My writing class for the 12-week short semester starts tomorrow night.
Which, in case you live under a rock or never enter a Target store, is Valentine’s Day.
I’m going to be so popular, dontcha think?
Students love missing dreamy interpersonal holidays to sit in drafty old college classrooms for three-and-a-half hours. (That’s right — did I mention that part? Three-and-a-half hours. Again with the popularity…).
And y’know, since it’s the first night, let’s spend a goodly portion of the evening talking about administrative nuts and bolts — syllabi and attendance policies, stuff like that.
Oh, they are going to be rolling in the aisles.
Do you think I should bring cookies or conversation hearts?
Today, my wee one turns seven. My baby. And I hate to be all maudlin and cliched, but wha?!?!?
Wasn’t she just born? I thought she was a toddler! Isn’t she still in preschool? Don’t give her the car keys! Is she going to college on Wednesday??? Stop!!!!
Last night we looked at her baby pictures. She and her sister found them funny. And cute. They don’t know, nor would they understand, that I’m just shattered when I look at those snaps. But not in a bad way. Y’know what I mean?
I look at those pictures and I can see, in the red lips and fuzzy hair, the beginnings of the girl I’ve got here now. And I remember every single moment of her teeniness. And it seems both like yesterday and like a long, long time ago.
The whole thing just cracks my heart wide open.
Today, this is a girl full of her own wild passions and big enough humour and personality to let the rest of us slide a little. This is a girl who careens through space — sometimes safely, often not — to see what it feels like. This is also a girl who can’t put a book down and sleeps like a stone. This is the girl who tends to the animals in our house, and she’d like to be responsible for most of the wild kingdom, too. This is a girl who hugs so hard it hurts.
I am shattered not because I want to rewind, to back her away from who she has become. I am shattered just that we have her, she is partly ours and has been now for seven years. Seven years. It’s a blessing almost too big to bear…
I am smart to be raising daughters around women who devote more of their time to hiking than hairspray, art than eyeliner, politics than pills.
I am lucky to have an abundance of fresh and healthy and delicious food in my fridge and on my table.
I am blessed to have two girls who are tall and strong and, so far, relish the bodies they’ve been given.
But.
But, I am still mindful of the fact that I hardly know a woman (and that includes the hiking-artist-activist type) who wouldn’t say she’s had body image issues in her life. I hardly know a woman who can’t reflect on stages of awful awkwardness and self-loathing. I hardly know a woman who hasn’t envied another her hips or abs or thighs.
Objectively, there is so much to love and revere, isn’t there? The way we can climb mountains and move futons and pull weeds and have babies? The way we can heal our own colds and strengthen our own weaknesses and survive stress and loss and trauma? The way we can age well with just a little good sleep, good food and brisk movement?
But subjectively, we are a people with harsh and critical eyes. We are riddled with flaws and if you give us the opportunity, we’ll tell you about them. We find it hard, most of us, to love our bodies without condition… to relish them the way my daughters still do theirs.
Which saddens me. Honestly, I’d like for my girls to sit around with your girls in their college dorms someday and talk about something else. Y’know — their majors, their favorite candidates, their plans to travel to Argentina or Alaska in the spring. Instead of what size jeans they hope to fit into by Christmas or whether the girl down the hall has bulimia. Right?
I have a lot of thoughts on what may help turn the mirror on its side, but I’m no expert. There are smart folk who have devoted their entire professional careers to researching how women perceive their physical selves and how those perceptions can change; how women are influenced by the images we are shown in the media; how women feel about other women.
It’d be a good idea if we all read up on this stuff and left Cosmo and Glamour to others.
It’d be a good idea if we just started loving up our own selves as examples.
And it’d be a good idea if we checked out this book. (Click on the book itself to preview the gorgeousness that is inside. And then, if I may be so bold, order it…)
This morning, the school nurse called me to come collect my daughter-with-pinkeye. It was 8 am and she caught me on my cell phone. I hadn't even made it back home from dropping the kids off.
It's been one of those weeks. One little thing after another after another… That kind of week.
Some of you might've recommended against hosting a slumber party for seven-year-olds during a remodel. And the other stuff I've taken on is beyond the pale, too.
I don't know if I should laugh or rage some days…
This morning, I'd like to take a book of poetry into the bath. Instead, we're on our way to the doctor for eye drops. And then I have to tidy up the war zone house for the slumber party. (That's a good one, isn't it? Cleaning up for a slumber party…)
Have you read Anne Sexton's fury poems? I love them. And they seem sorely apt for today. Here's one of my favorites:
The Fury of Overshoes
They sit in a row outside the kindergarten, black, red, brown, all with those brass buckles. Remember when you couldn't buckle your own overshoe or tie your own overshoe or tie your own shoe or cut your own meat and the tears running down like mud because you fell off your tricycle?
When I was in 3rd grade, I’m not even sure I’d heard of Romeo and Juliet and I fear there are plenty of people who still think that’s a Dire Straits song. The idea that she is memorizing Toby Belch’s funniest lines makes me weak in the knees.
So, unsurprisingly, discussion of old William is frequent ’round our house these days. Here’s some of the recent fodder:
Shakespeare was wild about ship wrecks.
And death, right?
A tragedy is quite a good play but you wouldn’t want one in real life.
Some of you may know that I’ve got a couple more picture books coming out soon (although “soon” in publishing is a very relative term).
I’ve referred to the manuscripts here as Wind and World, in case of title changes. They both sold to Allyn Johnston of Harcourt (and really, I should do a whole long and flowery post about her awesomeness) and they’ll both be illustrated by the totally tremendous Marla Frazee (again, a dedicated post is necessary). For now, suffice it to say that I am a really, really, really lucky gal.
Because…. I. HAVE. MARLA’S. SKETCHES. FOR. THE. FIRST. BOOK!!!!!!!
Right here. On my desk. I can touch them whenever I want to. The word ‘sketch’ does not do them justice. Seriously you guys.
!!!!!!!!!
So, now’s the time to tell you that the book formerly known as World is actually titled All the World and it is due out next year. (That is, if I don’t just xerox a whole bunch of copies of this dummy and start handing ’em out to all my friends and neighbors.)
The journey of a book being born is long one. There’s a whole lot of work and a whole lot of waiting. Most of my work on this baby is done — I devoted a good portion of the fall to tweaking the manuscript, under the visionary tutelage of my editor — and now I’ll wait. And work on other stuff. And wait.
But can I just say that the waiting got a whole lot easier and more pleasureable the day these sketches arrived, wrapped in a wide pink ribbon, on my front stoop. I’m so excited to share this book with you all… someday soon.
Just a little hint for all you parents who find yourselves utterly flummoxed by the amount of dirt and clutter generated by one small, sweet household:
Chinese New Year requires that you give your house a clean sweep to make room for the pleasures and abundance of the new year.
It’s a mandated de-junking! Wahoo!
I promise you, this is flawless motivation for kids to clean their rooms. Tell them it’s part of the festivity. Grab a broom, crank up a little worldbeat on the stereo and call it a holiday.
Oh. It wouldn’t hurt if there were a pretty paper envelope of money and some dumplings waiting. And if you’ve got a string of firecrackers lying around, even better…
Seriously folks. My daughters are going at it full-bore. Dusting. Untangling dolls from necklaces. Finding the caps to the markers. And I put a brown paper sack in the room on the off chance they stumble upon something they don’t want anymore. I know, hard to imagine amidst all the priceless treasures but one can hope.
Chinese New Year starts on Thursday. Clean up. Eat up. Open up to a whole new year of rich surprises.
(And here are some great kids books to get you in the mood.)
This week at her piano lesson, my younger daughter tried to wiggle out of playing the piece she’s been struggling with.
“I’ll play Procession twice,” she tried to bargain with her teacher. “I’m no good at Lullaby.”
“Ahhh,” said her teacher. “I’ll bet you said that a lot this week. And each time you said it, it became bigger and more real. You’re adding to this great big pot of I’m no good at Lullaby.”
She held out a round wooden box as evidence. My girl looked into it and sure enough, it was full. Insurmountable.
“So let’s figure out a new way to talk about this piece,” said her teacher. “A more positive way.”
My daughter was skeptical. She didn’t want to lie, for one thing. Lullaby was really and truly stumping her.
But they agreed, finally, on this: “Lullaby is a work in progress.”
And then my nearly 7-year-old put her nose down and worked it, for twenty minutes. Something that hadn’t happened all week.
By the time we left, Lullaby was a lovely work in progress. And I’m not just saying that.
I nearly missed this moment. Usually my husband does piano lesson while I do yoga. But he was traveling for work so I was on duty. And a good thing, too. Because I sat there on the sidelines, re-learning a lesson myself. That I can use as a parent. And a teacher. And a writer:
So much of life is process. And much of process takes practice. We might as well embrace where we’re at. All the time.
And along with practice and process comes perspective. How we look at life and talk about it defines how we feel about it and, ultimately, how we actively (or inactively) respond to our challenges and our gifts.
Today, my sonnet is a work in progress. My house is a work in progress. My marriage is a work in progress. The presidential election is a work in a progress. World peace is a work in progress.
And that’s a good thing.
Here’s a poem by Linda Pastan, in celebration of all that:
Practicing
My son is practicing the piano. He is a man now, not the boy whose lessons I once sat through, whose reluctant practicing I demanded-part of the obligation I felt to the growth and composition of a child.
