One of My Days As a Mother, in Action Verbs.

Career coaches are constantly droning on about how our resumes will be stronger if we use active language to convey the responsibilities of our varied job histories. In thinking about the treacherous terrain of forming a coherent resume / CV in the year ahead, I give you this. I had better duck; here come the herds of headhunters I knew would be a'comin'!


Executed.
New Year's plan for maximum efficiency and productivity by determining annual goals.


Procured.

• Discount vouchers for child's life-sustaining medicine (cost will soon go up due to ACA-Obamacare). 
• Healthy food from grocery store.

Negotiated.
Numerous sibling squabbles with patience, guidance with a startling degree of newfound equanimity.


Organized.

• Sorted, hung and contained clean clothing of family after folding three loads of laundry post-holiday vacation, washed in hot water to incinerate any last shred of lurking Norovirus. 
• My neglected manuscript, so as to begin concentrating on the piece as a whole (to edit).

Produced.
Three empty laundry baskets and delivered them to the laundry room.


Prepared.
After school snacks for hungry children who will arrive home in 3.5 hours.


Handled.
Call to pest control service after observing tiny jagged bite marks in plastic top of hot chocolate tin housed in lower kitchen cupboard this morning while preparing breakfast.


Navigated.

• Maze of voice mail tree when trying to contact said pest control service. 
• Three-tiered, staggered and color-coded complexities of the after school pick up car line.

Assessed.
Sizes of outgrown clothing for children, determined which pieces can be justifiably reused next season for younger sibling who will surely perform the "seasonal moan" about hand-me-downs.


Archived.
Holiday greeting cards received this year because even though most didn't bother to write a handwritten note on back I cannot in good conscience throw out photos of peoples' children and / or families.


Documented.
Already long-forgotten gifts kids received mostly from grandparents this Xmas, in preparation for supervising their pained writing of robotic thank you notes this week.


Administered.
Morning and evening doses of C2's daily life-sustaining medicines.


Monitored.

• Condition of car battery in sub-zero weather resulting from historic North American "Polar Vortex". 
• Alarm clock hawkishly at 5:30AM to determine whether kids' school had been delayed due to cold weather (school was on). 
• How much of C1's medicines are left before I must call in a refill to the pharmacy.

Assisted.

• In morning shoe tying debacle, sock finding and knit hat- and mitten-remembering on way out the door to school.
• In poetry memorization homework for C2.

Evaluated.

• Need for new furniture slipcover which likely succumbed to scissor puncture created by crafty children doing art projects in prohibited zone (on sofa).
• Reupholstery of living room chairs (decision = Yes).

Coordinated.
Dermatology and orthodontic appointments for C1 to minimize hours spent out of school.


Cooked.
Nutritious dinner for family of four who have wildly disparate notions of "what tastes good."


Drove.
(Logistical management). Met -- with seasoned precision -- deadline for morning drop off and afternoon pick up of C1 & C2 despite perplexing, sheep-like convoy of almost identical minivans driven by shivering, sleep-deprived parents.


Cleaned.

• Remnants of last evening's knitting and art projects left by kids in common living space.
• Kitchen (scrubbed extra due to possible presence of aforementioned mouse).

Purchased.
Long promised overpriced bedding set for C1's room after securing post-holiday sale bargain price.


Managed.
To find time to write this post, perhaps the most victorious achievement of all previously documented.

Our Once & Future Selves.

In every moment

we're the culmination of the people we once were

and the people we will be.

A wave that crests, curls, and folds in on itself

ever-new and unchanging 

all at once.

If we take that brave, close look, 

we're the same people we've always been

living what seem to be 

many lives in the space of 

this one we're given.

Looking at myself

I see the same eyes and expression.

Things that made me happy then

are the ones that make me 

smile now.

To remember I'm the same 

is a good thing;  instead of running 

away from who I was

toward never-ending self-improvement,

it's a comfort to  

recognize something familiar in the mirror: 

that I'm in a new version 

of my same self,

and that's exactly how it should be.

What's on Your Fridge Door?

Did anyone else read this New York Times article from sometime last Fall?

Titled "What Does Your Fridge Door Say About Your Family" it refers to a book called Life in the 21st Century which focuses on the "material saturation" of our Western lives and how we manage to live with all our...well...stuff.

As if you as a parent didn't have enough to stress you out, like whether your children have enough grit, or if you are sharing too much about their lives online, here is an article about what dark aspects of your personality and lifestyle you have unwittingly projected onto your fridge door. Their extensive research has unearthed...

"a tendency for high counts of objects on refrigerator panels to co-occur with large numbers of objects in the house as a whole. Put another way, a family’s tolerance for a “messy” refrigerator may be associated with a fairly relaxed attitude about high density or clutter in public rooms of the house … Perhaps a place as seemingly unassuming as the refrigerator signals overall family tendencies regarding consumerism and household organization."

(Insert defeated sigh here).

One look at mainstream American media (other than, perhaps, the TV show Hoarders) would seem to indicate that many peoples' homes look like pristine pages out of a home decorating magazine, or one of those home organizing shows on cable, which seem to only exist to keep makers of stacking plastic bins in business. Not so, people, not so. Anyone with children who has that sterile a life certainly either has kids in college, kids in boarding school, or, any minute now, are expecting a visit from their in-laws -- in which case they have swept all the clutter off their fridge an into a box which has been thrown into the coat closet.

Our fridge is one surface in our home that does indeed tell the story of who we are as a family. Posted there are a rotating series of school lunch menus, calendars, the artwork of our children, triumphant spelling tests, notes from friends, snapshots of great memories together, our agreement about family rules, fun magnets and other ephemera of our daily lives. I like to think of it as a collage of our life.

Yes, we have clutter from art projects in process, school books, and too many coats and shoes in the hallway that haven't been put away properly because, frankly, usually the first thing one of us does upon entering is the "drop everything and hug" thing we all do around here. There will be time to clean and organize -- it's not always now. Like the late comedienne Phyllis Diller famously said,

“Cleaning your house while your kids are still growing is like shoveling the sidewalk before it stops snowing.” 

It is literally snowing as I type this!

After I read the article I did indeed do an organizational sweep of the fridge doors, I won't deny that the article gave me pause. But though initially it felt like a breath of fresh air had swept through the kitchen, after I'd cleared some fridge scraps away, soon my little people were making adorable drawings and handing them to me like jewels. They are jewels to me. Up they went on the fridge, the childhood equivalent of an exhibition space. Then came a few more snapshots. The fridge is crowded again -- but I love it.

Throwback: An old essay of mine, on motherhood.

Fickle Tide
May 9, 2010

Like a fickle tide that swoops in to kiss the shore, I find myself seven years into the great journey of Motherhood. 

As a wave must retreat back into the swirl of its own currents, I value time to pull back and take the long view of my journey. I sit and watch the glisten of sun on the harbor, watch the trees submit to the playful breeze, listen to birds and cars driving by, and to people on walks outside the open window. What can be better than this to a mother whose days are filled up with the beautiful and arduous task of caring for her family? Time alone, but filled up at the same time. Kids and husband occupied at a Farmer's Market down the block, leaving me with uninterrupted time to reflect.

Picasso painted Guernica. He also needed to step away now and then to consider the strokes of his brush and perhaps marvel with satisfaction (or criticism) at what he was creating. It is this motherhood two-step I am so taken with. The ability and necessity to be gently aware in the moment of both the brush strokes and the larger work. Too much on one or the other and you lose the purpose and meaning of the Work itself. 

Who has stopped to think about the snapping cameras and smart phones at a child's play at school? Are we in the moment or just obsessed with creating it, staging it, capturing it, framing it, documenting it? Are we encouraging people to grow up performing to cameras or sharing experiences with people? If we all become documentarians of our lives what are we leading but a life outside the flow of constantly gathering experiences rather than merely living them? 

Both are necessary. Looking back on a past event that warms the heart is a tonic in the ever-changing, too often disheartening world. There is certainly a pull to cherish memories but not to the exclusion of living. I would rather have a life that resembles a mosaic constantly on display, than a scrapbook closed and sitting on a shelf. 

As a writer I am caught in the push-pull because of the writer's mindset of pulling in all the grist of life's experience only to experience the need to churn it out again in some form or another. It's a way of being that's so innate to me that it feels only marginally like a choice. So I am often on the edge of what's happening around me and must resist the auto-pilot reflex to accumulate experience rather than live it.

Perhaps this is why so many artists are drawn to the beauty of nature. It pulls us out of our intense need to create. Even if we have not dedicated our lives to studying it in our art, a life of letters tapped out on a keyboard in Key West or overlooking the Annapolis harbor is preferable to a dark room somewhere (yet that's also one of the best parts of being a writer, that it is the ultimate portable, mobile profession). 

The kids will be back soon, the house will fill with energy that itself is a form of meditation in its all-encompassingness. 

The river is outside the windows and I remember the currents of life, the unchanging give and take of nature. I am a wave swelling, waiting to break and crash back onto the frenzied shore of my daughters' daily lives. Sometimes I find rocks smoothed over with my good mothering; other times a sunlit shell shimmering like a jewel, and at yet other moments I find myself on jagged edges and try to negotiate them fluidly as my mother essence tells me to. Thank goodness for the unquestionable reliance I have on those instincts. 

At sea, with the long view, I am flowing water watching the beach. As it has forever, it awaits my return in an almost cavalier way -- the way that only the innate assurance of symbiosis** can create. I picture my girls on that shore, as that shore. There is no goodbye for the ocean and the shore. We are just interlocking parts of one organism. 

I want to give my daughters the steadiness to know it's okay to pull away from the love you have, to nurture and nourish and honor  and search for your own unique essence; and that if you take time to do so, your waves will swell even more. As a result what you have to give will be even more sublimely, tumultuously, uniquely YOU when it reaches the shores of those to whom you offer up your self, your friendship, your love.

**The definition of symbiosis is in flux, and the term has been applied to a wide range of biological interactions. The symbiotic relationship may be categorized as mutualistic, commensal, orparasitic in nature.[3][4] Others define it more narrowly, as only those relationships from which both organisms benefit, in which case it would be synonymous with mutualism. (Wikipedia, 2010).

The Granules of Motherhood.

The Granules of Motherhood: Why This Blog?

Well, I finally did it -- I stopped being a bystanding wannabe, asking myself perplexing questions like “how do mothers find the time to start blogs?” and I took action and started one. I took a swan dive off the precipice of possibility and decided it was time (even if I rarely have any).

The name? I’ve been conjuring up imagery of Tibetan sand mandalas for a while now; and being amused at how they seem to symbolize for me what motherhood feels like these days. Sand mandalas are created with a single-minded devotion and fierce attention to detail. They are meticulously watched over and created, representing life and its transitory nature. There are days when it feels like motherhood and its various rote but rewarding machinations, though done with love and reverence, are as impermanent as the granules of sand in a mandala. It feels as if each day the slate is swept clean, for better or worse, and the only place to be is in the present moment, hoping and believing that each day you seize the opportunity to re-create something beautiful out of your own experience of motherhood.

August 4, 2006