deep breath

tonight in my (all female) book club we're reading the conflict: how modern motherhood undermines the status of women by elisabeth badinter.

i'm taking a deep breath.

reading this book was extremely trying.

sometimes i felt affirmed because badinter makes a good point:  the expectations placed on bourgeois mothers can seem (needlessly) herculean (asking us to go well beyond our biological imperative of procreating and surviving), and when the outcomes of your efforts don't match the (herculean) efforts you put forth, you're left wondering

what?

i breastfed!

i used cloth diapers!

i didn't put my kid in childcare!

i hated every minute of doing puzzles on the floor/pushing them on the swings, but i did it anyway.

& now that i have raised a couple of kids, i wonder how much anything i ever did mattered anyway.

was i right to forego a full career?  was that to their benefit or detriment?  would they have benefitted more from seeing me happier and more empowered?

would i have been happier/more empowered with a full time career?

& how about some of the incredibly demeaning experiences i had trying to work and breastfeed, or trying to work in (many!!!) workplaces where bosses and co-workers thought i would be uncommitted/flaky because i had (too many!!!!) children.

oh the tales i could tell.  maybe i will when i'm not feeling so bruised.

(and also guilty for feeling bruised--after all, i have a lot less to complain about than most mothers who have ever walked the earth.)

so, i'm really interested to hear what my peers have to say about this book.  they're all mothers, and several of them have high-powered careers while others have done beautiful full-time work creating homes and being great parents.

(i've done part-time, semi-crappy work both at home and in the work-place.)

and one of them is french, so she can give insight about badinter's assertions that french women have a legacy of separating maternity from motherhood that makes them less prone to be oppressed by cultural expectations of motherhood (as evidenced, in large part, by their low breastfeeding rates in spite of the large presence of la leche league ((those "ayatollahs of breastfeeding", as badinter calls them)) in france.)

so i'm interested.  i really am.

but i'm also a little scared, a little reluctant, and a little nauseated, frankly, by the lacuna--the void--the realization that there seems to be no answer, no solution, at all.

what was bliss but the ordinary life?

poet rita dove

how long it took me to make peace with the incessant and fast cycling pattern of chaos and order involved in keeping house.

how long it took me to figure out that the minutia, the quotidana, were the real stuff of life--so much more of that stuff, that mundane stuff, than of the so-called major events.

this week has been one of restoring order to my mind, house, family, work, and health after a period of debauchery, depression, and loss of faith in the small things that make life work.

for instance:

1) ingrid cleaned the "hair drawer".  this is a space that gets much use in a household of five girls/women.  it contains brushes, headbands, elastics, gel, mousse and hairspray, barrettes.  but over the year it also began to contain: my 2008 planner, 7 dead batteries, gum, turkish currency, black lipstick, 12 bottles of dried up nail polish, one fake eyelash, and so on.  it is now neat and orderly.

2) i cleaned my dressing table (the top and underneath).  it contained old multiple copies of manuscripts (a whole box) a stack of things i should always instantly recyle, such as the sarah lawrence alumni magazine, kid art, receipts, single earrings, and at least a dozen dried up bottles of nail polish.  it is now clean and dusted.

3) i submitted 14 poetry manuscripts this week.  haven't done any submission since february.  i don't get acceptances that often.  i try to feel okay about that, to keep writing and sending anyway, just like i keep filling and emptying my kitchen sink.

4) saw friends last night and at lunch today.  so nice.  i forgot how good people are, and how lucky i am to know these particular friends.  i get too introverted without realizing it.  i need to make myself externalize more often.  this is part of my love of the color red--it reminds me not to retreat to far into the tar pit of my soul. . . .

5) reading tons and tons of poetry throughout the day, every day.  never have i read so much, simply for pleasure, wonderment and comfort.  i came across this piece today, and it seemed to connect with today's thoughts.  rita dove was the first poet i ever heard read at arizona state university, where she was teaching, when i was 18, and hers was the first book of contemporary poetry i ever owned.  i still like her work a lot.

“I have been a stranger in a strange land”

by Rita Dove

Life's spell is so exquisite, everything conspires to break it.

Emily Dickinson

It wasn't bliss. What was bliss   

but the ordinary life? She'd spend hours   

in patter, moving through whole days   

touching, sniffing, tasting . . . exquisite   

housekeeping in a charmed world.   

And yet there was always   

more of the same, all that happiness,   

the aimless Being There.   

So she wandered for a while, bush to arbor,   

lingered to look through a pond's restive mirror.   

He was off cataloging the universe, probably,   

pretending he could organize   

what was clearly someone else's chaos.   

That's when she found the tree,   

the dark, crabbed branches   

bearing up such speechless bounty,   

she knew without being told   

this was forbidden. It wasn't   

a question of ownership—   

who could lay claim to   

such maddening perfection?   

And there was no voice in her head,   

no whispered intelligence lurking   

in the leaves—just an ache that grew   

until she knew she'd already lost everything   

except desire, the red heft of it   

warming her outstretched palm.

summer symptoms & a little reflection

the shrine at the hell's backbone grill gardens in boulder, utah

i'm feeling that familiar anxiety, the existential anxiety of freedom, that i've experienced every summer for as far back as my memory extends.

the hours a week where i have to be somewhere to do my job are drastically reduced, but the number of projects and work i want/need to do are mounting.  i really miss having to be at work.  i'm a weirdo.

this is a nice problem to have, i know, and i don't want to sound ungrateful for the luxury of this kind of life.  i probably do anyway.

one thing i've loved about daily blogging this year is the little bit of structure it puts into my day, and even if it's not clear why i'm doing this, or for whom, i still do it anyway.

so, thank you world, readers, technology, & julie for the opportunity.

the lessons i'm trying to learn/re-learn come from yoga (sorry i'm such a yoga nerd), and this blogging project in particular seems to reinforce some of the teachings:

1) gaze at the tip of your nose.  my yoga teacher says this.  i think it means to stay present and focus on your own actions and no one else's.  (is this the same as "stay on your mat?")  this is probably most important for me.  i tend to think too far ahead, get tripped up by fears of the future and regrets of the past, and to compare myself to others too frequently.  beginning to work through this has been a profound experience for me.

2) practice, practice, practice.  for as long as you live.  every day is different, every day is practice, and arriving at a static point means you're dead.

3) falling is learning. for me this is a strong lesson because i used to think that falling was failing, and now i think it's progress, a step towards overcoming fear, a move towards the embrace of risk.  in poetry writing,  i feel like my best work happens when, at the moment of writing,  i think i'm doing something totally stupid, weird, or wrong, but i do it anyway, even if i'm scared.  my best work comes from not rejecting scary practices.

legwear:  bare, with the striped dress i wear too much.  at least i didn't wear yoga pants all day again today.

inspiration:  yoga teachings and daily blogging, whether i'm in the mood to blog or not

looking forward: to the provo farmer's market on saturday, my first one of the season & eating street tacos, tortillas hecho a mano.

the artist is present, or, present for president's day

from marina abramovic's rhythm 10

the artist is present slideshow

what am i doing for president's day weekend (besides being a widow while c. is in ny seeing, among other people, julie, eva and ingrid?)

jeez, i had "forgotten" it was a long weekend.  and do you know why?  because i utterly despise the long weekend, usually floundering about in the limbo of not working but not really playing either.   that is, if i'm not in a full-blown existential spiral. 

i just can't handle days off, people.  does anyone share in my existential terror of not knowing what to do?

in honor of this, i'll write briefly about something that's been a theme in the blog and in my life this week.  first, we've discussed all this hocus-pocus about "being present", "staying on the mat", and living "day by day." & don't get me wrong, i'm fully into that stuff, but not without a bit of self-consciousness about the amount of privilege and luxury one must have in one's life to need to be concerned about these questions of choice that are so frequent in my life.  and the attendant dissatisfaction that seems to come with too much choice (that's a whole 'nother blog post).  and, you know, "being present" has become a buzzphrase of the educated middle class.  it makes me feel all bougie to even discuss it.

still, it's the educated middle class that seems to have the biggest problem with, shall we say, "presence" (and does presence mean the same thing as something like soul, or spirit?  methinks yes.)

there was another bisecting theme for me this week, and that was marina abramovic, who recently had the smashing success of a show "the artist is present" at the moma where she sat for eight hours a day, no movement, no potty or food or drink breaks, across the table from various strangers and was just there.  present. 

julie was present, too, at some of the performances, and i think it was j. who got me interested in abramaovic.  anyway, i've been writing poems about her, and i just finished a group of five today (i mean, finished the revisions on them--i've been working on them for a few weeks) and realized that maybe abramovic interests me so much because a lot of her work is about presence.  her performance is very extreme, painful, dangerous and some might say masochistic.  she claims she does it to be in the moment.  she used to forbid re-performances of her pieces because they were all about the moment for her, though she's changed her mind about that.

i guess i don't have a point except to wonder how many other people have my same aversion to holidays (especially the ones where you don't have a prescribed set of rituals to perfrom) or what y'all think about this whole notion of presence.

and p.s. i'm linking my early post on larry rivers' "washington crossing the delaware"--very different from the american classic hanging in the met (image in julie's post from today)--in honor of the prezes.

my short list goes like this (not at all fun like julie's)

1) work on grant app.
2) revise poems from mss.
3) fold laundry
4) do something kids want to do that i hate, like ice skating
5) finish season 2 of sons of anarchy

legwear:  bare--i'm already in bed in my nightie!

inspiration:  marina a.

looking forward: to yoga and donut run tomorrow morning.

when i die

i don't want to have regrets, though it seems like that's part of the process of dying.

i spent the day ruminating on whether or not i am spending my life in the right way. normally i'm pretty much an existentialist, and i try to accept that it's up to me to make my choices into meaningful ones.

but sometimes i get obsessed about the "right way."

today i was haunted.

tomorrow is a new day, and i look forward to it,

& to living so je ne regret pas.

one thing i don't regret was a QUADRUPLE recipe of Artisinal's fantastic macaroni and cheese for the big girls' "return to college" farewell dinner party. i baked it in an enormous cast iron pan--it probably weighed 30 pounds--and warning: the gruyere and marscapone and parmesean costs a million dollars.

legwear: i wore my nightgown all day. showered and changed just in time for dinner. it was a tough day, but a great night.