storm craft

 

As Hurricane Irene approached, I became increasingly concerned. I normally scoff at the grim warnings of meteorologists because they are nearly always overblown, but I’d never weathered a storm like this so close to the water. On Friday, my Facebook wall started to ring the same note over and over: how many gallons of water should one have, where to get ice, who was evacuating and who was sticking it out.

So we took it seriously, making room in the garage for the car and filling the tub – just in case. Thank goodness we never lost water, but we did lose power. Who knows when it will ever come back on? I’m writing now on a battery-powered laptop that is creating the lone pool of light in this pitch-dark house. We’re well into Day Three without refrigeration, lights, land line, and internet access. No streaming, no satisfying the children’s wonderings about, for example, the distance from here to Papua New Guinea, no email, no blogging…! But tonight I realized I could write on a Word document and post this whenever I find somewhere to get online. Hence this gritty report from the frontlines of hurricane-induced deprivation.

As the storm built in intensity on Saturday, we set out on a crafting mission. There was still leftover cardboard from our Ikea ordeal, and the sharks seemed hungry. So I cut out a school of fish for them to chase, and the children painted and glittered them. Then we needed a crab. And an octopus. It was at this point that I started cutting up cereal boxes and whatever cardboard packaging I could find. Gabriel requested a sea spider, so I took a crack at it, and soon after that the recycling bin ran officially dry.

As the wind blew and the tree branches moved like waves outside, we kept painting and decorating in the kitchen. The rain pounded all day; it didn’t seem coincidental that we were drawn to underwater scenes.

 The power went out in the afternoon and we ate dinner by candlelight, watching the sky. I was hit many times by a strong desire to go outside into all that violent motion, but I knew that wouldn't go over well with my family. It was all beautiful and sinister. The darkness, the howling, the bowed plants and trees, the pervasive feeling of being trapped together in our strangely still, warm house.   

Branches littered the yard and street in the morning; one home in our neighborhood was destroyed by a large fallen tree. We took a rainy walk when the wind quieted, comparing notes with neighbors, then returned home to our fish, which were all dry. Gabriel and I decided to put the animals he’d decorated on his bedroom walls. (Frances is not sure of her fishes’ final destination). 

We all had great fun arranging and rearranging them in the room. And when we were finished, the sun had come out.  

Mike had to teach seminar, so I did bedtime tonight. Frances starts school tomorrow. I gave her a bath, rubbed her dry, and yanked a comb through her hair by flashlight, like so many other parents must have done all along the East coast. We are preparing for this leap into the first grade at a new school under unusual circumstances, but everything feels okay. As okay as it can in the dark, where all would be quiet if not for the pervasive rattling buzz of nearby generators. 

Frances looked so small while I gave her our customary nine sprinkle dusties. I count them off as we go, “sprinkling” by giving her a tickly pitter-patter with my fingertips down her spine.

Tonight she turned her body back towards me in bed when I was finished, asking “What are sprinkle dusties, Mama?"

Five years into this routine and now she asks! I didn’t tell her how she was captivated when saw her older friend Julian receive them once from his mama, or how the two of them had played sprinkle dusty with a little bath toy on the sidewalk when she was not yet two years old. Instead I told her sprinkle dusties were a kind of magic fairy dust that protected her and kept her safe in the night.

“Could you do extra ones tonight? I need powerful sprinkle dusties.”

On the third night of fumbling through our evening routines by flashlight, and on the last night of summer vacation, was I surprised that she needed extra magic protection? I heard myself saying a kind of prayer as I ran my fingers down her spine over and over: this sprinkle dusty is for courage. This sprinkle dusty is for patience. This sprinkle dusty is for kindness. This sprinkle dusty is for peace.

With each sprinkle her eyes drooped and her lips parted further. Those dusties really are powerful stuff, and thank goodness, because she’s about to step off this storm-battered craft into a great unknown. I’d cover my small, strong daughter in magic talismans and good luck charms, ropes of garlic and an invisible force field if I could. Ah, wish me luck tomorrow! Deep down I know Frances doesn’t need it – but I might.   

in defense of amusement

Bright and breezy, the weather on Wednesday was could not have been more perfect. The day fell squarely between a rare East coast earthquake and an anticipated hurricane; its proximity to extremes made it that much more quietly glorious. It was the last gasp of summer vacation, and we did not celebrate with peach jam preserving, nor with tomato harvesting nor daisy-chain making in a green meadow. People, we went to an amusement park.   

The whole day brought to mind The Sound of Music, another occasion in which I inwardly assumed a too-cool-for-school attitude in anticipation of some good, clean fun only to give way within seconds, forgetting my adolescent resistance and fully embracing how awesome the whole thing was. My mother brought us to that show, and she brought us to Lancaster County's own Dutch Wonderland yesterday. Because she knows I will love it. She pushes through my suspicion of things commonly considered to be Fun, things that people pay lots of money to do in large crowds on hot summer days, and says oh come on Meagan.  

We arrived and got right on the Sky Ride. When we disembarked, we rode a real roller coaster. And a carousel, and a crazy up-and-down ride that made me ill but the children loved, and a monorail in need of a paint job. And then ate our picnic lunch surrounded by all kinds of families in a pretty area just outside the park (the family next to us was Hasidic; the parents looked about my age and had eleven children).

It turns out that my kids, at ages three and six, are totally up for Fun. I was anticipating fights, tantrums, and meltdowns in punishing August heat. We did have one tough twenty minutes, during which both kids fell apart, but that was immediately before lunch so I attribute it more to hunger than bombardment by the relentless evils of an amusement park.

And seriously, Dutch Wonderland is just about the least evil amusement park I can imagine. There's no intense corporate presence, nor mass-marketed crass cartoon characters. Well, Thomas the Tank Engine does feature in a show, but it was so simple and low-tech that it was impossible to be offended. A freckled, tired-looking teenager in a blond wig and pink satin dress wandered the park and all the kids jumped up and down because a real princess was walking in our midst. What a summer job!

Being at an amusement park designed for young children within a two hours' drive from lots of big cities was a lot like my experience at the airport over the Fourth of July weekend. Except my love of country swelled even greater yesterday, because everyone seemed so happy, grinning at their toddlers and watching their big kids on the carousel. The diversity of parents pushing so many double strollers in one place took my breath away! There were disheveled Brooklyn dads in flip flops, Japanese families in matching polo shirts, Long Island glamour-mamas with bejeweled sandals and heavy accents, countless Hasidic families in long dark sleeves, and so many Amish teenaged girls taking their kid brothers and sisters out for the best day ever. I wish you could have seen them with their somber dresses and tightly knotted hair laughing uncontrollably on a roller coaster!

So on the cusp of a new school year that promises many changes in our family, I am all filled up with gratitude: for my mother who insisted on taking us out for some serious Fun, for my kids who kept it together and delighted us with their delight, for my hard-working husband who was home just beginning the new fall semester, and for my country, the kind of place where you can snuggle into a bumper car with your kid and slam into other cars driven by - among others - a teenage girl in a white mesh cap, a bearded man in a yarmulke, a chubby grandma in a sequined t-shirt, and a young Indian mother with shining black hair all in one thrilling 60 second ride. Then you all stumble out laughing on shaky legs, get in line, and do it all over again. What a fine way to say goodbye to summer!

kaleidoscope vision

It's cricket season here in Annapolis. We'd kept them at bay well into August, but by the time we returned from our trip they had settled comfortably in the basement and garage and were regularly sending scouts to do reconnaissance in the kitchen and playroom. And who can blame them? Our house is a pretty nice place to live for a bug; the crumbs are positively ubiquitous.

The only problem is that they make grotesque roommates. They jump out and scare you in the laundry room. Their song is an ominous soundtrack making the otherwise pleasant task of getting the scooters out of the garage uncomfortably tense. So...we murder them. It's true. We become ruthless cricket killers in August.

But then a couple of days ago, Frances - fresh off her first reading of The Cricket in Times Square - found one sauntering across the kitchen floor, and decided to catch it and make a pet of it. She named it Chester, and while she and Gabriel foraged in the backyard for things to make him comfortable in his new home, I poked holes in the lid of a jar. We soaked a tiny square of sponge with water and gave him a few fish flakes. Then the children huddled around Chester in his jar, cooing and yelping with delight whenever he wiggled his antennae.

At one point Gabriel looked up at me and solemnly declared, "Mama, he's adorable. We love him."

And that is how our tormentor became a beloved pet. Isn't it funny how shifting your perspective can turn a story upside down? When Mike and I went in for what has turned out to be a triannual visit with a psychotherapist who works with children this past week, she talked about turning the kaleidoscope. Shifting your vision. Finding ways to approach a tense moment with children from an unexpected angle, and thus diffusing a fight-in-the-making. When you turn the lens, the whole view changes, and what had been escalating in a bad way can end in laughter or a brisk walk around the block.

Or you might come home from Ikea with a nightstand that looks deceptively simple to assemble (when will I learn?) and find yourself on hands and knees at 9:30 pm, having studied the pictures and taken apart and reassembled for a very long time, trying to breathe, trying to imagine why we ever went to Ikea in the first place...only to wake up in the morning with more cardboard beckoning to be creatively repurposed than you know what to do with.

So I cut out a couple of sharks and let the kids go at them. They entertained each other with wild stories about their sharks (rather bloody - see those red-rimmed gaping mouths?), mixed paint colors, found art supplies I had forgotten about, and ended up with a couple of truly fantastic big fish. We're planning on affixing them to sticks to make enormous puppets.  

And with the aid of some very deep breathing, I made it through the nightstand assembly and it looks very stately next to our bed, adorned now with Tina Fey's book, Super Sad True Love Story, and a book on the middle ages that I think I'm going to read but probably won't. Ah well. I'll enjoy its presence so close to my head - rather than see it as evidence of my failure to read enough.

So yes. We are finding pets amidst pests; sparkling sharks in the sad detritus of an Ikea ordeal! I only hope I can access this kaleidoscope vision as we move ahead into the fast-approaching, fast-paced school year.

blame the kids

Well. We have been home for two days now, after nearly a week's idyll spent in and around quiet Belchertown, Massachusetts. Though the cool evenings, pond swimming, and abundant good food and drink were restorative, in retrospect those delights were but icing on the real cake, which was so many days and nights in the company of friends with whom I share mutual, unconditional love and regard. (Not to diminish the pleasures of friendship in a gorgeous setting. Heather once exclaimed, as she and Edith and I swam around Belchertown's pond considering our futures, "Jobs! Kids! Husbands! I feel like we're in The Big Chill!")

Yes indeedy, we're old now. Yet our feelings run hot as ever; when I said that the time in Massachusetts was restorative, I didn't mean to suggest it was peaceful. I mean, there were peaceful moments, like our morning spent in the Art Studio at the Eric Carle Museum making collages in the spirit of hungry caterpillars and brown bears.

I loved it there, not just because they let me make a collage too, but because the children were gentle and focused after a rocky start to the week. Three is not an easy number; Frances and Gabriel vied for their friend Asa's attentions incessantly. Frances took every instance of Asa's preference for train or truck play with Gabriel profoundly personally, and expressed her dismay accordingly. With tears and screams and gnashing of teeth! Or was that me who was gnashing teeth? Certainly someone was. Until we hit that Art Studio. Oh, thank you, Eric Carle.

But I can't simply blame Frances. Something about these summer gatherings stirs up the deep-down darkness in me that I am afraid to let out under normal circumstances. The safety I feel amidst these particular people is a signal to a year's worth of tears that have been waiting in the wings. Here's your cue, time to dance onto center stage! It is, as Edith said last summer, our one chance to be raw. Heather sees as an opportunity to ponder the Big Questions together, which we do, peppered with practical problem-solving and so many stories about college and early friendships (endured graciously by those present who did not happen to be thrift store shopping, mix tape making, and falling in and out of love in suburban Philadelphia circa 1998).

In any case, my emotions (and their free expression) ranged all over the place. But just as Frances eventually found her footing in our shared house, I also began to feel a sense of clarity and acceptance about the parameters of my life just now (which we'd pondered in the evenings and during those stolen laps in the pond). If you read my last post you know how I'd been feeling before the trip: pulled in too many directions, questioning my ongoing efforts to create "balance" in my life, wondering if the one-foot-in-each-world approach is a misguided one.

And now? I'm kind of over it - at least momentarily. I solicited and gratefully received lots of excellent advice. And something about touching the sadness and confusion beneath those concerns - with the support of friends - allowed it to float instead of weigh on me. It wasn't just letting myself be sad; it was seeing myself, my marriage, and my family through their loving eyes. (Aren't friends the unsung heroes of marriage? Of parenthood?) It's okay to be where we are. In fact, it's good to be where we are. Things will change. They always do. For now, my children are small, and while I may indulge in angst occasionally I do like to be with them, very much.

Besides all the perfect pond swimming and insightful, generous friends, Tina Fey's book was circulating around the house and proved yet another source of reassurance. In fact, it came home with us, on loan. Lordy, that lady is funny. She's also great on motherhood, commenting in her non-ideological, hilarious, honest way:

There was no prolonged stretch of time in sight when it would just be the baby and me. And then I sobbed in my office for ten minutes. ... Of course I'm not supposed to admit that there is triannual torrential sobbing in my office, because it's bad for the feminist cause. It makes it harder for women to be taken seriously in the workplace. ... But I have friends who stay home with their kids and they also have a triannual sob, so I think we should call it even. I think we should agree to be kind to each other about it. I think we should agree to blame the children.

Yes. I do. I blame the children. Just look at them tearing down the street like that, totally oblivious to the heartache and confusion they set in motion. You invite so much muddiness and pain into your life when you have children! (A consolation: now you have someone else to blame life's muddiness and pain on). And yet I'd do it over again, a thousand times over, a million billion gajillion times over. My week of reflection and reconnection triggered bouts of surging love and tenderness towards these two, the kind that can knock you off your feet. Good thing there was a hammock in the backyard.

a muddy morning

I returned from a run through the heavy gray morning air today, slick with sweat, and was greeted enthusiastically at the door by Gabriel, who led me right back outside. He suggested that we do a little weeding together in the front garden. As we set to work, Gabriel quickly transformed into a superhero named XY who battles a bad guy, Lex Leafer, who is forever making weeds grow where we don't want them to. Each clump of clover pulled became a kind of cosmic victory. And when all the evil weeds were pulled and Lex Leafer was finally vanquished, Gabriel took out his construction vehicles to build a house for the ants.

After a night of rain, the August air was strangely cool and thick. Droplets of water hung to every leaf, and the ground was satisfyingly wet and easy to move with a tiny bulldozer. For a construction site, it was unusually peaceful. I sat beside Gabriel in my sweaty skin, feeling the cool stillness without and within, after my own small storm the night before.

I was hit unexpectedly, after a seemingly inconsequential conversation with Mike about an ill-advised freelance writing possibility, with the same lost, unmoored feeling that has come and gone ever since my new home-focused life began when we moved here three years ago. It has been mostly gone these last few months, so I was especially discouraged to hear myself expressing hopelessness all over again about ever finding my professional feet here. I like being with my children and creating a home. I like to contribute to the wider world in exchange for a paycheck. Both desires feel genuine and legitimate, and yet they inevitably conflict.

I swear there was more nuance to my distraught feelings last night, but I suppose if you had to boil it down to one problem, that would be it. I've been trying to build my freelance writing work in the hopes of - in a small scale kind of way - having it all. (My social work identity is lying in wait, still scanning the horizon, still unable to detect a part-time expression for itself out there). I want the freedom to build an ant house out of mud on a whim with Gabriel. I want quiet and space enough to notice the rain clinging to the leaves overhead. I want to exercise my capabilities and participate in a wider world too - I want to know myself to be competent. I'm trying to invent a flexible life of career-building, bread-making, picture-painting, community-creating. It sounds pretty good, but in practice sometimes I simply feel pulled in too many directions. Stretched into a shapeless form with no assured place in the world.

There are mothers who work full-time who have sent their kids to day care since they were tiny babies, and there are mothers who are home full-time and have put their careers on hold. I know both sorts, and for the most part, they are not a conflicted bunch. They've made a choice about how to do this, and it's not up for re-evaluation. But I seem to be constantly tweaking and planning, sending out feelers, seeing potentialities everywhere, wondering how I could both add more meaningful work and balance all this better. This restlessness could wear a person out.

Good thing we're going on vacation on Saturday, for an entire week with friends in a beautiful place! I won't be blogging for a little while as a result...pictures from Western Massachusetts when we return. Thank you friends, as ever, for walking with me on this whole motherhood journey. The path feels shadowed and muddy today, but as Gabriel demonstrated this morning, if you stop and settle in for a moment, mud can be a lot of fun.

scenes from the weekend

Is it Tuesday already? We had such a lovely, restful time with friends and family over the past few days that I'm in perpetual Sunday mode. Gabriel is napping, Frances is off basking in the attentions of her grandparents (where we left her this morning), and Mike is dutifully painting our bedroom a deep, peaceful shade of indigo. The one thing interrupting my Sunday morning feeling is the mysterious, disturbing animal-like scent that greeted us when we walked back in the door of our home this afternoon. The flashlight is resting just next to the keyboard, waiting for me to pick it up and do a thorough investigation of the basement. I'm not ashamed to tell you that I'm afraid of what I might find.

So instead? A few scenes from our stretched-out weekend:

Playing at a small fountain in Philadelphia, adjacent to a farmer's market that was bursting with beautiful people and beautiful food. It was hot as heck.

Only the promise of water ice could entice my children to walk many city blocks in the heat with nary a whine...that, and the presence of our buoyant, light-hearted friend Amelia.

Oh yes indeed.

Book lovers in matching braids. They both indulged me; I couldn't keep my fingers out of all that hair.

Since adults are less tolerant of cameras snapping away during life's finer moments, I failed to document a very satisfying (company-wise, but also food-wise) reunion dinner with an old friend, during which I was able to meet his new wife and enjoy old rhythms of conversation; an afternoon with Ann Marie and another beloved friend Jessica, furiously talking away while the other adults and all the children napped, scattered throughout the house; and an early morning walk through quiet city streets to fetch syrup for pancakes, immersing myself in that delicious city feeling, breathing in urban energy that lay momentarily dormant, soon to waken and buzz all over again.

We headed to Wilmington to visit with Mike's family next, and were happily surprised to find my little blond niece and nephews waiting for us. The kids had a great time; I especially enjoyed sharing Shane and Zac's dinosaur books with all the children, exclaiming over a brightly illustrated stegosaurus or a particularly bloody tableau featuring hunting velociraptors. The passions of children are a joy to partake in, and I was grateful to Gabriel for preparing me for that moment.

And finally here we are, home again. Fresh zinnias on the table, a strange silence where Frances's voice is usually found. I'm relishing these August days, before everything speeds up all over again and a Tuesday afternoon never feels like a Sunday morning.

But I suppose it is Tuesday, and the weird stink isn't fading, despite my best efforts to ignore it. Ah well. Wish me luck, friends.