big messes + small deceptions

Today was all about getting things ready for winter: tossing our fat ghoulish pumpkins into the compost and raking up piles of wet leaves, mostly to be jumped in by Sprout and Bean. It was cold and our cheeks were pink after an hour spent outdoors, mowing the lawn a final time for the season and gathering up the stray bits of bark left from the wood that we stacked. Inside, after pulling off muddy boots and wet gloves we made hot chocolate: unsweetened cocoa and sugar melted with a bit of boiling water, then stirred into frothed milk with a touch of cream. Little boy moustaches, happy grins, and only one spill. “Uh oh, uh oh” Sprout exclaimed as his drink pooled into his lap.

By the end of every day my boys are covered head to tow with the evidence of their days: mud and chocolate, paint on their shirts, pasta sauce on their elbows. Are all little boys messy, or are mine particularly so? Reckless in glee and sensory delight. They’ve both grown this month; a late autumn growth spurt. One of my favorite things about our house is the corner wall between the kitchen and the den where we mark their growth with stubby pencils or whatever pen we can find.

“Let’s see if I grew!” Bean will exclaim gleefully after eating a particularly enormous serving of pasta or a heaping plate of blueberry pancakes.

Once we were a little overzealous and recorded his growth: a remarkable half inch in a month. The following month we discovered our error: he’d shrunk. Or so it seemed. The line made from his head to the square edge of the book was below the mark we’d already made.

“Did I really shrink?” Bean asked wide eyed.

“You did,” I lied without blinking. “That’s what happens when you don’t eat your veggies.”

Oh yes I did.

leverage

It started out beautifully. Bean + Sprout + sandbox = happy boys + happy mama. Despite the softly falling rain they were content as clams, pushing yellow metal dump trucks over dunes of damp sand. So I went to work stacking wood not twenty yards away. And the next thing I knew...

Sprout was covered head to toe in mud. I don't mean that metaphorically. I mean that very, very literally. He was so covered in fact, that it became immediately evident that he was not the one who had covered himself. His cheeks were painted with mud. His pants, his boots, his knees, elbows, hands, arms, neck. And he was screaming furiously. Indignantly.

Bean looked way too pleased.

See? He thought it was hilarious.

Until, out of nowhere I said, "I'm documenting this to send to Santa, you know."

And then, without looking at him again, I set the camera down and proceeded to strip Sprout down to his diaper. When I was finished I looked up to discover Bean was rooted to the spot. A look of utter abject horror on his face.

Then he dashed inside, removed his muddy clothes, and frantically started hugging Sprout.

I ran Sprout a bath. Bean came up and sat at the edge of the tub, urgently offering toys to Sprout who was delighted by the sudden change of events.

I asked Bean if he wanted to get in too. He said, "I'd be delighted." (Really, he talks like that.)

And then he got in and hugged Sprout and let him have all the toys. And after quite a while he said, "You know mama, you really don't need to send those pictures to Santa."

He was perfectly behaved all afternoon, too. Thank you, Santa.

scraps and bits

It's late. It is that time of night where the house hums in the quiet, and outside the moon, full and round and up till morning, is obscured by the clouds that came in the evening. It is that time of night where my mind becomes perforated and shallow; where what I'm working on dissolves like sugar in the bottom of a cup of tea.

It's been such a non-stop week, I haven't felt like there were ever minutes really where I could come up for air until today when Lizardek came for a visit, all the way from Boston, all the way from Sweden. Liz. What can I say? She and her mom filled up my home with smiles today. We went to an ice cream factory. The blue sky sang bluer. The yellow leaves lingering on the hills hued to gold. Such a fun day; also because Bean and I got to hang together, and I've been loving these times we've been having: just the two of us. He's a different kid when he's by himself. All kids are, I suppose. But I particularly like spending time with him when we're going someplace and chattering together. On the way home from our adventures today after two ice cream cones, he passed out in the car, chocolate still on his cheeks. Looking back at him I could feel my heart thudding hard in my throat. His eyelids transparent almost; his sandy hair falling slantwise across his dreaming face.

It's amazing, again and again, to find myself in the identity of being somebody's mother. It's a form that constantly shifts and sheds; like the fragile skin of a snake. I grow as they do.

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Some scraps of exciting news:

Milk & Ink: A Mosaic Of Motherhood is out! It's jam-packed with amazing writers--many of the pieces moved me to tears with the sheer beauty of the language, and poignancy of story. I've contributed three pieces to this collection and feel so lucky to be a part of it! All profits are going to Mama Hope--which makes this an even more most buy, must read book. Go get your copy!

I've started a new weekly column over at Today's Mama chronicling some of the nitty-gritty bits of being in grad school full time as a parent. Fun stuff.

Some musings about the future of digital media and culture here. (This is where my head is when it's not here.)

It's about this

This post is for my sister, who is due with her first baby in three weeks...

Oh yes. This is the way things happen.

You get pregnant, have a baby, survive a year or so of sleep deprivation, memory loss, heavenly smiles, and diapers, and then one afternoon while you're making a sandwich your baby is sitting on the counter, nonchalant, happy as a clam.

This is what having a baby will teach you:

That you are not in control.

That you were never really in control.

That there is grace in loosing the battle, just as there is grace in quietly, patiently persisting with boundaries, bedtimes, and broccoli.

You will never be able to hear a story about a child suffering again without tears wetting the corners of your eyes, entirely unbidden, always unexpected, smudging your mascara as you consider what if.

It's okay to start over or give up a million times. No one knows any better than you do--and when it comes to your own kid, you do, actually, know best, no matter what anyone else tells you.

It's all about giggling.

Getting dirty is inevitable and essential. Make your peace with the effing laundry heap. It will never go away. Although--one thing that most certainly will go away, inexplicably, and often, are single baby socks. One by one they disappear until you'll have an entire drawer full of singletons.Think I'm kidding? Just wait.

It's about stopping and getting down on the floor. Especially with boys. It's all about the floor and what can be accomplished there: block towers and tickling matches, and moments of physical affection, rough and tumble that they crave. Moms who wrestle are awesome. It's not just a guy thing. Please don't believe it's just guy thing.

It's about the fact that floor will always have crumbs, paper clips, pencils, crayons, snippets, legos, blocks, matchbox cars, marbles, rocks, crumpled leaves, gravel, sand, bits of grass, sticks. Don't let it get to you.

Don't let the crying get to you either. Whatever feels like the worst day in the world, the worst hour, the worst minute, will surely pass. And then they'll be 20 months old and sitting on the counter, as if that's okay, as if it's not precarious and against the rules. And they'll be grinning and giggling and drooling, and saying "No! No! No!" when you remove them, or suggest an alternative.

It's all about alternatives. About distractions. "Oh look!" That's a magic phrase. Oh yes it is. {more...}

snapshots like sunspots

From the past week:

1.

Frustration the color of crushed grapes; my fingers in my palms. We’re at a stand off: my five year old and I. He wants to do one thing, I’ve given him a choice of two others. It was like this when he was a baby. People said, “just let him cry it out,” but when we did, a single time, he cried for an hour, then fell asleep but woke up angry, remembering everything. Now his eyes are puffy with tears and allergies and I’ve had far too little time to myself, and far too many deadlines to make time now for this push and pull. I scream. SCREAM at him. I am ashamed, heartbroken. I want to snip through everything I’ve done with a small pair of embroidery scissors, thread after indelicate thread until I get back to the place where our hearts are close and our cheeks touch.

I hate you, Mommy. I hate you he screams.

Nothing prepared me for this. For the way I would feel like I had ruined everything. Like being broken up with, but irreparably worse. (Thank god we have a few more years before he is a teenager to figure things out...)

Finally I backed down. He played outdoors. We skirted each other ashamed by the mess we’d made of things. At bedtime he asked for Daddy to read to him, and slipped by my studio door without coming to goodnight.

2. T carries him into the bedroom before I am awake. The feeling of his bird like shoulder blades; the hull of his delicate ribs; the haphazard placement of his marionette arms against my neck, wakes me. I love you Mommy. I love you so much.

I love you too. I love you. I love you. I whisper back. His elbow makes an upside down V along the line of my chin. I press my nose into his neck where it smells forever just like him: like cookies and grass and autumn air, and slip a little towards a softer sleep.

3. We're downtown at a street festival and he stands watching the fire throwers, just like his dad, hands in pockets, one knee bent, transfixed. I leave the two of them watching and walk with Sprout and my mother to the Capitol green, where my littlest runs like he has something to prove. (He does: joy is everywhere.) His face beams. He climbs every set of stairs he can finds. He stops to smell every single flower; stroking the plush purple petals of the petunias as though they are the source of joy. (They are.)

4. My little one. He is the still point at the center of my heart, and a twirling dervish that colors my heart with of comfort. He is curls and sticky fingers and sweat on his brow and newly found independence and tantrums. He is laughter with juice running down his chin. He carries crushed gingersnap cookies in his fist and grins.

5. I can see them walking towards us across the green grass, both wearing yellow, like sunshine flooding towards me. They walk in synch and they are grinning: they’ve gotten lemonade and a new hat and gloves for him for winter, and they are almost one and the same, those two foreign bits of my heart.

6. The light is golden and the hills are purple and flame. The leaves have begun to turn to orange; tattered yellow; ocher. The grass is dewy now and strewn with the tree’s spent energy of a season.

Light refracts like fire in what remains.

This + that tonight

Hi. Tomorrow I have some photos to share + some stories about the epic tantrums and dark parenting moments that occurred this weekend (brought to my knees, I dare say, by my five year old Bean who holds my heart rather indelicately among the coins and pebbles and twine and marbles in his pocket) Tonight, I thought I'd share a glimpse into what I've been thinking and doing, squirreled away for hours in my studio studying:

I've been asked several times in the past couple of weeks what Emergent Media is exactly, and, as is often the case with my mixed-media multiple genre life, I find myself wanting to shrug and say: it's everything.

Because it kind of is.

It's words, for starters, and everything conveyed and made possible through the evolution of conveying words with letters, first on papyrus, then on the page, now here, on the screen. Simply: within the story of words evolving from speech to writing, is the story of human beings becoming, of human consciousness evolving, and of media emerging.

Thus, to study Emergent Media is to study both the medium, and the message, the chicken and the egg. It means to study words, and to study the ideas that words convey. It means to study media, and the messages they convey. It means to examine investigate the past for patterns, and to peak towards the future for clues. ...[more]

learning things

I want to feel like I am living down into my feet, but today I make it only as far as my spine: curved, contoured to chair after chair, listening, scribbling notes, my mind compressing and applying information as flexibly as I know how. It’s an all out pummeling to be submerged like this on Wednesdays: 6 hours of class, everything entirely new. Like learning to moon walk, or speak Japanese, that is what it feels like to dive into RAW and HTML and CSS; acronyms becoming little dog-eared tabs of meaning in my mind.

And then to switch gears from web design and theory, to making pizza and nuzzeling sweet little boy heads.

Over warm apple crumble I’d pulled together out of sheer will power Bean said, “I love Nonna more than I love you, Mommy. Just a minute more, but I do.”

Oh, to find the quite open space to be there with him then. To hold that moment open without filling it up with my own small hurts. I couldn’t help but turn away, picking at a fingernail, eyes smarting.

So this is showing up, this is what it’s like to throw yourself towards the day with the urgency and grace and inexperience of a dancer learning new material. Some moments I feel like I am defying gravity: I hit all the deadlines, I take copious notes, my mind is a perpetual shower of sparks while I am vacuuming the kitchen floors. Other times it’s about falling hard: the way my eyes feel blurring from so many consecutive hours of screen and classroom time; the way my boys see me for less time some days than they do their grandparents.

Tonight the house smells like baking apples, and I read the boys stories in the semi-dark of their bedroom. Then I come downstairs to where the house is humming with stillness. I want to fold like an origami bird, wings to body, head tucked inside a fragile crease of paper and sleep, but this isn’t about folding. No, this time, this year, these moments, are all about learning to fly.

How to take a walk

Take a deep breath. Stop whatever you are doing, even if you think it cannot wait. Even if there is a deadline attached to it, and maybe especially then. Close out facebook, email, twitter. Close your computer. Close your eyes and take another breath and look to the window where the miraculous sky meets the horizon. Maybe it will rain. Do not let this deter you. Take your little one by the hand and let the whole process of putting on shoes and finding sweatshirts be moments at the center of the rippling circles of your life; moments that are still with presence. Open the door and feel the air on your face: sweet with early autumn and cool.

Watch your little one take the steps down from the door confidently, carefully, the hight still a challenge. Watch him run then, gleeful towards the grass.

Pull your mind back to this: to the gravel on the road; to the clovers in the grass; to the sky above, spread with gathering clouds. Watch for birds. Watch for unexpected delight. Find a wild apple tree and shake it until the small hard apples rain down. Pick one, the pinkest one, and rub it on your shirt until it gleams. Tae a bite. Sweet, tart, fragrant. Offer it to your little one who will be reaching for it eagerly. Watch his delight.

Go to where the road forks and look both ways. Follow your feet. Go wherever. Go slowly. Instead of feeling impatient, look for four leaf clovers. Look for yellow leaves. Look for birds on wires. Look for flags, wind, wires, wings.

The point isn't about going far; or about exercise; or about anything except this: you, outdoors, with your little one. Offer to hold hands. He might take your hand in his, grabbing two fingers at a time, or he might dash ahead, curls flying in the wind. Either choice is the most joyous thing in the world. Follow the road. Follow your your heart, there, ahead of you in blue pants and a red shirt and little sneakers. Watch him discover what it means to run. Watch how he stops, starts, stops, and finds wonder in everything.

Stop to listen. There is wind. Maybe you will hear the sound of traffic, airplanes, windmills, woods, plastic bags rustling; kids calling; horns; quiet. Listen for the quiet. Hear it between the moments of sound. Wait for it. Wait until you've heard it enough to make your heart feel full.

Stop for pebbles. See how many colors you can find. Watch his delight as he finds one, just right, white, the size of his small fist. Watch as he squats down and picks it up.

Here, this one is for you.

Discover just how fun it is to put rocks into your pockets. Go ahead. Try it. Find one. Put it in your pocket. Let your fingers become accustomed to its surface and edge.

Look for beauty. Keep looking. Find it everywhere. {more...}

small discoveries

At some point there will be enough hours and I’ll know it, but for now Photoshop is like sliding down a rabbit hole into an alternate reality where everything reacts and responds in arbitrary, brilliant, and unexpected ways.

I spent the whole day occupied in this way, siting at my long white desk, sheaves of paper sketches spread around me like snow, making images, digital and graphite both.

Outside the weather has turned decidedly autumn like, and today the sky was the kind of gray that makes me moody, and it’s that time of the month where everything seems blunt or sharp depending on the circumstance, and chocolate really is the only solution.

It takes more effort to dig out of my own head space on days like these: to inhabit family life without the residual layers of mood and intellectual momentum. Still, there were lovely moments: French toast with maple syrup from our neighbors, cuddling with the boys on the floor, taking a walk down the road with Sprout in the wagon, Bean holding my hand, T's arm wrapped around my waist. Every single day I fall in love with my boys more. All three of them.

Today I wanted to share a new mix of music I’ve been absolutely crushing on: A soundtrack for making things.

Also into this project: Love 146. And this awesome, awesome site: Arbutus Yarns I love, love, love discovering your sources of inspiration. What are you crushing on lately?

almost a list about today

There were things, hours, chocolate graham crackers, kisses, tears. There was a walk down the road stalking birds on telephone wires for an art project (I've been inspired by this theme. Do you like the new header?) There were storm clouds and hours spent reading, Ong and Havelock and Surowiecki, and pages filled in my notebook ideas bursting like sparks.

There was an afternoon self portrait session when the light was temporarily good. Three self portraits are due in another week, in deferent mediums, and I've settled on a theme I think, of how we occupy ourselves in this illusive way: we are beings being. I feel this particularly as a mother--the way so many different piece of me are occupying the same space with myself. Does that make any sense at all? I am interested in the way we converge with ourselves, and are at odds. The way the words mother | writer | artist | designer don't necessarily overlap in any kind of orderly way.

There was giggling on the bed, snapping more photos, twirling, and heading for the door. There were white rocks found and stored in pockets. Wild grapes eaten that stained our lips. Birds caught in flight, in pixels. Birds in silhouette, black over blue.

There was an evening sky filled with pink, and fallapart tired boys and more tears and bedtime snuggles, and then T and I found each other on the couch, soaking up the light, soaking up each other, our fingers running lightly along each other's limbs.

Now there is night, windows are mirrors, lamplight makes circles and words fill the page.

Tell me about your day... I love reading little glimpses into your worlds.

Blur and beauty

Hi. I have resolved to come here and snatch snippets and pin them down even if I feel like they don't matter or don't make sense. Will you still come to visit? I hope so.

So Wednesdays are the longest days for me around here now. Two studio classes with so much awesome my brain basically explodes by the time I'm through at 5pm. Then the long drive home where I can feel my body practically humming still with the energy of thought. Like a whirring halo of ideas that glisten over the surface of my skin. It really feels like that.

I'm grateful for the drive; for the almost forty minutes (with evening traffic) to pull myself out of my mind. To reconnect with my muscles, breath. It's a good transition time so that when I get home I can melt to floor level where Sprout comes to find me, folding into my chest. He strokes my bare arms with his little sticky hands. "Hi mama. Hi."

This is the hardest part and also the riddle: not being around him all day, even though when I am around him all day I long for exactly what I have now--heady intellectual conversation and artistic challenge.

Why must this be so?

Tonight T was out late, so it was just me and my two boys after their grandparents left. We said grace, ate polenta with cheese and sauce, giggled a lot. And then already it was about teeth brushing and diaper changing and bedtime and now more than ever I want to sneak in and kiss their faces. Am I missing everything by not being here every day to police the endless tussles over toys; to clean up the endless messes; to catch their endless smiles? No. That can't be. Their lives are rich with grandparents and Bean is in Kindergarten (!) and oh, how I love this crazy intense busy mind expanding stuff of being in school. Little by little I'll be posting a few more tidbits over here if you are ever interested in following along. I'm also on twitter pretty regularly, sharing all the inspiration I'm finding daily. Like this (so fun!)

It's starting to feel like fall here. The garden has reached that prolific wild state of neglect and bounty. There are potatoes with a thousand sleeping eyes waiting to be dug; crickets still in the evening; the first yellow and red leaves. Something I'm going to try very hard to do on the days when I don't have class is to get outdoors for small snippets of time. There is nothing more restorative than walking under the open sky, or lying in a field of tall grass, or feeling the wind hard on my face at the top of a parking garage with a glorious view.

August 24:: Treehouse

"I want a fort really, really bad Mommy. Can we make one?"

Today I said yes.

Yes, and a pile of wood destined for the dump became a flying boat fort. He built it nearly half himself. Singing, hammering, adding knobs and buttons and tubing and the appropriate tree fort signs. And then he came in for lunch and over rice with tamari and avocado slices he drew this absolutely awesome self portrait.

"Why is it white just around your head?" I wanted to know.

"Because I'm sticking my head through the hole in my treehouse, and there is space between my head and the hole. Don't you get it, Mommy?"

And then I did get it. I love the way he thinks.

August 5::Thursday

This boy makes me smile all day long. I snapped these right after his nap... when he was all sleepy and mellow still. Love his little bum in the air.

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Today was all about long walks and conversations with my best friend... Conversations interrupted by little boys asking for snacks and finding caterpillars and banging on drums. Conversations about purpose, about passion, about direction, about contentment.

About the difference between these three terms:

Self absorbed.

Selfish.

Self confident.

What do you think of when you read these words. What does each mean to you? How do your definitions change when you apply them to your best friend, your lover, your mother, your child?

Saying Yes

The summer rain is falling slantwise against the open window glass. The sills are damp, the view a duotone of green and grey: foliage and clouds. In my new studio the window looks out on an apple tree, Norway beeches, and beyond the cloud cover, the mountains not so very far off. I’ve spent most of the morning here, working, and I love this new space so very much. I love how I can move from painting to words and back; how the book is taking shape now more quickly, my ideas knitting together from one day to the next. It's happening.

+++

Now for the news:

I will be going to graduate school full time, starting at the end of August.

It’s an MFA in Emergent Media (web and graphic design combined with the technologies and storytelling mediums that are emerging from the future.) It’s an opportunity for me to be at the forefront of field that is new and growing; and to shape a new career that is lucrative, creative, and complementary to what I already do. This has been in the works for a while...this shift...but I've said very little about it here because I didn't want to jinx, or speak too soon. Last year, doing part time work, discovered how much I was into this field; how I naturally had an eye for color and design, and for shaping a vision, or ad campaign.

It took me awhile to give myself permission to consider perusing a new career; a financially viable career; a fast-pasted, demanding career. (I've shared before how it has taken me a long time to shake off my father's altruistic expectations for me as a teacher. Whew. What a process!) It also took me awhile to dream up a career that would complement writing, maybe even sustain it, instead of detracting from it (as teaching has always done.)

So I'm in. I'm going.

Of course it is terrifying. Programming languages + me? Ha. Virtual worlds? Video editing? Pure crazy.

But I have never backed down because something is hard. And this is exciting-hard. It's thrilling.

I’ve written so much about the endless tug-of-war that goes on in my head about being a mother and being more than a mother. About being an creator in my own right; a writer, an artist, a shaper of my own financial future. And about being a mother who gets down on the floor with her boys every single day: plays legos, wrestles, builds things, paints, reads stories, bakes bread. Of course I’m torn. When making this decision I thought of my boys in 18 years from now. I asked their future selves what they would think if I went for this, or didn’t. I asked them what they would resent more: me super busy through two years of their childhoods, or me unfulfilled and holding that resentment deeply.

The answer seemed clear.

They offered me really generous funding and I had to say yes or no within twenty-four hours (I applied late in the game, after deadline) and everything was topsy-turvy yesterday and the day before, deciding. T and I stayed up late, late, whispering about our futures and looking at calendars and daily schedules that seemed impossible to navigate. And then my inlaws and friends joined forces to say: we want this for you. We'll make this happen with you. (They are amazing.)

So I said yes.

I can’t believe where this year has taken me; us. It’s astounding. And awesome.

A quiet space

Here are some studio glimpses...I love it so.

And today I am trying to make one more hard, important, life-changing decision about career pursuits. It depends wholly on others: their help, support, time, etc. And it's about having kids and having a career, naturally. About pursuing graduate school now, or waiting. It's about feeling like time is slipping by (my time, and their childhood's both.)

It's about loving them hard: my boys with their sweet sticky grins and laughter and innocence, and about about wanting the best for the... and also wanting the best for me. It's about wondering if those are mutually inclusive or mutually exclusive.

It's about getting ahead or falling behind and about hopefully ending up right where I'm supposed to be.

(I'm curious what you believe: Does the universe have the outcome planned, or are we architects of the outcomes all on our own?)

Trusting, trusting, trusting.

Retrospective

Hi friends. How was your day?

I spent the day sifting through the artifacts of who I used to be. I moved my things into my new studio today (pictures tomorrow in the morning sunlight!) and spent hours sorting and perusing and riffling, and discovering again who I used to be.

Since I was twelve I’ve a notebook or journal of some kind more or less consistently, and today I leafed through several, re-reading words I no longer remember writing. It was a blast.

I’m not much of a diarist (though my earlier notebooks were certainly concerned almost entirely with boys and my relationships to them.) My notebooks usually contain the recordings of a haphazard, passionate life: words I've read and want to learn, conversations overheard, to-do lists, notes for poems, and sometimes the longer unravelings that write to discover what I am feeling in a given situation or moment. And oh, my twenties were abundantly full of feeling. Relationships coming and going; loves arduous, delightful, foolhardy, intense. And always the repeated question of whether I was pregnant or not (so glad that is no longer a question mark on the table!)

I was so holographic in my twenties; so changeable to whomever I was around. I was enormously influenced by certain men I dated—and while I’m grateful I didn’t marry any of them, I’m happy that I still know them all, peripherally, in the tender and distant way you can only know a former love, now become friend. They are all great men. Enormously talented in their own ways; worthy of the influence they had on me to be sure. Still, I was nearly transparent dating some of them: taking on their passions and pastimes the way water takes on the contours of the riverbed it travels through.

A couple of weeks ago I was chatting with a dear girlfriend of mine about turning thirty; about the angst you feel at the end of your twenties when you are told that the world is your oyster and you want to do everything you can to make sure it stays that way. You become preoccupied, maybe, with the way things appear (you check off certain boxes, perhaps: house, spouse, puppy, baby.) Perhaps you throw yourself into multiple activities. You maintain a bustling social life; commit to far to many things fearing that without all the hustle you’ll become a working stiff, a boring old married couple. Maybe you fear becoming that couple with the new baby who no one ever sees any more. Maybe you fear becoming the couple who have regular sides of the bed; who don’t talk over breakfast; who forget to hold hands in the grocery store. Already you are fixated on remembering what you used to be like when your were younger, in your early twenties, when all-nighters were effortless, and you could drink hard and not feel it the next morning (or when you had sex on the couch just because you wanted to, instead of because it was the only cushioned place in the house not occupied by a sleeping child.

I was so glad, looking back, to no longer feel that angst. To feel instead the grace that comes with sticking with things; with letting the edges soften a bit. As I said to my friend: it’s not about doing more, it’s about being more. Quietly, subtly, within the very small orbit of your ordinary, extraordinary life.

That said, when I turned thirty I had no idea how I'd feel now, at thirty two (and a half!--remember saying that when you were a kid?). I hated turning thirty. I can remember my optimism and anxiety cocktail perfectly. I was obsessed with the idea that I had missed the boat already (for becoming a writer and artist; for ever having an amazing body; for doing any kind of adventurous travel; for having a night life.)

I was sure that I was saddled for the long haul, and that in fact, it would be a haul. Thirty sucked. I was pregnant (and vomiting) and while things were fabulous financially, I hated my job more than I can even begin to describe. It unsettled me, and sucked the creative energy from me in a way that left me frazzled and certain that I would never amount to a single thing in the world. Then I turned thirty-one and had Sprout and quit my job and all of our financial security came tumbling down around me like an igloo made of sugar cubes in a rainstorm. Yet miraculously I began, last year, to see how being more means being in the moment. It means discovering the day, wholly, with joy and wonder, and living into it as wholly as possible.

I discovered grace in the midst of sadness; wonder in the thistle-sweet heart of despair. I grew disciplined with fitness, and found in push-ups and running the control I could not claim for the rest of my life.

Last year was unfathomably hard. If my twenty-five year-old-self could have seen last year she would have been terrified by th repetition (the laundry, the dishes, the endless responsibility of making food and enforcing bed times), the perpetual noise and lack of privacy, and the endless, endless worry. But she would have been missing the point.

I have a kind of tempered, hard-earned confidence now that I never had in my twenties. The kind of confidence that comes, trial by fire, through doing the difficult, painful parts of life. From giving birth; from loving two small boys until my heart could split like an overripe melon, revealing the sugary sweetness inside; from fighting and wincing and feeling small and reactive in my relationship and growing from it, to become richer and deeper, like soil made from the decomposed refuse of last season’s garden clippings. We lost a lot last year. A lot of security, a lot of known outcomes, a lot of comfort. Still, I gained a groundedness I'm grateful for. I traded muscles and determination for all the thinness and whimsy I had at twenty-five.

And I’ve begun to discover how contentment can come slowly with the unfolding of a day: with eating berry crumble and a frothy coffee for breakfast (surrounded by the hubbub of small boys); with folding sheets fresh from the dryer; with the sound of the oscillating afternoon fans and lemonade; and later, berry picking after dinner. Black raspberries are my favorite, for sure. PS:

Here are some summer tunes I've been humming along to.

Fishing at home

I discovered a blog this past week that I am absolutely smitten with, that has made all the difference this week in terms surviving summer and having some fun while we’re at it. It’s by a dad, Joel, who is also a designer, artist, crafter, and kid-toy-making genius.

Using Joel’s design as inspiration I sent my husband and Bean out to the garage one morning (while Sprout napped and I snatched an hour or two of writing time) to make a pole using one of the many sticks he has managed to collect.

Side note: have you noticed this about boys? How they seem to have a perpetual thing for sticks. How it’s almost innate, the desire to pick up sticks and wield them about as swords or javelins or flags or walking sticks? Also rocks. My boys, both of them, have this inherent love of gathering rocks, throwing rocks in water, collecting them, kicking them, stowing them in pockets (alas, so many end up in my washer.)...more.

Summer Routines & Rhythms

I’ve been thinking a lot about how I’m going to survive this summer and how my kids are going to survive this summer and how, optimally, hopefully, we’ll do it with a bit of grace and perhaps even some pizazz. So. To that end I’ve been trying to tackle the work-play rhythm I mentioned in my last post, and I’ve come to a few ideas (and I’d love to hear yours on this topic too!)... More...

There is an art to this

There is an art to this. To waiting, to being present in uncertainty when moments are only whatever it is that they are until the next moments arrive.

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Today writing terrifies me. It terrifies me because of the way these stories last, the way we tell ourselves stories in order to be who we are, to become who we are becoming. It makes me ache, to see the small uncertain snapshot of myself as I am right now: here at the dining room table, in a room so humid the pencil digs into the soft pulp of the paper like a finger nail scratching at mosquito bitten skin.

Outside it is pouring and green and warm. Water drips from the gutters in irregular staccato and farther out the rain falls steadily with a rushing noise that fills the valley, the house, the sky with sound. Upstairs, in his crib, my son is sleeping, likely on his belly with his cheek pressed softly into the matted sheepskin he’s slept on since the day he was born. He’ll sleep for another hour and then wake and my day will circle about again, and I will become something less productive and possibly more real.

In thirty years what will these moments mean?

Today I re-read, slowly, meticulously, intentionally, every line Joan Didion’s piece, “On Going Home,” examining each comma, each particular use of parenthesis, each use of metaphor and observation, and found myself nearly in tears at this last paragraph, knowing as I know, that her daughter died at 39.

It is time for the baby’s birthday party: a white cake, strawberry-marshmallow ice cream, a bottle of champagne saved from another party. In the evening after she has gone to sleep, I kneel beside the crib and touch her face, where it is pressed against the slats, with mine. She is an open and trusting child, unprepared for and unaccustomed to the ambushes of family life, and perhaps it is just as well that I can offer her little of that life. I would like to give her more. I would like to promise her that she will grow up with a sense of her cousins and of rivers and of her great-grandmother’s teacups, would like to pledge her a picnic on a river with fried chicken and her hair uncombed, would like to give her home for her birthday, but we live differently now and I can promise her nothing like that. I give her a xylophone and a sundress from Madeira, and promise to tell her a funny story.

What can I promise? What do these moments hold?

Sweetness

The last few posts have been so moody and somber...but all kinds of lovely has been happening too: sunshine and a warm wind; chalk drawings and skateboarding in the garage; meandering walks down to the pond; homemade pizza with friends.

And today: a trip to the farmer's market, just Bean & me..to meet my lovely friend & her little boy. A cinnamon danish; boys on bikes; exploring by the lakefront; sunburn; an old-fashioned root beer float.

I can't quite describe how lovely it was to hang out with just my big boy. I hardly ever get Bean one-on-one these day's and he's so charming and smart and articulate and full of mischief.

When we came home we spent another few hours out doors with T and Sprout planting shrubs and building a trellis using saplings (can't wait to show you pictures.) Bean loved dragging the saplings down from the woods after T cut them down, and Sprout was pleased as punch to take up occupancy in the holes we dug for the shrubs.

Tomorrow, a laid back Father's Day (will share the super simple + sweet project Bean & I worked on!) with more outdoor projects planned (unless it rains...)

(More on how the first week of summer vacation went here.)