Starting Samhain

We are gearing up for the Halloween party, which makes us basically look like the Adams family to all the nice wholesome little families at Will's school when he shows up nice and early with his copy of Rattlebone Rock, featuring the rhythmic adventures of a bunch of skeletons and ghouls. Fortunately we’re over this realization with all the folks at Laura's school; they already know we're only a step sort of Satan, since we let her read not only Harry Potter, but also the kid equivalent of Stephen King, R. L. Stine. Nothing like being a little wacky. Sometime I think maybe it’s actually a little out of hand—Chris and I bought this really creepy (but extremely cool!) folk art skeleton the other day at this eccentric little shop on our one day of child-freedom—and I haven’t taken out of the bag yet, because I’m afraid it’ll scare Will. It’ll be really spooky on top of the fridge if I can ever recover from the sort of Day of the Dead turned somber look of it.

We did get the biology supply company skull out of the attic the other day (alas, not Yorick, since that seemed a little too much), along with the less ominous trick or treat spin the wheel candy holder. I have managed to resist buying anything else from Bucky’s Boneyard, but it’s tough. We have, though, been shopping for costumes rather seriously. William wants to be Batman. Or a pumpkin. Or a kitty. Or a firefighter. Or a lion. Or whatever he sees the next second he turns around. We did go ahead and buy him a Batman mask and cape when the Halloween stuff first came out in the stores; both he and Laura dress up year round, so he’ll certainly wander around pronouncing “I’m Batman” for months, whether he ends up wearing it at Halloween or not. I’m sure Batman’s not the end of it.

Laura has discovered that I can sew, although she is much more optimistic about my abilities than they warrant. She wanted to be Princess Leia, she announced one day last weekend, so off we went to the fabric store to get yards of white cloth (and possibly a pattern, although I thought I could wing it). Unfortunately we had had a little miscommunication—she wanted to be Princess Amidala, in the skin-tight suit, perfect for climbing the poles to which you’re chained when you’re about to be eaten by strange animals. All this time I had been thinking she had the perfect long hair for those dumb cinnamon roll buns, when she wanted a blaster and a body suit. My machine doesn’t have a knits foot (that I’m aware of), and I’ve never sewn with knits, and besides which, no woman in the world, even a gloriously perfect ten-year old, looks right in that sort of suit unless you have a tailor actually following you around in case you pop the seams. We finally compromised back on the original Princess Leia idea (the long white gown, mind you, not the slave outfit), but now I still have to cut it out and sew it.

Unfortunately this will leave very little time for me to work on anything interesting for myself, so I guess I’ll be a cowgirl again. Yee ha. House to clean, invites to mail, menu to plan, food to cook. Why do I do this party again?

Women writing (with children)

Well, I’ve been conferencing with my first-year composition students all week, which leaves very little time for food, much less blogs, so I’ve been pretty behind lately. I have lots to catch up on, but I thought I’d just drop this in. My students in my women’s literature course have been thinking about how having children/not having children affects women’s writing. I posted this to our discussion this week.

I’m interested what V. says here about the possibility that children might encourage creativity. I write a bit myself, some poetry (I’ve published a handful of poems) and also some creative non-fiction type memoir type stuff that’s currently just for myself, although I’m thinking of branching out. I find that having children increases my writing productivity, but I am also constantly frustrated by trying to write while having kids.

My daughter was born when I was in grad school, and all I’d been writing for several years at that point was my academic papers, although I’d written poetry all my life until grad school. I just couldn’t concentrate on creative writing when I was trying to write my dissertation. But when my daughter was born, I wanted to write about how differently I began to see the world. And I didn’t have a lot of time, so poetry seemed to work well for me again—it can be such a tight and compressed genre. During her naps, I could draft a poem and revise it and have something to finished in a week or so, even if it wasn’t perfect. So I wrote a lot of short poems, none of which were very good.

When my son was born years later, I also began writing again in response to that. It’s not that a lot of my work is about birth or even my children, although a good deal of it is. But my perspective was changed by having kids. I saw different things—smaller things. Small things became more important to me. It’s what Emerson wrote in “Nature”

To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child. The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood.

While obviously he’s very vested in that whole wacky idea that Mankind includes woman too, his sentiment here is one that holds—that children see differently, so when I had my children, I started to see differently as well.

The problem, of course, now that I have all this poetic inspiration, is that I regularly have to get up at 5:00 a.m. if I’m going to write anything—I can’t do it during the day at work, I can’t do it after work because we’re all dealing with homework and dinner, and I’m too tired to write after everybody’s FINALLY asleep. I have had to retrain myself in terms of my writing and thinking abilities completely—I used to start writing at something like 10:00 at night and I wouldn’t really get going until 12 or so—I’d work til 2 a.m. and get up around 9:00 for classes the next day. Now by the time my husband and I get everybody off packed to school and daycare, I’m still at work by something like 8:00. I almost literally pass out between 9:00 and 10:00 at night. I’ll sit down to read a bedtime story and wake up the next day, you know?

I can’t tell you what a significant disruption to my work life this schedule change represented. It took years before I adjusted enough to do real writing at that early hour—I could prep for class or something like that, but I couldn’t write. Now I’m more accustomed, but I feel as if I have to steal time from my work and my home to write at all.

I have some other good quotes on this by actual women writing about their own creativity, but they’re all at home! I’ll try to post one or two of those early next week.

Accepting (too much) responsibility

My brother’s wife Shari is pregnant, and I am so delighted. They’ve been trying to have a baby for several years, so I am thrilled for them, but I am also vicariously enjoying her pregnancy. I get to talk about being pregnant and think about being pregnant and remember my own pregnancy and my children’s baby days at the same time that I am really really glad I am not pregnant myself.

Breastfeeding scares Shari. Any woman in her right mind, in my opinion, should be scared by the idea. I’m not a big fan of the cow imagery that some women evoke when talking about nursing, but all the books and La Leche folks and whatnot make it absolutely clear that for the first, oh, say the first month, you don’t do much else besides breastfed—an absolutely unimaginable thing. Because I didn’t know any recent mothers and had practically never even held a newborn, I read all the books voraciously and dutifully, but I didn’t believe them. I can remember reading about one woman said she couldn’t find time to take showers and thinking “what’s her problem?” Shari might be doing that now, except that she and Matt were married and close by when Will was born, and her own sister has a baby about his age too, so she has a much more realistic vision of motherhood than I ever had.

I’ve loaned her all my books and my breastpump, I gave her my bottle sterilizer and all Will’s old bottles, I promised for her baby shower present to buy her a breastfeeding present (the bra pads and lanolin and GIANT water bottle and whatnot she’ll need to make her life a little smoother), and I’ve tried to answer her questions and reassure her while still letting her know that it’s just plain hard. She emailed me at work the other day to ask whether I nursed Laura and Will right away when they were born and whether I gave them any formula the first few days, and I emailed her back and said basically, let’s get together, because we need to talk about that.

I am not a breastfeeding nazi, and frankly I resent that phrase, with its suggestion that women who actively support breastfeeding somehow equate to Hitler. I understand that overaggressive behavior people talk about when using that phrase, on a couple of levels, though. Women are often ugly to new mothers, without meaning it maybe, but every time a woman on the street tells you that your child needs a hat or socks—or why are you using that bottle, don’t you know breast is best?—that suggestion, not matter how gently phrased and how well intentioned, represents a judgment on the poor new mother: you’re not doing it right. And God knows that’s the last thing a new mother needs to hear, unless she is somehow really endangering her baby’s life.

But I also see the other side, why those lactation consultants are so determined that you do not give your newborn a bottle in the hospital even though the nurses are so determined that your baby will starve if you don’t: because every bottle of formula you give at the outset makes it that much more difficult to establish breastfeeding when you get home. When Laura was born, she and I both had a fever, and they wouldn’t let me see or hold her until twenty-four hours after the fevers cleared up. Who knew twenty-four hours could be so long? The nurses kept cheerily urging me to pump, which I did to absolutely no apparent result—even with the hospital grade breastpump I’d be lucky to get a few drops of milk. Nobody told me not to worry about this, that my milk hadn’t come in yet and this was normal, and so instead I would sit hooked up to the giant pump, not at all a conducive environment for milk-let down, I might add, and worry about those first drops of milk, that “mother’s gold,” and how Laura would never have them, how she’d be developmentally delayed as a result. I just knew she’d probably die. Or at least grown up to be a wino.

So I need to tell Shari this story. And I need to tell her at least one other. When Will was born, I was teaching at MTU. I taught online classes from home the last month of the spring semester, and stayed home with him through the summer, so the start of the fall semester, our first separation, was tough. Laura was eighteen months old when she started daycare, and I thought I would die if I had to leave my four-month old boy with strangers, no matter how well credentialed. I did it anyway, because I both have to and want to work, but my lord. I used my breastpump in my office between classes, and in the first days of the semester I put a do-not-disturb sign up on my door.

Very unusually, the dean came by my office for some reason or the other while I was pumping. He didn’t knock, but later in the day he stopped me outside his office to ask his question, and then expressed concern about the sign on my door, how it was unwelcoming to the students. “I was using my breastpump,” I told him, and while he didn’t exactly cringe, I could see this wasn’t a conversation he really wanted to have. “I’m glad I didn’t knock,” he said, and that was that. At the time, I stewed over this conversation for days, worrying about my sign, furious that I could be told I was unwelcoming when in fact I needed and was entitled to privacy. I could ignore the students who knocked and pretend not to be in my office, but if the housekeeping staff knocked and got no answer, they would come right on in, and there I’d be, whoosh whoosh whoosh. I finally arranged this elaborate plan with the housekeeping staff in my building, fortunately just two women, that I would put a big neon pink sign on my door that read “I will be back at ___.” And I would put a time on a post-it over the blank. When that sign was over my keyhole, that meant I was inside and not to come in. I still use that sign now, although just for changes to my office hours, thankfully—I was so thrilled to pack away my breastpump.

Three years later it occurred to me for the first time to wonder why I didn’t ask the dean what he would suggest as an alternative to my sign. I might have asked if he’d like to provide a nursing room for me and any other faculty or staff (although MTU is so teeny that I was the only pregnant person on campus, except for one or two students). Honest to God, it never occurred to me until today to ask these questions, and while I wandered around in a lost and demoralized way telling people this story about the lack of support I received trying to come back to work as a new mother, everyone expressed outrage, but I can’t recall anyone suggesting that I ask for support. Maybe someone did, but evidently I just understood it was my responsibility to take care of the problem.

The dean never had to breastfeed—how was he supposed to know what to offer if this was the first time the situation came up? In my own defense, he could have done some research—but why didn’t I ask for what I needed instead of trying to work it all out myself? Why did I sit nursing and stew about the work I wasn’t doing instead of pay attention to the books that advised me to nap when the baby napped? I remember thinking then the advice books were naïve, and I still do think that. Until those new mothers can believe they are not responsible for everything, that will never happen—and I don’t see anytime soon when mothers won’t be the ones responsible for those things. Shari has a lactation room at work, so she’ll be a step up from me when she starts—but she asked me at dinner the other night, “do you really have to feed them every three hours?” and didn’t believe me when I told her it’d be more like every two hours. I understand. I didn’t believe it either.

I’ve been sitting on this blog entry for a couple of days trying to come up with some lovely conclusion, something that pulls all these threads of politics and gender and mothering together, and I can’t do it. Hell, it took me three years to think about asking the dean to set up a nursing room, so clearly I have to mull these things over for quite some time. So I’ll just post this before it gets any longer and stop worrying about no conclusion. Evidently this isn’t a topic concluded in my mind anyhow. Maybe by the time Will’s six, I’ll be done thinking it over.

Great Ideas

I was at Books-a-Million last night and saw this lovely display of twelve beautiful printed books, with embossed covers and antique fonts—just exactly the types of book design that appeals to me. Penguin Books now has a new series called Great Ideas. Guess what, though? Not one of those twelve books was by a woman. Every single one was a western white male. Guess no woman ever had a great idea, huh? No Mary Wollestonecraft at least? Not to mention any person of color?

Evidently since the books first were published, Penguin has published some additional texts and they’ve added Wollestonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Virginia Woolfe’s A Room of One’s Own—but they were certainly not in the stand I saw at BAM last night. And still no writers of color. Do I need to draw conclusions about this? I don’t think so.

Theories of cleaning

Cary Tennis at Salon has explained my obsessive compulsive cleaning behavior. I might have come to this conclusion on my own, but maybe it was just easier not to mull it over too much. In fact, only recently have friends pointed out to me that my maniacal clean-every-free-minute behavior might be--oh, a tiny problem. Since my house is still dirty, I didn't have a problem arguing with them about it. But this makes more sense now.

To clean is also to confront your silent enemy of long fruition, the dirt of secret accumulation. It can also represent an encounter with our own decay, which is so distasteful, that heavy, slow, dragging feeling that is the opposite of transcendence. It is an encounter with entropy, the tendency of things to lose their sheen, to grow dull in the air, to corrode, to weaken and rot, to become covered over and eventually unrecognizable. And so, as perhaps one might have guessed, it is ultimately a confrontation with death.

Of course--you know me--Cary's discussion, while excellent, doesn't address the basic gender issues implicit in our cultural understanding of who does housework. And I have a husband who became a semi-obsessive kitchen cleaner after living for a while with really nasty college roommates. But he doesn't see a dirty house as a reflection of his lack of moral worth in the universe either.

GPS and journeys

We ran a quick errand tonight, and I had to ask Chris if we were going to die as a result of GPS-induced inattention to actual roads, given all the enthusiastic interest in the virtual display. He assures me not, but he had that GPS either in his hand or perched on the dash in front of the odometer the entire trip. Evidently our car’s odometer is accurate, but his bicycle’s is not. This new military intelligence necessitated a redrawing of the cross country course at Rolling Hills High, as the previous one evidently wasn’t quite long enough. At both ends of our journey, the kids and I got a statistical briefing as to our highest speed and our average speed, as well as the miles traveled, and some other things I have sort of zoned out on already.

In other words, Chris loves his new toy.

He came in here just a minute ago to show me the screen that comes up when you first turn it on, which includes his name and our address, with a hopeful note asking any finders to return it to said address. He added the Le Guin quote from my bracelet to the bottom! “It is the journey that matters in the end.” What a romantic way of customizing your handy-dandy global positioning device. What a sweetie.

Snippets of bedtime conversation

I was wearing my Batman mask and cape and they were very very comfortable. I didn’t want to take them off for bed, they are so comfortable.

William, I am not your scratchy, so get off my head. I am not a doll and my head does not come off. Quit pulling my hair!

Mommy, put your feet up here on the bed because my baby feet are missing their Mommy feet.

Hello from Laura

Hi, I’m the guest blogger and my mom asked me to do this. Just to fill you in my name’s Laura my mom is Lisa. I want to tell you about Will and Halloween. Well yesterday Mom, William and I went to Garden Ridge to look at costumes and the Halloween things. And William saw a Batman costume. So we got it for him and when we got home, he was begging to put it on and when we put his costume on for him, he wanted me to dress up too and play with him. Ever since I played with him, he has been begging me to put on my costume and play with him. It gets really aggravating to have him begging me all the time, especially when I’m doing homework. That’s all for now. Bye.

A man and his maps

Chris and I both like presents that are either a) exactly what we want or b) money. I also like c) surprising, unusual, expensive, and arty presents, but I don’t believe Chris falls into this same category. He’s more into d) trendy, technological, expensive and cool gadgets. He has an external hard drive and an I-Pod, for instance, but today he filled a great absence in his heart of hearts—he got a Global Positioning Device with his birthday cash.

He’s such a navigational kind of guy. He reads maps, almost for a living. He absolutely adores them. I used to give him giant historical map books, until I realized that he really just wanted the DeLorme Atlas and Gazetteer for any state within a easy driving distance. And several copies of the South Carolina one, please, because they don’t last long with the use they get. I have old road atlases that I tear pages out of to gift wrap his presents (or rather, his annual dose of Simpson’s DVDs and I-Tunes gift cards). I would flip through the maps, finding the perfect map of Alabama, say, for this year, until I used up all the ones that had any personal relevance, after which I just started using Montana and whatnot. When he found Google Earth, I thought he would die of happiness. It would’ve only been more perfect if it hadn’t been free so I could’ve bought it for him and surprised him.

When he taught out of town the first year we moved here, he would come home from work a different way every day—you cannot imagine how many little back roads, both paved and unpaved, that South Carolina offers the adventurous driver, particularly if he doesn’t mind fording the occasional stream. Since Chris started kayaking, we’ve acquired one or two maps of various watery locales he likes to frequent, but the GPS—with GPS, he can know his longitude and latitude any minute. He can measure his mileage with an odometer. Before GPS, he could only trace his finger along the map to show the curvy route he paddled (and show us the digital pictures, which I’m afraid he did more often before I picked on him once by exclaiming “look, another tree!”). “It is the journey that matters in the end,” says Ursula Le Guin in The Left Hand of Darkness, and on the bracelet Chris bought me again, but for Chris, I think it is not only the journey, but planning the path, imagining the depth of the waters, and later, retracing his route again. The GPS seems something like a bookmark to me, saving his place in the narrative, a weighty task for something the size of a cell phone.

He brought it in at one point tonight, maybe taking a break from the instructional video that came with it, to show me how it could tell us what gas stations were at each exit. (I was amazed, really, that this marvel of modern technology didn’t also compare gas prices at the Shell and BP, but I guess that’ll come out in the next model.) I was wading through my email, piled up since Thursday, and didn’t realize he couldn’t get online to play with his new software until too late, so I am planning to work on other projects tomorrow night—and I believe that next Saturday may be a perfect day for kayaking. He can wear that t-shirt I got him a few years ago, perfect for the irreverent English teacher, although it doesn’t quite meet the dress code: “I took the road less traveled by, and now where the hell am I?” Now he’ll always know.

Great Mommy Power

I have been feeling so defensive lately about being somebody’s Mommy. It’s an odd feeling, because normally I love that—hearing Laura call me to ask me about something, or even when I’m in a different section of a store and Will’s with Chris and I hear him start hollering, and I can tell no matter how many other kids are yelling which one is mine. I have Great Mommy Power: I can pick up my crying child and he’ll stop. But you’re also not exactly a free human when you have Great Mommy Powers, and I seem to be a little prickly about that lately.

No doubt the cross country season contributes to this. Chris and I share the parent job pretty well, I think, although sometimes it divides up oddly and even a little unfairly for him; he has never cut the first kid fingernail, but he also gives most of the baths—certainly bathtime is more frequent than fingernail trims. I generally get sick kid duty, though, because my job is flexible. I flipped through Faulkner Fox’s Dispatches from a Not-So-Perfect Life: How I Learned to Love the House, the Man, the Child recently and stopped to read when I ran across a discussion of how she actually logged the parenting work both she and her husband did alone—when she was doing the bulk of that work, she created this system in which she built up Frequent Parenting Miles that she traded later for a week long trip away. My first thought: how bizarre. My second: could I do this?

I guess that since all year but fall Chris and I divide kid work relatively evenly, I get more frustrated with the less equitable divisions that occur when he’s coaching cross country. Practice doesn’t end until 5:30 every weekday, so I have to pick up the kids just about every afternoon, which means leaving work fairly early because of my commute. He does take the kids every morning, and I guess I should try to get out of the house early so I can add that time back in early, but despite all these years of rising with my children and the sun, I am still not a morning person and often don’t get into my full work swing until mid-afternoon, when it’s time to pack up and leave shortly afterwards. I had a work crisis Thursday and Chris was able to sneak out of practice early to get Laura and Will for me that afternoon, but most of the time I’m doing that Mommy driving thing—about an hour and fifteen minutes to get everybody picked up. Some Tuesday and Thursday nights the team has meets, and I swear it feels like they have a trip practically every single Saturday, even though that’s not the case. Certainly Chris is not an absentee Daddy, but I am alone with the kids a lot more during the fall.

Alone time has its pluses, but normal life generally doesn’t fall into that category. Cooking dinner, or checking homework, for instance—although Chris gets home in time to eat most nights and usually cleans up the kitchen afterwards. Taking the kids to the grocery store or Wal-mart alone before dinner is tantamount to hell on earth, and I generally come home complaining about being a single mom, which in saner moments I recognize is an insult to the many women who really are single mothers all the time, not just during Wal-Mart trips. How can an errand, such a small thing, be so overwhelming? I’ll be almost done with the grocery list when I realize I somehow missed lemon juice or whatever, and whatever I’ve planned for dinner that night invariably requires teaspoon after teaspoon of lemon juice, or heck, maybe it was whole cups. I’ll be standing there trying to decide if it’s worth going all the way back to Aisle 2, or should we just have cereal instead, when William will sudden notice he left his Scratchy in the car and needs it now or he’ll die. At these times, you’d think that perhaps I’d think fondly of my considerate husband and how rarely this occurs, how Chris happily keeps the kids so I can go, or how very often he’ll go grocery shopping instead, but no, I stand there fuming and hating sports. Emotional balance doesn’t seem to enter into the equation.

Shortly after Halloween last year, I hurt one of my childless friend’s feelings when he started romanticizing my wonderful life, my blissful marriage, my perfect children—because all I could think of was how much I wished I could go have coffee alone and read a book for hours without worrying about when I had to get home to cook dinner. In my own defense, my ex-friend Leon lacks social skills himself, and I was at least still trying to be nice in our email exchange when things turned ugly. I never wrote back—I don’t need that grief. Well, last week after a meeting, some friends and I went for coffee at Starbucks, one of my favorite rare—and always just a bit guilty­—treats, second only to having coffee in a bookstore completely alone. When as we were leaving, we ran into this old friend. I felt my face actually seize up as I tried to make nice. I think we’d exchanged about five words each before we were exchanging polite sniping conversation just like before—how lovely it was for him to be hanging out reading Candide alone, how on earth were my perfect children, and was his book finished yet? My worst self, just all hanging out. All I could think was How on earth can he not have finished writing his book in five years when he has no children? If I had had five years with no children and his teaching load—which is half mine—my God, I probably could’ve written two books.

I keep reminding myself that I thought I was busy before I had kids too. I never could get work done. I wrote slowly, and had the luxury of writing slowly. Now, on a Saturday morning even when Chris is at a cross country meet I can write a couple of paragraphs and wash clothes and print baby shower invitations at the same time, although at the expense of being a good mother, since I have to plunk Laura and Will down in front of the television to get it done. I wouldn’t give my children up for all the leisure time in the world—but I might loan them out for a few hours of it. Does this make me a bad person? It certainly in this world makes me a bad mother—although maybe that’s just because I’ll admit it.

The Back to School Bash at school recently brought it to a head. I got out of class and walked over to the games, where two of our junior faculty were playing with their kids. Both men’s wives had brought their kids over for a hour or so in the middle of the day. The Student Government Association had rented one of those inflatable obstacle courses, and Will and Laura would’ve given up even an afternoon of uninterrupted Disney Channel to play in there, but by the time I drove back home to pick them up and got us all back to campus, Will would’ve missed his nap. He’d have bounced for fifteen minutes, I’d have to turn around and take him home again so he could sleep, and I would’ve lost exactly half my work day for him and Laura to play for those fifteen minutes. My children are invisible on campus, an odd state of affairs since I was visibly pregnant with the second at this job for at least seven months. I went from embodying motherhood to being an invisible mother—I don’t bring them to school I can’t bring them and work. The visible parents are these untenured dads with their stay-at-home wives, who bring their kids around for visits. I watched those dads following their toddlers around the obstacle course, missing my own kids and knowing that they’d both be back in their offices in an hour working again, their wives and babies on the way back home.

I used to teach an essay called “I Want a Wife,” and I still think of it often. I couldn’t get it out of my head that afternoon. It’s not that I want a wife, because I’d sort of hate to do that to anybody, to tell you the truth. But that being a Wife, having Great Mommy Powers, is so consuming and exhausting. I found myself yesterday yelling at Laura because she wouldn’t help me—and well, that’s fair enough, she’s ten and certainly old enough to participate in our shared household life, which includes things like making sure you can walk in her room. But what angry yelling, so disproportionate to her piles of toys and laundry. I wish I knew why I feel so furious sometimes with people who certainly have no personal responsibility that merits being a focus for that anger—shouldn’t I just remind Laura again to clean up her room instead of exploding at her? Shouldn’t I want to support those junior faculty dads as they make parenting a visible part of their lives, not kill them because they have something I don’t? Maybe it’s just that questions like these have no real answers (and certainly not before breakfast). I guess the only thing to do is keep working at it, questioning the anger, worrying it over like an old bone, making sure the outlet isn’t my kids or friends or Chris. Maybe I need a voodoo doll for general cultural purposes, like whoever designed grocery stores to be such kid-unfriendly zones even though moms do most of the shopping? Who knows. But Chris bought us Krispy Kreme doughtnuts last night at the grocery store—maybe a doughnut that I didn’t have to shop for will help. Time for breakfast.

Happy Birthday, blog

My blog is a year old today! One of my babies, and we didn’t even have a party. It’s odd, actually, since I am still blogging about the very same things, a year of babies and books and asking why.

One of my friends, Carolyn, suffers from terrible depression. She and I and a couple of other friends had coffee together this afternoon, and she talked about reading this trilogy of books, evidently incredibly disheartening books, and oppressive to all womankind. I promised I would come home and look for my most life-affirming book and send her either the title or the book itself. I came up with a couple of half-hearted suggestions, Anne Lamott’s Plan B, and a friend offered up The Mists of Avalon, although we both had second thoughts about that one again since things turn out pretty badly in the end. Three English professors at the table, and we couldn’t come up with a book to cheer somebody up. A year ago I told my students that happy smiley literature was boring. Can it be literature and be happy? And why does happy seem to mean mindless and simplistic in literary studies?

If blogs and online journals are a new literary genre—and I think they are—are they and the books they produce “literature,” and especially can they be life-affirming literature? If women write about their ordinary lives as women and mothers, does that offer me a new vision of what my life might be? Catherine Newman’s Waiting for Birdy: A Year of Frantic Tedium, Neurotic Angst, and the Wild Magic of Growing a Family, Bitch Ph.D. and her Pseudonymous Kid, the author of Chez Miscarriage? And does that literature of mothering have relevance to people who aren’t mothers? My sixty-something year old friend who never had kids—can I hand her Waiting for Birdy, which I found hilarious and wonderful, loving but honest? And what about my friend who’s struggling with infertility?

I was in my narcissistic mode that afternoon, so I offered Carolyn my blog, because keeping On Comprehending Gravity has become so important to me, a reminder that I can take time out of my work every couple of days and write something about my life, the life of my family. Writing is a way of thinking, and here I write my life into some permanent form of existence. My purposes over the year have changed; OCG started as an example for my American literature students of what a blog looked like, but even then I know I didn’t write it for my class—I wrote it for myself (one reason why I never turned the comments on: I didn’t really want to hear what my students thought about my life).

Writing for yourself when you have no idea who else is reading is an interesting proposition. Pissed off at your kid or husband? Careful how you present that! Having trouble at work? Better not go there! I buried a link my blog far down in my teaching website once briefly and pulled the link down later, imagining my dean wandering through my website for a technology Commission on Higher Education Performance Funding report. And none of those audience issues addresses the larger question—what kind of life am I writing here? Who do I understand myself to be? One day I hope my children will read this—what sort of wacko will they think their mother was then?

Happy Birthday to my blog and my year-old self. A year is barely enough time to learn to stand on your feet—maybe next year I’ll learn to walk.

Kids and culture

I’m going to Washington in a couple of months for a conference and having some mixed feelings about it. The trip will be wonderful, I know, and I’m spending the time with my best friend from my last job, which I can’t wait for, but I have some Washington issues, to tell you the truth.

When Laura was three or so, I think, we went to D.C. to visit a cousin. I remember being thrilled—I’d never been there myself. I could finally see the White House. I could go to the Smithsonian. I could see big dinosaur bones. Maybe even the real thing, and not just casts. Growing up in South Carolina small-townville, I didn’t get a whole lot of exposure to—well, perhaps culture isn’t quite the right word, but I’m guessing you know what I mean. Some weeks our biggest outing ended up being an Icee at the laundrymat.

I absolutely envied Laura at times when she was a baby—we took her to the Field Museum in Chicago when she was one! We went to Ontario the next year! She had traveled outside the country for the first time when she was two—and that trip was the same time I traveled outside the country the first time! Well, I’m not totally stupid—I understood even then that she wouldn’t remember these things and her primary impression of Chicago evidently was that snowsuits were roughly equivalent to straightjackets. But I knew, even if the only trips we ever took were to the MLA or some other conference, she would have many of her initial travel and cultural opportunities as I was having them myself in my thirties. She grew up knowing scientists and visiting the studios of our artist friends. I wonder what my own life would be like now if I’d grown up that way.

And then I remember what happened when we went to Washington. We couldn’t take the stroller in any of the museums. That may not sound like a big deal if you don’t have children, but you try hauling a thirty-pound kids through however many acres those hallways stretch. On several occasions, we had guards following us to make sure our daughter—our well-mannered daughter, by the way—never touched anything. At the National Gallery of Art, we were actually stopped by guards on at least three different occasions because of the way we were carrying Laura—she couldn’t ride on our shoulders. She couldn’t ride on our backs. I can’t even remember the various offensive ways we must’ve tried to carry her, but I remember quite vividly not one single thing about the National Gallery of Art except that my daughter was bored and heavy and that the entire museum seemed to be deliberately designed to make all of us miserable. I literally cannot remember a single piece of art I saw that day.

I’m not taking Chris or the kids on this trip. I’m looking forward to a visit to the Library of Congress to see a Walt Whitman exhibit, and to tell the truth, I would love to go back to the Smithsonian or the National Gallery and actually see something this time. But I don’t know if I can—how could I enjoy something that shut me and my children out so completely last time? We take Will and Laura to the State Museum now, which is designed mostly for kids, and to Discovery Place, and even the Columbia Museum of Art has Family Fridays now, but now, as I’m making my plane reservations and thinking about my days in the big city, I just keep thinking about how unwelcome I was before in the museums—because I was somebody’s mother. Even in the dinosaur galleries, where you’d expect the kids, since they’re the only ones who could remember or pronounce a name like Protarchaeopteryx. My relationship with my government was vexed enough before I learned I couldn’t even love the museums.

Maybe I’ll try new things instead—the Hirshhorn or the National Museum of Women in the Arts, or maybe a little farther afield to Mount Vernon. My Midwestern friend is trying to understand slavery and the South, so that could be an interesting stop. I should probably spend most of my time at the conference, to tell the truth. When I booked my flight, I thought about staying an extra day or two, and finally decided I couldn’t—I didn’t want to be away from home that long. And some of that mystery, the wonder of those national treasures, just isn’t that appealing any more. Sad to say, I’m glad Laura was too young to remember that last trip, and it makes me wonder if I should’ve taken her to Disney World instead. In a way, both places present their own versions of history, and I’m not sure the Washington one is more accurate. Just less kid-friendly, and somehow a lot less appealing now.

Pizza and a walk after dinner

I was in Alabama when Hugo hit South Carolina, and my biggest memory of that time is trying for hours to call my parents back home to see if they were OK. The lines weren’t functioning, and weren’t functioning, and just weren’t functioning, but finally the call went through and a stranger answered the phone. I nearly fainted. I knew it was police or the coroner recovering my parents’ bodies. Turned out it was their friend Larry who lived in Charleston and evacuated inland to their house, and they were all fine. They sent pictures later of upside down Volkswagens perched in trees, of houses without roofs or walls, trees down everywhere.

My mother’s a nurse and legally mandated to report to the hospital in emergencies like this—I was telling her last night about reading about the nursing staff in one of hospitals in New Orleans, people who’d been on duty since before the hurricane and couldn’t leave. They were required by law to work their shifts. I try to imagine what it must be like, to work in the hospital, pumping air for patients without oxygen, not able to go home, probably not even having a home. What are the doctors and nurses with children doing? The whole thing is so unimaginable that I keep having to focus on things like the nurses and who’s taking care of their kids, the students at Tulane and all the other affected schools who will be attending universities across the country because Tulane had to cancel their fall semester. I think about how difficult it must be to be Tulane’s president, and how glad I am that I not on the committee in charge of this problem. Because I can’t think about the rest of it.

I’m not sure anybody else can much, either. People here are mostly bitching about the gas prices, which are terrible—nothing like a national disaster to bring out the profiteer in everybody. I guess the pipelines aren’t back up to speed yet, since many of the local gas stations have bagged their pumps. I don’t remember the energy crisis in terms of gas—I remember having to turn the lights out at school when we left class, and the little stickers next to the light switches reminding us to save energy—so this is like nothing I’ve seen before. And when they’re done with the gas discussions, which take a very long time, then people seem to wander around talking about the lawlessness, and Sodom and Gomorrah, and raising money, which I think makes us feel we’re doing something. We had a call tonight from one of the district’s administrators asking if we supported donating half the money we’ve been raising for library books during Rolling Hill Reads. If we don’t, there’s a phone number we can call. I didn’t bother to write it down, even though I know people will give money to the Red Cross, but our district literacy drive is only once a year and there won’t be more money for books when this is over. But I can’t bring myself to call. I already made my Red Cross donation through Amazon, and I guess I’ll just donate a little extra for the books this year.

I made pizza for dinner. Laura’s spending the night with Adeleigh, Chris and Will and I took a walk after dinner, and Kitty’s here rubbing around my ankles. I finally stopped reading CNN and the New York Times, and we’re going to make popcorn and watch a movie. Will doesn’t know about any of this, because I don’t want him watching what’s happening on the news. Laura knows a little, but she’s plenty immersed in the healthy self-centered girlhood where her only problem is that we made her pick up her clothes off the floor before she could go to Adeleigh’s house. So we go on with homework and the cross country meet tomorrow and laundry and a walk. It all feels surreal, and like dancing on somebody’s grave. But what else is there to do?

Re: just got a check

From: Chris
To: Lisa
Date: 9/1/2005 11:05:57 AM
Re: just got a check

for 63.88 for some supplement of some sort
not sure if that's journalism or what
but i'm putting it in my briefcase in the outside pocket
and subsequently forgetting about it (in all likelihood...)
cross country supplement will be adjusted next month

this is just to say
that the money
I earned
for you
was so sweet
so pleasurable
to earn
that I would
do it
again
______________________________

From: Lisa
To: Chris
Date: 9/1/2005 1:40:58 PM
Re: Re: just got a check

Supplement 63.88 is for journalism (gross amount should be $75). I will remember to get the stub out. I had already planned on the cc supplement adjustment. All good.

filing is awful
no way to live
tax evasion unlawful
might as well give

papers bore you
check stubs suck
statements annoy you
just earn a buck