Material

The "Top 10 Emailed Articles" on the New York Times web site today:

1. An Immune System Trained to Kill Cancer

2. In Study, Fatherhood Leads to Drop in Testosterone

3. If It Feels Right...

4. A Child's Nap Is More Complicated Than It Looks

5. The Stone: The Meaningfulness of Lives

6. The Trouble With Homework

7. In Suburb, Battle Goes Public on Bullying of Gay Students

8. An Impeccable Disaster

9. A Squirt of Insulin May Delay Alzheimer's

10. Well: Is SpongeBob SquarePants Bad for Children?

America, I think we may need to up our meds.

Pretty for you

Not to take the place of words, but sometimes you just need pretty.

This is a picture I took in 2003 in Barcelona of the floor in a house designed by Gaudi.  The shadows are cast from a lace curtain.

Old moon, new moon?

Last night, at 10:38pm, I was quite a sight to see.  Sitting on the leather couch in the basement, wrapped in blankets, a giant metal bowl which had contained my dinner-- 10 cups of popcorn dusted with nutritional yeast-- sobbing.  

Sobbing because I was tired and didn't know how to just go to sleep.  And because my husband has been gone almost a week to a conference in Poland.  And I know it shouldn't make a difference where he's gone to, but the further away he is, the harder gravity pulls the tides up within me.  

I am always shocked by this occurrence: it seems so out of character for me.  But I actually know it very well.  It's the straw widow peeking out.  The straw widow comes out only when the moon is new, and everything is quiet and dark.  

It always seemed strange to me that the new moon is called just that-- new-- because we experience it as an absence.  New suggests, somehow, presence.  

Then again, sometimes for the new to appear, room must be made.  Reminds me of the haiku by Mizuta Masahide:

Barn's burnt down --
now
I can see the moon.

Sobbing by yourself in your finished basement while watching an episode of a teenage musical drama while your two beautiful, perfect children sleep two floors above you is inane.  Yes, I was sobbing because I was tired.  And overwhelmed.  And unable to let go.  And missing my husband desperately.  

Which is actually, in a sense, redeeming.  I was crying-- stupidly, gulping for air and (though it was dark and I was alone) with a speckled, hottening face-- because in that stupid, stupid teenage love, I could feel the stupid feeling that I needed to feel.  Out of control and desperate for the love of someone I could not have (at least for the moment).  

It's embarrassing to feel you've become untethered.  It's embarrassing-- even in your own basement (perhaps especially in your own basement)-- to let go.  To sob.  

But, to my surprise-- I did just that.  I let it go.  The sobbing did something for me.  

Should that surprise me?  Actually, maybe it shouldn't.  Funny, that thing.  It's like as a baby, all you know is unravel unravel unravel and need the world to swaddle you in.  Then you become that binding for yourself; you become the binding for others. 

Sometimes that unravel unravel unravel is okay.  I really am OK.  Sad, but OK.  I can unravel sometimes, even if just to the floor.  Then I can be retrieved.  I can retrieve myself.  Weave, unweave.  Weave.

Rainbow Connection

In this blog post, MamaH exposes her bedtime tropes, which include mash-ups of AA Milne stories and the Three Stooges, as played by vegetables.  Very small vegetables.  

Baby Broccoli (whose name was a sad attempt at trying to get my son to respect vegetables) cohabits with Pooh and Piglet in the Hundred Acre wood.  Baby Broccoli's sidekick is Baby Corn, and the two little imps are always off on some adventure that Pooh and Piglet have to extricate them from.

Usually, the stories end up in some sort of slapstick race where one unlikely thing happens after the next.  My son thinks they are hilarious.  In fact, they are so hilarious that he ends up jumping up and down in the bed, squealing at the twists and turns in the story, and waking up his little sister who had inevitably *just* settled down to sleep.

I haven't figured out exactly what these two "boys" look like-- do they look like broccoli and corn?  Because that's sort of creepy.  Anyhow, my son doesn't seem to mind. The main thing is that they are funny, single-word-with-exclamation-point-screaming boys.  They appeal.

However, they don't necessarily serve the purpose of a bedtime story to CALM and RELAX.  At the end of the story, my son is inevitably:

a) Belligerent

b) Crying

c) Shouting continuations "...and then they get in a rocket ship and go up up up to the moooooon!"

d) Crying from having laughed so hard

Tonight was "movie night", so that necessitated a shorter version of events, and preferably one that did not involve keeping up the already-past-her-experation-date sister.  

Tonight Baby Broccoli and Baby Corn witnessed a quadruple rainbow in the field across the street, and ran over to catch it.  They ran and ran, feeling like the closer they got to it, the more it receded.  Until they stopped and looked around and realized that they were actually IN the rainbow.  The rainbow enveloped the entire field and became a sort of glowing blanket that skimmed over the surface of the ground.  

The two boys found that they could run and slide on it; they could arc around as though ice skating; the slightest of pressure with their hands or feet could steer them one way or another, as if swimming, or weightless in space.

There need be no end to this story.  No closure, no resolution.  Baby Broccoli, Baby Corn, my son and the rainbow.  Sublime.

I came, I saw, I said too much

Even though my days as a poetry graduate student are far, far behind me, I still seem to have some of the self-perception issues that plagued me in the day.  You see, the job of a poet (at least as I see it) is to say something essential; say it with an economy of words-- only the right words; transmit messages that are encoded and decoded, so they are sort of an app that shows up and opens itself to the reader-- enacting, running the program. 

 

The problem is, I don't have the will to be a poet.  I have the ideas; I have the language; I have the spiritual desire to make things.  I am just afraid.  I am also inconstant.  I distract easily.  I am a magpie of ideas and images.  Oooooh!  Look at the pretty over there! And zap, moving on.

Except, recently, after a long blogging hiatus and exorbitant facebooking, I signed up to audition for "Listen to Your Mother".  LTYM was started last year by Blogstress with the Mostess and Jewish Humorista Ann Imig, who also happens to have a son with the same name as mine, and who is a parent at my son's former preschool.

Last year I did not read at LTYM.  I feared "I am woman hear me roar" or, worse, Hallmark theater.  When I dared peer into last year's video of LTYM, I was blown away.  Nothing of my fears.  But fierceness.  FIERCENESS.  And people I couldn't have imagined listening to, I listened to.  They had something to say to me.  

So when I saw the call for auditions this year for LTYM I said to myself SHIT.  I don't want to do this I do NOT WANT TO DO THIS.  But my mother self said Screw you it'll be good for you.  Mother knows best, doesn't she?  Crap.

I struggled and struggled.  What did I have to talk about?  What DIDN'T I have to talk about?  Fret fret fret frette.  Frette is a bedspread.  A yucky bedspread.  Write anything.

So, on the urging of a friend,  I wrote a poem.  I fell back on writing a sestina, because I love sestinas (I particularly love this sestina from Elizabeth Bishop called "One Art").  I love the repetition of the end words.  So, here was my sestina.  Not perfect, but not half bad:

Sestina for Six AM

I woke up at six.

Through the monitor, my daughter was having a serious word

 with the assembled animals in her bed.

 What I understood was only a fragment,

 some misbehavior.  Some laughing.  Stop!

 The wards were getting restless.  I the mom! I mom!

 Then the rankling, like a cup against metal bars.  Maaaaaaaamiiiiiiiiiiii

 as if suddenly she were reminded of my existence as the six

 o’clock alarm clicked on at five past to stop

 her machinations.  She utters THE word

 which makes all things happen; which lifts her from her bed

 into the morning which continues like a fragment

 of some conversation from the night before, not rested, but embedded

 and continued.  Even Dora calls out from the infernal talking dollhouse, “Hola, mama!”

 as if we must be surrounded by things that fragment

 our thoughts to not let us get too deep; The six

 year old slumbers on.  Sometimes I can hear the murmur of unintelligible words

 through his door, a flow that doesn’t stop

 even when it seems like all motion, all thought should stop.

 It’s like constant traffic, even in bed.

 Syllables being hatched and born into words.

 What is that like?  To be born into words, like mom

 came to mean ME six

 years ago (I have to count on my fingers), as though even that fragment

 of control, of time, escapes me.  I peel fragments

 of the orange and place it on the tray, in front of my daughter and stop

 in thought.  Or out of thought.  Then she counts back to me-- to six

 though she does not-- cannot-- understand numbers.  She sings No more beeeehd

 because it makes sense, doesn’t it to her? Mom

 is the beginning of word.

 Words

 are just a convenient way of taking fragments

 and making sense.  Yes, slivered, mom

 is elemental, full-stop.

 Developed or grown from seed in the world’s flower bed.

 In the beginning, God created six 

 days and rested on the seventh. Mom has a word

 for Six AM.  It is eternal.  It does not rest; it fragments.

 Stop.  Go back to bed.

But that was just what got me started.  Now I was furiously trying to find something else-- I was NOT going to read poetry in front of an audience again.  N-O-T, as in NOTHANKYOU.  Then a friend-- Jen over at the Checkered Chicken-- encouraged me to write about my relationship with my mother.  

So apparently that's how I ended up reading on Mother's Day in front of 350 people at the Barrymore Theater in Madison with 12 other amazing mothers.  I still can't believe I did it-- mostly because I can't believe what I said IN FRONT OF 350 PEOPLE, including, apparently, former Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold.  Really?  Did I really have to clue in the Feds in front of Russ freaking Feingold?  

I guess I did.  I will post the video as soon as it is up.  In the meantime, believe me that it was great and awful and freeing.  And now I'm here doing the blog thing again because what more can happen to me if I don't try?  Nothing.  Nothing will happen if you don't try.  Things may happen TO you, but they won't happen FOR you.  

So listen to me.  Pretend I'm your mother.  I'll make you eggs.  Now get out of here.

Sweden, You Taunt Me So

Sweden has given the world IKEA and Astrid Lindgren and Meatballs.  All things that are somehow so elemental, so simple and smart you can't help but slap yourself on the head and say, "Now why didn't I think of that?!?"

Yes, Sweden is, to my mind anyway, the gateway to the collective unconscious.

It's also an absolutely absurd language which seems to at once make sense to the native-English speaker and also make total nonsense.

Exhibit A:

From the Swedish Website Barnvanligt  (If you want to see the English website, click on the British flag at the top left of the page).

Simple.  Iconic.  Functional.  Swedish.  They call it a Nyckering.  Well of course they do!  Not sure what the heck it really means (probably key ring holder, I suspect) but Nyckering really satisfies, doesn't it?

Just like all the names of products at IKEA: Malm and Halsa and Barnslig Randig.  All those umlauts dancing atop vowels like the bouncing ball in a child's sing-along video.

I guess it also doesn't hurt that Swedish maintains more than a passing resemblance to Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky.  To wit:

Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
  Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
  And the mome raths outgrabe.

Okay, perhaps I should have rather said, "Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky maintains more than a passing resemblance to Swedish".  Still, there's truth to it.  

So yes, Sweden.  You are home to my linguistic and design unconscious.  And I deign to say, your meatballs are irresistible.

What I do when I'm trying to avoid meaning

Knit
Trim cuticles
Put too many books on my library queue that I will never have time (or energy for that matter) to read
Woot-off!
Come up with Byzantine plans for:

• The next social gathering that I am going to host because I love being around people but hate hosting but will host anyway
• An art project that will go awry, perhaps in the planning stages, but after having purchased all supplies
• The yard, including an orchard, a pagoda, 1000-lb. boulders and no weeding
• Controlling the unstoppable decay of my house, car, and everything I touch
• How I can best torture myself about some social commitment that I really don't want to fulfill but can't say no to.  Because I can't say no to it, OK?

Oooooh!  Recipes from the New York Times!  I'd LOVE to try and use pomegranite molasses again.  

People.comUsmagazine.comTMZ.com-- OK, that makes me disgusted.  There's avoiding meaning and there's gossip-porn.  Let's not go THERE.

Baby Gap.  Because your baby looks cuter in clothes that have been assembled by her contemporaries.

Doesn't it seem like it's been an awful long time since something was recalled?  I should check and see if the crib/medicines/toys/clothes/food has been recalled.  It HAS!  Oh crap.  I'm a bad mom.  I shouldn't waste time on meaningless things and I should hug my children more.  Really, what's more important than a hug?

Cereal.  In front of the computer.