this small loss, the shared tragedy we all felt, I was safe.
No one I knew died. I would not even, in the 10 years to come, know anyone who lost anyone, but over the radio airwaves; the radio to which I still listen each September 11. I would think the pain would lessen over the years, but it has not; I would, after all, celebrate my birthday, but never with abandon, with joy. How could I claim this -- even this listing connection? -- I do not know the pain of this day. I did not sit in the street a few blocks away, watching my community disintegrate, feeling the ash of cubicles and file cabinets and humans over my face. I did not get a phone call from the 104th floor, or from anywhere in Manhattan at all. No: four days later, I drove toward New York in my fancy car, I watched the towers smoke, I could not tear my eyes away so I drove slowly through the city toward Liz' home on Long Island, where we were -- somberly -- celebrating her wedding shower.
Life goes on; life does not go on. The worst thing for me, the one I still remember as desperately as I did then was the stories about the cars left in train station parking lots. Were their owners still alive? the question went, with that downy lofting sense of not knowing we all had in those days. What could we know? I never heard an answer. Now, all victims have been identified, labeled, quantified, compensated, their names entered into an algorithm and carved into stone and spoken aloud all over the world, year after year, with voices wavering through tears and strength and pride.
There is nothing for me to rub, but my eyes; there is no monument for me; nor should there be. I celebrate my birth each year with tears but I no longer mourn for that. I mourn for life lost, and not just theirs, those 2,977 victims, but also my imagined life, my self in that pin-striped suit catching the E train, my high-heeled shoes on the concrete floor, my slow ride up the escalator, my sip of coffee, my unheralded ordinary part of that city, which I will never regain.
of lice and zen . august 16 . 2011
I dreaded this for years. Dreaded the discovery of lice in my boys' hair, dreaded the laundry and the shampooing and the combing and the panic of it all. Dreaded the endlessness, dreaded keeping them home from school, dreaded the discomfort, dreaded my shame.
When it happened, I flooded with all the dread, my mind gasping among sheets and pillows and special shampoos. I googled lice and I blogged lice and I read horror stories: weekly nit-pickings for a foster child, desperate souls who'd tried everything before the silver bullet (two bottles of original flavor Listerine, or olive oil and a shower cap, or Cetaphil lathered, blow-dried and left overnight, or Lice MD and a haircut), maternal exhaustion. When I found lice I did not just find a few but an infestation, creeping and crawling and egg-laying all over my eldest son's head and (as I'd learn soon) over the rest of the family, too.
Of course there was discomfort; for days and even weeks, the scratching at the back of the head was so normal I forgot -- until met with another, lice-averse human -- that I should be ashamed. Of course there was laundry; daily strippings and hot-water washes until I became weary of such things, out of laundry soap, disgusted with my energy use. But I was surprised by the zen of the process.
After all my research and my mouthwash-scented dousing, I discovered only one best practice: a stool and a comb and a head before me. One boy at a time through the morning, through the middle of the day, I sat near their chair or together with them on the couch and, hair by hair, gently lifted and combed and pulled out lice and their eggs. I would discover clusters, at the base of the neck or the back of the head or over ears, and I would exclaim, and Everett would say, "oh, you should write about that!" to share my knowledge, or Monroe would wake up in the night itching and crying and would calm when he could find his words and ask for me to "get the hice out" of his hair.
And there I would sit, in the day or the late-night, with a child's head in my lap or against my shoulder, talking quietly and grooming and only, only listening and ministering to that one little boy. And I remembered my sisters, my friends; I remembered brushing and braiding hair, the camaraderie and the care, the quiet times during which the stillness was broken only by reminders to keep one's head still, to lift chins, to turn cheeks. My juvenile primates and I were engaging in a ritual rarely entered into between mother and son; in many ways, I know my boys need this closeness, this ritualism, this quiet communion of hands and hair.
And so I let out my breath of shame and breathed in sweet closeness. I let my shoulders fall, fall, fall; breathed out concern and, slowly, took in a breath of competence. I know what to do: seek out, find, pick, destroy. Make clear these boys' scalps. Give time in abundance in the quietest, the simplest of conversations. Open my eyes and ears; listen, see, groom, take care.
a success . july 29 . 2011
I was voted 'Most Likely to Succeed' in high school. Here we are, me and Jeremy Silver, photographed unflatteringly and with the flag a suggestion success might somehow relate to patriotism.
By the ten-year reunion, it was clear to both of us that elected office was not our planned path to success. At the time, I was transitioning out of job and relationship, and could tell people what I did -- Vice President of Planning & Analysis at a dotcom startup -- with conviction in its trappings of success but not its fact. The dotcom was bleeding money and I was giving up my worthless stock options for... what?
The next ten years were the what? and it is a question I still am asking. Though I have had fancy job titles and acceptable salaries since 2001, I have not had a job which fulfilled me to the toes, wrapping me up in its pinstriped cloak and whisking me away to the twirling heights of legitimacy. Much to the contrary, I have stormed quietly away from salaried work, preferring over the past few years to freelance in a comfortable relationship with a former employer, Aol, writing long and passionately frugal or vividly contrarian posts on blogs I helped launch into being. Success? Yes, I had successes, but not so much success. I'd get into a national newspaper or appear on TV; I'd get a million pageviews for a post and think smugly, they emailed my post to the president! -- I'd get an agent or a publication in a magazine; then I'd lose an agent, but gain a prestigious award.
I would not finish the book. I would not sow the whole garden; I would not find my zen organization in the house; I would not harvest every grape, I would not complete every thought, I would not serve every meal on time, I would stop going to church (too hard!); I would pull my oldest out of school (impossible); I would promise things and not deliver them, always (who can?). I would start things until the unfinished piled up in all textures and realities, stacks of papers and baskets of knitting and folders of .txt files and buckets of seeds.
Aol would buy the Huffington Post. Do not care about this; know only that it was a rout, a hectoring, a bloodletting. Hundreds were fired immediately; many more were told in cheery emails, "this note confirms the end of your engagement for content services." I did not get this note for many months -- until my 20th-year reunion was almost upon me, until the blog property I founded, itself, was being shut down. I was sent this note by someone I helped hire. It has happy primary-colored Aol buddies in the signature line.
deja biked . july 16 . 2011
You know how this goes. I've done this before.
First, it is my son's ninth birthday. It is not the birthday it should be. He hurt his foot during one of his feats of balance and adventure, falling off the fence. "I'm ok, I'm ok," he'd say every morning, and then by afternoon it hurts. He won't stay off it. "I'm crippled," he says, groaning, by evening. We plan to have a party, but when we learn all his favorite friends will be out of town for this very weekend, we decide to postpone his party until a week after his birthday. Instead: Pok Pok.
There is nothing better than Pok Pok, but Everett is restless and hurt and unimpressed with the quantity of dinner guests: his grandparents, his brothers, mama, and dad -- who is late. Who decides he must finish power washing the sidewalk so that grandpa can take the gas-powered Thing back home. We eat shrimp chips with peanut sauce; we eat muu sateh and I order a whole fish even though it is beyond extravagant and probably not local. We look at the eye, giggling. As mother of a birthday boy, this is not how I am, usually -- I do it myself, I pick hot dogs made in my neighborhood and last year, I even made graham crackers with local kamut flour and honey for fair-trade dark chocolate 'smores. I am proud that my children and their friends love my homemade cupcakes, even though I use almost all whole-grain flour and limit the sugar to a half-cup per birthday boy. I am feeling, part grieved, part relieved; some birthdays devolve into near-tears as I rush to finish my baking while my husband points out, again, that I am late and that I am always late and that this is "how I role."
Instead of birthday cake, the boys order dessert from Oregon Ice Works. Truman, holding out for maple bacon ice cream from Fifty Licks, gets an indulgent ride home from grandma and grandpa, who are interested, really, to see this strange treat.
Second, we bike homeward. The rest of us, Monroe and Everett on my bike and Jonathan sprinting ahead, waiting. I'm slow. The safe route, the one with the very least hills that I have carefully cultivated over years pulling children and groceries and bathroom tiles toward home, takes us across Powell at a crosswalk. We walk our bikes or go pedestrian-pace, so it's allowed; if we didn't cross here, we'd have to navigate sharp hills or narrow sidewalks past busy bus stops or even more dangerous fare. This is the best way.
It is also past the drive-through Starbucks there. It was once a Coffee People, and though I love local and want to support such things, Starbucks is an improvement. You think Starbucks coffee is burnt? At least, it is intended as such (Howard Schultz calls it, snooty and assured, "Full City Roast"; I call it "yuck"). Coffee People's lattes were just made badly. When I used to drive and used to eat what my family calls "regular" sugar and when I first was pregnant, I would go through this drive-through for coffee banana milkshakes. It is what Everett is made of.
I treat my children, once in a while; on their birthdays, I treat them more. They love Starbucks, and though we talk about how I'd rather (really) make them treats myself, or have them eat cherries out of the colander and raspberries off our bushes, I let them go to Starbucks once a week for good behavior. There used to be a better choice in our neighborhood, a coffee shop with cookies made by a sweet woman who I would see, at People's, buying flour and oats and chocolate chips, with banana bread, with seasonal hand pies. Now: there is nothing but Starbucks on every side.
At home, I drink coffee that is direct trade, from Stumptown or Trailhead, I push a French press potful each morning, I compost my grounds by dumping them around my highly caffeinated garlic and raspberries and strawberries. We all appreciate this. At Starbucks? I rarely buy anything; I'm here for my kids, whose treats at home never include soda or juice or candy or Doritos. Not if I'm buying.
Ahhh. There's the rub. Have you, my dear reader, ever been a co-parent? Have you ever -- I'm curious now -- have you ever parented a bundle of difficult children, whose loves and angers and unique unusualities bedeviled your calm smug sense of preparedness for this parenting job? Is it possible you're also, reader, a spouse of an Army man, one who (from time to time, or for the first time, just now) goes, then returns, from a very long time away? Used to meals at regular times served by those who are paid for such promptness, flats of diet soda in his bunkplace fridge, unfettered access to vending machines and junk-food-laden marts of military sorts, he may come home willing and able to indulge his children in ways you find abhorrent. Eager to recycle again, he has (sadly) no patience for your intensive but slow DIY meal plan, your compost heap, your habit of feeding leftovers to chickens, your not-very-compromising snack regime.
Third, we stop at Starbucks.
the rules of re-entry . may 22 . 2011
They give you restrictions; they give you rules.
Before a soldier from any branch of military can be released from active duty, he must undergo a series of counseling sessions and briefings and tests, some of which are meant to preserve the physical and emotional health of the soldier and keep him deployable for future tours of duty. There is a TB test. A thorough dental cleaning and examination. A legal briefing, a jobs briefing, a finance briefing, a battery of emotional tests. PowerPoint is heavily overused and the rooms stink with anxiety and many months of desert sweat.
Standing alone in its paired imprecision and regimentation -- never appropriate in all circumstances, carefully detailed and quantified, impossible to either enforce or drill for: the family re-entry briefing. Soldiers are given limits, expectations, and rules.
In the keeping is the homecoming. In the space before and after the rules, the re-entry.
Remember, you are a guest in your spouse's house. He walks in the door at 11:30 p.m. on this Thursday, jarred with exhaustion and relief. I have just taken the asparagus out of the oven, I have just reached in the fridge for organic mayonnaise, I am ready to slice blue cheese and to spread it on a plate as he no doubt wishes. A guest in my house, he kisses me and hugs me and smiles hello at his oldest son, waiting, rubbing eyes, for daddy. A guest in my house, he puts his things away in the basement and says goodbye to his friend who has given him a ride from the airport and washes his hands and takes off his boots. A guest in my house, he turns on the television.
I am hungry, ravenous really, having spent the past several hours cleaning so a guest would feel welcome. I have spent time moving and scrubbing and putting the younger boys to bed; cleaning and snapping the ends off asparagus spears and sprinkling things with Portuguese sea salt and drizzling organic California olive oil in a recycled green glass bottle. "I'm so happy to recycle again!" he says. "I'm so happy to be home!" Happy to be home, he buzzes with excitement, he cannot eat, he cannot sleep, he sees what I have done: the bathroom in progress of its major renovation that should have taken three weeks, but has taken more. His clothes, taken downstairs to save from the construction dust. The toaster oven, stored away in the basement. The filing project, never quite finished. He does not say anything, not this night. I eat and he does not, I sit on the neat and orderly couch watching a show we both like and he whirs around, up and down the stairs and on the phone and on Facebook and we stay up very late because, it is after all a celebration of this guest's arrival in our humble home after oh-so-long.
Do not make any demands on your children or enforce rules for 72 hours. He tells me this again and again when he arrives. No demands, no rules. He tells me this in the morning when I awake, I have given Truman the day off school but I must notify the bus driver and I must get breakfast for the boys and I must try to keep them quiet for as long as possible so that he can sleep but of course I fail and he wakes up at 9 a.m. and he begins to wash the dishes. "Don't do that!" I say, meaning to keep this, this maintenance of the cleanliness I have so frantically established in a rush, wanting to be a good military wife, knowing that truly I am not. He pours the purple highly-scented brand name dishwashing liquid that his sister bought all over the dishes and I cringe. I push him, gently, out of the way; he does not want the cereal I have bought for him or the eggs I have gathered for him or the yogurt I have bought for the boys because they both love it and he goes out to the convenience store for food.
Everett has been home-schooled for the past three months and it is really, if you want to be frank about it, un-schooling and I did this knowing that Jonathan would not ever be entirely o.k. with it, if he was ever even a little o.k. with it, and knowing that there was no other way. At 10 on this first morning home he asks me about Everett's lessons and when I laugh it off he asks me again at 10:15 and when I say, "there are no lessons, really," at 10:30 he demands an answer in a voice that is not modulated and is rather demanding, really. There are no lessons. Really, there are, but not with paper or pencil or quizzes. When he is on the back of my bike I teach him about satire (when we are reading satirical literature or he is watching Mad TV) or schadenfreude (when he is taking undue pleasure in the misfortunes of others) or, if he is bored, I make him add up the digits in license plates or figure out story problems in his head. On another day, he makes a wall with his french fries at Burgerville and we are making jokes about it so I teach him about the Berlin Wall. I show him how Reagan said, "tear down that wall!" and he and his friend nod sagely when I remind them of Hitler and explain communism in a soundbite. No, there are no lessons.
Integrate yourself into your spouse's life; respect existing schedules and commitments. I tell him, when he is in Georgia getting ready to receive his travel itinerary; I tell him, in Atlanta at the airport; I tell him, the morning after he arrives that I have promised this 5,000-word report on Monday and that, I must, I am sorry, work so very hard on it after I have organized a party for him and after I have helped him unpack his treasures and after the bed has been made and re-made and re-made three times. This will be my Sunday, my Monday: I will work and work and work, because I am like that. I can do things at the last minute, and they can be the best of all possible things. He says, "of course" and "I will support you in whatever you need," and "it will be different, I'm here for you."
On Sunday, he does not like my rules about what the boys should watch on television and he does not think he should, yet, be left responsible for little boys and he does not know if they will suddenly run out into the street (364 days without a boy in the street, I think to myself, not even chasing an overthrown ball -- they cried, they came to me for rescue -- ), and I have not properly prepared the food at the proper times and I walk, boys and me, to Starbucks together instead of going it alone and I am (I can admit this) bitter, and I have not yet cleaned out the fridge and this is becoming an enormous point of contention, and there is no room in my head to think and I cast about my brain wondering, 'where do I find my space,' it is not here.
I am two days late with my project; I rip time out of its family moorings and deliver, still; the bathroom project creeps and slows; I will spend a weekend cleaning the refrigerator and the closet, I will not make a lesson plan, I will keep sweeping madly, tearfully, throat closing with sickness, at the corners of my brain, making room, there has been a re-entry into my space and no one delivered to me a PowerPoint, no one briefed me with the regulations, I have lost the manual to my equilibrium and I am scrubbing, still, on hands and knees, if I only swipe madly enough I am sure I will find it, somewhere.
birthday . april 28. 2011
The day Truman came into the world was one full of a constant gray rain. These are the days I love most in spring in Portland when I am very, very pregnant (and many other times, besides); what is there to do, after all, but go inside and focus everything inward, wait, perhaps, or push and yowl and pull and in the end needs slice and stitch and slowly slowly heal: there, a baby, made in the rain.
Of course I knew, but Jonathan forgot until the next day that it was his own birthday, too. Later we would look at them in admiration of the match, their dark hair and dark eyes a marked difference from Everett and I (blondish, eyes more green, freckles coming into their own, however slowly, contrary to their father's resolutely flaxen-skinned biology). Truman would at one point claim his father's middle name as his own, instead of the "Thomas" we gave him. "Truman David Hanson," he'd say. His father's boy, his father's decades-removed twin.
With two birthdays on one day, I should do better. A big party with invitations mailed and hot dogs a-sizzle and guests coming at all hours. But it is this inward time for me, I do not want to spring wide my doors and play expansive hostess; I want to sit on a birthing ball before the window in the cloud-founded dark of day, staring just past the rain into myself. I want the house swept clean, of people, too; I want only the sound of our two hearts, one slow, one buhbipbuhbipbuhbipbuhbip, my breath shallow in my throat before I remember, and again breathe deep as the rain is steady. I can bring this boy into the world.
But I want the world serene, quiet as the buses swishing-sighing by on splashing streets, I want perhaps a timid pile of presents, wrapped in greys and blues, eyes wide and room too dark for any but the magical photograph, that one from the pile of a dozen that sees into my wise small boy's dark eyes.
He has a joke. "Why did the newborn cross the road?" Why indeed, I ask. "Because it wanted too!" he cries, and I knit my eyebrows into his hilarity and wonder, why, how? My logic is no match for his; he believes in everything at once and will be both a black ninja, and a mage.
Birthday come, he moves everywhere in all directions, he dances to the door, he knows it's a special day. A day that dawned with rain-plashing car wheels earlier than any of us were full awake, then cleared and brightened and beamed just as the happy boy. It wakes us all, and I will welcome friends and family, I will buy those grey-wrapped gifts, I will cook chili and hot dogs and believe in magic and the hilarity of road-crossing babies (who do, I hope, look both ways). And before we head homeward from his kindergarten classroom celebration -- where he, wound up and fizzled with excitement, cannot decide whom to pick for his birthday book presentation, and gives up with a rollick -- it rains, and rains, and rains.
We come home cold, turn up the heat and change our clothes, we celebrate cozied up with friends who do not hurry home in the chill April drizzle. "Was it the best birthday, ever?" I ask as I put him to bed. "Yeeee-eesss!" he thrills, still wobbling with joy.
Dishes left in sink, cake crumbs scattered everywhere, wrapping paper underfoot, I fall to bed, joy-wobbled, too.
winning the prize . april 25 . 2011
Much have I spent these days, travell'ng through the realms of memory and gold. I have pursued with some wild surmise old colleagues and loves both (and, indeed, some both in one).
On first looking upon the cloudless bio of an old long-distant friend, I am struck with the richness of it all. I have, yes, travell'd in these realms, and I know the difference in wealth and import between principal and partner, managing and plain; I know without wild conjecture that a string of founderships of richly-titled firms, evocative of stone heroes and Parthenonic piles, means salaries in the mid-six-figures. These, then, are the fates of my old office-mates, my fellow graduates, my long-lost but not all mourned past loves. But for the grace of God and the bards, there goeth I.
There might I be: standing in $300 high heels and charcoal gabardine suit, smiling confidently at the camera as my paragraph to the right read "Wachovia" and "Merrill Lynch" and such, "Ms. Gilbert has fifteen years of experience in leveraged finance and mergers and all the rest."
But I am not. I sit before you, thrift-store Sporthill sweatshirt and bare feet, nine-some years of lifework, now, in parenting these boys; well-versed in the workings of my red thesaurus and its fast friend, the identically-clad French presspot. I smell of coffee from the peaks of Darien; a new poem swims into my ken.
And I am here before you breathing the pure serene, the heady air I never knew before now, despite my travels and travails and resume. I have received a letter: "I'm delighted to inform you that your essay 'Veteran's Day' has been selected by our judge as winner of the 2011 Water~Stone Review Judith Kitchen Creative Nonfiction Prize." Poe Ballantine, a man whose work I have now read, consumed, with gratitude and love, said this about my essay: "'Veteran's Day' is the easy winner, lyrical and powerful, worthy of publication in any magazine. A (sad) pleasure to read."
Have I yet begun to see? This is the life I've chosen; I must move back to Coleridge, now, and discern that this is not a charitable benefactress's path. "And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething, / A mighty fountain momently was forced: / Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst / Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail..." Want I to swim the sacred river? I want. And without the seething turmoil, the fragments of my young investment banking dreams hailing down around me, I cannot reach that sunny dome, those caves of ice!
This is my honeydew, my paradisiacal milk: I won first prize in the first essay contest I entered. I am wooed and amazed and beholden. Thank you, Poe, and thank you all who read me here: my piece will be published in October, and I will keep writing.
My prose playlist: John Keats 'On First Looking into Chapman's Homer.' And the writer would like to thank the Write Club, of which she cannot speak but proves weekly that workshopping can be full of life and meaning and utterly collaborative; and of course, Mara, who was and is her sister-in-motherhood.
peek into the past . of daily apples and pinecones . november 18 . 2008
joy in the midst of the dailiness of life
