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.