the hills are totally alive

We have been enjoying a stretch of open holiday time at my mother's house this week. Before that, there were simple celebratory pleasures at our house. I hope all of you have been digging in to some bright, warm, beautiful days together with people you love and just the right amount of snow. And I hope you have spent at least some of this time-out-of-regular-time singing.

Yes, singing! Yesterday I sat in the front row for a matinee of The Sound of Music with my mother and daughter at the brilliant, golden Fulton Theatre in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The space itself is glorious and worth a visit. But the show...! This is the sort of thing I would have rolled my eyes over but a few short years ago. When my mother proposed we go, I immediately imagined sitting in one of those plush velvet seats next to my five year old and my heart skipped a beat. Still, I thought I'd have some cool kid distance from all the nuns and lederhosen. You know, watch my starry-eyed kid with the satisfaction of a holiday event well done while inwardly scoffing at the schlocky sentiments onstage. Ha.

I fought off tears during the entire show. Every time Maria opened her mouth I was a mess. It happened no matter what the actors were singing about (they're yodeling! sob!), and so I decided my response must have been related to the fact that I was sitting 8 feet away from the source of pure, round notes. The sound was penetrating. It shook me up and squeezed the tears out! Music is extraordinary that way. (Though, I must admit, I did cry more when the Reverend Mother belted out Climb Every Mountain).

Today Mike's parents, bearing many gifts, came to join us at my mom's for a visit. It was peaceful and happy and the children were delighted with their toys and books. But Frances became increasingly brittle and fixated on playing librarian in a disturbingly dictatorial, antisocial way. Eventually she snapped. Tears, tears, and more tears. Reasoning with her was useless. (Do you remember ever feeling that way as a child during the holidays? I do. The adults want to talk to each other, or maybe throw your cute younger sibling in the air, the presents are over and you suffer all the same problems you did before they arrived ... in short, it is just not as special as it is supposed to be and that is unavoidably sad.) 

Finally I coaxed her into my lap and sang My Favorite Things into her little red ear. Forty pounds of tense kid immediately relaxed and sank into me. When it was over her head popped up. She found my eyes with her wide glittering brown ones and said simply: sing another. So I did. Then I vividly remembered doing just this thing with her as a toddler. I'd stretch out on the couch, and she'd climb up and settle herself like a frog on my chest and ask for another and another and another. Her insatiable appetite for songs unearthed countless tunes from summer camp, girl scouts, church, and musicals that had long been dormant inside me. 

Sometimes I wish I could sing better, or that I'd stuck with piano, or learned to play the guitar. Then I'd have real musical gifts to give my kids. But on nights like tonight, I recognize that what I do have to give is enough. Children are forgiving. Mostly they make a poignantly appreciative and generous audience. And songs - even when sung imperfectly - can communicate something essential when conversation fails. I experienced the voices at the Fulton yesterday as if they were stroking my cheek, smoothing my hair, squeezing my insides. How startling to realize that in a small way, my voice can do the same for someone else.

Yours can too. Sing another!

p.s. A piece I wrote for the Being blog ran on Christmas (scroll down a bit to find it). It was such a gift for me - a source of validation and happiness to contribute to a show I truly admire. 

community quandaries

Here is the girl who reports with astounding attention to detail on every birthday, word wall addition, time out, and social intrigue from her day in kindergarten. I must admit, on the few occasions I've spent time with her classmates, I have been equally enthralled by them. And in September, when the four of us went to Back to School Night, we felt irrepressibly happy. I am certain it was about being in a harmonious public space after such a long sojourn in a private suburban world. That night felt like returning to a part of myself that had been long neglected. We were thrown together with all sorts of other families whom we would never befriend in our regular life. But because of our common investment in this little school, we found points of connection across difference. When I am feeling discouraged about an inane worksheet Frances brings home, I sometimes think of Back to School Night. 

But there are other goods. Yesterday while making bread I sat a bag of flour on one half of  Laurel's Kitchen to keep the page open to the recipe I use. That cookbook opens with an essay by Carol Flinders called "The Work at Hand." Strangely enough, I've never read it - not til yesterday, when a few pages floated up to meet the flour, exposing these passages to my view:

When we turn our home into a place that nourishes and heals and contents, we are meeting directly all the hungers that a consumer society exacerbates but never satisfies. This is an enormously far-reaching achievement, because that home then becomes a genuine counterforce to the corporate powers-that-be, asserting the priority of a very different kind of power.
...
We are on a frontier, surrounded by wilderness, and the job at hand is to make a clearing - to clear a space and determine that what goes on within that circle will be a prototype of the world as you would like it to be. The thrilling thing is to see those small circles begin to touch upon one another here and there, and overlap - sturdy outposts, grounds for hope. (pg 30)

I know there are potential problems with this way of thinking, but the observation strikes me as true. If we do not make choices within our small circles that reflect our hopes for the whole world, then we must be cynics.

Mike and I have been doing this odd thing lately. We toss ideas about how we would homeschool our kids, as if this were in some way a possibility (thus far, I assure you, it is not). Yet how we love to fantasize about mornings spent reading poetry, playing with shapes and numbers, drawing botanicals, and writing stories! Our pedagogical reveries tap into a yearning I have been feeling of late - a yearning to set up our family life in a way more radically true to our ideals.

When Frances explains to me with great sincerity that the most important thing to learn in kindergarten is how to color in the lines (No one can go to first grade until they learn to do it, Mama!), I am positively deflated. I want to retreat to our sturdy outpost, spread out the big roll of brown paper on the floor and engage in some wild Pollock-esque splattering. Since we moved here I haved long for community. Could it be that the best way to realize that sense of connection is to cultivate the tiny community in our own home?

Two competing narratives about how to be a family in the world are vying for my allegiance. The exuberant kindergarteners say: throw in your lot with us! Mass culture isn't great, but that's where the people live, and perhaps we cannot be who we are meant to be without each other. But. But maybe there are other places and ways to connect across difference. Because when I volunteer to ring up Justin Bieber memoirs at the Scholastic 'Book' Fair and then walk past the breakfast bins outside the classrooms filled with chocolate milk and some kind of packaged morning cupcakes, I am so discouraged. These things do not nourish, heal, or content! They are vulgar and corrosive and make us want more awful stuff. I wince to think of children being fed (or rather, starved) with such fare.

So I slip into fantasies about a homeschooling coop - a small circle that might grow. A collective that would recognize the joy children take in learning and discovering, and do its best to avoid squishing it. Of course I would go insane. Of course Frances would start a hunger strike in protest. The only way it could work is if all of you, dear reader pioneers, decided to come pitch a tent in my backyard and found this educational outpost with me.

Open invitation, people.

(Maybe these pictures from the Christmas pageant will help convince you.)

the ties that bind us in a happy knot

When it began to snow this morning, and my mother's brow furrowed as she contemplated navigating the slippery roads back to Pennsylvania, can you blame me if I could barely repress a smile? Sure does look bad out there, I said. We're only thinking of your safety. You'll have to stay another night, I guess.

And she did! Here she is in the kitchen, playing hangman and making acrostics with Frances while engaging in sock battle with Gabriel. When intergenerational family life works, it really works.

 

 

When I can sit back and take a breath, I am awed by the pathways of love that seem to be running in and out and through us when we are all together. Watching my mother take care of my children, I feel so tenderly cared for myself. And when my children run and shout for joy when she walks in the door? I melt like butter. Just knowing she is nearly as interested in them as I am deepens my connection to her and to them. (Plus it takes the edge off the sense of infinite responsibility that comes with being a parent.)

When I became a mother, I began to understand and empathize with my parents in a new way. That process never stops, as Mike and I encounter each new stage of parenthood with our growing little ones, and new memories and insights from our own childhoods flicker to life. Isn't it extraordinary? You think you know a person. And you do. But life takes you to new places - the light shifts, the wind blows gently in a new direction - and suddenly you see that person with new eyes. The person she is opens up in surprising yet consistent extraordinary ways.

What facets of our relationship will catch the light and shine as my children grow, as my sister becomes a mother, as I age? Oh, the happy mysteries of being a family, ever unfolding into the past and future!

one kind of christmas list

About a month ago, I told myself to rein in the ambitions for a homemade holiday season. If I want to do more yoga, writing, and reading, I cannot also ramp up the crafting and baking. Choices must be made! Purchasing a few modest gifts and neglecting the neighbors will be just fine this year. 

Except here we are. Ten days til Christmas, the weather outside is blustery and cold, and I am yearning to hunker down and craft. I am so over kindergarten and the fall semester at St. John's. All I want is to be together in the warm kitchen, to drink endless cups of tea, to wrap awkward homemade gifts in recycled, decorated paper bags, and to fill the house with the scent of pumpkin muffins.

Even though I know most of it is absolutely futile, I have been dreaming up a list of things I'd like to make and do in the coming days. I'm going to share it here, in the hopes that one of you might take some inspiration and give me the satisfaction of living vicariously through your domestic holiday endeavors:

1. Making orange pomanders with the kids. There is a nice guide in this book, involving a hammer, so I know Gabriel would revel in the process. This ornament is also appealing in its simplicity. I love the inherent sensory pleasures of these orange and cinnamon crafts.

2. Curating some of the kid art that I've tucked away in drawers for our walls.

3. Baking unusual cookies for friends and neighbors. I have my eye on a couple of recipes from this list. Don't they look beautiful? I've promised Frances that we will somehow incorporate crushed candy canes this year. And spelt flour and coconut oil. (Just this once, I'm kidding. Some of you will be pleased to know I even bought real white sugar in preparation for the cookies that may or may not happen.)

4. Finishing the embroidery on our advent calendar.

5. Stringing popcorn and cranberry garlands for the tree together.

6. All kinds of making with the kids:

• a fresh batch of play dough 
•  crazy unattractive ornaments featuring items found in the recycling bin
• fresh art from bits of crumpled tissue paper waiting patiently in a shopping bag at the back of the hall closet
•  many loaves of bread 
• potato-stamped holiday cards for family, and
• something spectacular with all the acorns and pinecones hiding in our kitchen.

7. Sewing something special for my sister, who is growing a baby inside her even as I type. 

Maybe one of these things will happen in 2010. It is possible that I'll cross two off the list. At its heart, this tally is an indication of just how much I've been yearning for quiet creative time together as a family. It really doesn't matter what we make (though pretty things are nice). Today Gabriel, channeling the Onceler, used a pink plastic knife to chop down monkey ball trufula trees standing on their stems in a dish of play dough. I embroidered 13 and half of 14 on the advent calendar. We were listening to my very favorite Christmas music. Time together, inhabiting that still space of focused and sparkling creative energy. Heavenly.

the truth will out

Frances: Will we ever have any more kids in our family?

Meagan: I don't know. Would you like it if we had another baby?

F: (looks down, thinks a bit, smiles) ...yes.

We sit at the table quietly for a moment. Frances stares into her bowl of oatmeal and I stare into my coffee, letting this possibility gently fill the space around us. Suddenly, she looks at me and oh-so-earnestly asks: How do you get a baby, anyway? Do you just want one? A lot? And then nine months later you get it?

Oh my. We have books that describe the sperm and egg cells meeting and dividing, and in the past that was sufficient explanation. But when I remind her now of the whole cellular business, Frances finds it wholly unsatisfying.

F: But Mama. How does the sperm cell get to the egg cell inside the mama's body?

M: Oh. Well. When two people love each other very much, and get married, and decide they want to have a baby together...

F: What? What do they do?

M: They hug and love each other in a special, important way, and the sperm from the papa's body actually goes inside the mama's body, and then if the cells get together just right, a baby starts to grow.

Silence descends. I am feeling insane at this moment. It is like treading water in the middle of the ocean; none of my extremeties have any hope of even grazing solid land. I immediately think back over what I have said and regret, regret, regret. Will she think hugging boys will result in pregnancy, like some lost Victorian girl whose mother never told it like it was? Will she watch her parents for hugs that seem particularly special and start preparing for a new sibling?

Thankfully Frances took the conversation into other arenas, such as where one finds a husband (college is a good place, Mama), how old a person should be when they get married (probably 27 or 28), and how in the world you know how to take care of a newborn baby when you become a mama (I didn't tell her that you don't). The whole exchange was oddly exhilarating. I felt the urge to shout and laugh at inappropriate moments; I wanted to squeeze her way too tight. All I could do was grip my coffee mug and focus my energies on maintaining an I'm-taking-you-very-seriously sort of expression on my face, so as not to break the spell.
 
That was all yesterday morning. Later we went to an Elizabeth Mitchell concert - in downtown Annapolis, of all places! Those of you who have been reading me for some time know how much I love her family band's big-hearted, deep-souled music. We sat with some dear friends and fellow fans; it was just lovely. Again, I fought the urge to squeeze Frances the whole time. This was our music!! But like the concert we saw more than a year ago, she was intent upon having her own experience. Sitting a bit apart from me, resisting eye contact, Frances was staunch in her unwillingness to let me define this concert. Watching her from across the table, she seemed so impossibly grown up. (Gabriel, happily, was sleepy and didn't mind sitting on my lap as I swayed and sang along into his ear).

That evening at dinner, Frances wanted to talk Santa. The weirdly thrilling and disorienting feeling of being in parenting freefall came rushing right back as I watched her quiz Mike on whether or not that guy at Whole Foods was really Santa, what about the St. Nicholas who lived such a long time ago, and do you and Mama ever put toys in the stockings?

To Mike's credit, he answered kindly, with lots of open answers, partial truths, and more questions for her to ponder. It seems best to open these doors gradually, letting just a crack of light in at first.

But really. Sex and Santa, all in one day! Being five is no joke.  

a smashing spirit

Not too long ago, I asked Frances what she thinks she'll like to do for fun when she's older. Probably the things I like to do now, she said. Read books, make pictures, write, listen to music. Stuff like that.

Her prescience caught me off guard. It helped me to see the continuity of my own inclinations throughout my life, and so I have little doubt that Frances will love books and art and music as an adult. But what about Gabriel? The things he likes now are zooming trucks and trains around, doing outrageously expressive superhero dances while singing impromptu superhero anthems, throwing and kicking balls, and fantasizing about destruction of all sorts.

To be fair, he also loves to draw. Machinery and trucks and balls, mostly.

Let me tell you a little more about the superhero song and dance numbers. His acquaintance with superheros is shockingly slight, considering how deeply they have moved into his soul. When he gets in the Superhero Zone, Gabriel bends his knees deeply and plants his feet wide apart. His voice descends two octaves. Think stability; think power center. Gabriel taps into a way of moving that I found completely counter-intuitive in my college African dancing days. We former ballet types would be crossing the floor, tugged upward by an invisible thread connecting our sternums to the sky, while the teacher would shout GET. DOWN. LOW. Lower! It was something I had to learn, bending my knees deeply and moving my weight down into my hips. But Gabriel, at two? The boy gets down low.

Channeling Spiderman today, Gabriel punched the air and ran and kicked and twirled. In the midst of this toddler capoeira routine he was breathlessly singing/shouting: Spiderman! Does whatever he can! SPIDERMAN! Yeah yeah Spiderman! Usually during this song there are some repetitive boom boom boom bash phrases thrown in as well as evocative details about Spiderman's violent pasttimes. Today he sang convincingly about how Spiderman "smashes and cuts people."

Woah! Really? Like, with a knife? I was taken aback for a moment, but the truth is I feel pure awed delight when I watch Gabriel embody his superhero side, even when cutting and smashing are involved. He glows with energy and happiness, asserting himself completely in his imaginary world (which blends so readily with reality for him).  How remote from my own experience! I can only stand back and grin. 

But what will happen to this creative love of power? I know that when he is in a classroom with ten other kids who also like to play with sticks, chances are slim that he will have a teacher who can simultaneously embrace the superhero and maintain order. That said, my inner mama tigress starts to stir and rage at the very thought of somebody crushing his outrageous testostorone-fueled enthusiasm for the world.

I wonder what he will do for fun when he's older. I wonder how boys grow up to become men who can still feel and cherish that essential love of power and motion within themselves. There must be some expression of this possible beyond sports fandom!

Ah, but wait. My dad read comic books until his dying day. He loved to run off the trail and holler as he heaved dead trees down to the forest floor, told dirty jokes with gusto, and would wrestle on the rug with any dog or kid who walked in the front door. The man liked to knock things over. Just like Gabriel. Maybe that's why I sometimes feel a joy so big it almost hurts as I watch my little boy enact noisy dinosaur battles at the kitchen table.

So I guess I know from experience that superheros can find a place for themselves, even in our techonological world. There are still towers to crash. Even so, as I anticipate kid institutions that don't always sit easy with robust physicality and boundless, assertive imaginary play, I feel a little protective of my boy. Hello? Future teachers and coaches and Sunday School leaders out there? Are you listening? Beware the tigress. 

betty, hope, and me

A confession: for someone who doesn't own a television, I manage to watch a lot of television. Last night we watched Madmen, and not too long ago I watched the pilot episode of thirtysomething with my mom. Both these shows, I suspect, have been the subject of many a cultural studies-type dissertation and plenty of sophisticated media analysis. I have nothing particularly interesting to add to those fancy conversations, but I would like to figure out why Betty Draper and Hope Steadman get me all stirred up.

A dear friend told me (in the comments section here) that one reason she and her husband had delayed having children was that other couples they knew who were dedicated to equality in their marriages seemed to throw their convictions out the window as soon as they had a baby. Well, yeah. It's a problem. It was less of a problem when I worked full time and Mike was home taking care of Frances, but that situation was difficult in other ways. I struggled with envy and sadness, and felt compelled to do everything when I came home. It wore me out. But then I got my turn staying at home, and guess what? That wore me out too.

It is a conundrum. When I was offered a great 32 hour/week job shortly before Gabriel's 2nd birthday, I said no. Even though I had applied for it, even though I was going nuts missing work, something told me I would be nuttier still if I worked four full days a week. I imagined that life, rushing and dropping off and scrambling to get dinner ready. I thought of all the spontaneous beautiful things that require stretches of quiet, open time together that would never happen and knew with sadness that I could not take that job.

When I watched thirtysomething, I wondered if a single thing had changed for mothers since the eighties. Hope was my mother's age when the show first aired; funny, because she's my age now. In the pilot episode, Hope's new role as mother is alienating her from her friends, colleagues, and spouse. Everyone gets less of her now, and they're sort of annoyed about it. She also misses work and friends and easy intimacy with her husband. Plus being home puts her right in the resentful homemaker shoes I am loathe to slip on - and yet have, do, and will. She is sacrificing a lot, and she knows it. Yet she can't bring herself to go back to work.

Without the distancing power of shoulder pads and bad perms, thirtysomething would be too excruciating close. It left me feeling vaguely glum: this mother problem just might be unsolvable. The onward and upward course of feminism suggests that we are supposed to be marching with our ERA signs towards an ever more equal future, but I don't know that much has really changed since 1987. Better birth control pills, maybe? Less sexual harrassment in the work place, perhaps. But have we made any progress towards creating conditions that support more equitable, sustainable roles for men and women in families?

You could say the problem is just that some ambitious, educated women want to be with their kids - unlike men - and so they have to deal with the consequences of that. Except in Madmen, privileged Betty Draper has no desire to take care of her kids. Neither do any of her friends seem interested in spending time with their children. It's not a part of their culture. Educated women of means weren't expected to want to get down on the rug or make crafts at the kitchen table. (This also suggests that a culture that reinforces a male lack of interest in caring for children has perhaps more to do with the dearth of stay-at-home dads than some essential masculine temperament).

Did you ever read Crossing to Safety? As in so many other stories from that era, the women don't work, but they keep busy fulfilling social and community obligations, leaving their young children behind while they do. They remain essentially aligned with their husbands, and the children belong to another world ruled by ruddy-cheeked working class girls and maiden aunts. The vision of marriage, family, and community life in that book was powerfully attractive. Alas, we have no family compound in Vermont, nor the resources to hire a "girl." But the bizarre truth is I am too attached to spending time with Frances and Gabriel to make it work anyway.

So Betty Draper was not interested in parenting. Neither were her parents, who hired help to do the work of caring for their children. Betty and Don's daughter Sally (whom you can easily imagine building bombs in some basement for the Weather Underground in a few years) is the first one who is going to at least consider whether or not she wants to take care of her own kids.

Isn't it interesting to think the second-wavers were the first to feel these conflicting desires? (I'm just talking about an elite, educated bit of the population, I know - forgive me for the purposes of this thought experiment). We think of our feminist mothers as making the desire for meaningful work outside the home possible. Did they make the desire for intimacy and time with our children possible too? Did the feminism of the sixties and seventies result in an awareness of ourselves as subjects - agents in the world - with all kinds of desires? And was the kind of involved parenting that baby boomers trailblazed (and for this author, modeled) a reaction to second wave feminism, or a natural continuation of it?

Enough of me. Readers, weigh in!

friday stillness

I went for a walk this afternoon. I passed this defiant December rose, bending and shaking in the cold wind, still smooth-petaled amongst her wrinkled and graying sisters.

A brilliant fushcia rose, waving to get my attention on such a wintry day. She was not asking me to smell her so much as marvel at her. To open a door wide, and let her in.

Lately I seem to be tripping over myself as I run through the to-do list in my mind. Surely I have been missing out on countless other things of beauty calling out my name as I rush past. The coming weeks seem overstuffed with packages to send, gifts to prepare, birthdays to remember, travel plans to make. However will I do it all? Regular life maintenance kind of hovers near the too-much line for me. Add some preparations for fun and holiday cheer and the precarious balance begins to tip.

So today, I'm trying to slow down my forward rush into the problem-laden future. I'm trying to let the soft petals of Advent touch my face, because Advent involves a different sort of preparation. It's about waiting for God with one's whole heart, which makes the world around me - December roses included - new and strange. Intentional anticipation clears a space for the present moment. There is nothing burdensome about this emotional gesture, though it is so hard to make.

But we have our little calendar to remind me of the gift of each and every regular, messy day. And when I can find moments like this afternoon, I realize that this season that can so easily give way to anxiety is at its heart a gentle time of year. The sky is soft gray and purple. At times I feel a quiet openness as we move into winter, like the birds’ nests that are exposed now that the leaves have all fallen. There is a stillness in the season, a hush in the air that whispers: don’t be scared. Just wait.