Around here today
I felt like sharing a few photos of everyday things today. Some tunes I've been liking. A new place I've been collecting the things that catch my eye. Also really enjoying some of the new self portraits up in the Self Portrait Sunday Flickr pool~grab your camera and join in (you know you want to.)
And: we took Bean ice skating today--and it was, well, sort of a disaster. Like a wet noodle on ice. Maybe it's not his thing? Any suggestions (we did that push-thingy, it didn't help much.)
Finally: what music have you been listening to this month?
The way laundry gets done around here:
Can you hear Bean accompanying his play in the background with a little off-tune song? I LOVE it when they're both occupied like this. Bean was building train tracks and castles with wooden blocks under the dining room table...and Sprout: the minute he sees a heap of fresh laundry he's on it. POUNCE. He played like that for oh, twenty minutes easily. Perhaps not the most efficient (or clean) way to get the laundry folded...but hey, when it affords time to hang out and sip coffee in the sunshine and get through my inbox, I'm okay with it.
In fact, I've discovered that I might have exceedingly low standards about the way things should be done around here, in terms of housework. DH does to, so there isn't a lot of strife in our house about such things (except, ironically, for the laundry--he never puts his away! Like EVER. Whyyyyy???) And we're both generally okay with letting things build up, and then cleaning them together...The dishes, for example, might wait all day if there are better things to be done. (Like essays to be written for example.) How do the daily things get done at your house?
A post where I ask the internet parenting advice again
1. At what age is it no longer appropriate to bring your son into the ladies room with you? And if you send him to the boys room himself, how in gods name can you be sure he hasn't touched EVERY SURFACE POSSIBLE? 2. How much sugar does your kid eat daily? Or perhaps better put: what kinds of sweet foods does your kid eat daily? (I've been thinking about this because Bean seems to be sugar sensitive...he's sensitive to everything, so that's not really a surprise...but lately I've been starting to think I'm seeing patterns. Curious about your experiences...)
3. Why do so many mothers stop their children from taking risks--because they are afraid themselves? (Or something?)
EXHIBIT A: Today at the park there was a dad watching a boy and a girl. He let them both climb to the very top of the monkey bars, where they both perched, holding on, happy as clams while other kids rode the zip line thingy below them. Then mom came and dad left. And literally the first words out of her mouth were: "Get down from there right now!" Boy: "Why?" Mom: "Because, you'll fall!" Boy: "How do you know?" Mom: "Because so and so fell, that's why."
ACK. Why do we do this? Why are parents (and possibly particularly mothers) today so different than their counterparts a decade or two ago? What is it about nature, and high places and sharp that seem so terrifying that it's not even worth the supervised risk?
E.B. White in Charlotte's Web wrote about the Fern and Avery swinging out the barn door on the rope swing something like, "All the parents are afraid they'll fall...but they shouldn't be, because children always hold on tighter than adults think they will." (This is NOT a direct quote...If you haven't read Charlotte's Web in a while, you should!) And I tried to remember these words today as Bean spent the entire time climbing across the monkey bars and asking me to lift him up so he could cling to the zip line and fwap from one end of it to the other, his little pale boy belly exposed, his face scrunched up with glee and concentration.
(I'm also loving the Boys Almanac.)
And: Sprout's first time on an outdoor swing today. He couldn't stop giggling. I'm kind of addicted. Seriously cute.
Sugaring
Last year ate our savings. Last year ate everything. This year, who knows? This year, the outcome is anyone's guess. We could move. We could stay. It's all up in the air, illusive as the steam, as tender as the first fat buds.
So that's the truth. I want this life more than anything.
Also: You can win this painting.
Self Portrait Sunday:: Challenge # 1
Challenge # 1: Your face, partly hidden maybe; partly out of the frame, out of the picture, in the shadows or turning away.
Add your photos to the Flickr pool or leave the url to your photo here.
I'll be posting a bunch of your photos here throughout the week. Go take a peek.
I can't wait to see what you share this week. Happy Spring!
one of those days
Today I left my keys on the roof of my car dropping Bean off at school and spent the better part of an hour looking for them in the parking lot in the slick mud with Sprout on one hip.... one of those mornings (not enough coffee+ not enough sleep + feeling kind of sick = not that much fun.)
Looking for small pleasures today... Like the yummy salad my friend made me for lunch: roasted eggplant, red onion, zucchini and pepper with goat cheese & mixed greens. Mmmm! Thanks K!)... and like this photo...and this awesome music. What's making you smile today?
all or nothing + love
Today I am...
sipping the first iced latte of the year...
letting my hair dry naturally...(it gets curly)
gathering chapter ideas
letting the dishes sit in the sink...
listening to my rosters out-crow each other...
cutting forsythia for vases to go in sunny windowsills...
working from home today...
...and feeling grateful for you today (in terrible resolution, but still. You get the idea.)
identity::being a mother
To be a mother means that my hands are always full: with the soft-jelly limbs of my baby Sprout, or with the eager sweaty palms of my Bean, bigger now, perpetually on the brink of dashing out into traffic, or climbing over fences, or scrambling down rock strewn ravines. And just as it means that I am carrying things, it means that my hands magic. With my hands, I accept imaginary cups of tea, paint dozens of pictures, rinse a thousand dishes, type a hundred thousand words.
But maybe it’s really about this: being a mother means becoming adept at the imaginary; at telling stories about monsters, or fairies, or of mice that drive dump trucks.... and its this capacity to imagine that makes enormous, extraordinary, things possible for my children, because I dare to dream them. Just as it’s this same capacity that allows me to imagine a time in the future without sleep deprivation…when my short-term memory will return… (it will, right?) and I'll have just a little more time.
SELF PORTRAIT SUNDAYS: Wanna play?
A self portrait to start the week for a while... How to play: post a self portrait on your blog and leave the url in the comments here. I'll pick some of my faves to post over at the brand-spanking-new Self Portrait Sunday site. Tag! You're it.
a work in progress
It's been twenty days since I launched A Field Guide To Now, and in those twenty days I have been more intensely creative than I’ve been in over a year. I've been forced way outside my comfort zone. My word for the year was action, and this project has forced me to take action on behalf of my career as a writer and artist in ways I couldn’t have conceived of when I first took the plunge. I've had to learn how to query and research and push the limits of my ability to create at night after small boys go to sleep. I’m working on this book project, my novel, paintings, and a few other big projects that are under wraps with fingers crossed.
(I am also working part time, at a job that is pushing me to learn In Design and Photoshop, always under deadline. The child-free hours of my day are spent thusly: designing ads and view books and writing press releases. The rest of my day is spent juggling, with a single-minded focus pounding in my head like jungle drums.)
I am compelled, determined, wired, moody, thrilled, exhausted, inspired. When I sleep my mind is active in a way that is almost new to me. It’s frenetic and repetitive: gnawing away at the creative tasks I’ve left off from before bed. This past week I’ve begun dreaming of whales—and they’ve inspired some of the newest art for A Field Guide To Now. Here is a glimpse (in progress.)
Incidentally, when I looked up what it means to dream about whales, this is what I found: Whale reintroduces us to our creative and intuitive energies to show us a talent we've forgotten about or haven't been aware existed. How spot-on is that?
I’ve had more coffee and less sleep; more wine, more sex, more dreams and less rhythm. I’m spending less time on laundry and dishes (and the house is in probable shambles because of it) and more time perched on the stool in my studio painting, with gauche on my fingers. Less time taking leisurely walks with my boys; more time trying to multi-task while they’re under foot.
It's made me think about my identity, about who I am and how I define that. For a while, after Sprout was born, I slipped wholly into the identity of mother, and felt my world narrow to the small, domestic orbit of that life. It was restful, to be there. For a while. Sprout was such an easy baby that I enjoyed his babyhood in a way that I never fully did with Bean—who cried more and was more needy, just as I was newer and more anxious at the whole mommy thing.
But now, Sprout is walking. Bean is 5. The house is littered with legos (Sprout holds lego helmets in his mouth like a chipmunk. I’ve checked his diaper but he’s never actually swallowed one. Go ahead call me neglectful. YOU just try to keep legos off the floor with two boys in the house, four years apart.) There is a constant stampede of activity and peanut butter sandwiches and glasses of milk that get spilled. The vacuum is out all day long. Money is tight. Bean has outgrown all his pajamas. Sprout is starting to say words.
And.
And in the midst of all this messy, simple, regular domesticity, I’ve begun to long fiercely for myself. For myself not as a mother, but as someone entirely separate from my children.
Truthfully, I’ve always had an uneasy relationship with the definition of motherhood, and now, more than ever, I am enjoying my boys and wanting to be distinct from them, in my own right. A writer. An artist. Right now my mind is preoccupied with the craft of writing, with images, and also about self-doubt, and longing…
How do you define yourself? Where does your definition of motherhood (if you are, or want to be a mother) shape you? What are the words you use to tell yourself the story about your life as it is at this current moment?
Before you knew what your life was like
Flipping through a book of poems by e.e. cummings I found flower petals by the dozens from a time in my life when love was a dreamy and girlish thing (embodied by the poem, above--one of my favorites.)
I wanted to be loved the way e.e. loved his women in his poems. I understood little, if anything at all about how love endures and changes; how things get messy and slip; how you become soft in the middle, or are caught like plastic bag rustling and rustling in the bare branches of a tree before spring comes to mask it with blossoms and green.
I haven't seen flowers for months (it's still winter here, for another month at least.) And I think about the girl I was then; how I I had a crush on everything beautiful; how my life orbited around boys and their attention (specific boys, and also the general boy populous); how I had abundant energy and time, but no certainty or focus.
I wonder if I would have believed me--describing who I am today? I still have a crush on everything beautiful. And my life still orbits around boys--three, specifically; the biggest of whom still brings me flowers. Somethings stay the same.
What were you like then? Before you knew what your life would be like?
the journey
"Every day is a journey,
and the journey itself is home."
--Matsuo Basho (Check out the entire set on Flickr.)
A Handmade Writer e-Course GIVEAWAY* UPDATED!
I am so excited about this giveaway! Amy Spencer is the wildly talented and creative force behind the blog, Bring Yourself and the author of The Crafter Culture Handbook and DIY: The Rise of Lo-Fi Culture. Her first novel, London Clay, is due to be published in 2011.
Amy is also an experienced workshop leader and crafter, and she's teaching an e-course called the Handmade Writer.
Here's a little sneak peak at the course: "The Handmade Writer e-course will help you gather together material from every source imaginable. You will learn about the craft of writing and how to sew these fragments together to build your own pieces of creative writing. This e-course has been inspired by the strength of craft communities as well as the impulse to transform everyday finds into something amazing."
The best part? She's giving away a spot to one of you.
This is a chance for you to make the leap, claim creative space for yourself in your life and take your writing a bit more seriously (even if you don't think of yourself writer!)
Read the whole course description here. It begins Monday 12th April 2010
* Givewaway rules: This giveaway is tiny bit different in that Amy offered this giveaway to me as a way to give you all a gentle, encouraging, nudge to go support A Field Guide To Now... so here's how it will work:
* To enter, make pledge there... and leave a comment here. * Comments can be just one word (say hello!) and pledges can be just 1$. * The winner will be chosen at random by Sprout. * Comments will be closed Saturday, March 6th at 5mEST.
The winner will be announced Saturday evening.
The winner (chosen randomly by SPROUT, who snatched at itty bitty snippets of paper with your names on them) is: Sonrie! Please email me & I'll put you in touch with the incredibly talented Amy.
hello, Monday
Beneath the covers when the day first sets in, I’m not quite here, not quite anywhere else either. Hello, Monday. It’s already 6:03 and the night was a slapdash mess of wake ups. The teeth, they keep coming. Arched back wailing at 3:27a.m. for ten stagger-around-the-room minutes, searching for Tylenol, and then again at 5:06, too early and too late for more or better sleep.
I lie awake, face in the pillows, the thudding of my heart reverberates in my head. My breath moves my ribs up and down, up and down, but I am not here, not all of me, not yet.
Under the weight and softness of my stomach my wrist bones, carpals and metacarpals, are crumpled like soft bits of clay and as I flex my fingers, pins-and-needles set in.
Somehow our boys, both of them, are already in bed between us.
This morning I can feel the way I’m sort of pushing around at the outline of myself with my mind. Hello, day. Hello, memory. Hello, this life of mine. I feel myself begin, reluctantly to inhabit my vertebrae, lungs, buttocks, thighs; in the nick of time I roll out of the way. Bean’s at it already: making a pirate ship out of the covers. Sprout, miraculously stays asleep (of course, now after a night of it) and he is perfect, perfect, perfect here beside me. Rosy, tousled. His hair smells sweet like only him.
The day comes fast then: wooden slats of window shades pulled up; snowmelt; shower steam; the fragrant bar of French lemon soap slipping from my still slack-fingered grip; coffee. The boys are both underfoot (vacation until Wednesday) which gives new meaning to the phrase “work from home,” which is what I try valiantly to do, meeting four deadlines, non-stop screen time, CS4, phone calls, 37 emails, everything interrupted by the repetitive cacophony of BOY.
The day is gray, and the is light translucent and dull, but I like the way the thermometer climbs to 38 before 11am, and how on the south facing fields I can see bare patches where the grass pokes up. I’ve been looking at the trees for signs every day now: the buds are swelling with the secret lives of leaves that wait for chlorophyll, for sun.
Inside, the boys and I are barefoot, and I look at them and feel the fragile container of my ribs nearly snap open with the thunk-thunk-thunking of my little hammer dulcimer heart. Bean with his thin arms and messy hair and growing-in-crooked teeth and ski-jump nose, and Sprout, who has been trying to run from the minute he learned to walk and whose gait looks a wee bit like a cross between a high stepping horse and Frankenstein. Some days I hardly have words. I have two sons. I don’t think this wonder ever goes away.
And so without stopping it’s night already. We visit friends after work and arrive home late. The sink is crowded; the cat wants fresh water; the refrigerator needs to be cleaned. Instead I let the boys stay up another minute. Bean and I eat toast with cloudberry jam. Sprout carries pot lids around the room. Nonstop, there went Monday.
How was your day?
PS--I have a super-duper exciting giveaway for tomorrow, that I can’t wait to share!
PPS--Did you see? I made some pretty Field Guide To Now blog buttons. Please grab one, if you'd like & spread the word. 30% funding tonight is awesome.This is the work I am learning to do
Hello friends! Where have you all scuttled off too this month? I miss you around here… I’ve been changing things up… have you noticed? It's still a work in progress. (I crashed my entire theme twice. I wish I understood CSS.)
Something about having the kickstarter widget broadcast in the sidebar was really throwing off my mojo the past couple of days. I started to hate seeing the amount of funding flatline... and it has been interesting to listen to my own inner dialogue turn doubtful, even as I’ve gotten the most exciting new (!) and incredible support because of it so far. (Can’t tell yet....not for a while.)
I am discovering that art and risk become something else entirely once a dollar sign is attached. It’s made me take myself seriously as a writer and artist in a hundred ways I never saw coming...and for a long, long time I never took art and writing seriously (although they were the things that made my heart sing) because my father—who was an enormous influence in my life when he was alive—pushed me towards a ‘worthy’ profession. While he appreciated art in a sort of distant and abstract way, he implied often that to pursue it would be self-absorbed and indulgent, compared with pursuing a career in the service of others—as a teacher.
So I became a teacher.
To this day, one of my greatest regrets is that I listened to him when he told me that interning at Ms. would be a frivolous waste of my time. I still wonder how my career would have been different had I taken that internship that I’d been offered.
So it’s been a long time coming for me to believe that my words and art can be a career. And this way, this project has been an incredibly tender and scary and exciting process of self discovery.
I have been breathing, eating, sleeping and dreaming ideas and words. And I’ve been thinking about the community on the web, and what makes it, and about how if we could meet, we’d look each other in the eyes and laugh and share delight and there would be no question in your mind that you’d put ten bucks behind me. But here, in this almost imaginary place, filled with a vast, unfathomable amount of information and creativity, I am small.
So.
There it is.
In the middle of the night I wake up wondering what failing at this might look like. I watch the snow falling outside the window and wonder if it was foolhardy to leap without a parachute, holding only the strings of handful of helium balloon hopes. Then I wake up in the morning and I can feel excitement zinging in my veins. This is what I want. This creative, terrifying journey. This work.
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Every winter I wait for a time when I can no longer remember the way the world looked before white, and then I know that spring is near. I wait until I feel myself falling into the faulty labyrinth of memory. Like a mime, I like to put my hands up against the pretend container of the present and see how well it holds me. And today it happened.
Today I can’t remember leaves. I look at the gray birch out my window, the one that is tall and leaning with the rot gnawing at a burl where a limb was torn away in a summer thunderstorm, and I cannot see it green with shimmering leaves. Logically, I can remember it, but I cannot really see it in my minds eye any longer. This is the beginning of spring fever. This is when snow is wet and heavy and slides off the roof hard and fast in sudden melting avalanches. This is when, invisible mighty things start happening in the earth.
Sap will flow. The birds know. Soon they will start building nest with mud and sticks.
+++
I'll be posting about the project once a week from here on out...and over on the kickstarter site maybe more often. (I don't want this blog to become all about this project all the time.)
Please know that your gentle words of support are just as valid and and inspiring and helpful as a pledge. I get that times are hard, and there are other, bigger things (Haiti, for one).
And I am curious tonight: have you ever ventured out on a limb for something that you wanted or believed in? What was it? How did it turn out?
Sometimes it'ts like this
Nearly two feet of snow tonight, and the plow truck is in the shop (timing is everything.)
Shoveling snow in the gathering dark, the fat flakes melted on my cheeks, still hot from crying.
Sometimes it’s like this, and today it was (although tonight we’re better.)
It felt good to throw my body into the rhythm of pitching wet snow, after arguing (sometimes we’re in direct competition for the same things: time, mostly.)
And I have begun to be aware of how everything is always close, always just under the skin of the moment. Starts. Finishes. Hurts. Exhaustion. Glee. Laughter. Eggs cracked in a skillet. Post-it notes rumpled and forgotten. Self sabotage. Determination. Making it through the day.
The snow, tossed to the side of the path was aqua blue beneath each nook and chink, where the chunks would fall and align, making shapes, silhouettes of other-worldly castles in the dark. Today it was like this. Some tears. Some self doubt. Some frustration. And snow. (It’s still falling.)
When things get messy, what do they look like for you?
The way we dance
Little Sprout: We danced today, you and I.
You wound your way between my knees, around my swivel chair, across my studio floor scattering things about, mouthing everything, drooling, laughing. And I, well, I was busy dreaming; stringing words together, watching sunlight, reading things and feeling hopeful. I was also trying to get just about a hundred things done. Eighty nine still wait, but so? We danced.
You unwound spools of thread and uncased CDs and pulled the contents of every low opening drawer onto the floor: mostly paper, some postcards, a pile of forgotten wallpaper from when we first staked a claim here, in this house. I watched. I reached for you. I picked you up. We twirled. You laughed.
I watched the havoc gathering on my floor and let it gather. I made paragraphs, and sought after things; I discovered, replied, and tried to cover my ears so that the simultaneous voices of optimism and fear would drown each other out. All day I kept going after the things that beg for words and time.
So much is happening right now, and it feels like the moment a crow lifts dark and sudden from a quiet branch, and all around it the air is filled with the sudden, invisible eddies of movement. That is what the moments are like right now. Like flight. Or perhaps the moments just before, when the bird is neither on the branch, or off it, but in motion, lifting off.
We saw a crow like this, later, running. We startled it from a pine; its feathers black and glossy in the sun. You wore a red fleece snowsuit, and hugged a raggedy stuffed moose in the stroller. I ran hard, feeling resistance from thighs that skied all yesterday afternoon. I almost quit a dozen times. The road was mud and slush, and you weigh no small amount, but instead I began to tell you how things go.
In panted breaths I told you how there is always this resistance; how there is always a whispered voice that taunts give up, and you might just fail. And how the only answer is so what?
So I ran until I could feel my heart thunking hard in my chest, and my hands were numb and my cheeks flushed bright red with cold and exertion, and I finished.
By then you were asleep, your head tilting, slack against your shoulder. I carried you inside, and in the sudden warmth you woke, eyes still dreamy, and looked about—smiling ever so slightly when your gaze landed on my face. And so we danced. I held you close, breathing in the fragrance of your warm, rumpled hair. You pressed your cheek against my shoulder, and pulled your knees up and tucked close as though your body still remembers when you grew below my heart, tucked just so.
And so the day went by. Things happened, things got done, your brother came home from his grandparents, the sun set, and dishes accumulated in the sink. And in between we shared the succulent sections of a ruby grapefruit.
You liked each wobbly gem colored morsel, the bitter skin removed, and mushed them in your little hands before sticking them into your mouth. I learned about clipping paths on Illustrator. You pushed a ball around the floor. And today, like every other day, we danced. You are one year old. I love you so.