When you live with a highly verbal preschooler, you soon realize that every conversation is actually a thin path bordered on each side by miles and miles of quicksand. And you, the parent, do not know the path at all. And your preschooler just happens to regard quicksand as her natural habitat.
I am thinking of the conversation Cora and I had in the car about a year ago, when I was explaining Memorial Day and why it was a holiday, and soon found myself facing the laser-beam gaze of a four-year-old asking, "Would you die for your country, Mommy?"
Which brings me to the most recent episode. The one that got me thinking that Cora actually does know the path, but the path she wants me to follow her down is indeed overlaid with quicksand, and so long as I don't panic, we will be just fine. The thing about these conversations is that they always seem to come out of nowhere. Sunday evening, we were watching Nickolodeon after dinner - I am not sure why, but iCarly has caught Cora's attention in a big way - and Cora was also coloring on the floor while I caught up with some editing work. Then she asked me if the world started when Baby Jesus was born.
This was actually still sure-footing territory, because if there is one thing I am clear on, it is that the world existed for a very long time before that point in history. And I thought it would be cool to talk about evolution and dinosaurs and so on. But, she cut off the science talk to ask why the people "crossed him." We are nowhere near Easter! Where is this coming from?!
Cora might be much smarter than me, because I'm pretty sure that it took me another six years to realize that being nailed by your hands and feet does not kill you. And that was her next question: If they didn't put a nail through his head, why did he die? And this is where I thanked Mary Roach and her book Stiff for providing me the answer, which I delivered in short, relatively non-graphic language. (But, face it, once you are talking about crucifixion, you are in the graphic language whether you want to be or not.) And then we were back to why, and a discussion of Biblical-times politics.
How much of this has to do with amorphous knowledge of the Arizona shootings? Did she hear Chris and I talk about it? Something in the air? We don't watch news shows with her, and I don't think they do "breaking news" on Nick or PBS. Is it just synergy? Even though I often fumble my way through the theological discussions, trying to tread that thin line between cultural and personal assumptions and beliefs, I find the discussions of real-world violence harder. I would rather explain the mechanics of childbirth than try to explain war.
Which means I have my work cut out for me, because I have read, written, and thought a lot about certain world events, and one day Cora is going to be able to read. She's going to look at those collections of books and have some big questions about words like Holocaust, genocide, Rwanda, and others that she can find in our volumes of history, politics, literature, poetry, and graphic novels.
Really, it has already started, because she's seen The Sound of Music, and while you don't have to go into the whole WWII history, you do have to talk a little about Nazis. And, thinking she would love the dancing, I did show her some clips on YouTube of West Side Story, which turned out to require a primer on gangs and the politics of the "other".
There are so few sure pathways!
Showing posts with label motherhood. Show all posts
Showing posts with label motherhood. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
Sunday, September 26, 2010
Unplugged
A week ago today we were coming to the end of our camping weekend - our first family camping trip, with borrowed tent and sleeping bags. Cora has been asking for months to go camping. I'm not sure what sparked her interest - whether it was something we read, something she saw on a TV show (did Curious George go camping? Oh, that's right, Olivia went camping! Mystery solved.) - and finally it seemed like the right time. Nothing else planned, fall weather so the mosquitoes might be dead or at least too weak to do much damage, and because it is the school year again, Chris could meet us if we picked a point half way between us. So we did. We found a State Park, reserved a campsite, and I started my lists.
The lists paid off. We had good meals. We had everything we really needed. I got to sit by the campfire reading Dracula the Un-Dead by flashlight (oh, the book is not good at all, except as a further permutation of the story, but I am reading it anyway!). We roasted marshmallows every night and that is still Cora's favorite part. I put my Girl Scout training, my family camping training, and my matriarchal fire-building genetic advantage to work in building the fire, making hobo packets, washing dishes in a basin, and generally accepting the discomforts of camping with as much fortitude as possible.
It was beautiful, it was relatively quiet. We were surrounded by trees. It came at the end of a week when I'd had the luck to spend two different days with friends who are also writers. I got my chapbook manuscript close to finished. I did some reading. By Sunday afternoon I was feeling more like myself - my idea of myself - than I have in a year. When Sunday afternoon rolled around, we got everything packed up, headed to the nearest town to have lunch together, and then drove our separate directions. We all felt good. We'd had a great weekend. Cora was excited to watch Alice in Wonderland (Disney animated version) on her little player. No tears.
After ten minutes on the interstate, the temperature warning light flashed red. Then the oil light came on. The car beeped at me. And then the smoke (later identified as steam; the water pump had blown out) started pouring out from under the hood. We pulled off on an exit ramp, called for help, got towed nine miles back to a little town with no Sunday mechanics. We stayed at a roadside motel - the managers were nice and helpful, but it was still a setting straight out of 45% of the horror movies ever made! (No deadbolt, no peephole.) We survived the night. We walked 30 minutes to the Ding Dong Cafe for breakfast. Our car was fixed by 4pm and we made it back home. Much of the serenity and self-restorative power of the weekend stripped away.
As we drove into our neighborhood I was explaining to Cora how camping had been so nice, and then our unintended adventure kind of ruined the weekend. She was shocked. But Mom! Wasn't it fun to eat snacks in the motel? Wasn't it fun to watch a new TV show? Truthfully, it wasn't, for me. But I suppose the fact that she thought it was indeed fun, was simply another good adventure in the weekend, also says something about what the weekend did for my state of mind: I may have felt like the weekend was somewhat ruined by the misadventure, but I didn't ruin her weekend.
I'm almost as proud of that as I am of my fire-building skills.
The lists paid off. We had good meals. We had everything we really needed. I got to sit by the campfire reading Dracula the Un-Dead by flashlight (oh, the book is not good at all, except as a further permutation of the story, but I am reading it anyway!). We roasted marshmallows every night and that is still Cora's favorite part. I put my Girl Scout training, my family camping training, and my matriarchal fire-building genetic advantage to work in building the fire, making hobo packets, washing dishes in a basin, and generally accepting the discomforts of camping with as much fortitude as possible.
It was beautiful, it was relatively quiet. We were surrounded by trees. It came at the end of a week when I'd had the luck to spend two different days with friends who are also writers. I got my chapbook manuscript close to finished. I did some reading. By Sunday afternoon I was feeling more like myself - my idea of myself - than I have in a year. When Sunday afternoon rolled around, we got everything packed up, headed to the nearest town to have lunch together, and then drove our separate directions. We all felt good. We'd had a great weekend. Cora was excited to watch Alice in Wonderland (Disney animated version) on her little player. No tears.
After ten minutes on the interstate, the temperature warning light flashed red. Then the oil light came on. The car beeped at me. And then the smoke (later identified as steam; the water pump had blown out) started pouring out from under the hood. We pulled off on an exit ramp, called for help, got towed nine miles back to a little town with no Sunday mechanics. We stayed at a roadside motel - the managers were nice and helpful, but it was still a setting straight out of 45% of the horror movies ever made! (No deadbolt, no peephole.) We survived the night. We walked 30 minutes to the Ding Dong Cafe for breakfast. Our car was fixed by 4pm and we made it back home. Much of the serenity and self-restorative power of the weekend stripped away.
As we drove into our neighborhood I was explaining to Cora how camping had been so nice, and then our unintended adventure kind of ruined the weekend. She was shocked. But Mom! Wasn't it fun to eat snacks in the motel? Wasn't it fun to watch a new TV show? Truthfully, it wasn't, for me. But I suppose the fact that she thought it was indeed fun, was simply another good adventure in the weekend, also says something about what the weekend did for my state of mind: I may have felt like the weekend was somewhat ruined by the misadventure, but I didn't ruin her weekend.
I'm almost as proud of that as I am of my fire-building skills.
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Now reading: Bad Mother, by Ayelet Waldman
Yesterday I found myself with an hour and a half between when a meeting ended and when I needed to pick up Cora. Not quite long enough to go home and accomplish anything before having to be right back in the same part of town. My meeting had been at a coffeeshop, so the last thing I needed to do was to go somewhere and have another cup of coffee. So, of course, I ended up in a bookstore. I can always kill some time in a bookstore, though there is the substantial risk of purchasing something.
Needless to say, I succumbed. I walked out of the store with a copy of Ayelet Waldman’s Bad Mother, a nonfiction book. I’ve read most Waldman’s other books, the MommyTrack mysteries and also the novels, and I remember when she was branded a “bad mother”. It is always nice (if you ask me) to see good work come out of something like that, and Bad Mother is definitely good work.
The book caught my eye because this very subject has weighed on my mind quite a bit in the last year or so. One of the questions Waldman asks in the first chapter is “Is there really no other way to be a mother in contemporary American society than to be locked into the cultural zero-sum game of ‘I’m Okay, You Suck’?” (19). She looks at those tropes of society, the Good Mother and the Bad Mother (and wonders why the bar is set so low for Good Fathers: “a reasonable, attainable goal; you need only be present and supportive” (11)). She looks at judgment, the judgments we pass on ourselves as mothers and on each other.
I’ve only read through the first chapter, but I am hooked. I knew I would like Waldman’s voice, but I also like the way she lays out the playing field, the way she ropes in modern references (Andrea Yates, Brittany Spears) and literary ones (Anna Karenina, late-Victorian poster girl for Bad Mothers, and Medea). I like the way she is both very funny and very serious – that this is serious business is never obscured.
While I’ve never been held up for public excoriation, as Waldman has, I know that I have felt the weight of judgment from other mothers. And I know that even though my mantra with Cora is “different families have different rules” (different needs, different challenges, different ideals), I do sometimes wonder if in some cases different actually is wrong.
Of course, there are different rules which are wrong – abuse is wrong, I think we can all agree on. Shame is wrong, many would agree on. And so on. But between the clearly wrong and the lofty ideal, there is a lot of open space. There is a lot of room for difference, for comparison, for jockeying for position to be closest to Good.
I’m looking forward to the rest of the book; I may come back to talk more about it (fair warning!)
Needless to say, I succumbed. I walked out of the store with a copy of Ayelet Waldman’s Bad Mother, a nonfiction book. I’ve read most Waldman’s other books, the MommyTrack mysteries and also the novels, and I remember when she was branded a “bad mother”. It is always nice (if you ask me) to see good work come out of something like that, and Bad Mother is definitely good work.
The book caught my eye because this very subject has weighed on my mind quite a bit in the last year or so. One of the questions Waldman asks in the first chapter is “Is there really no other way to be a mother in contemporary American society than to be locked into the cultural zero-sum game of ‘I’m Okay, You Suck’?” (19). She looks at those tropes of society, the Good Mother and the Bad Mother (and wonders why the bar is set so low for Good Fathers: “a reasonable, attainable goal; you need only be present and supportive” (11)). She looks at judgment, the judgments we pass on ourselves as mothers and on each other.
I’ve only read through the first chapter, but I am hooked. I knew I would like Waldman’s voice, but I also like the way she lays out the playing field, the way she ropes in modern references (Andrea Yates, Brittany Spears) and literary ones (Anna Karenina, late-Victorian poster girl for Bad Mothers, and Medea). I like the way she is both very funny and very serious – that this is serious business is never obscured.
While I’ve never been held up for public excoriation, as Waldman has, I know that I have felt the weight of judgment from other mothers. And I know that even though my mantra with Cora is “different families have different rules” (different needs, different challenges, different ideals), I do sometimes wonder if in some cases different actually is wrong.
Of course, there are different rules which are wrong – abuse is wrong, I think we can all agree on. Shame is wrong, many would agree on. And so on. But between the clearly wrong and the lofty ideal, there is a lot of open space. There is a lot of room for difference, for comparison, for jockeying for position to be closest to Good.
I’m looking forward to the rest of the book; I may come back to talk more about it (fair warning!)
Sunday, May 10, 2009
Being happy
Oh come on, what more can I really say about Mother's Day that isn't being said, photographed, or blogged by hundreds of other people?!
I suppose not too many can also be saying Happy Birthday to their moms! There have been times in the past when it has seemed a kind of cheat for my mom to have to have her birthday on Mother's Day every couple of years. But more often, it just seems right that the two should coincide.
On the one hand I want to say that this is because she was so clearly born to be a mother - so gifted with love and patience and empathy and creativity. But on the other hand I have a feeling that, had the chips of life fallen elsewise, she was also born to have become any number of other things. My mother would also be (has also been - the vocation of motherhood encompassing so many other careers) a wonderful teacher. A compassionate doctor. A thoughtful mentor. A passionate artist. A dazzling cook and pastry chef (oh those castle cakes! That Easter bonnet cake! all the other crazy cakes she let her children choose out of her book!).
More than anything else I have to say that my own experience of motherhood has impressed upon me the wonder of PARADOX. Mainly in the sense that something could simultaneously circumscribe and enlarge your life. I don't think I am (any longer) breaking any codes of sisterhood to say that - I know for a long time it was all about just talking about the enlargements and not the limits. But they coexist, often in the very same moments, and in the best of circumstances one is more than warranted by the other. At least, I find it to be so, which bowls me over because I didn't expect it to be the case.
So, this was my day today. I woke to find Chris had gone to get us donuts for breakfast; we all had donuts and homemade lattes (yes, even Cora). A couple gifts: an ABBA CD from Cora (clearly she has ulterior dance party motives) and a Marie Curie biography from Chris (she is still my hero, 30+ years after I first learned about her life). We went to church and then out to breakfast where Cora refused to eat anything except grapes (frustrating) and shouted hello at everyone that walked past (mostly endearing). Then home to naps. I fell asleep almost immediately - woken up here and there by Cora's interactions with her dad (reading books...refusing a diaper change...alerting him to her "friend" in the room - a wasp...more talk about the wasp as he trapped it...screaming for a diaper change...and finally falling asleep). Later in the afternoon Cora and I watched ballet videos on YouTube (American Ballet Theater's Swan Lake, Paris Opera Ballet's Sleeping Beauty), I tried to explain the phrase "keel over" to her ("but why she wanna fall down? but why she so tired?"), then she and her dad played Legos and watched a video of the Little Women opera. Then we had dinner...homemade bread, mango and strawberries, crackers, and FIVE KINDS OF CHEESE! (Guess who was left in charge of the menu?). A nice fume blanc (this meal Cora opted for the more age-appropriate milk). A good day. A happy day, despite the frustrating parts, the tantrum (hers) before the nap, the usual spills and falls.
I'm happy to be a daughter; I am so lucky to have the mother I have.
I'm happy to be a mother; I am so lucky to have the daughter I have.
I suppose not too many can also be saying Happy Birthday to their moms! There have been times in the past when it has seemed a kind of cheat for my mom to have to have her birthday on Mother's Day every couple of years. But more often, it just seems right that the two should coincide.
On the one hand I want to say that this is because she was so clearly born to be a mother - so gifted with love and patience and empathy and creativity. But on the other hand I have a feeling that, had the chips of life fallen elsewise, she was also born to have become any number of other things. My mother would also be (has also been - the vocation of motherhood encompassing so many other careers) a wonderful teacher. A compassionate doctor. A thoughtful mentor. A passionate artist. A dazzling cook and pastry chef (oh those castle cakes! That Easter bonnet cake! all the other crazy cakes she let her children choose out of her book!).
More than anything else I have to say that my own experience of motherhood has impressed upon me the wonder of PARADOX. Mainly in the sense that something could simultaneously circumscribe and enlarge your life. I don't think I am (any longer) breaking any codes of sisterhood to say that - I know for a long time it was all about just talking about the enlargements and not the limits. But they coexist, often in the very same moments, and in the best of circumstances one is more than warranted by the other. At least, I find it to be so, which bowls me over because I didn't expect it to be the case.
So, this was my day today. I woke to find Chris had gone to get us donuts for breakfast; we all had donuts and homemade lattes (yes, even Cora). A couple gifts: an ABBA CD from Cora (clearly she has ulterior dance party motives) and a Marie Curie biography from Chris (she is still my hero, 30+ years after I first learned about her life). We went to church and then out to breakfast where Cora refused to eat anything except grapes (frustrating) and shouted hello at everyone that walked past (mostly endearing). Then home to naps. I fell asleep almost immediately - woken up here and there by Cora's interactions with her dad (reading books...refusing a diaper change...alerting him to her "friend" in the room - a wasp...more talk about the wasp as he trapped it...screaming for a diaper change...and finally falling asleep). Later in the afternoon Cora and I watched ballet videos on YouTube (American Ballet Theater's Swan Lake, Paris Opera Ballet's Sleeping Beauty), I tried to explain the phrase "keel over" to her ("but why she wanna fall down? but why she so tired?"), then she and her dad played Legos and watched a video of the Little Women opera. Then we had dinner...homemade bread, mango and strawberries, crackers, and FIVE KINDS OF CHEESE! (Guess who was left in charge of the menu?). A nice fume blanc (this meal Cora opted for the more age-appropriate milk). A good day. A happy day, despite the frustrating parts, the tantrum (hers) before the nap, the usual spills and falls.
I'm happy to be a daughter; I am so lucky to have the mother I have.
I'm happy to be a mother; I am so lucky to have the daughter I have.
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