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Thursday, December 03, 2009

closer

As a child, looking at an album of photos of my parents, I felt so removed from these wise older people -- by age, by time, by the grainy grayscale of the photos that made it hard to believe that objects came in colors in the long-ago time before I was born, by the simple knowledge that they were grown up, and that being grown up was a very, very distant thing.

As a teen, I felt removed from them by fashion and by anger. How can these people ever understand me? Look how different their lives were from mine! They have no idea what it's like to live now or to be me! They were young so long ago!

As a young adult, though, things began to change. There's the child that would become my father, with a dirty face remarkably like the one you'll see a few dozen pages and twenty years later -- in the section of pictures from my own infancy. Those are my parents, not even twenty, vowing before God to stay together for the rest of their lives. That's my mother, with my brother in her arms at nineteen years of age. Why, she's not old at all! How did I ever think she was old? She's my age! She's so much like me, holding my own son at the age of twenty-one! She must have felt... just like I do.

And now the past and the future are telescoping closer and closer together, years collapsing in on each other like the pages of a book. Fifteen years ago -- a breath, a lifetime -- I was nineteen, married, calling my mother to ask how to make gravy that didn't turn out as paste. Fifteen years before that, I was four and my mother was in her youthful mid-twenties, an age so far from my own that I thought surely I could never really reach it, not for reals. Fifteen years before that, my mother was a child herself, the age of my younger daughter, keeping a list in her beautiful schoolgirl penmanship of all the horses who lived along her route to school, their locations and their colors and their names if she knew them. I saw that yellowed, penciled list once, and my heart felt squeezed at the thought of that little girl, so like me, so like my own daughter. Then I looked up and saw her standing in front of me, a grandmother six times over. The same girl, no longer removed. Someday soon: me.

Now I look through that same album, looking for a photo of my parents together for a project that someone else is doing. I look at my father and mother, engaged to be married, eighteen years old. I see my brother's eyes looking back at me from Dad's face; I see my daughter's cheeks on his young bride-to-be. I realize with a visceral shock that of all the people in our family, the person closest in age to those young people in that photo is my own son. The infant, the squeaky-voiced round-cheeked boy grown suddenly tall and sonorous, now a carbon copy of the grandfather in the album who left home at sixteen to fight in a war, all long lean legs and unruly hair. Five years from now, he'll be a man. Five years, a breath, a nothing.

Saturday, February 07, 2009

Girls' weekend in.

C and I are on our own tonight, as the boys have taken a Scout trip* to the San Francisco Bay area and no I'm not jealous IN THE SLIGHTEST even though they're camping and hiking in places from which I have wanted to photograph the city for at least THREE YEARS. No, not jealous at all. (Oh well. LT says it's foggy anyway.) So far in their absence, C and I have:

• had a nap (not very successful; neither of us woke in the best mood, and C was unbelievably grouchy)
• eaten junky food (deep-fried Tina's Burritos. I'm sure there's something junkier but you'd have to look pretty hard to find it.)
• watched a costume drama (BBC's adaptation of Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South, LOVE)
• had hot cocoa (from a mix, but with real hand-whipped cream on top so that has to count for something, right?)

  and, so that we can feel less slothful:

• folded three baskets of laundry.

Overall I'd say it's been a Good Day.

*Girls' nights in have become more common around here since the Scout troop resolved to do at least one overnight trip PER MONTH until the end of time. So roughly one in four weekends, it's just the two of us. Good thing we have an excellent supply of film adaptations of classic British novels.

Thursday, February 05, 2009

So this is how the other 97.8% lives.

I had two extra children from Sunday until today; my niece and nephew were staying with us while their parents were away. We've had them stay with us before, but not for so extended a time when school was in session. OH MY GOSH. How do you people do it all the time? One thing I hear pretty often as a homeschooler from non-homeschooling moms is that they just don't think they could do it -- homeschooling, that is. I'm here to tell you that it's about five bazillion times easier to teach my children the three Rs plus extras than it is to get up at zero dark thirty every day and get two kids onto a school bus. It was kind of an adventure, really, but I must admit that the thought of sleeping past 6:30 in the morning has me a little giddy with joy right now. This must be what weekends are like for normal people with, you know, day jobs.

It was really a lot of fun to have them here, though. I'm not going to deny that. My kids always have a great time with their cousins. They love my cooking. And I got to have that strange combination of shuddery horror and bittersweet nostalgia when I dropped my niece off at the junior high -- excuse me, middle school -- one morning. Speaking of feeling fourteen.

By the way, my nephew says that he told his teacher that I did his homework for him, which is absolutely not true, but I wonder if she believed him. If so, she must think I am a pretty awesome haiku artist -- not to mention my madd skillz at spelling. My handwriting needs work, though.

Thursday, November 08, 2007

fear

C has this... abscessy THING on the back of her right earlobe next to her piercing. I just discovered it tonight. It is about the size of a pea, and it looks exactly like the pictures of the early stages of MRSA infection that are all over the Internet right now. We are planning to be on her pediatrician's doorstep when the office opens tomorrow. If they refuse to fit her in to the schedule, we'll be going to the ER. Please pray. Not just for her, and for accuracy in diagnosis, but for me, because I am simmering silently at a level just below total freakout right now and I know sleep won't come easy tonight.

I can't think of anything else to write. Just please God let this all be a huge overreaction on my part, that's all I ask.

Tuesday, November 06, 2007

growing, growing, gone

Lately I have been getting really maudlin (again) about The Passage of Time and How Fast They Grow Up. I know, I know, when am I ever not (answer: never), but this latest spree of sentimentality in particular began when I looked across the room and couldn't tell who was taller, my mother or my son. And my mother is not one of those dinky petite little women; she's 5'5" or 5'6" -- pretty average for an adult.* As often happens, I found myself getting choked up thinking about that little squeaky toddler boy who grew into the leggy, squeaky preschool boy who seemed to vanish overnight and leave this gangly, solid preteen, whose voice I swear I heard crack the other day, in his place.

Then I was, as aforementioned, reading Annie Dillard (how do I love thee?), and she sucked me in with sympathy and then slapped me around a little bit:

"...few, if any, women love anyone so much as their children... Often she missed infant Petie now gone -- his random gapes, his bizarre buttocks. How besotted they gazed at each other nose-on-nose. He fit in her arms as if they two had invented how to carry a baby. [...] Later she washed his filthy hair and admired his vertebrae, jiggling his head in toweling that smelled like his steam. She needled splinters and sandspur spines from his insteps as long as he let her. That is who she missed, those boys now overwritten. Their replacement now sat at the green table wiping crumbs onto his plate. [...]
She confronted the sink. How she wished she could see all those displaced Petes and Peties once more! She imagined joining picnic tables outside by the beach and setting them for 22 Peties and Petes, or 122, or however greedy she was that day and however divisible Pete. Together the sons at every age and size -- scented with diaper, formula on rubber nipples, salt-soaked sand, bike grease, wax crayon, beer, manila, engine oil, fish -- waited for dinner. Who else knew what each liked? It was a hell of a long table. She gave herself a minute to watch them -- Petie after Petie barefoot near his future self and past. They pinched or teased or shoved one another. All but the babies ignored the babies. What mother would not want to see her kids again? When this sort of thing got out of hand, Lou called herself 'Poor Mom'. She dreaded 'Poor Mom', her periodic walk-on role as grieving and piteous victim. Lou spied her from a distance floating long-skirted over the sand, hands on face. Lou gave the hag a short hearing to shut her up, and tea in a cup. 'Poor Mom,' she commiserated: her child grew up."

--Dillard, Annie. The Maytrees. New York: HarperCollins, 2007.

Whew. Thank you, Ms. Dillard. I needed that.

*(Since I know the suspense is killing you, it turned out that she's still about three-quarters of an inch taller than he is, but you couldn't tell, what with his thick golden wavy Mediterranean-Italian hair standing up all over his head.)

Sunday, May 06, 2007

the haul

T decided that we should celebrate Mothers' Day today, since both days next weekend are devoted to other things (like hanging around with our mothers). So. Here is the haul:

*a blender. yay! milkshakes before bed tonight! par-tay! (I think we might really get crazy and watch some Twilight Zone episodes from the library, too... we are all about the Twilight Zone episodes these days.)

*a very nice iPod case, with coordinated but separately purchased ribbon to make myself a lanyard for it, since apparently nobody thinks iPods should have lanyards except me. Or maybe -- this just occurred to me -- the busy little companies whose sole purpose is to make accessories for accessories are all afraid of the lawsuits that would ensue (ensue! lawsuits! hee! I kill me!) if they ventured to make a product with a lanyard and people bought it and then they turned out to be defective and they started, you know, dropping people's iPods. Hmm. Drat this litigious lanyard-killing society! Or maybe lanyards on iPod cases are just dorky. I'm always the last to know.

(blender + iPod = Don't Try This At Home. And also don't blame me when you miss an hour's worth of work sitting and watching episode after episode of that little show. And by the way, that blender costs $400. It is not the one I got for Mother's Day.)

*a big bag of Twix miniatures.

*a lint roller. It was on my list! And I already used it, tonight, to get the cat hair off my tights before we went for my Mother's Day...

*dinner out at my favorite restaurant. Where I ate way, way, way too much, and the food was oh so yummy, and I did not have to plan, shop, prepare, cook, or clean up after ANY of it.

So I am feeling very smily and grateful (thank you family!) and I think I'll go curl up with my iPod and this hat I'm knitting and maybe a few (zillion) Twix bars. See you after the sugar coma wears off.

Saturday, September 30, 2006

Happy Birthday Princess!

I just wanted to take time out of a crazy day of party preparations to post a Happy Birthday to my little seven-year-old princess.

When I picked my daughter's name, I kind of had a mental image of this violin-playing, blue-velvet wearing Emily-of-New-Moon-sleek-dark-hair type. Not that the velvet or the sleek hair or the violin were at all important, really.

Which is a good thing, because in the intervening years I've also learned that hers is a wonderful name for a girl who looks like this:

and like this:

But look:

BLUE VELVET(een)! (or was that black?)

Saturday, September 16, 2006

it's a beautiful life really.

Don't mind me; I'm always a little bit this way when summer starts to end. I went for a walk with the kids yesterday. It was about 65 degrees, blue sky, puffy white clouds, bright sun on a clean world, with brisk clean air that felt good going into my lungs. I literally shouted what a wonderful day! as we were walking. More than once. It's a good thing I don't have to care if people think I'm crazy. Or maybe I should say if they know I'm crazy. A little bit anyway.

I made apple pork for supper. The oven warming the house during the afternoon was a good thing for a change, and the hearty food was exactly what we all wanted.

We split wood in the evening -- 'we' being mostly LT and myself, because T is still on light duty (although he feels better than he has in ages). LT is actually quite good at splitting wood. He's getting really broad shoulders and a deep chest, and now instead of standing as tall as the level of my chin, he's up to my nose (and I'm tall). I'm putting my money on him passing me up in height when he is... twelve. And I foresee plenty of maul-swinging for him in that time and beyond; the reason we started this particular job yesterday was that he was having, shall we say, anger issues, and I remembered how when I was his age, a little bit of woodshed time had been an excellent vent for the kind of pent-up frustration that would otherwise have caused much intrafamily conflict*. LT found the technique equally effective, and I think we will probably be using it rather a lot over the next, say, eight years. Good thing we have a woodstove.

* (Plus when people had been mean to me at school I could come home and do a little bit of imaginative play. Quite satisfying really.)

Next week we're supposed to be in the low 80's again, so I'm going to take the kids to the valley today while it's still brisk and lovely, and we'll do some necessary shopping (I need new clothes, and I actually feel like shopping for new clothes, and we actually have the money for some new clothes, so I am going to capitalize on this rare confluence of events), and we may walk along the creek too, and look for turtles and trains. life. is. good.

Tuesday, September 05, 2006

dream analysis 101 followed by a wacko introspective about housework

What does it mean if I have had a week of very memorable dreams, all involving either a) world-scale disasters such as nuclear war and comet collisions, b) massive failures in various attempts at important tasks due to my blistering inadequacy at, say, walking, or c) both?

Oh yes. It means today's the first day of school.

********************************

update:

School went fine. Everyone was quite cooperative and so it took less time than I thought it might and actual learning took place. Oh, that's nice, Rachel, you might be saying. Then why is it that your hair is standing on end and your chest feels tight and you want to run far away into the hills? Ah. Well. That'd be because of room-cleaning time.

We give ourselves a bit of a problem in this area, I admit. Well, really, we (T and I) give me a bit of a problem, since I'm the one who has to deal with it on a daily basis and he is not. On the one hand, we can't just bring ourselves to be the bohemian, tie-dyed, parents-are-pals kind of parents who tell their kids, "I don't care how messy it is, just keep the door closed," for several reasons: First, we have to traverse their rooms to get to the laundry room and to the clothesline, and LT has to get through C's room to get to his. Second, how do those parents deal with it when it's time to go somewhere and the child can't find a single thing he or she needs, from socks on up? Third, well, we're just not that bohemian, I guess. We're school-at-home types too. Oh. That kind of parents. Yeah.

On the other hand, though, I refuse -- I patently refuse -- to clean their rooms, especially C's, or even to help her clean it, because it makes me absolutely bananas, even more bananas than I am at this present moment and that's pretty darn bananas to tell the truth, to do the work of cleaning with or for her only to have the room be an utter disaster area again within 48 hours. I am Not A Good Mommy when this happens.

So this leaves us requiring the kids to clean their own rooms. LT is not so bad at this nowadays. He's finally figured out that it's a job he has to do and the quicker he gets going and gets it done, the sooner it'll be behind him. C, on the other hand, will cheerily spend all day -- literally all day -- in her room, supposedly cleaning it and then weeping remorsefully every time she gets scolded and/or punished for not doing so. This makes me absolutely insane. Do you ever feel like having your head explode would be so, so nice, not because you want to die -- that would, indeed, be an unfortunate side effect -- but because the release of pressure would feel so, so good? You don't? Do you... have kids? Oh. Must be just me then. Because I feel this way every time it's time for C to clean her room.

And we've tried so many things. We've tried rewarding her for keeping it clean. We've tried racing her to get it clean (against, say, me folding all my clean laundry) and whoever wins gets a prize. We've tried keeping it lighthearted. We've tried spanking. We've tried taking away privileges (there have been times where she was on computer restriction for three or four weeks at a time, all as the result of one particularly nasty bedroom-cleaning incident). We've tried taking away cherished possessions for various lengths of time. I yell. I explain. I rave. The only things that have ever worked are:

1) T or I stand in her room and tell her what to pick up, continually reminding her to move along and not dawdle, until her room is finally clean. (see above re: wreck in 48 hours and I Am Not A Good Mommy, etc)

or

2) She has to clean it every day before she can do anything fun at all whatsoever. Even reading.

Number Two actually lasted for maybe a month last spring. The difficulty with it is that things intervene -- school, a necessary trip somewhere, whatever -- and before you know it three days' worth of mess have piled up and you're back to square one.

Complicating this whole thing is the simple fact that I am not a good example. Sometimes, in fact, I feel like a complete hypocrite, going ballistic at her for stalling and dawdling when my bedroom looks like a clothing tornado went through it and I have four baskets heaped up with clean unfolded laundry sitting in the living room. I rationalize by saying that I'm trying to teach her good habits so that she won't end up like me. Except maybe I should spend the same effort teaching myself good habits, so that I can stop ending up like me. Hmm.

Wednesday, August 23, 2006

is this the real life?

(bonus points if you're humming a Queen song now.)

Yesterday my husband emailed me this story (go ahead and at least skim it and come back or this will make no sense a-tall to you), and asked if I thought it was an accurate snapshot of the way women think. I told him, as I am telling you now, that I wouldn't know about the women-in-the-bar scene, or what it's really like "out there" for single women my age, because I and all my (staggering array of) women friends are married and have been that way for a while. This is what it's like in women's BOOKS, I'll say that.

What really made my stomach clench up was this bit in the men's equivalent article (linked at the bottom of the women's one):

Q: How far will you guys go that first time you’re together?

Joe: All the way.

Brendan: How far would I go, or how far would I go and have a relationship afterwards? Because if I get everything the first time we’re together, I probably won’t be calling her back.

Beecher: That’s horrible. But I will say that if she’s willing to hook up on the first date, it says something about her attitude.

Joe: For me, it wouldn’t matter. I’m not going to judge her based on whether she goes all the way, because, to tell the truth, I will if she will.

Beecher: It’s not a deal-breaker. If she makes me wait, so long as it’s not too long, that’s fine.

Q: How long is too long to wait to do the deed?
Beecher: Three dates.

Brendan: For someone I really liked, I’d wait months.

Joe: To tell you the truth, I haven’t had to wait any longer than three or four dates, so I don’t really know. But I’d have a very hard time waiting as long as Brendan.

These men are in their twenties. That means that, considering the way social mores trend downward, twenty years from now, when my daughter is in their age, it's going to be like that to the twentieth power, I would think. Or at least times twenty (observe my staggering mathematical acumen as I completely pull this theory out of the air). Or whatever. But it's going to be worse than this, I think we can all agree on that, yes? And those are going to be the men in the world who will be looking at my daughter as she walks down the street and goes about her business. Frankly it makes me want to pick out a few prospects who might be OK and then take out every other male who looks at her. Really, though, I'm going to try to save this article until she's old enough to discuss this topic, say eight or ten years, and point out to her that this is what average men of the world will think of her. They will think of her as someone who isn't worth waiting three dates to have sex with. Please God I hope there are some parents out there bringing up their sons to be different, and please God I hope that He will help us to bring up our children (both of them) to see the harm in this kind of lifestyle and avoid it like the plague.

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