Some days the ease of my former life is almost impossible to remember, from my place on the living room floor. Once I hiked 200 miles in a summer, when I lived in the Rockies. I’ve never truly been an outdoorswoman, not like some people, but I hiked twice a week after work that summer, and I kept a log—it was easy. I curled up in bus seats in Colorado, in Indiana. I stretched out on airport floors and slept the sleep of the innocent, my head propped on my bag. I slept in the back seats of cars hurtling across the continent, happy with the funny curves and indentations and a bundled up sweatshirt as a pillow.
Another summer I climbed in caves with children and swung from ropes in the trees. I grew lithe that summer, unburdened by a desk life. Even when I nursed babies in my late-thirties, I preferred to sit cross-legged on the floor, because I loved the floor, loved being near the floor. I could settle anywhere. I propped my knees to one side in a cushioned chair at Starbucks, then shifted my knees to the other side, later, or dangled my feet over the arm of the chair, close to the fireplace.
Three years ago I broke a bone in my foot, a stress fracture, while walking. When I was working to recover, I damaged a tendon in the other foot, causing a nasty bump called a ganglion. I climbed trees, still, with my children. I played Frisbee at the beach, using the waves for resistance training. Then a year ago I slipped on a ledge of granite while hiking, slamming my hip against the stone and my face against a tree. I’m afraid as I write this that you will see me as an old woman—I am not. I have never been an athlete, but I’ve been the kind of person who could rise to an occasion. I’m learning to throw a football, for my son. I’d hoped to coach a softball team, someday.
In the morning, each morning, it seems I’ve grown into a hard pickle of a woman, or perhaps a turtle with a knotted shell on my back. I lumber to the living room and carefully lower myself to the floor with a book behind my head, like the therapist showed me. Then I loosen each clenched muscle group, starting with my neck, lowering vertebra by vertebra to my one hip, then the other. Sometimes I feel a vertebra untwist, loosening all the muscles with it, and it reminds me of pregnancy, of the occasional movement of a baby heel or elbow across the expanse of my abdomen—not only is the movement amazing, but the muscle release feels profound and I find myself once again at ease for a moment. When I rise to walk again, I wiggle my neck and shoulders, relieved. Sometimes the tension has returned by the time I sit down for my cup of coffee. Sometimes the bones of my spinal column continue to shift pleasantly throughout the day, letting go in ripples as I’m driving the car down the highway.
I am trying to take long walks again. What feels like a good walk may require days of recovery. All of me feels heavy, slack, bittersweet. I am learning again how to sit, how to walk, how to stand without stiffness. I will never again sleep in the backseat, it seems, or fold myself up into a chair with a book. I will need to pay attention. It is not much—some people suffer so much more than this. Still I want to listen to the cravings of my youth: I wish I could sit on the floor. I wish I could sleep on the ground. I wish I could move without worry.
When I am resting my back on the floor, I concentrate on breathing, and I pray, sometimes for an hour, sometimes more, the strangest and most urgent prayers. My eyes water when a muscle lets go, and tears fall into my ears, or tickle down my neck. I unpickle, unturtle, and pray to be more yielding from head to toe. Beloved floor, I wish I could sit here, cross-legged in the sun. Maybe someday.
Thursday, April 08, 2010
Thursday, March 25, 2010
one for pussy willows, another for forsythia
One vase for pussy willows, and another for forsythia branches.
Sun streams in over the living-room-turned-infirmary, Lincoln Logs, board games, adventure books propped open and blankets, handkerchiefs, half-finished cups of tea. The boy agrees to a bath, if the water is hot enough, if he can use the eucalyptus suds, if, if, and all the requests are granted. I leave the half-emptied dishwasher, the sink full of dishes, the table a wreck of medicines. My first hour alone in days, and while I’m not truly alone, this is as close as I will get, this week.
I am on day seven of antibiotics, myself.
“Can I come out?” he shouts. I tell him to soak another five minutes. I just sat down. As close as I will get.
So, a quick note: I’ve been working to establish a writing routine, and jumping into a hundred fresh starts of writing. I’ve also been struggling and moping, adapting to the questions raised by freelancing, and I’ve been researching houses to buy or rent. I’ve secured a teaching job for the fall semester. I still need to dig out from the housekeeping neglect of the past two years, and I’m working at that bit by bit. I’m caring for the world’s most delightful two-year-old, two days a week, and she reminds me how good it is to live in the present tense, to shake off worry, to play when the weather is fine.
The five minutes has passed and soon the boy will emerge from the bath, breathing better I hope. I’ll check in with the doctor and I’m sure we will need to make an appointment, which will mean leaving the sunny house. I’ll finish unloading the dishwasher and with some luck we can both settle into some reading.
At least we have sun and pussy willows. The forsythia will bloom tomorrow, I’m guessing.
Sun streams in over the living-room-turned-infirmary, Lincoln Logs, board games, adventure books propped open and blankets, handkerchiefs, half-finished cups of tea. The boy agrees to a bath, if the water is hot enough, if he can use the eucalyptus suds, if, if, and all the requests are granted. I leave the half-emptied dishwasher, the sink full of dishes, the table a wreck of medicines. My first hour alone in days, and while I’m not truly alone, this is as close as I will get, this week.
I am on day seven of antibiotics, myself.
“Can I come out?” he shouts. I tell him to soak another five minutes. I just sat down. As close as I will get.
So, a quick note: I’ve been working to establish a writing routine, and jumping into a hundred fresh starts of writing. I’ve also been struggling and moping, adapting to the questions raised by freelancing, and I’ve been researching houses to buy or rent. I’ve secured a teaching job for the fall semester. I still need to dig out from the housekeeping neglect of the past two years, and I’m working at that bit by bit. I’m caring for the world’s most delightful two-year-old, two days a week, and she reminds me how good it is to live in the present tense, to shake off worry, to play when the weather is fine.
The five minutes has passed and soon the boy will emerge from the bath, breathing better I hope. I’ll check in with the doctor and I’m sure we will need to make an appointment, which will mean leaving the sunny house. I’ll finish unloading the dishwasher and with some luck we can both settle into some reading.
At least we have sun and pussy willows. The forsythia will bloom tomorrow, I’m guessing.
Saturday, February 20, 2010
provision and grilled cheese
Note from a few weeks ago.
I arrive home from a day of childcare. I call him from home, and he tells me our daughter’s team is neck-and-neck right now, so he can’t talk long. I hear the crowd sounds subside as he walks from the gymnasium.
“Can you please pick up one Chinese entrée?” He hesitates. We are short on funds this month, since my job ended in December. “Teething. My gal howled for 45 minutes straight. I am covered with snot and I smell like a diaper. My head hurts like I’m teething.”
He laughs and says yes I deserve Chinese food, yes, one entrée.
“It’s been a long time since teething,” he says, “She’s on the court now, and we are up by six points.” He tells me he doesn’t have the phone number for the Chinese place—I remind him Madeleine added the number to his cell phone. He’ll need to ask her to find it when the game is over. I agree to cook our own rice, to save a few dollars. Because every few dollars is a few dollars, right now.
I enrolled in a masters program three years ago, to pursue my love of literature and writing. I didn’t foresee any problems paying off my student loans—I’d graduate with a degree, I thought, and the parenting gap on my resume would look less glaring. I’d work, finally, in an area I love. When I completed my degree in August, I found adjunct work at a terrific college, a few minutes from my children’s elementary school. I taught two classes, my introduction to grading papers and teaching eighteen-year-olds in a classroom. I loved the work, and it took all my time until it ended at Christmastime.
And now I am free to do the thing I studied: I’m free to write. But I’m not free, as long as we struggle to pay bills. In some ways I am lucky: I knew my job would last four months. I haven’t checked in on my friend Dave’s job search. He thought he had his high-paying job as long as he wanted it. I haven’t checked in on Pete, who used to commute halfway down the coast for his work week. Lauren is happy to work on a consultant basis for awhile. These are people who earned serious money, and my adjunct work is small potatoes in comparison.
Are we all struggling? I assume most of us are.
I step into the shower to return to my own scents, to comb the toddler-gunk out of my hair. When I emerge from the shower, the family arrives. He doesn’t bring me Chinese food, not even one entrée. Kids needed to be home, he says, and I can see it’s true. He starts the grilled cheese sandwiches without asking. I eat mine with a bowl of tomato soup, then go to bed at 7 pm to sleep for eleven hours. It’s been a long time since teething.
Now they’ve gone to school for the day, and I have no childcare duties. Time to write.
I arrive home from a day of childcare. I call him from home, and he tells me our daughter’s team is neck-and-neck right now, so he can’t talk long. I hear the crowd sounds subside as he walks from the gymnasium.
“Can you please pick up one Chinese entrée?” He hesitates. We are short on funds this month, since my job ended in December. “Teething. My gal howled for 45 minutes straight. I am covered with snot and I smell like a diaper. My head hurts like I’m teething.”
He laughs and says yes I deserve Chinese food, yes, one entrée.
“It’s been a long time since teething,” he says, “She’s on the court now, and we are up by six points.” He tells me he doesn’t have the phone number for the Chinese place—I remind him Madeleine added the number to his cell phone. He’ll need to ask her to find it when the game is over. I agree to cook our own rice, to save a few dollars. Because every few dollars is a few dollars, right now.
I enrolled in a masters program three years ago, to pursue my love of literature and writing. I didn’t foresee any problems paying off my student loans—I’d graduate with a degree, I thought, and the parenting gap on my resume would look less glaring. I’d work, finally, in an area I love. When I completed my degree in August, I found adjunct work at a terrific college, a few minutes from my children’s elementary school. I taught two classes, my introduction to grading papers and teaching eighteen-year-olds in a classroom. I loved the work, and it took all my time until it ended at Christmastime.
And now I am free to do the thing I studied: I’m free to write. But I’m not free, as long as we struggle to pay bills. In some ways I am lucky: I knew my job would last four months. I haven’t checked in on my friend Dave’s job search. He thought he had his high-paying job as long as he wanted it. I haven’t checked in on Pete, who used to commute halfway down the coast for his work week. Lauren is happy to work on a consultant basis for awhile. These are people who earned serious money, and my adjunct work is small potatoes in comparison.
Are we all struggling? I assume most of us are.
I step into the shower to return to my own scents, to comb the toddler-gunk out of my hair. When I emerge from the shower, the family arrives. He doesn’t bring me Chinese food, not even one entrée. Kids needed to be home, he says, and I can see it’s true. He starts the grilled cheese sandwiches without asking. I eat mine with a bowl of tomato soup, then go to bed at 7 pm to sleep for eleven hours. It’s been a long time since teething.
Now they’ve gone to school for the day, and I have no childcare duties. Time to write.
Friday, January 22, 2010
the just-right thing
A toddler chalkboard easel. A size 2 wetsuit. Wooden playclips for building forts. A small trampoline with a handlebar across the side—the children spent hours jumpin on it every winter day, and used it as a “bunk bed” though it’s only eight inches off the floor. They hung by their knees from the handlebar, ignoring the manufacturer’s safety warnings.
Wooden train tracks.
The attic fills with toys-once-dear, artifacts of earlier years of my parenting life, the silken capes, some of them hand-dyed with marigold petals as a kindergarten project. Thick books with cardboard pages, so critical for everyday life—just a few months ago, it seems.
Now our living space fills with musical instruments, a violin, a keyboard, woodwinds of all kinds, ocarinas and pan pipes. The shelves fill with chapter books—never enough to satisfy the hungry readers—and always a few really good books we parents nudge children to try. Someday they will. A few picture books still linger, though they gather dust. My son needs a shelf just for his baseball collections, and my daughter crafts more paper dolls than we can house. Nowadays her paper dolls look more like contemporary teenagers and less like Laura Ingalls Wilder. Our handcrafted cloth dolls might need to be tucked away in tissue paper soon, to protect them from dust and teenage experiments.
My daughter laughed when I showed her the tiny flower-print cap she wore for her first few months, when she had no hair. Newborn pajamas seem impossibly small. She is in middle school now.
As winter sets in I notice the differences between this year and the last: we didn’t visit the playground this fall, too busy with swim lessons and play dates and my teaching schedule. My son still loves to return home at the end of the school day, but gone are the days of building little cities on the floor, and pushing small cars along handmade roads.
I love these kids’ ages, now more than ever. Madeleine crafted tuna salad sandwiches for my dinner, yesterday, because I had schoolwork due. Soon winter will arrive in earnest and Brendan will commandeer the snow shoveling. Twelve years from now my children could be parenting their own babies, and suddenly twelve years doesn’t seem long at all.
Saving these toys happened by accident—I thought I sold the trampoline years ago. A friend offers $20 for the easel and the bottles of tempera paint. A mom at school gives me $10 for the wetsuit. But I scrap the plan to sell the wooden barn, the dollhouse. I can pack away a few boxes and hold them for a decade or maybe more. And tucked in beside the useful toys, I’ll enclose the tiny pajamas and hats, the special dolls. Why? I don’t know. I have two small boxes of my own belongings from childhood—nothing I’d pass on to anyone else, really. I loved my room as a kid, my quilt with the birds embroidered on it, and only a few other things. I kept a teddy bear my friend Cheryl gave me in eighth grade. My son sleeps with it—he asked me one day how old the Teddy is, and when I answered, “your bear is 33,” he paused for a moment and said, “Let’s just say she’s two.” I have a hard time wrapping my head around that many years, too.
I keep the tiny purple and white alarm clock I spied at a store when I was ten years old. I nagged my mother each visit to the store, reminding her there was only one alarm clock like it. I couldn’t find a price tag for it. Then it disappeared from the store shelves and I grieved and pouted. When I found the tiny clock atop of my stack of presents under the Christmas tree, I was like Clara in the Nutcracker, making everyone confirm that the clock was perfect, its ticking was perfect, its alarm bell was perfect. “Three dollars and ninety-five cents,” my mother muttered to my dad. “Maybe we didn’t need to get her all those other things,” my dad quipped over his Christmas cup of coffee. I wound the clock dutifully through high school and college until it stopped ticking.
My little purple and white alarm clock sits on my son’s workbench, now. I keep opening the back to see what I can learn, to “fix” it for another few days, until it stops working again.
Each year I bring out “new” tools from my early adult life: the alarm clock, which the boy might learn to fix. My daughter was delighted to find I have a full set of calligraphy pens and inks, which I set aside for just this time. In the springtime, I will offer them some juggling toys I bought at Pike Place Market, in Seattle, in 1987.
I will choose carefully before packing “the keepers” from my children’s childhoods—we can’t keep much, so it’s best to sort carefully now. The rocking horse my father made, it stays. The travel mattress for toddlers goes, and the nursing pillow. Soon I will make one more pass through the bags of kid art projects, to see which pages offer a snapshot of who they were, when they were smaller, the “alien people” whose bodies were round, and to discover which of the paintings no one can identify any longer.
Keeping mementos is a very odd practice. Can anyone say why we do it? We want our children to know they were loved, I suppose—but they already know that in ways far deeper than a rocking horse would show. We can't keep much, so how do we choose?
Perhaps we keep things to remember who we were, when our children laughed and rocked for hours, singing, how we sang, too and glanced at one another over our coffee cups, happy to have chosen just the right thing, happy for our children to be completely and utterly satisfied.
Wooden train tracks.
The attic fills with toys-once-dear, artifacts of earlier years of my parenting life, the silken capes, some of them hand-dyed with marigold petals as a kindergarten project. Thick books with cardboard pages, so critical for everyday life—just a few months ago, it seems.
Now our living space fills with musical instruments, a violin, a keyboard, woodwinds of all kinds, ocarinas and pan pipes. The shelves fill with chapter books—never enough to satisfy the hungry readers—and always a few really good books we parents nudge children to try. Someday they will. A few picture books still linger, though they gather dust. My son needs a shelf just for his baseball collections, and my daughter crafts more paper dolls than we can house. Nowadays her paper dolls look more like contemporary teenagers and less like Laura Ingalls Wilder. Our handcrafted cloth dolls might need to be tucked away in tissue paper soon, to protect them from dust and teenage experiments.
My daughter laughed when I showed her the tiny flower-print cap she wore for her first few months, when she had no hair. Newborn pajamas seem impossibly small. She is in middle school now.
As winter sets in I notice the differences between this year and the last: we didn’t visit the playground this fall, too busy with swim lessons and play dates and my teaching schedule. My son still loves to return home at the end of the school day, but gone are the days of building little cities on the floor, and pushing small cars along handmade roads.
I love these kids’ ages, now more than ever. Madeleine crafted tuna salad sandwiches for my dinner, yesterday, because I had schoolwork due. Soon winter will arrive in earnest and Brendan will commandeer the snow shoveling. Twelve years from now my children could be parenting their own babies, and suddenly twelve years doesn’t seem long at all.
Saving these toys happened by accident—I thought I sold the trampoline years ago. A friend offers $20 for the easel and the bottles of tempera paint. A mom at school gives me $10 for the wetsuit. But I scrap the plan to sell the wooden barn, the dollhouse. I can pack away a few boxes and hold them for a decade or maybe more. And tucked in beside the useful toys, I’ll enclose the tiny pajamas and hats, the special dolls. Why? I don’t know. I have two small boxes of my own belongings from childhood—nothing I’d pass on to anyone else, really. I loved my room as a kid, my quilt with the birds embroidered on it, and only a few other things. I kept a teddy bear my friend Cheryl gave me in eighth grade. My son sleeps with it—he asked me one day how old the Teddy is, and when I answered, “your bear is 33,” he paused for a moment and said, “Let’s just say she’s two.” I have a hard time wrapping my head around that many years, too.
I keep the tiny purple and white alarm clock I spied at a store when I was ten years old. I nagged my mother each visit to the store, reminding her there was only one alarm clock like it. I couldn’t find a price tag for it. Then it disappeared from the store shelves and I grieved and pouted. When I found the tiny clock atop of my stack of presents under the Christmas tree, I was like Clara in the Nutcracker, making everyone confirm that the clock was perfect, its ticking was perfect, its alarm bell was perfect. “Three dollars and ninety-five cents,” my mother muttered to my dad. “Maybe we didn’t need to get her all those other things,” my dad quipped over his Christmas cup of coffee. I wound the clock dutifully through high school and college until it stopped ticking.
My little purple and white alarm clock sits on my son’s workbench, now. I keep opening the back to see what I can learn, to “fix” it for another few days, until it stops working again.
Each year I bring out “new” tools from my early adult life: the alarm clock, which the boy might learn to fix. My daughter was delighted to find I have a full set of calligraphy pens and inks, which I set aside for just this time. In the springtime, I will offer them some juggling toys I bought at Pike Place Market, in Seattle, in 1987.
I will choose carefully before packing “the keepers” from my children’s childhoods—we can’t keep much, so it’s best to sort carefully now. The rocking horse my father made, it stays. The travel mattress for toddlers goes, and the nursing pillow. Soon I will make one more pass through the bags of kid art projects, to see which pages offer a snapshot of who they were, when they were smaller, the “alien people” whose bodies were round, and to discover which of the paintings no one can identify any longer.
Keeping mementos is a very odd practice. Can anyone say why we do it? We want our children to know they were loved, I suppose—but they already know that in ways far deeper than a rocking horse would show. We can't keep much, so how do we choose?
Perhaps we keep things to remember who we were, when our children laughed and rocked for hours, singing, how we sang, too and glanced at one another over our coffee cups, happy to have chosen just the right thing, happy for our children to be completely and utterly satisfied.
Sunday, January 17, 2010
bewildered
I keep getting spam on one particular post in my archives. Any idea how to deal with that?
Friday, January 15, 2010
2010, here we are
I generally do not indulge myself in post-holiday depression because I am so often overcome by post-holiday euphoria: my children go back to school, my husband goes back to work, and I get the house to myself once again, the happiest circumstance. Now I can get work done.
Or so it’s been for the past few years. Last January and the January before, I threw my efforts into my graduate work. January 2007, I was applying for grants, freelancing for a magazine, working part-time for my blind friend on the weeks she was home from the hospital.
In May 2007, a friend offered to buy me a laptop so I could work while in grad school. We took my acceptance letter to the Apple store, to get an education discount. I said to my friend, we can return it if I just don’t open it. He pulled out his pocket knife for the UPC symbol on the box, for a rebate of some kind, and the deed was done. I was going to school, or else.
My blind friend entered the hospital for an extended stay, the same month. I was writing a story about her the morning she died in December 2007. Then came January 2008—behind on my reading for the first quarter, I determined I’d not get behind again.
In January 2009, I prepared my critical thesis and kept reading.
In August 2009, I finished grad school and packed my children up for a long road trip, following one travel extravaganza with another. From the passenger seat of the car, I phoned to accept a job offer, teaching a course for first-year students at a nearby college—for one semester. The semester ended in December and I spent the first days of my kids’ Christmas break grading papers.
When I look through my own papers, I find ticket stubs from Santa Fe and Cincinnati, and New Hampshire. My bedside is awash in student papers, literary journals, spiral-bound notebooks, and knitting projects.
We had a lovely Christmas. It snowed at the beginning, and snowed again at the end, and in the middle we stayed home most of the time, cooking, preparing, singing and enjoying our new gifts.
Now they go back to school and jobs and I am not a student anymore, not a teacher this semester. I am freelancing, or I am unemployed, or I am just catching up with myself. I am frustrated that I’ve gotten so little done this week: I’ve attended a school party for my sixth grader, applied for a state grant, organized a list of literary contest dates. I’ve written each day. I’ve begun to clean house and restore order to our lives.
I’ve not made resolutions nor lost 20 pounds. I’ve not cleaned the icons off my desktop. I’ve not won literary awards nor found a well-paid job. I’ve written a few email thank-yous, but not nearly enough for the gifts I’ve been given in the past year.
I will need to shed another skin to enter this new 2010 life of mine. I need to make my own deadlines, like a grown-up, and keep them. I will need to make inquiries for magazine stories.
A friend needs a babysitter for two days next week, at a pre-grad school rate of pay. Her father smiles as he says, “You will sleep well when you are done!” The two-year-old laughs and prances all day, then she naps. When her mother arrived home at the end of the day, the child pointed at me and announced, "Mama! She SINGS!" And so I do. It’s a happy match.
Catch up soon.
Or so it’s been for the past few years. Last January and the January before, I threw my efforts into my graduate work. January 2007, I was applying for grants, freelancing for a magazine, working part-time for my blind friend on the weeks she was home from the hospital.
In May 2007, a friend offered to buy me a laptop so I could work while in grad school. We took my acceptance letter to the Apple store, to get an education discount. I said to my friend, we can return it if I just don’t open it. He pulled out his pocket knife for the UPC symbol on the box, for a rebate of some kind, and the deed was done. I was going to school, or else.
My blind friend entered the hospital for an extended stay, the same month. I was writing a story about her the morning she died in December 2007. Then came January 2008—behind on my reading for the first quarter, I determined I’d not get behind again.
In January 2009, I prepared my critical thesis and kept reading.
In August 2009, I finished grad school and packed my children up for a long road trip, following one travel extravaganza with another. From the passenger seat of the car, I phoned to accept a job offer, teaching a course for first-year students at a nearby college—for one semester. The semester ended in December and I spent the first days of my kids’ Christmas break grading papers.
When I look through my own papers, I find ticket stubs from Santa Fe and Cincinnati, and New Hampshire. My bedside is awash in student papers, literary journals, spiral-bound notebooks, and knitting projects.
We had a lovely Christmas. It snowed at the beginning, and snowed again at the end, and in the middle we stayed home most of the time, cooking, preparing, singing and enjoying our new gifts.
Now they go back to school and jobs and I am not a student anymore, not a teacher this semester. I am freelancing, or I am unemployed, or I am just catching up with myself. I am frustrated that I’ve gotten so little done this week: I’ve attended a school party for my sixth grader, applied for a state grant, organized a list of literary contest dates. I’ve written each day. I’ve begun to clean house and restore order to our lives.
I’ve not made resolutions nor lost 20 pounds. I’ve not cleaned the icons off my desktop. I’ve not won literary awards nor found a well-paid job. I’ve written a few email thank-yous, but not nearly enough for the gifts I’ve been given in the past year.
I will need to shed another skin to enter this new 2010 life of mine. I need to make my own deadlines, like a grown-up, and keep them. I will need to make inquiries for magazine stories.
A friend needs a babysitter for two days next week, at a pre-grad school rate of pay. Her father smiles as he says, “You will sleep well when you are done!” The two-year-old laughs and prances all day, then she naps. When her mother arrived home at the end of the day, the child pointed at me and announced, "Mama! She SINGS!" And so I do. It’s a happy match.
Catch up soon.
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