I’ve always been a sucker for a guy with a guitar.
Good thing I married one.
And guess what he got me for Valentine’s Day?
This soundtrack, currently set to peat and repeat on my iPod.
Have you seen the movie?
You haven’t?
You guys! They didn’t invent Nexflix for nothin’…
I’ve been thinking lately that one of my purposes, in writing for children, is to honor their perspectives —
wild, varied, inscrutable, sweet.
To empower through recognition.
To notice, to listen, to see.
That’s what I remember wanting as a kid.
Recently I was plowing through piles of my own poems and I found this one, written when my first baby was wee.
I think this is when this whole idea must’ve started to coalesce for me.
Don’t you love tracing your own paths backwards sometimes, to find out how you got where you are today?
It is nearly impossible — impossible —
to recognize the difference
between dog and bear
in the transmuting dark
and the long croony whistle of a train
sounds so much like moo
as to be four-legged and lonesome
A sock looks like a hat
but doesn’t fit and isn’t
a pear looks like an apple
apple sounds like happy
and is
Blowing on breakfast
cools it off, blowing
in the bath makes bubbles
and the wind blows
arms into fingered wings
Every man is Daddy
— the Wicked Witch
is Mama and so is the moon
in this afternoon’s sky
milky as the breast
at bedtime when who
will stay to keep things straight
who will name the sounds
that come in the night?
— Liz Garton Scanlon, 1999
This morning, The 2007 Cybils awards were announced and hot dang, you judges did a fine job!
I haven’t read every winner, but I can assure you that I will.
I can see the rush at the circulation desk now.
As for those I’ve read, a quick little hoo-rah to a few:
Linda Urban’s A Crooked Kind of Perfect took the honors for best middle-grade novel, which, to my mind, is kinda perfect.
Congratulations, Linda!
Back in January, I predicted the winner of the picture book category — The Chicken Chasing Queen of Lamar County — so woot! to Janice Harrington and Shelley Jackson and woot! to me!!!
And finally, the winner of the poetry award: This is Just to Say: Poems of Apology and Forgiveness.
Sigh, swoon, sigh.
I love this book.
And (I know, I’m gonna hurt my wrist patting myself on the back this morning) I just so happen to be the reader who nominated it!
Joyce Sidman, you wrote a book of lovely, honest and meaningful poems and I’m awfully glad they’re being celebrated.
OK, now go on you guys.
Go check out The Cybils for yourself…
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…)
Our within-a-whisper-of seven year old celebrated her birthday last night.
Scavenger hunt… sparklers… ice-cream sundaes. A big time.
One of her little buds gave her The Invention of Hugo Cabret.
It is now 5 o’clock PM here in Austin, Texas, and she is reading on the couch.
She is still in her jammies from this morning.
I kid you not…
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?
(Read the rest here…)
Tomorrow is another day, tomorrow is another day, tomorrow is another day…
Be not afraid of greatness: some are born great, some achieve greatness, and
some have greatness thrust upon ’em. — Twelfth Night
When our 3rd grader stumbled into the kitchen this morning, Shakespeare spilled from her lips.
Truly.
One of the dads at her school helps run a Shakespeare program at the University of Texas and — lucky us — brings his passions to our kids. Our daughter’s studying The Comedy of Errors with her class and Twelfth Night in the afterschool masterclass.
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.
If it was up to the kids, Midsummer Night’s Dream would get picked every time.
Shakespeare thinks words like bottom and belch are hilarious, which is why he’s good for kids.
Did you know, Mama, that Shakespeare does not have to be read in an English accent?
This last one was followed by a demo of Shakespeare sung, Shakespeare rapped and Shakespeare in a Texas twang.
Swoon.
Off to school now, Sweet.
Go have greatness thrust upon you…
Results from today’s primaries are rolling in.
Most of you have already voted.
Some of us don’t get the chance for weeks to come.
In the meantime, we can all take a minute to get inspired.
Yes, we can…