First person!

Bean drew a picture of a person today. See? The long legs. The shoes. Up top is the body and head all rolled into one (could that possibly be the way he sees us? His tall mommy and daddy with our long legs and our heads way up high?) There were also, at least while he was painting, blue for the eyes and red for the mouth, but they rapidly became blurred. The long arm going off the page is holding an "orange race car."

Sitting on the kitchen floor and watching him paint made my night.

Like peguins

I hate that I get to the point where some remarkable super woman part of me has managed to sort, organize, file, and accomplish, and I'm just rounding the corner on being "ahead," when then the week catches up with me again. I hate that on any given day I can never really accomplish even half of what I’d like to.

I know deep down that this moment, right here on this couch, matters. Here, in a circle of light surrounded by the dark of the sleeping house, with my breath and my anxious heart, this is what matters. Here, with my feet tucked up under me and the steady clacking of the keyboard, my fingers fluttering to create words without conscious effort. Here, longing for sleep. This is what matters.

But I get hungry for days where everything feels sorted out and accomplished. Where there is time to come home from work and take a walk outdoors; time to do some yoga, or run; and mostly, time to write. Each day I don’t write I feel a terror rising in me. What if I never get this down? What if all I can ever do are fragments? But each day, the demands prioritize, like jostling penguins. I’ve heard that they’ll do this at the edge of an ice burg: push and bump until one or two penguins fall into the icy water below. The rest stand watching—waiting to see if the ones they pushed surface and swim about or are devoured.

I keep picturing some graphic organizer, some chart, something that could synchronize and streamline the crazy that is my day—but even if it were—even if I could remember and coordinate all the things I need to accomplish, it still comes back to this: the hours run out. The clock’s hand crawls steadily around the face. Night fills my body with a craving for sleep, and then, too soon, the alarm clicks on.

Because it's Monday

And because I can't eek out anything more than this, I'm wondering what you're top 10 favorite foods are. Foods you can't live without. They can be entire dishes--or individual ingredients. Mine: pomogranets & mangos chocolate coffee fresh salad (especially with micro greens, sprouts, etc.) grilled cheese & tomato soup cheddar, manchego, and chevre baklava sushi french toast + maple syrup avocados

(not necessarily in that order)

Runners up: honeycomb dates coconut tom ka (Thai soup) pad Thai bacon omlettes

I will not die an unlived live

I read through your comments and what resonates most is this: wait to have a second child until nothing else seems right. There are so many different ways to look at the same picture, tilting and turning the image until it fits what we imagine for ourselves. It’s the imagining that matters. The taking of steps. The risk in doing so. We can never really know where our life will take us. The outcome is more illusive than four leaf clovers tucked among the grass. We cannot be sure we’ll be at the right spot to pluck them up and pocket them—cannot for that matter be sure that we won’t gather an armful of lilies instead. It’s the attempt that matters.The effort that goes into charting the course and then leaping into bright blue space.

Right now this feels right: my small family of the three of us, tucked away here on a hilltop at the end of a long valley. We’re just getting the hang of us. Here. Last year was like a bruise, with so much energy scattered helter-skelter that we’re still just hoping to make it through the winter, gathered around our wood stove, drinking coffee over breakfast.

I will not die an unlived life. I will not live in fear of failing or catching fire. I choose to inhabit my days, to allow my living to open me to make me less afraid, more accessible, to loosen my heart until it becomes a wing, a torch, a promise. I choose to risk my significance, to live so that which came to me as seed goes to the next as blossom, and that which came to me as blossom, goes on as fruit.

Dawna Markova

One or two

On a run, we talk. It is a good time for talking actually. The conversation makes the strain forgettable. In between words, pauses long enough for breath, and for making things intentional. We run past open meadows and woods where the leaves are piled high and brown. The sun is warm on our backs, but we wear woolen hats. We talk about the things we’ve always wanted. About the dreams we have. Living in Europe; graduate school; a life where we can look back each day and say we lived it well and fully. It’s easy to dream and forget to leap. To stand at the top of the cliff, and get lost looking down, without ever stepping off, and then there’ll be the day we’ll look back and regret.

“That would be the summer you’re supposed to be pregnant with another baby,” he says, of two summers from now. We’re talking about living in Europe—a part of a graduate degree program I’ve been accepted to, and have decided to attend. I feel my stomach flip flop.

When I pick up my friend’s baby, he fits perfectly into my arms. My body remembers that rocking motion (a side-to-side movement I grew so accustomed to, that for month’s I’d catch myself standing in line at the grocery store, or the bank, swaying.) I bring my lips to the softness of his downy head instinctively. Motherhood is in my bones.

And yet, I have a fierce, anxious longing to do more than this. I’ve come to this other passion slowly, like an embering fire. It hasn’t been a direct route, like Karen Russel, who at 26 has already published an acclaimed, original collection of stories. Writing for me has been more like a slow aquifer, bubbling to the surface with greater and grater force with each year’s passage.

I love my son wildly, and am grateful for his little satellite self, orbiting my days. But I’ve just started to feel like things are possible again. Life beyond the insular circumference of a baby’s needs. I imagine a sibling for Bean. But when I really examine this image, I find much of it is a composite of expectations. Everyone I know has had two or more kids. I grew up in a family of three. I don’t really know any onlies, and people ask me regularly when I’ll have a second.

As it stands, it’s a matter of timing. A matter of putting one dream ahead of the other. People say siblings born close together are happiest—they have each other, and all that. But I can’t imagine this now. I can’t imagine the constant rush. The never enough hands. The diapers in addition to the night time worries of a toddler. I can’t imagine never being able to sink back into the couch with a stack of books, to read to a wide-eyed eager Bean with no interruptions. Nor can I imagine giving up this wellspring of focus and direction that I've come to in my writing. Maybe I could do both. Maybe, especially if they were far enough apart in age. Maybe if I had a two-book deal in the works. But now?

I can picture a second. I can picture being pregnant again, and a part of me wants that chance. The first time I was caught so off guard, the whole nine months passed in a blur of coming to grips. I’d be able to do it more gracefully now—and also those first crazy months. I’d be less terrified, more confident in the certain joy of hour of melted moments spent staring at a newborn’s face.

But as much as I can picture this—and even want it—I cannot imagine it now, or next year or the year after. Huge, in the front of everything else, is the desire to write, to publish, to make this into my career. And I get these things, still, I am uncertain.

I want your thoughts on this. If you’ve had kids—why have you had more than one? How did you decide the timing? How did it affect the scope and outcome of your dreams?

Trailing

I skip work and sleep in until ten. My body has felt like a Duchamp painting the past few days, in too many places at the same time. When I woke up the sun was flooding the room, and I lay in bed, surrounded by soft white flannel, and watched the dust motes dance in the light. When I wake up, especially when I wake up late or from a nap, I feel like I am trailing myself for a few moments. I startle easily then, and prefer to move slowly, to linger where I am still fluent with the images of my dreams, before language ripples the surface of my mind like someone throwing a handful of pebbles into a serene pond.

I made my way to my studio where lady bugs still seem to linger—one or two greet me each day on the windowsills, moving about as the sun warms their shiny beetle backs. I wrote for an hour or so, feeling the zinging of anxiety rise and fall in my chest. What if it’s not good? What if I can do better? What if I can never get past the point of beginning, or the halfway? Then I’d move to my yoga mat facing the sun, and bring my attention towards my tight hamstrings and uneven breath.

By noon, I went running. Some days I wish every day could be like this: mired into the thick of the work I love most, yet able to be flexible and active midday when the sun makes the air fragrant with the smell of dry leaves and damp earth. I came back determined to gather focus, and to pursue what I want (to write fulltime) with more clarity. I’ve been waiting for this to happen. This shift away from summer’s dreaminess and early autumns tumbled wonder. Like waking up, it takes me a while to shift gears towards productivity after the sensory world I inhabit when the fields are green and the air is rife with the fragrance of ripening fruit and the busy humming of insects.

NaBloPoMo Redux

It's that time of night where I feel my bones become heavy, and I can neither make myself get up and go to bed, nor do anything constructive here at the keyboard. The stories are mostly tatters anyway, but I'm using this month of NaBloPoMo to really hunker down and write. I've been thinking about spending more time capturing the 'glimmers' of every day. The small shreds of story I overhear; the scenes that present themselves. Usually I overlook them, trusting my faulty memory to hold the small bits of scene in place until I wearily find my way to the keyboard. But it never turns out that way. I end up never sitting down. So for me this month will be one of recording details; glimmers; taking note of the small, unremarkable, bright shards of day that become story when wedged back to back. It will be a record of autumn turning towards winter: the hills washed suddenly gray with the first hard rains. The field in the morning dusted with frost. The dry heat of the wood stove filling the kitchen with snug warmth, and the moon as big and perfect as a dinner plate rising up golden over the crest of the hill.

What do you want to take note of this November?

Trick-or-treating for the first time

Carving pumpkins on the kitchen floor, then bringing them in the red wagon to light the drive. Take-out-Thai for dinner and then a flurry of costume snaps. A baby skunk, fur fluffy on his belly, and turquoise Crocs to walk the dirt road stretching between our house and the neighbor's. We held his hands, one in each of ours, as we followed the bobbing light of the flashlight up to each door. Then watched him murmer the words, shyly at first. "Trick-or-treat," and then "Thank you," his small fist clutching each new candy bar with amazement.

Above us the stars twirled. We went to a half-dozen houses, and then down to the end of our road to look upon five hundred jack-o-lanterns, all glowing. His eyes wide in the dark, his face smudged with chocolate and wonder.

Pumpkin carving

Anticipation angst

This morning called for errands in town. Warm cinnamon buns from the last farmer’s market of the season, and people watching in the rain. Returning home for a much needed two hour nap among soft white flannel sheets (with the cat at my feet) and then an afternoon cleaning in that wholesome, down to the nooks and crannies kind of way that is utterly satisfying. Tomorrow we’re having a shindig with several dozen people. All good friends and neighbors. Cider, pumpkin carving, a rip-roaring bonfire. And though I can’t wait to have everyone in one spot, I’m way out of my comfort zone.

Throwing parties isn’t something I’m good at yet. I’d like to be. I’d like to be better at social things in general—and it was a resolution of mine this year to push myself in this direction. Being the Aquarius that I am, I’d prefer to be holed up somewhere creating, or with a few friends huddled over steaming lattes in a bohemian cafe. I don’t do new social situations with ease—or, more honestly, I don’t do anticipating them well. Once I’m actually in the midst of it all, I’m generally fine. I fly by the seat of my pants and hope everyone’s having a good time. But the residue of the ahead-of-time angst makes me nervy for the first twenty minutes or so of any new circumstance.

I look back on my quiet, almost cloistered home life as a child, and find my anxiety coiled there. We rarely had guests. My parents never “entertained.” Hence I really only have the random collection of fall-back experiences from my late teens and early twenties, and mostly those sucked. Red plastic cups of cheep beer, etc. But I’ve always craved more. I love people, and I love good food, and I love these in combination. Like a chapter out of an Isabelle Illende novel, I want my house to be full of the vivacious, bubbly, cacophony of voices and laughter. I want this to be the memory Bean has. Friends, always welcome. Dinner parties. Gatherings. Ruckus chatter under starlight, as people gather around a fire.

Mommy stone

“Where is my mommy stone?” He asks, upper lip quivering. It is bed time. I’ve come to say good night. Then he says, “I love you and I missed you.” He says this often, the latter almost automatically following the former; but it’s also something that must reflect the hunger his little self feels for mommy time. I’m not always available the way I could be—if I were wholly and exclusively focused on being his mother. Selfishly, I take time for me often. I write, I run, I forfeit controlling the circumstance of his days in exchange for time to do my own things.

Now we’re in the semi dark. He’s talking about the small stone I gave him when I went back to work this year. I told him it was a Mommy Stone with kisses in it, to rub on his cheek if he missed me. I don’t know why he’s suddenly thought of it tonight, and seeing him, upper lip trembling, I want to make everything immediately okay.

“I’ll find you another mommy stone and put kisses in it and have it ready for you in the morning,” I rush to offer.

“But how can I see the kisses? How do they get in there?” He is earnest, almost crying, and suddenly I’m over come too. I wrap him in the dark, kissing his cheeks a hundred times, tears suddenly, unexpectedly wet on my cheeks. “You can’t see them, you can feel them when you rub the Mommy stone on your cheek. Because I love you, and I put the kisses in there just for you,” I say.

“Okay,” he says, and then “I love you, I love you mommy.”

“I love you too, with my whole heart,” I whisper into the air against his cheek.

“I love you, I love you,” he says, his arms wrapped around my neck.

synchopation

I have the day off and I’m gleefully miring my way through an inconceivably long to-do list. I have yet to figure out how to accomplish my every day life and everything else that needs to get done.

The biggest thing I’ve accomplished: completely reorganizing and painting my studio. Last year sometime, in the middle of the winter, under a blanket of depression, I painted my studio a pale blue, which felt like a bad idea almost seconds after the last coat was applied. Without meaning to, I began to use my studio space less and less, until I would go for a week or two without ever entering it.

This affected me on a subconscious level. I felt creatively terrified. Performance anxiety corroded any attempt to splash color across the page or really sink back into a routine of writing. Without a space I felt comfortable in, I resorted to writing at the kitchen table, in the midst of the hubbub of daily life, and routinely sabotaged my own efforts even there, buy skimming through my favorite blogs, or trying to keep up with the voracious demands of my gig over at Parent Dish.

Somehow the entire month of September (and nearly all of October) was swallowed by the murky creature of un-ambition. All summer I was entrenched in the rich sensory beauty of the outdoors; of leisure; good food; good novels. Then fall arrived with the first nip in the air and the hillsides turning orange, and I didn’t know what to do with myself. My syncopation was jagged and blurry; like a scarecrow trying to dance. Somehow with the shift in seasons I stopped doing all the things that I love: running, writing, art, and instead became (maybe necessarily) submerged in the fabric of work.

Headlong there, in the classroom, participating in the daily alchemy of turning eighteen individuals into a working group of learners; time spent watching spiders eat grasshoppers in the terrarium; and writing stories about magical shrinking potions. Time spent tying shoes and counting shells and navigating small sorrows. Time spent feeling nearly exhausted every afternoon; always empty, hungry, anxious.

And then I came home a few days ago to an empty house (Bean and DH were out running errands) and despite feeling hungry and grumpy, I decided to pull on my running shoes and head out in the perfect autumn sunlight for a run.

On the way back, passing a long field that follows the road for a good stretch, a small pony saw me running, and cantered up to the fence and then ran with me. I stopped and petted her tousled mane, and then continued, delighting in the unexpected equine attention. And then I realize: I was no longer either hungry or grumpy. My mood and body had been off kilter because I’ve been so out of rhythm. My soul misses running, it seems. Just as it misses moving through steady sun salutes on my yoga mat on my sunny studio floor.

So in the past few days I feel like I’ve come back into orbit around the quiet fire of my inner self. I’ve started running again, and I want to do it nearly every day. My body needs to move, just as my mind needs the quiet emptiness of one foot falling in front of the other along the gravel road.

So I’ve cleaned my studio and tackled my to-do list, and finally feel like I’m at least leaning towards a place of balance. Not quite there yet, but at least facing the right direction now.

As I write, thousands (really!) of lady bugs have migrated to our house. They are landing on the windows, twirling through the hazy autumn air in their bumbling flight. Do they hibernate? What are they doing here? Some say lady bugs are good luck. I'm content to imagine that they are.

'Cause I'm swift like that

Tonight, while painting my studio, I pushed a box that bumped a table that bumped a shelf on which our portable phone sat. The phone arced through the air and landed I THE BUCKET OF PAINT. No joke. I spent the next twenty minutes cleaning it with q-tips. It still seems to work.

Okay then.

My studio is now a yummy golden pumpkin color. While the paint dries I'm eating dried mango strips and espresso chocolate while my cat is curled at my elbow. The woodstove has made the house toasty. Rain is spattering the windows. Dark noses in at the glass.

How did you spend your day?

Twirling in a burlap sack

Or something. This week has been hectic, and I'm grumpy that I'm turning into one of those depressing post once a week bloggers. I love coming here and finding all of you and your comments and your stories, and I have a zillion posts that I write in my head... you know how it is.

This week though, in particular, has been like a bizarre synchronized swimming competition and I've barely had time to come up for breath. It shouldn't really be so hectic--my in-laws have moved here (and though they don't have appliances so they're here all the time for meals, they help A LOT with Bean and such) and my class at school has finally started to come together as a group. There have been no more incidents of scissor throwing or wailing or refusals to say, sit in a chair, or come to the meeting area, and today a parent came in and built an exquisite terrarium for us.

At home we have a toasty warm new wood stove, and the hills are turning to burnished red and saffron. When we take walks in the afternoon we walk through armloads of fallen leaves the color of gems, freckled with rainwater. The rooster has begun crowing. The skies at dusk are purple like the stain of a grape, with gauzy gray clouds smudge across the mountains. It’s a good time of year. Time for apple pie, and café au laits and pumpkin cheesecake ice cream.

But I still have this feeling; like a dervish. Twirling, my feet barely touching ground. I know the real reason is that I haven’t connected back with my writing for several weeks now, and the threads that connect me to the stories I’m constructing have become fine and tenuous like spider’s webs. But every morning I wake up still tired, and every night I go to sleep with my mind a kaleidoscope of fragments. I have forgotten the geometry of being divided in this way: mother, writer, teacher, spouse.

In a conversation with my mother yesterday, she was saying how so many women she knows are on a quest to find the true things that they love. A calling. A direction. A depth of purpose. I laughed, relating my own woes. Mine has never been a lack of purpose or direction or enjoyment, it’s always been a lack of time.

“If I could do every day twice,” I said, “then maybe, just maybe I’d get everything done that I long to do.”

How about you?

(Time in parenthesis)

We took a weekend trip. Just us. Two. Without the little scampering sweetness we've created. It was the first time, since him. The first time to loll about in bed, taking advantage of uniterrupted time spent both horizontal and unclothed. And also, time to laugh and sip martinis at the open bar (we went to a wedding) and to tear it up on the dance floor. Time to giggle and eat ice cream and walk hand in hand. Time to watch mallards landing on the Delaware River, and the fog lifting. Time to poke into ecclectic hippie shops and glass blowing galleries and cafes. It was, simply put, an amazing weekend of rediscovery. We have so much fun together. He rocks my world, still. More now.

What do you believe?

I'm sitting outdoors with a bevy of chickens clucking at my elbow. Across from me the cat is licking himself, fur soaking up warmth. Next to me Bean digs a big hole in an empty flower bed. The grass is wet from rain, and the sun is warm on the black rubber of my boots. I just spent the weekend with a good friend I've known since I was fourteen. He's an creative, free-spirited atheist. Invariably we always have at least one argument about faith. He sees no need for it--the opiate of the people and all that. I'm on the other side, but less articulate. I don't keep a drawer of knife sharp words to define the shape of what I know. Tautology. Ignorance. Deism. How do you use the scientific method to argue the depth or scope of spiritual faith? How do you use logic as the basis for accepting or denying that which you cannot know about the movement of another person's heart?

So now I really want to know:

What do you believe? Do you have faith, or do you live outside it? How do you rationalize your fundamental view of the world? Can logic define it, or is something lost in translation?

Sweet, sweet, bittersweet.

Morning Poem # 3

Swallows swoop in at the barn doorand their feathers, bones filled with air, brush up against the corrugated metal roof.

The air is rife with musk and hay and the hot piss of sheep pressing against each other in woolly urgent nearness.

The sky bends down closer to the earth now; blue tucking the edges of the vermilion mountains in;

and every vine heavy with wild grapes bittersweet.

Morning Poem # 2

Because his small hand fits into my palm still,I hold my breath and feel the gills of my heart pummel inside my chest.

There is no way for keeping this; like stacking bags of sand against the jetty, crumbling no way to keep back his tide of growing up.

“I’m you’re a little bit big boy,” he whispers against my cheek in the dark then moon gets caught in the branches on the hill

and I’m begging that this filament these slender fish bones of love and the flotsam of our days will keep us when he is taller than my head,

and turns to walk the other way.

Morning poem # 1

The sun falls in broken rectangles on the floorshards of yellow plates we gather in our pockets, for the winter ahead. Our skin bare to the wind, the grass tattoos our arms with zig zags and clover while the moments grow steady and the verdant humming of summer dwindles into the big-moon nights and stillness.