http://www.cafemama.com sarah gilbert lives here, and discusses her inconvenient life as a mama, writing, cooking, running, knitting, sewing, biking, birthing, reading, or just thinking Sun, 01 Nov 2009 15:53:00 GMT en-us http://www.cafemama.com/2012/may/03_dream_of_myself.html http://www.cafemama.com/2012/may/03_dream_of_myself.html Fri, 04 May 2012 19:14:00 PDT The longer I live the more I mistrust theatricality, the false glamor cast by performance, the more I know its poverty beside the truths we are salvaging from the splitting-open of our lives." Adrienne Rich said that, not I, but I say that too, and more. ...trying to sightread what our fingers can't keep up with, learn by heart what we can't even read. And yet it is this we were born to. We are born to this, yes. We are born to ourselves, this uniqueness that defies expectation, that bursts out of a family fully-formed, who knows itself at four-almost-five. We are born to become invested with what our families gave us -- brains, love, our hair-color and eyes, birth order, poor or overcome with money, sidewalks or elegant drives or dirt, too much or not enough responsibility -- but also the human every-ness of us. We are born to yearn for one another. To seek friends, friendships, great and terrible loves. When I was a child, I thought as a child but also I thought as I do now and it is stunning to look at my son, brown eyes, hair fine and rock-star wild like mine, jumping off everything without fear and adding numbers, four-almost-five. Monroe. Utterly unlike anyone and all of me. And I look at him as I read out loud what I wrote at 16, this: "I remember the day now; it was late in the summer, and I was nearing first grade. [Surely! I meant kindergarten!] I pictured the years looming ahead of me. I only wished to be able to play happily, morning, noon and night, for the rest of my life. To be four forever would be true ecstasy... I would go to school in the fall, I would grow up, I would never be able to play completely obligation-free, for the rest of my life." Did I know then (at 16 or at four-almost-five) what life would be like, now, that I would have all that but something more, a deep and abiding love for all that I carry responsibility for? Did I know then that I would have those same dreams I had then, lost homework, missed deadlines, tests overslept-for? No. I got to my tests on time, or near enough, all the way through business school; I did so well I skipped on the way home from finding out my grades (except when I did not, but that was for a great and terrible love, and does not count. I forgive myself). I have lived through this. But more I have lived up to this; I have embraced this, I have done all the things I said I would in my never-given Valedictorian speech. Have I? (This is a valid question I must ask myself every time I read those stirring -- but unstirred -- closing lines.) Yes! I have risked things and I have looked into each day's responsibility and made peace with it, found my very home in it. Oh surely: this is not what I would have expected, at four, at six, at 15, at all the ages up to almost now. This is in some ways far below but in all the important ways far beyond my wildest dreams. In the end I have not found my truth in the performance; like Rich, I found my truth in my truth, in the raw, the revealing, the splitting-open. Peel back my skin, rip out my throat -- I have said this, I mean it. See inside. This is where artifice withers. This is where the pulse beats and I love the rhythm more than I love the look of it, of me, of anything. Let go! The false glamor, any glamor. You will see the paint peeling along with my skin; you will see the dirt in my callouses, the growl of my imperfect angry striving self. I spill out. I spit up. I shout. I no longer look to -- as I wrote in my journal then -- the approving words of the "harsh but fair" journalism teacher (whose fairness I long ago discarded as fiction). I look to other things. I look to you. And you, you have said enough. http://www.cafemama.com/2012/apr/20_something_monthly.html http://www.cafemama.com/2012/apr/20_something_monthly.html Fri, 20 Apr 2012 23:01:00 PDT That it comes every month, again, is a cheat; possibility and opportunity and all! Missed! Messy! It is burning, pulling, ripping into my insides, yanking handfuls out, stripping that home away while he is away from home. Perhaps this is too -- you know how they say it -- "visceral." It is indeed. The very stuff of veins and blood and surfacing, baring, yielding. Can I write about this and keep you (even you, you male, you young, you not-yet-a-mother readers) driven, bitten, reading on? I could, you know: I could have another child, or several. It is not just my biology saying so. I thought it; I wanted it; I want it still. "My baby sister," says Monroe, as if this child has been conjured already, conceived, expected soon. Any day now. We all do: want her, or him, a small tiny wresting thing, with the smells of me and milk and pain and the infinite tiny future. More to love and more to be loved by. More to care for, more to hold me back, more to see through to -- somewhere -- toddling, adding four and five, screaming in brother-fights, calling me angry names or "a really frequent runner," making me cry with pride, adulthood, further even. I want it all. But with a husband gone the something monthly goes on, useless and stinking and selfish-making, in the way and all over, pulling my life to the curb and forcing me to walk the rest of the way. I do not even take my middle son to school Friday, I am sick with it, I have no drive or tackle or completion. I wallow. Unfair or not, wanted or not, of any use to any of us -- not! surely not! -- possible to endure in this house of boys and no man, in this wartime family in a time of tentative peace, proof I missed my window of conception again, I circle once more the date on my calendar and say to myself, "LMP," knowing, of course, it will not have been my last-before-anything. Next month -- we go again. http://www.cafemama.com/2012/apr/09_vote_for_me_a_poem.html http://www.cafemama.com/2012/apr/09_vote_for_me_a_poem.html Mon, 09 Apr 2012 10:01:00 PDT Dear Cleveland High School, I hope you all agree, The best choice for president, is Sarah Gilbert, that's me. read the rest here I didn't win this election; I did, however, win the next election and was president the spring term of my senior year at Cleveland High School in Portland, Oregon. There's more though: I may be reading this poem and other, less mimeographed, bits of my journal and secret, private thoughts at the Mortified Portland event on May 4 and 5th. Come along, and see. (and buy tickets early from Mission Theater -- you'll pay less in those silly ticket fees.) http://www.cafemama.com/2012/apr/07_fifteen_day_leave.html http://www.cafemama.com/2012/apr/07_fifteen_day_leave.html Fri, 20 Apr 2012 18:41:00 PDT Tonight, I wanted to run. I ran -- with my shopping tote, and my denim skirt, and my gold yard-sale Nikes, to Trader Joe's, for Easter candy and bread. It is three blocks away and I ran fast to make it back before dark and everywhere I smelled the jasmine and the lilac and the beautiful sweet warmth of spring and not-quite-rain in the air and I wanted so badly to run for miles, to keep going and not hurry back to the boys afterward but to have the husband at home to whom I could say, "put the boys to bed" and "I'll be back soon" and maybe even the dishes would be done when I returned, woozy and sweet from the inhalation and the exercise, sweaty and accomplished, limber and achey and all put back where I belonged. Instead, I go home and we all do -- what do we do? -- we brush our teeth and we read our bits of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and the two younger boys fall asleep and, as always now that he is not taking medication any more, the oldest asks to come to bed with me. This is always how it is, for the week before and the week after, the comings and goings of a soldier husband and father. In all the other weeks, in all the other months, you see how it is and you set your jaw and if you are like me you do not count the days. You wake up in the morning and think, "I can do this!" and you put on a smile because this is the way that you can do this. There is no other path. If you are tired or desperate for a run or need candy for Easter baskets, you find a way to solo parent it through. If you must run and nothing else matters you will take your shoes and your cell phone and you will say, "call me if you need me," and you will run as fast as you can and not too far. But my boys, they are on the top of that fence-rail that is "old enough" and "not quite," and I fear they might fall hard on the wrong side if I get too far, or if I have recently been visited by state officials or askance-looking friends. And so when my husband has left or when he is about to come back I anticipate or I remember all too keenly the freedom and authority I have with another adult in this life, in this house, an adult upon whom I can count perhaps not without question but at least with assurance that our sovereignty is dual, our guardianship is equal in legality and roughly equivalent in love. In the throes of the 15-day leave there is nothing like an equilibrium or a one-state. There is a rush of the coming -- the not-knowing when it will be, the knowing and the planning and the decisions, who will come to the airport? How will we care for those left behind? Will there be a banner? And the setup, the rise of expectations and coming fun and then the inevitable boredom and exhaustion of either waiting at the airport or at home. He is home. He cannot sleep and he cannot eat (or he is absolutely starving but cannot eat that) and he smells of his travels and he is excited to be home and the next 18 hours are a buzz, buzz, BUZZ! until you want to scream, "go to sleep!" and he does not but he showers. He eats. He talks on the phone and again talks on the phone some more. You go out; there is a babysitter and a taxi! and drinks and friends and enjoyment. And this is wonderful but the next five days or six days are more of the same, the impossibility of sleep in this place, the sleep between 4 a.m. and 10 a.m. or something like this that throws the whole family tizzily against itself, bouncing against walls and tiptoeing, "shhh!" and wondering when he will awake and start the fun. You make plans. These plans, oh, should you have made them? The only thing you can guarantee is that first 24 hours. You should not have. You decide to do this the next day and the other thing, the next. The only thing you have is that ability -- if he is tired and the kids are covering him like a boulder for climbing and imagining into a mountain, a pirate ship -- to say, "I'll be back!" in an hour or two, to run or see friends for coffee or walk home from a grocery store smelling lilac and blossom and burst-into-spring. http://www.cafemama.com/2012/mar/04_a_letter_to_my_friend_awp.html http://www.cafemama.com/2012/mar/04_a_letter_to_my_friend_awp.html Thu, 08 Mar 2012 10:01:00 PST This is a letter to my friend, Poe Ballantine. You are a writer. I know because you have written about it so beautifully -- strike that, so fully and deeply and in such a real way -- that you do not always say to yourself when you walk into the world, "I am a writer," but you are a writer and your writing proves that and your reading of your writing proves that. Do you know that a tear comes to my eye? You do not need me to tell you but I will tell you that your writing is worth much, and every time a person who is perhaps drunk or sleep-deprived or in any way unwise comes to ask you your story you should, in a gentle and laughing way, say that it is in your writing. Say this because: I knew you before I met you and this is the greatest gift a writer can give the world, the self, painful and bare and tender and with love and gratitude and sight that opens all our eyes. And I would also like to thank you, for this gift, and for others of hands-shaking and such, and this letter is my recompense. This is a letter to my friend, Frances Lefkowitz. I have only just met you and talked to you so briefly that it is perhaps presumptuous to call you my friend, but I have also read in your writing and your voice (spoken and on the page both) a kindred spirit of upbringing, of being at some point a square pinion in a svelte, curvaceous world. And I see that you are still proudly yourself, originally angular, and yet you have found a fit in the other worlds and I admire this in you and I admire your book. This is a letter to my friend, Cheryl Strayed. What can I say to you but, "you have never done anything unbeautiful"? I sometimes wonder or doubt or am afraid to pick up a new thing that you have written and it is always, unfailingly, heartrendingly, beautiful. It brings me high and it shatters me at the bottom and then, as I think I will never put the pieces together again if I can even find the pieces, I am swooped up, again, up, and I am crying and it is for pain and wonder and awe. I look to find a cliche or a trope or a criticism (because I am critical; because I believe in always wearing those glasses that help me see clear; because I doubt those who love their friends' work unflinchingly) but I cannot. It is always beautiful. And you do not need to apologize, you know. I have known all this since the first time I heard you read, at Powell's Hawthorne. It was cramped and hot and I had left my second baby behind and I was late and I was uncomfortable in this new world of other writers and then you began reading and I was transported. I am reading Wild, now, and I am transported again. Thank you. This is a letter to my friend, Courtney Santo. We knew each other before. But I had forgotten: I had forgotten all the reasons I felt you and I were kindreds, too: I had left that behind me with the dirty shame that was Washington and Lee. This was not your fault of course, nor the fault of the institution nor of the professors. It was one person's fault, I told you about him this week, one person's fault that I have pushed too much beneath a dark surface of grief and the very worst kind of love. Love is not pain. I know that now. I did not then. But, love is here, in a new way that rises into my throat and chokes me for a moment until it jumps out into laughter and wise conversation and easy companionship. I appreciate what I forgot we had and what we have now, which I will not forget, for I am writing it down and I know that it is not a lie that badly smears over the truth. I am glad for the serendipity that led us to the same college and, fifteen years later, the same conference, the same table. I cannot wait to read your book. And thank you for the beer. This is a letter to my friend, Nuria Sheehan. I have only known you in this context, this exuberance of writing, this celebration of writerliness, this extravagance of writers. I have only known you as a hostess of sorts, as I enter your territory -- the Midwest, the land of MFAs -- that is not foreign to me but neither is it homeland. It is familiar but a little awkward, still, the way that, as a sophomore at college, you are still getting used to the way the streets are laid out and the favorite professors and the menu at the restaurant the townies prefer. Not you-specific, you-general; YOU, Nuria, are a graduate student in this hypothetical institution of Midwestern purveyors of fine arts degrees in literary writing. I am glad that you have taken me under your wing and I will remember how easy it is to trade passionate oral essays on the things we believe over a table that holds the now-empty mugs of beer and the overflow of our ideas and beliefs and stories. To share those stories so immediately with almost-strangers is how we all are, now, in the world, not the people who hold back the answers to the awkward questions nor the people who call "private" the most uncomfortable bits of human experience. No, we, with eyes and mouths open, make a game of calling essay topics, prepare to turn the words we are all turning over together in an almost-empty restaurant in the artsy neighborhood of Chicago into works of revelation, works of exploration, works of art, themselves. This is a letter to all of you. You buoy me up. You, by the simplest interactions and the most expansive introductions, by the easiest "hello"s and the time when you describe in detail how it is you feel about my writing, give me faith in myself. Give me strength and resolve and passion and inspiration. Give me energy, give me a writer's food: that feeling that I am a part of this world, that I one day might belong on a stage instead of in an audience, that I can finely, artfully navigate this world of creative literary writing without a masters of fine arts. You give me hope; you give me something to think about; you give me a smile on my face as I type. You give me the gift of your conversation and of your reading my work, and that is, after all, the greatest of all gifts. Thank you. http://www.cafemama.com/2012/feb/20_what_i_learned_breaking_up_a_fight.html http://www.cafemama.com/2012/feb/20_what_i_learned_breaking_up_a_fight.html Thu, 08 Mar 2012 10:04:00 PST I stop Monroe after he throws the first punch at his six-year-old brother. It was then -- in the next few moments as I sought to contain the struggling, furious boy -- that I learned so much. I had heard it all in the background as I was writing a post about saving money. I was writing about the emotional barriers we need to put up to not saving and Everett was telling his brothers they could play the Wii, but that first, they must wash their hands. The screaming -- along with the charging up the stairs and the sounds of scuffles and the reactionary screaming -- came right after. As with any screaming, punching, hurting fight between my boys, my first reaction was protective and senseless rage. My blood turns to high heat and I can only think, blindly, back-of-my-throat hoarsely, NO!!! and this is what comes out of me, and I want them to just hear the word and the rage and stop. Docile. Lamb-like. Baaaa-aaaa. They do not. I must charge up the stairs, too, a mare or a herd of them, cutting off the predator (who is what, who? My four-year-old or my six-year-old? A nameless cloud of anger? The world and all its just conviction?). I enter the bathroom to more screaming, and the end of a boxer-style punch to the face. Truman is crying. As I grab Monroe to restrain and comfort him at once, I know already what the fight has been about: Monroe wanted to wash his hands downstairs in the kitchen. Truman, upstairs in the bathroom. The kitchen was closer, and quicker; the bathroom, easier for Truman. He is the sort of boy who is comforted and in fact can only survive with routines that do not change. Handwashing with a bar of soap in the bathroom, where he does not have to climb up or adjust a handle to get the correct chill of cold, is his way. I take a deep breath. There are always deep breaths, this is how I teach and how I learn. All one: into my belly, shoulders out; out -- out -- out -- loose my jaw, tension flows from my shoulders. I do as well as I can, and I am telling Monroe, "take a deep breath, take a deep breath," and I am holding him to keep from running at his brother and I am trying to calm my own fool self. He is still talking and crying at once and kicking and I realize what to say. I need to find him in this rage. "What do you want?" I ask. "I want Truman..." and he gasps, and swallows, "to wash his HANDS..." "But why?" I ask. "Why are you washing hands?" "So we can PLAY with the WIIIIIII!" More sobbing, his body heaving in sadness. "But you could have washed your hands downstairs and let Truman wash his hands up here," I say. "You could have both done it in different places and you would have already been playing. But: you thought it would be faster to wash your hands downstairs, right?" A tearful nod. "Was this fast?" I ask. "To fight and cry and punch and scream? Are your hands washed yet?" He shakes his head. No. "What you need to focus on," I say, "is the goal. Getting your hands clean. Not the way you do it!" We wash his hands and I tell the story again to him, the problem and the moral, and I tell it to Everett and to Truman. And it does not work right away but when he and Truman scream and fight a few days later over which door to take to get into the house after school, he is in misery, in hysterics, and I tell the story again as I drag him up the side stairs, wet and heaving, and when we come into the house even another day later he takes a deep breath. Into his belly, shoulders out; and then out-out-out, shoulders falling. "Truman, next time, you can go in the side door and I can go in the front door!" he says, magnanimous, beneficent, a thousand years' wise, at home in the world. I do not contain my joy, but let it open my shoulders and thrust out my belly, let it expand the space between my spinal bones, throw wide my jaw and brighten my eyes, let it exercise me, I tell the story again. http://www.cafemama.com/2012/feb/13_my_art_beats.html http://www.cafemama.com/2012/feb/13_my_art_beats.html Mon, 13 Feb 2012 23:01:00 PST If I love Valentine's Day, it is the Valentine's Day of my youth; it is the Valentine's Day of these boys' youth. It is the Valentine's Day in which the sweet-heart saying is all that matters; it is the Valentine's Day in which a treat in miniature makes the heart grow fond, and two of them, fonder. Most of all, the Valentine's Day I love is the one in which homemade is always better. Craft rules, and the messier and redder, the more authentic, the more desired. Add paper-lace, add glitters and sparkles, add ribbon, and desire shows its heart there, on the paper-lacy sleeve. So we will make Valentines. I will not worry nor kvetch nor even roll my eyes over jeweled gifts and splendiferous dates and steak tartare. Pinot Noir is only for the noir, and won't I be asleep by then, speckled in red and yellow acrylic, stuck with Elmer's glue? My husband is overseas and all I dream of, is the art of hearts. A little something, then, for all you who do not drink deeply on the bitterness of the commercial, nor do you look askance at people such as me, dip your dipper into the well of Walgreens and pull up a shrink-wrapped package. Who am I to judge? Not I. I am here in all my muck and paper scraps, delighted and deviled, dancing to the music and stomping my feet in rage. We will get it done. It will never be quite as imagined; it will never be done quite on time; it will never be something I will not look back on with a fondness of heart only delivered by dozens of treats in miniature. I made it for them and for you, too. We thought we'd make -- no, I thought I would make -- marbelized paper as I once did in grade school, straight out of Martha. But I could not find quite the right thickener for the watery goop, nor did I remember to apply the alum solution mordant, so this paper was more fingerpainted with acrylic paints from the art store, thinned with water and much of that non-toxic glue, than marbelized. I splattered the yellow over it, though, just like in the magazine; with a tiny paintbrush and a tap-tap-tap; each one is an art piece, in miniature. I'm sure they'll all be thrown away by Wednesday. You'll want to make them, too? There are two Mario Brothers-style powerups -- put little mushroom caps cut from painted paper on the fronts, big mushroom caps in the insides -- and the pun on "art" and "heart." It's great for use with those joyous chaotic fingerpaintings that you are sure mark your three- or four-year-old as the second coming of Jackson Pollack. The color theory on this one! I made pdfs; use, or giggle. http://www.cafemama.com/2012/jan/26_on_pinterest.html http://www.cafemama.com/2012/jan/26_on_pinterest.html Thu, 26 Jan 2012 14:24:00 PST 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. http://www.cafemama.com/2012/jan/08_breatharian.html http://www.cafemama.com/2012/jan/08_breatharian.html Sun, 08 Jan 2012 23:01:00 PST It is cold today, and it has rained, but now the fog has come and gone, all but a bare trail of cloud trilling its slow fingers over the long outer branches of pine trees, along the edges of roofs. I have been reading today, this weekend, gulping, books with compulsion like junk food, and now it is time to run. I have my old, hundreds-of-miles shoes, and my black wool pants and my black wool shirt and my knitted wool hat and scarf. I am black and edged in bright reds and greens and pinks and my feet take the sidewalk with hunger like brown bread and thick butter and honey. I have been reading. I have been reading memoirs that are hard for me to read; those in which the protagonist makes choices I have never made, would never make, choices of sex and alcohol and pain. I have been reading these, and I have been reading writers on writing, and I have been reading Facebook and Twitter posts and we all must drink, hard and often and early in the day, Scotch and vodka and tequila and Mexican beer. "...if we didn't have drugs and alcohol, we wouldn't have art," says one memoirist, "I know that is not a popular thing to say but I believe it is true nonetheless." And, "our drug and alcohol excesses... are also part of who we are as artists." And I am running. I am not drinking, though it would indeed be a wonderful day to drink and to create if I were that writer, but I am not. Instead I am running, fast enough to make my breath come hard and a little shallow and very cold, and even the shallow breaths are like inhalations of god, or pure single-malt inspiration. I am breathing and what I am getting are words and sparkling descriptions and a rhythm, a shine, a cadence that pulses through me like Tennyson, like Yeats. As if I am repeating a mantra for birth or for yoga, I breath in the words and I breath out the emotional cloud that has been holding them at bay. I am light-headed, in the sense that my head is no longer heavy with sturm und drang, with the statements of political contenders, with the argument of the days. It floats and flies. I am full of the presence of the divine. It is here I have my Sunday church, here on the bare-but-for-mud pavement, here on the borders of traffic and loud-laughing brunches and hangovers darkening the shades. It is here I find my soul and commune with my fellow worshippers. Here, with the birds, with the winds and the raindrops and the clouds. I have wondered if I should -- if I should go with the Hemingways and their Parisian cafe-hopping, with the modern memoirists and their expansive afternoon drinking, with the mercurial and mythical father-writers, the fathers of Anne Lamott and John Dunne and all the others? -- should I go then, fill my cup with the expensive bourbon I keep on a top shelf, gulp, expose my teeth in a wince, gulp again, until I do not wince? Should I fill my belly with fire and my soul with intensity, writing until I fall asleep in the couch or the bed between my kicking, mouth-opened boys? Sleep late, wake up drowsy and pounding... of course not. Of course. But the romance. But the intensity. But the passionate defense! The mystery, the success, the drama of it all! But no. This is my drink, my drug, my religion, my god: this breath. This one. And this. However shallow or deep, these breaths of fog and mottled winter sunshine and wet pavement and birdsong, these breaths of pounding feet and open hips, these are the fire in my belly and the stir in my soul. I am, breatharian, complete. http://www.cafemama.com/2011/nov/25_gratitude.html http://www.cafemama.com/2011/nov/25_gratitude.html Sat, 26 Nov 2011 18:24:00 PST 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. http://www.cafemama.com/2011/oct/21_the_ask.html http://www.cafemama.com/2011/oct/21_the_ask.html Fri, 21 Oct 2011 23:01:00 PDT 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. http://www.cafemama.com/2011/oct/15_piece_of_publication.html http://www.cafemama.com/2011/oct/15_piece_of_publication.html Mon, 31 Oct 2011 23:01:00 PDT 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 WaterStone 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 WaterStone 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. http://www.cafemama.com/2011/sep/24_goodbye_again.html http://www.cafemama.com/2011/sep/24_goodbye_again.html Sat, 01 Oct 2011 23:01:00 PDT 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. http://www.cafemama.com/2011/sep/11_my_day.html http://www.cafemama.com/2011/sep/11_my_day.html Mon, 12 Sep 2011 23:01:00 PDT 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. http://www.cafemama.com/2011/aug/16_of_lice_and_zen.html http://www.cafemama.com/2011/aug/16_of_lice_and_zen.html Sat, 17 Sep 2011 12:01:00 PDT 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 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. http://www.cafemama.com/2011/jul/29_a_success.html http://www.cafemama.com/2011/jul/29_a_success.html Tue, 02 Aug 2011 23:09:00 PDT 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 and 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. When you are let free, do you cheer or weep? I knew that I should cheer but instead wept, falling into tears at a moment's provocation. Success? I had nothing. Not even, to be frank, money. I was borrowing against that which was promised elsewhere. I was baring all my threads and reddening all my eyes. http://www.cafemama.com/2011/jul/16_deja_biked_starbucks_drivethrough.html http://www.cafemama.com/2011/jul/16_deja_biked_starbucks_drivethrough.html Mon, 18 Jul 2011 17:41:00 PDT 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. http://www.cafemama.com/2011/may/22_rules_of_re-entry.html http://www.cafemama.com/2011/may/22_rules_of_re-entry.html Sun, 22 May 2011 23:01:00 PDT 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, undergoing, finally, 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 terribly 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 picked for the boys 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 Everett 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 was born with this writerly habituation to doing things at the very last minute, and still believing 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" while he is elsewhere, while he is still receiving briefings and examinations, while he is waiting to fly home. On Sunday, briefed and examined and home, 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. http://www.cafemama.com/2011/apr/28_birthday.html http://www.cafemama.com/2011/apr/28_birthday.html Mon, 02 May 2011 12:57:00 PDT 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. http://www.cafemama.com/2011/apr/25_winning_the_prize.html http://www.cafemama.com/2011/apr/25_winning_the_prize.html Mon, 25 Apr 2011 11:01:00 PDT 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. http://www.cafemama.com/2011/mar/28_keep_counsel.html http://www.cafemama.com/2011/mar/28_keep_counsel.html Wed, 06 Apr 2011 00:06:00 PDT On Saturday night, I fall asleep ragged-breathed and spotted with uncomfort. Eleven has come to spend the night -- an older boy, two-and-some years older than my oldest, a fast friend for these three months. They have a language already, they both say, "LITerally," they chant phrases they love together, they both have long eyelashes and sweet faces and thick wavy hair. Give them a half-decade, and they'll be slaying hearts as they now slay stick figures Eleven scribbles in red and black on the DSi, animating with sweet conviction. Eight, he is, my own boy. Not ready for this other one. They know it; they have reacted to my quiet limits with quiet outrage, singsong, at first one at a time and then in unison. I have to bar the door, at midnight, for a moment so they will not go running out into the wet night without shoes, going where? "Around the block." They erupt in laughter. No. I dream. I must get up early and I have done battle these three hours with foes who look evenly at me with a small smile and say, 'No. Way.' and I dream. I dream that they have been up and down and up and down the stairs again, that they have watched a scandalous movie, that they have looked at me, giggling, and told me that my food was poisoned. 'You want me to DIE?' Eleven asks. Happily. I dream that I am waking; I dream that they are walking brazenly out into the night and day, needless and heedless of me, of parenting, trolling bars for girls and vampires, maybe. I do not remember what I dream but there is copious blood, abundant blame. When I wake they are sleeping, buried deep and quiet in white wool blankets and unbothered by the happy little ones, pounding up and down stairs, leaping off beds and couches, shouting and throwing stuffed animals, some who are super, and must scream as they fly. They sleep, until I must wake them, tell them to eat pancakes. My boys have eaten with appetite and tell me the pancakes are delicious, but Eleven takes a bite. "It tastes like spinach," he says. And that is that. I cannot say I do not count the hours until he takes his leave. I talk with my boy after his friend has gone, ask questions that seem to have no useful answer. He almost whispers. He is all inside. He wants to sleep alone. Youngest calls to him, his voice creaking in sadness, and I go and tell him so. Eight crawls into bed next to his little brother and when I have finished reading I lie there, too, it is not what my friends from high school or even my husband would do, sleep together with boys in a heap, but we keep our own counsel, still against the rainy-pavement night. When I sleep I do so deeply. When I wake, Eight has returned to his room alone, and I do not wonder at the break but observe it. I am in the museum of my family and I am skirting this work, looking at it in silence and from every perspective and a great removal of time. I am not sure if its worth is in its ability to astonish, or in its technical excellence. There is a time for every season; there is meaning or there is not meaning to everything under the sun. And a man will take himself from his family and cleave... He has told me he does not believe in God. He has told me that he does not believe in the tooth fairy or the easter bunny or Santa Claus or God and I have discussed this evenly but he has told me, "Mom. You can't MAKE me believe in anything," as if that was my goal. He now sleeps in a room by himself every night; he keeps his own counsel; he is own sculptor, own clay. And I, unsure of my own experience in this genre, can not even criticize. http://www.cafemama.com/2011/feb/16_unrest.html http://www.cafemama.com/2011/feb/16_unrest.html Wed, 16 Feb 2011 15:58:00 PST I hear the word, "unrest," and it is all truth, no rest anywhere. It began in Tunisia, a flash-bang; smoldered and soldered and fizzed and exploded! in Egypt, and still spits and sparks through the streets and the souks; it snaps and growls, an ill-treated dog on a frayed and careless leash, a power line split and hissing in Yemen, Bahrain, Algeria, Jordan, Syria. Like in a dream, I see the black map in my mind's projection screen light up with red, yellow, orange, green, incandescing, popping like firecrackers and shotguns and the little LEGO heads of bad guys and good guys. My safe-in-Kuwait Army husband is, while not exactly out on the streets of Cairo spinning and whirling in dervishes of fear, still in a different place in my anxiety than he was as January broke cool and collected and everything-possible. I saw the Saturdays laid out, then, busy cold whirls of happy activity all through March, until we'd be packing bags and boys and balls on bikes for farmer's market, Little League, long slow head-back coasts through balmy calms and sparkling, spittling rainy giggles. School in and school out, each day would be longer and more achievable than the day before. Spring always has me gasping by day's end with the just-sprinted-my-heart-out feeling of an euphoric effort. I did it, I did it, I can do it again! Then unrest broke into my house, slowly at first with the usual winter's bane; nausea and aches and coughing and sniffles. We'd miss wrestling tournaments, and bike rides, and miss again; school days, and meetings, and such. I'd dose all with beef bone broth, rich with onions blackened on the gas range. I'd fight back, lemon juice and cold honey and hot water; marmalade, whole grain bread, carrots and celeriac. I'd sleep in late two, three days in a row, sniffle to my duty with pounding head, with ice cream. We'd be better. And the unrest spread, from the Mid-East to Southeast Portland, alighting on my eight-year-old boy. In a year's time, less, he'd blossomed from someone other mothers feared on the playground to almost-mainstream, impressing the LEGO club coaches with his unusual and empathetic creativity -- he designed, for the health-themed competition, a entertainment center for the young family members of hospital patients -- screeching through his responsibilities for the Oregon Battle of the Books with uncanny recall. He joined the Lucky Lectores, a teamful of fast-talking, fast-reading M. and two other confident eight-year-olds. Last week, we made buttons, and everyone thought his was SO COOL. http://www.cafemama.com/2011/feb/07_explain_a_poem.html http://www.cafemama.com/2011/feb/07_explain_a_poem.html Tue, 08 Feb 2011 00:23:00 PST "But wait," said Everett, scrolling through love songs on the iPod, leaning slight away from where Monroe had fallen, tearful, asleep beside him in his bed on the floor. "I don't understand why poems..." he trailed off. "What makes them different from prose?" I said, "from stories, from books, from things in paragraphs?" He nodded, pushed "play." "I'll tell you after the song," I said, and read ahead for three minutes. It was Clamor that I was reading, a small book written by a woman who also seems small in her photos, not short but so little, as if she might squeeze herself into a linen closet or under a desk if the occasion rose. Elyse Fenton. She'd won the Dylan Thomas prize, this is how I'd discovered her poems that told so much of my own experience and so much more of her own. No, she was there symbolizing me but was nothing like me, full of sex and long kisses and hunger for the flesh of the man she'd let slip away to Iraq, so gored with the blood and dirt of other men's death. He was a medic; she a young bride pushing pepper seedlings into the dirt of Eugene; she read Dante and wrote of Persephone as I, near-past thirty-something, dove deep into Homer and looked to Andromache as my icon guide. As my husband drove fast down highways and slow down tarmacs, in armored SUVs, picking up luggage, not body bags; making itineraries, not lists of personal effects. Oh! We are worlds different; we are one and the same. The song ends. I haven't an answer yet. "Poetry," I said, "in classical times had rules. It had to fit a very strict form; it had to rhyme if the form said 'rhyme,' or have the rhythm of sounds that the form said 'have.' Iambic pentameter," I said, "duh DUM duh DUM duh DUM duh DUM duh DUM But SOFT what LIGHT through YONder WINdow BREAKS, it IS the EAST and JULiet IS the SUN." But poetry, now, it can be in any form and it is different than prose because prose tells a story with words in ordinary sentences that do not hide their meaning. They are what they say they are. Poetry, poetry has meaning behind the words, hidden meaning that you can see or not see, can strike out at you, meaning hidden behind every word. "Poetry," said Everett, contemplating, "I've noticed that poetry describes things." http://www.cafemama.com/2010/dec/10_this_sadness.html http://www.cafemama.com/2010/dec/10_this_sadness.html Sun, 02 Jan 2011 14:30:00 PST Here is where it is: on the road (yes, the one between hither and yon), and I have too much time to think, often about the great undone of the day, week, year. Or at home, in the space between kitchen and living room, where I am repeating the supplicant's walk, what, what do you want, what, what will you show me, what, what has happened?, and I do not have time to think at all. It is here, it is flitting about in the chill gorgeous fog-draped afternoon, it is all around me. It is a sadness that strikes me, nowhere-from, grabs me by the folds of my shirt and shoves me up against the wall. THIS. NOW. A phone call from a coach, describing the unhappiness with Everett's attitude, the need for apology; a spill across the floor; a remembrance of Legos broken. Things fall apart; the ceremony of innocence long-since drowned; my center loses its hold. Wanting a spiral into tears, a falling onto the floor in a heap, a long slow bath or a drippy, sniffling recounting of my woes, often all I'm allotted is a silent shout into the inner-ness. The center of my mass, my undercurrent, my warp drive: it's a swirling mass of "why?" and "it's not fair!" and "could you give me a break?" All I wish for, in some of these moments, is a room in which to lock myself, a chair in which to curl, a cotton handkerchief, spotted and damp, warm slippers, no one waiting, no one asking, no one hungry or sockless or late. Unable to diagnose my sadness as loneliness, exhaustion, the holiday ordinaries, a shortage of Vitamin D, I can only sit, or stand, or ride, trying to keep my eyes open, trying to keep the tears out of my voice, trying to try again. Slice leeks, peel potatoes, gather thyme; strip bed, carry laundry, start load; put on socks, put on shoes, chase, catch, chase and catch again, talk calmly, hold firmly until he yields, put on coat. Sit and type until someone grabs my arm, swipes papers to floor, holds my cheeks in his hand for direct, two-eyed attention. Stop, start again, stop, plan the shower a little later, still later, maybe tomorrow. Choose sleep over book. Choose book over TV. Choose TV over idle clicking through Facebook, through other people's lives, other problems better or worse than mine. Ask, "what can I do?" Think, "why can't I be better?" Wonder, "will this cycle ever end?" Stomp, lose my cool, forget things, leave them out in the rain. Soggy, pocked with mud and pestled leaves, they become compost, or worse. Answering my questions with more questions, more pointless diagnoses -- none of the cures are easy, after all -- I avoid, make toast, say "yes" to the opening of the Halloween candy box. I fail to answer the phone; fail to listen to the messages; fail to call back. I want to cancel everything, skip school every day, lie on the couch and watch all of the episodes of every TV show I discover, at once, I love fiercely. In my bed (the boys' bed) at 1:47 or 2:23 a.m., I lie staring at the insides of my eyes, brain burning with sorrow, loss, wasted lifeforce. When it lifts it is a quiet inconsequential sweeping away, big clouds on a slow wind, or a burst of brightness that lasts maybe a minute or a day: a painted sunset, a clean counter, a complete and perfect sentence, a child's stuffed dog who tells me he loves me. All is white and persimmon and grey and steel-blue and there is pink at the edges of everything. I catch myself from a sob, because what? How would I do this crying? No, no time, I wipe tears with the back of my mind's hand, stop sniffles in their tracks, grind my palms in my eyelids for a minute and yank back from the precipice. I am all they have, these boys, with no time this here-and-now for this sadness. http://www.cafemama.com/2010/oct/21_reentry.html http://www.cafemama.com/2010/oct/21_reentry.html Thu, 04 Nov 2010 14:30:00 PST He called me, barely past midnight on Saturday night, morning for him, in his office. He was leaving: setting away messages, cleaning his desk, putting the last presents for boys in his bag. It seemed impossible, too early; but no, he told me, 72 hours before your travel date is right on time. Okay, then, I thought, adding and subtracting in my head, travel times and processing and possibilities. Tuesday night, maybe, surely no later than Wednesday. Plans: he could come to the cross country meet, but should shower, nap first; he'd want to take the boys to school Thursday. He called from Al Alli two days later -- Monday night -- with a cryptic message, "alpha alpha one nine six one twenty twenty," I was supposed to know this was flight number, flight time. I expected him, tracked his progress across the country, picked up the boys saying, "Daddy's getting on the airplane now, in Texas!" we told Everett's teachers what was for dinner: flat iron steak, roasted yellow cauliflower, maybe cheesey bread, yes, cheesey bread. I would make it with garlic, I thought; I tried to get the boys home. Home, home, home again, and when it was almost time to start the dishes, the dinner, I saw him on Facebook. Germany, for 12 hours, he said. Counting, adding German time to oceanic crossings and subtracting from Atlanta, Dallas Fort Worth, military wrenches, thrown in works. Thursday. Thursday morning came without confirmation, flight times, no code this time but the unspoken one. If I don't call you, perhaps I am near. Is it a surprise homecoming he wants, or airport fanfare and hugs? Does he wish to sneak away first, to devise within himself courage for the re-entry? If I were a private eye, I would call airlines, seek manifest information, I would sound officious and make the far-away agent, a woman, stumble over her words as she hurried to type his name into her keyboard. Instead, I rush laundry into the dryer, hurry around the house thinking critically, through his eyes, of my livingspace. When soldiers are completing paperwork for a homecoming, temporary or less so, they must meet with a chaplain, watch PowerPoint slide shows explaining what it is to re-enter their families' lives. They are reminded to be patient and not expect too much, intimacy, authority over children, ecstasy of welcome. They are told not to do what sounds horrible, coming out of the recorded tutorial or the mouth of a man of the cloth, you'd think it obvious, like so much else in these tutorials, soldierly reminders. "It must have happened at least once," Jonathan always says. Once, twice, a million times. I wonder in the dim Thursday before-sunrise light, watching clouds in grey watercolor smudged, with thick round brush, with thumbprint, across the grey-blue sky, if the re-entry presentation included reminders to call, to let us know. I wake again, and the sun has lit the paint smudges on fire, hot-pink embers, singing! Rejoicing! In my heart it is quiet and hot and expectant and choking. I wake the boys, one by one, I point out the burning clouds, now flaming whitely, almost too much for our eyes. We watch, we talk about what, who, might come this day. And still, there are dishes and chickens pooping and boys who will wear pajamas on pajama day (too foolish, says Everett, and I want to tip my hat at him, the statement is so Victorian), and we gather together ourselves and our things, we scurry into the car my parents have loaned us, left in the driveway before I saw the first cloudpaint. We buckle seats in, we drive, one schoolboy in pajamas, one not. He will come home while I am picking the boys up later that afternoon, hitching a ride with a friend; he will be bearing gifts; he will heed some of the PowerPoint warnings and not others; we will go to the beach, we will feel waves crash over us, we will find seashells, we will watch leopard sharks swim overhead in a tunnel; we will shout and cry and laugh and wrestle and I will sit in a small chair as I hear Truman's teacher and speech therapist confirm, he's smart, so smart, he rages, he does indeed seem like a child with Asperger's. It will be too short and too long, it will be wonderful and terrible, it will destroy us all, it will fix everything. I will wish I could re-write the re-entry documentation; I will know it would be utterly useless. A five-year-old, shouting silently into the storm, crying that he loves you, hugging with all his might, hitting his forehead against the motel bed, bang, bang, bang. Welcome home. http://www.cafemama.com/2010/aug/25_permission_summer.html http://www.cafemama.com/2010/aug/25_permission_summer.html Thu, 26 Aug 2010 02:59:00 PDT We wake, when we wake; we eat cookies, watermelon, ice cream, peaches; we do not plan our days so much as we observe them, watching with slow eyes as they slump out like a deflated exercise ball before us, whop, thlupp, mummm... The TV is on more than I strictly allow, and while they are watching it and I have finally begun a sentence that sings sentiently, one yells, "can I please have more toast?!" and another, another. Toast dispersed, I am hungry too, the dishes should be washed and the chickens begin to bwaawwkk. When I come in, more toast is required. With butter, and honey, and cinnamon. So the days go. We do not swim, or picnic, or hike; we do not camp, or boat, or barbecue. We do not visit the library once. We walk through the alley, one day, and we pick blackberries. We find tart apples, and hops, and little rocks, and a ripe tomato, and figs and Asian pears and grapes long from ripe, and fennel, fennel, fennel. I want to grasp this under the arms, lift it high and swing it around in the air -- but it is over as soon it has begun, the boys are running every which way and soon they are out of sight, gone, down the alley hill, across the street. Home, we find them, three, at the computer, playing a game about jumping and bopping. How much it is, how much, to let go of the image that I have somehow concocted, to let go of the design of summer as it might be. There might be tall pine trees, a cold stream, cooking on a grate blackened from use and fires built inexpertly. There may be cabins with bunk beds, a cafeteria, capture the flag. There should be picture books, concerts in parks, old blankets laid on grass, picnic tables, watermelon slurped, not sitting with legs spread wide on the kitchen floor, but in rows of cousins and lifelong friends. When I see summer and childhood, I see sleeping bags and mountains and huckleberries, running in cool grass over wide lawns, chasing children we meet only when the days are long. I see the sky at night when it is dark, wholly dark, stars so close you blink, blink again, to clear your head of the fancy you could reach one, jump, touch it with your fingers. I see us looking at one another, eyes wide, knowing this is something we'll never, ever forget. A bear. A geyser. The very mountain top. An airplane ride. This has not been our summer. I have wasted time; I have missed opportunities; I have slung darts at the target badly and without practice, brain dulled with too little sleep and too much leisure. All I have are these: a cold hour at the beach, robot arms stacked of canning rings, blackberry leather made, free, words that follow on behind words too slowly, too slowly, books piling up too fast, too fast. I apologize to my boys, who deserve a summer from my imagination, not one to which I have given permission too easily, 'yes' without thinking first, without asking a followup question. How could I have allowed this? How can it be over, almost, all but the running and the scrambling and the routine trudge back to routine? I cannot say, I can only give myself permission to open my eyes, cock back my head and look at the stars through the city lights. Look, says Everett, the first star. It is not the first, it is nearly 11 p.m., but I say, oh! and I smile with my voice, and go back to my canning pot, sorry, I say inside, sorry, and reach for the ice cream.