Poor Little Loved Child

Standing in line at the supermarket checkout line yesterday I saw this:

NO TV or Happy Meals!

NO medicines, just herbs!

Scientology play dates & MORE!

INSIDE SURI'S STRANGE WORLD!

What? She doesn't watch TV? They don't let her have Happy Meals? God forbid anyone try holistic methods instead of Western medicine! And can you imagine letting your child have play dates with people who practice the same religion as you do? Gasp!

This poor, poor little rich girl. I feel for her, I really do. What is it like inside her strange world? How does she live without the nutritional joy that is a Happy Meal? Without the magical picture box known as "TV"?

Sadly, I will never know.

But I do like reading about the shocking lives of other parents in supermarket checkout lines. I know now that since I let my kids eat Happy Meals and Tylenol in front of the TV every day, I'm doing a great job as a parent. Thanks, Star Magazine!

3:38 - 5:37

Matilda and Freya both came down at 3:38 this morning.

"What happened?"

"I had a scary dream."

"What about Freya?"

"She had one too."

It is now 5:37 and the last two hours have been filled with dreams of the two of them – coming down, then being taken back to their room which is of course a completely different room from the one in which they actually sleep. Once, Freya was there, sleeping, then awake, another time the bed – a blanket spread across the floor – was covered with legos, tiny, tiny legos that more closely resembled dirt than toys. Another time I went up there to sleep myself, and my mother was there, didn’t understand why I wouldn’t just sleep with the children, or let them be awake. Also there was a part in which I had somehow gotten pregnant and everyone knew it but me.

I did not sleep much, or well. I get crowded when they come into the bed and my sleep is restless. Of course I was also nearly falling off the bed for two hours. I like sleeping on the outside edge, but when the bed is full of children Steve’s side next to the wall has some advantages.

On the other hand, I have been getting up early to write before the house is full of demands and responsibilities, so 5:37 isn't really too bad. At least this way I can be guaranteed at least another hour of silence and solitude.

Home - but not at rest.

Okay, with one day of semi-normalcy under my belt, I am ready to write again.

The trip was, overall, a success. It certainly did what it was intended to do, which was to allow me to get a feel for some of the schools I am considering. This was important because, having lived in the Northeast my entire life, I have the unfortunate tendency (as do many Northeasterners) to believe that the United States of America drops off somewhere around Ohio and picks up again in California. What's in the middle? Um, nothing, so far as I know. (This is not an intentional slight against the lovely states of the Midwest, more of a lack of conscious thought about them at all.)

But now I know better, I know that there are interstates and strip malls and lots and lots of farmland. Also, there are Ohio University and the University of Missouri. I'm told the University of Nebraska also exists, but we didn't make it quite that far so I can't personally vouch for it.

We did get to do many fun and exciting things, like meet two of my favorite bloggers and go to the Pro-Football Hall of Fame (man, is that place a trip), the Great Lakes Science Center in Cleveland (which was amazing), the Terre Haute Children's Museum (one room with a bunch of dirty toys), and the Children's Museum of Indianapolis (amazing: floors and floors of great stuff) (I would have called you Casey, but it was last minute on the way back through, and I didn't have your number), and of course, the reason for the trip: Ohio University and the University of Missouri.

Poor Fionn caught the plague on our third day and spent a good 24 hours feeling totally awful, but he insisted we go on, pointing out that he'd have to spend time in the car either way. He was a great companion, Matilda loved having him along. I think being around him and his art inspires her.

Now that I'm home I find myself facing one of the biggest decisions of my life. Lucky for me, I don't have to face it alone, but unlucky for me, the family does tend to make the decision a bit more complicated.

There are so many things to consider, and some of the things that I thought would have the biggest impact on my decision are turning out not to matter so much after all. I'm still organizing my thoughts on this, and will post about it soon, but for now, here's a high quality photograph of the three of us at the Football Hall of Fame. I was really bad about taking pictures on the trip, so this is actually the only photo of the three of us, which really makes it that much better, if you ask me.

Impending decisions and lousy weather

So we made it to both schools and are now stuck just east of St. Louis, waiting out a nasty belt of ice and snow. We'll see what happens in the morning, it's no fun being stuck, but of course would be less fun to have something worse happen due to the weather.

I will write more about this when I am not using a "Guest Courtesy Computer" in the lobby of a Quality Inn (it does have a pool, which Matilda would never have left if I didn't make her), but I am now feeling very torn in terms of which school is a better fit for me and for my family. The program at the University of Missouri is very strong, but Athens, Ohio felt more like home.

I have a few strategies for figuring it out, which I will share as I go, but for now I am safe and warm and uncertain, my mind racing as I try to puzzle it all out, trying not to miss any of the possible angles.

Oh, and of course lunch last week with my dear blogging friends was wonderful; unfortunately the Moosh was at preschool, but Jennifer's children are even more adorable than they appear on her blog and we all had a great time hanging out, even though it was too short.

More soon, I promise!

Updates and Last Minute News

Okay, so first of all, there will be no Cornell. I got the letter today and was surprised to feel almost nothing after reading it. Maybe later, but best I can tell I never really thought I'd get in anyway and am too excited about my other prospects to be disappointed. In any case, I've no time to linger on that now.

Tomorrow we leave, Fionn and Matilda and I, barely recovered from this most recent case of the plague that swept over us all this past week like a steamroller from hell.

First stop Ohio University to meet with important people and explore Athens a bit.

Then lunch! with her! and her! and I just know it will be so much fun! (Andi - I'll make it all the way up to Canada someday, I swear.)

Then on to Missouri where they're begging me to join their program (well, okay, not begging exactly) and more meetings and a poetry reading.

I'm going to skip Nebraska this time, due to time and money and this awful plague, but I have not forgotten it. We'll see what happens.

I'll try to post pictures and/or updates as I go, but I expect access to the interwebs to be spotty at best. In the meantime, avoid the terrible plague and have a wonderful time while I'm gone, I'll be back soon!

Happy V Day!

by Matilda

In a Recent Conversation with Myself

I've been giving a lot of thought to the feeling of apathy lately, or maybe not apathy per se - but distance, from myself, from my children, from my life. I have no doubt that these feelings stem from my recent state of limbo, but they've always been there in the background, maybe even from the beginning - whenever that was.

I adore my children. I admire the way they learn things, the way they express themselves, the way they scrunch up their faces and say, "So, does that mean..." They are amazing creatures, my two girls, and as they grow into themselves and need me less, I admire them all the more.

I love my life. I have an amazing partner, someone of whom the phrase "we're in this together" can be spoken with sincerity. A man who is willing to move halfway across the country just so I can get an English degree (English? really? so what, you'll teach?) is not something one finds everyday, let alone one who comes with the kind of kitchen skills mine's got. I wish for no other.

Still, even as I love what I have, anticipate what the future will bring and make my way through each day as it presents itself, I often find myself thinking, meh: the mental equivalent of a shrug.

Of course this is not without its effects on me, on my family, on my parenting. One thing that I have found myself thinking about recently is the idea of "having it all," of living a life that incorporates aspects of self-nourishment that simply mothering can not provide, but of course also having the deep joy that comes with the work of mothering. This came up in a conversation I had with a friend, and then again in a post by Amy at Milk Breath and Margaritas.

What does it mean to have it all? Can it be done? Maybe. But the point is this, that in every moment is a choice and as each choice is made, all other possibilities fall away in invisible layers.

In the afternoon: Should I play a game with my children, or hide in my room, hope (assume) they're okay and read a book?

In the evening: Should I put my children to bed early and do something for myself, or read with them until they fall asleep on my shoulder?

In the morning: Should I get up and make breakfast for the little darlings, or lie half asleep in bed and listen to them push chairs across the floor as they get it themselves?

The problem with having it all seems to be that the answer to all of the above questions is yes. Yes and yes. And of course that's impossible. Each choice presents itself with some coy appeal, whether it is the soothing simplicity of the everyday, or the thrilling guilt of a stolen moment. So is having it all really possible? Well, yes and no.

Yes.

No.

It depends.

Last night I read a short story by Lorrie Moore, called People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk, about a couple whose baby develops cancer and their experiences in the pediatric oncology (peed onk) ward. The mother in this story (called only the Mother) is naturally sarcastic and maintains an emotional distance from her child which felt familiar to me. This is not to say she wasn't devastated by the Baby's cancer, or that she didn't do everything in her power to protect the child, whom she clearly loved, but the kind of jokes she feels guilty about making once the baby's cancer is discovered are the sort of jokes I make all the time. (Oh yes, Freya is the Evil One, just listen to what she said yesterday...)

I don't think there's anything wrong with having a sense of humor about life, in fact, if I can enjoy a humorous story about a baby with cancer, well, there's really no limit to my depravity is there? What if there isn't? So what? After all, I take pride in the fact that I am the sort of mother who allows - encourages really - the mummification and ceremonial burial of Barbie dolls. In my mind I am the sort of mother who sips dry martinis at cocktail parties and laughs lightly about the charming or idiotic things her children do. Never mind that I don't much care for dry martinis, that's not the point.

Whatever social shift has occurred in the last decade or so to create parents who are so involved as to actually accompany their little darling to his first job interview (gag me, please), has left me clinging to my apathy. (A contradiction if there ever was one.) Who says that children with ultra-involved parents are better off than those with parents who nurture both themselves and their children? Are they the same ones who imply that I should feel guilty if I choose to spend a Saturday hunched over my computer, barely hearing my daughter call my name until she sneaks up behind me and yells directly into my ear?

The distance that I feel (or put) between myself and my life, is that a coping mechanism? A safe guard against over-involvement? Or is it just the way I make it work - a natural by-product of trying to have it all: if I give a fuck, will it be too hard to handle the truth when it turns out I can't have everything after all?

Of course I care. But I can't care deeply, passionately all the time, that's just not me. (It sounds utterly exhausting for one thing.) Of course I feel that surge in my chest when I look at my daughters, notice them in a fresh way. And of course I push myself to feel nothing as I slump on the couch and idly listen to them fight without bothering to intervene.

Is this what having it all means? Maybe. Yes and no. It means loving what I have, and trying to have more, but without sacrificing myself and without sacrificing my children. It means making it work, and even though on the surface saying it out loud sounds like a contradiction: it means making compromises.

Photos, from the top: 1. Matilda's Barbie Art, created last year, 2. Freya with marker and a sour face, 3. Freya, having her cake and eating it too, 4. Matilda last summer in Bar Harbor, Maine, 5. The girls in dress-ups and with Legos

At Last!

I have been accepted to the Graduate Program in Creative Writing at the University of Missouri.

All that obsessing about not-knowing, all that feeling imobilized by the uncertainty of my future has been replaced with the sincere relief that against all odds, everything is going to be okay. I now realize that while trying desperately to focus all of my obsessive worry on the not-knowing, what I was really worried about was that I might not be accepted anywhere; something it wasn't possible for me to admit to myself until now.

While in one sense the single acceptance changes nothing - we could still go anywhere next year - in another sense it changes everything - we will be going somewhere.

Where to Begin

I've been trying to work on this novel of mine, a story that has been haunting me for years now, but with over a hundred pages and months of neglect the very idea of sitting down to work on it seems to require a kind of physical and mental solitude that has been hard to come by lately.

I know I keep going on about this not-knowing that is driving me nuts, but really, I think I'm starting to come apart at the seams here. Why can't I just write a letter to the schools asking them all very politely to decide now or I might not be the same person when they finally get around to accepting me.

My focus is split, I can't think too much about the future, but I can't stop thinking about it long enough to think about anything else. Stupid future.

But it’s not just that. In a way the not-knowing is just the latest in a long line of excuses.

I need to restructure my life in such a way that I can do all of the things that need to get done and then have time leftover for the other stuff, the stuff that helps me feel like a better person. The tricky part is that the kind of time I need is not just a stolen moment here or a break between loads of laundry. I need the kind of time I can really relax in. The kind of time that is both preceded and followed by a gradual transition period, one that allows me to sink out of my life and then back in, but not too fast.

I just can't seem to envision having this kind of time. I can't picture any practical way for it to work and I’m starting to feel the story slipping away. It haunts me, yes, but at the same time, it’s leaving me, and the danger inherent in that is troubling.

Change is as scary now as it ever was and for me the kind of change that is the scariest is the kind I have to create myself. People have said that I’m brave, to apply to schools, to really go for it, but that’s not bravery. For me that’s just a series of things I have to do, with clear deadlines and a pre-determined list of requirements. The payoff is that then some administrator in some school will decide what will happen. The big scale stuff like that isn’t as frightening to me as the little day-to-day changes, the need for which I feel pressing on me lately.

I’m not sure it makes sense to wait anymore, but I’m not sure how to begin.

Unexpected Solitude

Driving home tonight I found my mind drifting to places it hasn't been in years. I wondered where the closest cemetery might be, not for any morbid reason, but because when I had more time to myself walking in cemeteries was one of the things I enjoyed doing. I would usually seek out the oldest graves in the place, looking for dates that indicated a child, or groups of stones dedicated to a family, imagining their lives, their stories.

The reason I thought about this tonight was that for the first time in a long time I found myself unexpectedly childless.

When Matilda was less than a year old my friend Kehr and I began swapping kids with the result that now - more than five years later - our kids are practically siblings, and so in addition to Matilda sleeping out tonight, Freya has embarked on her very first sleepover at the tender age of three, Steve is at work, and I am sitting home alone waiting for the phone to ring.

I don't know what to do with myself. I ate dinner with my parents (who were disappointed when I arrived sans-grandchildren) and had a drink at the restaurant where Steve works on the weekends.

It feels wrong to be sitting home doing the same things I always do, but I can't remember how to be alone - really alone.

I used to do it all the time - before I had a family and children of my own. I loved it, sought it out. When I was eighteen I spent a few months in London and loved just walking around the streets alone at night, watching people, exploring. I don't do that anymore.

I could. Steve's home most nights and once the girls are settled it would be easy enough to take a stroll along the train tracks or sit out on the roof of the shed and listen to the night. It's just not me anymore, and I don't miss it, not really.

And yet, upon finding myself suddenly alone, it is still the very first thing that occurs to me.

On Learning How to Not Plan

As I make tracks on my Google map and think about ways to make this move forward smooth for everyone I find that even though I am trying not to get my hopes up, am trying not to count too much on any one outcome to this whole life-in-the-air situation, that the idea of staying in this house has become more and more remote.

This house was our first, the prize at the end of a very long and tedious road to owning our own home in a part of the country where the average cost of a single family home is over $300,000. Tucked into a little side street with a great yard for the kids it was a stroke of luck that we found it at all. It's small, but cozy, with a cottagey feel that I really like. The girls have the upstairs all to themselves which has made my no-toys-downstairs rule pretty enforceable.

When we moved in it seemed like we'd be here forever, I could imagine the girls have their friends over, as teenagers, imagine dinner parties and weekend visits, imagine raising the slanted roof upstairs, adding a bedroom and expanding the kitchen, over the years of course.

Starting way back in September when I began my grad school application stuff in earnest, I made a commitment to myself to take things one step at a time: do the GRE, get my recommendation letters, request my transcripts, fill out applications, mail things... There were so many things that needed to be done that it was easy to set a limit on how many things I could do at once.

Now that most of the little things are done I find my mind drifting into the future, thinking about a new house, about a new place, making friends (do I even know how to do that anymore? did I ever?), enrolling the children in a new school, figuring out where stuff is. The things is, I won't know for at least two more months where those things will be happening, there are still too many pieces that need to fall into place before I can even know what the feasible options will be.

Although the shift has been gradual, I find myself now in a place of reckless ambivalence, with a proclivity for careless promises. The possibility of staying here - originally one of the potential outcomes, the back-up plan - has become so remote that when Matilda asks about the future, something as simple as whether Freya go to her kindergarten class, I shrug and say lightly, sure, if we're still here. It's such an easy answer. When you have no idea what will happen to you, where you will be next year, what kind of people will surround you, what kind of house you'll be living in, it's easy to imagine that anything is possible. Sure, it's possible that Freya will go to Stearn's in two years, but it's just as possible that she'll be in some school in Ohio that we've never heard of. Sure, it's possible that I'll get into Cornell, but it's just as possible that Nebraska will offer me a great assistantship and we'll pack it all up and head west.

The range of potential futures that confront me now are both freeing and frightening. I'm a planner, I like to know things. With a future so packed with individual paths, it has become impossible to see very far down any one of them. The only way for me to make sense of this is to convince myself not to care too much about any one outcome. I'm not used to - or very good at - taking things as they come, but it's actually pretty exhilarating.