life is a highway

This statement is truer than I ever believed. Life lessons I’ve learned from our recent 10-day, cross-country odyssey:

-Just because someone is yelling your name in your ear as loudly as he can does not mean you won’t hit a deer.

-Be sure of your driving ability before you go above 9000 feet in early October. Whether or not you can believe it, the temperature is below freezing up there. Pulling off the side of the road to change drivers isn’t very helpful when the sides of the road are slush-ice puddles. Angry words don’t help you get the car out of slush-ice puddles.

-Sometimes it will be a sunny, dry day. You’ll be able to see for miles up the highway, watch the scenery, sing road songs with the family, and feel invincible. More often, it will be nighttime. You’ll be the only one awake, visibility will be limited to the front edge of your headlights’ range, and there will be nothing but the monotonous sound of the tires and the endless oncoming road to keep you company. Sometimes when you’re desperately tired, fighting to keep your eyes open and your tires on the road, you can ask the other driver to trade places with you so you can nap. Sometimes he is exhausted too, and you have to go on alone.

-Some facts are indisputable. You cannot argue with a 5-year-old who needs to use the bathroom 10 minutes after her last stop. Well, I suppose you can, but if you don’t stop, and she’s right, I’m not cleaning up after her.

-Quality family time is like pomegranate juice. Encased in a whole bitter peel and lots of useless seeds’ worth of quantity time is the lovely red juice of joyous family memories. Spend all that time bickering, and you may eventually find yourselves standing in awe together looking out over Yellowstone Lake.

-The sign that says “Dense Fog Ahead” is no guarantee that, once you get into the dense fog, you won’t come across another sign that says, “Bridges May Be Icy”. Nor are both of those guarantees that you won’t come across another sign that says “High Winds Possible.” Keep your eyes on the white lines and hang on. The fog does end eventually. When it does, how much more grateful you’ll feel for simple night driving.

-Some parts of this earth were not meant for women. (Or girls.) On long stretches of Wyoming highway there are endless miles of bathroomlessness, restaurantlessness, and hotellessness. If you wanted to shoot yourself something to eat, sleep on the ground, and use all the open country as your “facilities”, Wyoming would welcome you. Otherwise, hold it, stay awake, eat granola bars and move on.

-There’s a point when all the novelty and fun of being on a road trip has worn off. You’re saddle-sore, worn out from trying to sleep straight up in your chair, weary of fried food and ketchup. Suddenly the place you were trying to get away from becomes the only place you want to be. Lots of lessons can be gathered on the long highway between here and there. But the really great thing about a road trip-and life-is that at the very end of the road is home.

too happy

“I’m too…happy,” a friend told me when I asked her if she’d written anything lately. “It’s hard to write when you have, happy husband, happy children, happy life…” I thought about her and her lack of writing-inducing angst this morning.

As the sun came up over the tall trees that form the rim of my world, I was walking back up the gravel driveway toward the house. It needs a new roof, I thought. The chickens need water, I thought. The kids’ll be up soon, I thought. Many things that need tending. Every day a day’s worth of the kind of work that makes lives run, builds the framework of memories.

Breathe in, breathe out. Wake up, go to sleep. Make meals, clean up. Wash clothes, wear them, wash them again. Nothing new, nothing earth-shattering. I’m with her. What’s to write about?

Only this:

-In my corner of Georgia summer has melted into fall. The air is cold at dawn and dusk, turning to crisp in between. All the outdoor projects that have waited through the blistering, steamy months are suddenly possible. I put lovely new paint on all my shutters one breezy afternoon this week.

-Today I sat on the edge of one of the garden boxes and planted the fall garden. (Don’t do as I have done, I’m very late.) Cabbage, kohlrabi, bok choi, brussels sprouts, turnips, radishes, lettuce. My toddler sang and shoveled soil out of the boxes onto the ground, and it was a lovely garden day. All we had to pay for this beautiful moment was four packs of seeds dumped on the kitchen floor and cabinets painted white with latex paint and a broom.

-I took some of those nasty boards from the dining room floor and sawed, sanded, screwed, painted them up into two picket-fence headboards for Katie’s room. Got them all in there, went to get the bed frames I had in the garage, and found that they’re not the kind of bed frames that have feet. So…now I have two pretty fences sitting against the wall in that room there and the kids are scratching their heads about their crazy mother.

So that’s it. Nothing particular is going on, but life as usual. Which all by itself is a blessing. I promise to let you all know when I have a moment’s worth of angst worth philosophizing over. But for now, it’s good, in its way, to be too happy to write.

baseball

A page torn out of the autumns of my childhood might show a picture something like this:

My mother and father have spread out a blanket on the hill overlooking the Little League field and the playground. All the other parents are sitting in the bleachers behind the field, but mine have nine children to watch, and most of them are swarming over the playground equipment.

We spent many, many evenings there. Most of us didn’t care about the ball game, content rather to swing as high as we could, play on the big rocks, and, when we thought our mother wasn’t looking, wade out into the cold Little Tennessee River. We always kept one eye on the game, though, watching for the two teams to make two lines and pass each other, hitting hands, repeating “good game, good game, good game.” That was our cue to come running from all corners of the park. That was time to go home.

During the rare times I would sit on the blanket and try to pick out one of my brothers on the ball field, I discovered something interesting about the two of them. One played baseball like it was the best, last thing he would ever do. He slid into bases, dove for the ball, lived and died with the score. The other was a dreamer. He’d stand, usually with his back to the game, in the far outfield, swinging his mitt, kicking the dirt, watching the sunset or a butterfly. Balls would roll by him, the game would go on around him, and he was in a world completely apart from all of it. He knew someone would tell him when the game was over.

Time, of course, went on, and Little League was left behind in the scrapbook of childhood. I think I can honestly say that I haven’t thought about those baseball games once in the years that separate me from them now. So it was rather a strange feeling to find myself standing this past Saturday, between the ball field and the playground, watching my own son play. How odd, I thought, to have walked back into this scene so precisely the way I left it. It was in a different town, a different state, but everything had been preserved exactly. The air smelled like honesuckle and sunscreen. The parents had the same expressions of concern when their sons were up to bat, and patience when they weren’t. There was the playground equipment, the children playing, and I turned toward the ball field to pick out my son.

There was his number, far in the outfield. I watched as he put one foot over the other, spun around, and stared away over the fields. I saw him kick the dirt, swing his mitt, start singing himself a song. It would seem that he will be that type of player, I thought.

It all reminded me so exactly of meeting back up with a relative that you realize (uncomfortably) that you hadn’t known was even still alive, but whose life has continued unchanged since you last met. It reminded me of an island I used to know in the river near my home, that never changed although the water always rushed around it.

The game ended, and the players lined up. Two teams of little boys marched past each other, hitting hands, muttering “good game, good game…”, and I knew it was time to go home. I shook my head at the strangeness, at the familiarity of it all. In its own special corner, untouchable by time or change, baseball lives on.

gotta get this off my chest

They say that 85% of women in the US are wearing the wrong size bra. Shocking. The other 15% must either work at or for Victoria’s Secret. So, assuming for just a moment that you are part of the 85% of American women who create this vast underprivileged class, let’s try and figure out, shall we, why this might be so.

You suddenly decide you need a new bra, for whatever reason. (Probably because yours suddenly became, or was always actually, the wrong size.) So in shame at your ignorance and self-neglect, you hang your head, get one of your girlfriends, and go on over to Victoria’s Secret to get yourself into the privileged class who wears the coveted Right Size. But wait! Be careful which of your friends you choose to take with you. The moment you walk into the store, a chipper (correctly-fitted) saleslady will come right over and slap her measuring tape right around both of you. And then, with a “you’ve just won the lottery” tone of voice, she’ll proclaim to each of you your perfect bra size. If you happen to be a relatively flat-in-the-front sister, and your friend happens to be on the buxom side, this pronouncement is sure to produce in both of you a vague sense of embarrassment that will make you both blush and turn away to pretend to be browsing around the merchandise. The merchandise almost always happens to be purple and black lace teddies, being found looking at which is sure to have the effect of increasing your confusion.

So you take the saleslady’s advice. Trying to find the blandest, whitest, most boring bra possible amid the strapless, backless, leopard-print ocean is an adventure all by itself. You finally find one that fits, go back and get another couple, glance at the price tag, and put back all but two. Then you go and collect your friend and the two of you check out, unable to meet each other’s eyes and hoping you won’t see each other for a few weeks.

Then you get your hard-won bras home. And because the punishment you endured simply procuring the bras wasn’t enough, the pink lettering on the bubble-gum pink satin tag reads, passive-aggressively enough, “Hand Wash. Drip Dry.” So sure, you can throw them in the family wash with the kids’ socks, but they won’t be responsible for the consequences.

So you do it anyway, and in a matter of months you’ve got a lumpy mess of a bra, are embarrassed going out in public, and are considering buying bras again. Sigh. You can’t take that friend, you’re just now starting to talk to each other again. So you try to buy bras online. Sure. They’ll come straight to the door in a lovely unmarked box. But you’ll have to go to the website to get them. At a time when your children aren’t standing around, because they will gape and point and you’ll sigh and weigh the cost of a smooth new bra against the psychological damage you’ve done to them, and leave bra shopping for another time. Because although YOU just came for a simple piece of sturdy underwear, all the come-eat-me women on those websites seem to have other ideas for you. (On second thought, those bras really don’t fit those women at all.)

So you’ve picked out the blah bra you want to purchase, but you’ve got to tell the website what size you are. So you take their cryptic instructions and go in the bathroom and try to wiggle yourself into the right position to get the right measurements while holding the door shut and shouting at the children who are banging on the door, “Really, dinner’s in just a few minutes, guys…” And you do not consider asking your husband for help in measuring yourself for a bra because he’s sure to completely miss the point.

Eventually, late at night, you do get all the right sizes in the right slots on the website and you’re sitting there with your credit card out and your husband saunters through and happens to see that you are buying something online. “SIXTY DOLLARS!?!” he shouts, his eyes bugging out, one hand grasping at his hair. “Why do you need a bra that costs SIXTY DOLLARS?”

So you put your credit card back and figure, well, I’m going to Wal-Mart this week for groceries, I’ll just get one while I’m there…

But you have to take all your children with you, and as soon as you’re crowded in that tiny dressing room, they will have forgotten that over the short little wall is another woman dressing, and over the next wall, another, and they can all hear everything you’re saying. You’ll remember the last time you went shopping for bathing suits and as soon as you took off your pants your toddler said, at the top of his lungs, “OH MOMMA, you have a BEAUTIFUL BACKSIDE!” And you’ll hold your breath and hope they hold theirs.

You try one on…it’s the wrong size, and you think you’ll go get another one, when one of them gets that thoughtful look on his face and winds up and shouts, “Momma! If you are a white woman and you wear white bras, do women who are BROWN have to wear BROWN BRAS?!?”

At which point, you throw the wrong-sized bra in your cart and leave the store as quickly as possible, vowing never to buy a bra again no matter what happens as long as you live. So I guess I can understand why you'd go along wearing the wrong size for so long. Because actually, given what a new bra costs, the old one fits just fine.

the reluctant malcontent

I sit on the piano bench early on a gray, drizzly morning, flanked by two not-yet-dressed children. I am playing Gounoud’s “Ave Maria”. It is delicate and beautiful. A prayer. The children beside me bang relentlessly on the high and low keys, until there is no way for my music to be heard. I stop, sigh, and look behind me at the house they’ve already trashed…again.

As a little girl, I was asked what I wanted to be someday. I always gave the response that I had been carefully taught to give, “I want to be a mom”. That satisfied everyone within my circle of acquaintance. As I grew, though, I began to realize that my parents expected me to go to college. I never asked why I needed a degree to be a mom. Suddenly my simple answer was no longer appropriate. You can’t go through high school saying you want to be a mom. So I layered over my childhood response a new one. “I want to be a landscape architect.”

I was the recipient of an odd sort of double injunction we give to little girls. "You can be whatever you want. But it would be best if you were a full-time mom." In this way we satisfy the feminine-rights part of our conscience, assuage the family-first part, and completely confuse a child.

When I did graduate from college, I stood outside the assembly hall in the beautiful spring day with a degree in one hand and a baby in the other. At that moment, there was a choice to make. Or was there, really? I could pursue a career in landscape design, coming home to my family at the end of the day, as millions of women do every day. To my family, and to myself, because I had been taught so from my cradle, that would have been a failure. On the other hand, I could choose to turn my back on the career world and become a full-time mother. Despite the difficulty and privation attendant to such a career choice, this, I was assured, spelled “success”.

Having walked neither of these paths before, I had to take the counsel of those with more experience. I chose to stay home with my child, and future children. Every day I do the work that it takes to raise a family. Every day I wash laundry, make meals, change diapers. And every day I think about the other women who had the same choice to make that I once did. How did it turn out for them? Did some of them choose, in the face of discouragement, to take a career, and discover that it wasn’t the hell everyone had said? Did some of them find another balance, perhaps part-time work, and still find the happiness that I had been promised?

Some days with my children are so difficult that I gaze longingly at the grass over on the other side of the fence. Some days I wish I were leaving the house to face challenges of another sort. My own challenges seem so threadbare sometimes. I don’t know anything about the lives of women before the “women’s lib” movement, but I wonder if having fewer options made them more or less content. Some days the grass seems so green over there I have my hand on the fence ready to jump over.

But I have a little box of treasures, for the trouble taken to be “just a mom”. There are long afternoons spent sitting on the porch doing nothing, petting the cats and discussing life. There are the comical faces of my little boys when they know they’ve been caught doing something they shouldn’t. There are all the hurts kissed, all the arguments settled with a hug, and all the naps taken with a snuggly baby face-down on my chest. Now, with the benefit of a few years’ experience, I choose for myself to be here, at home with my children. I choose these treasures.

So I turn back from the fence, put my fingers back on the piano keys, and begin again to play. I am accompanied by the exuberant poundings of my future virtuosos. We are squeezed together on the bench, our elbows banging, fingers tangling together. And I know, once again, that this is the place for me. The sun breaks through the clouds, filling the room with light, and our prayer ascends to heaven.

fighting hunger

I hide to eat. I actually eat in hiding. Sound like some bizarre eating disorder? Before you come running over to my house for an intervention, let me explain.

Most people’s appetites are (I assume) set to “eat until you are no longer hungry”. My children’s appetites are set to “eat until there is nothing left.” Regardless of the amount of food available, they will consume with unbelievable frenzy until they’re certain that there’s no possibility of any of them getting a larger portion than any other. It’s never a matter of there not being enough to go around. I just don’t think they came with a hunger-stop mechanism.

So they eat all day, every day. They eat their breakfast, and before I can finish putting the dishes in the dishwasher, they’re begging for a snack. And so on until lunch, and then after that until dinner. Dinner comes and goes, and the vacuum cleaners are still set on Turbo Suck. Then they have to have a couple of snacks before bed, and in the morning they wake up starving like they’ve never eaten before.

And my job, faced with this kind of steam-engine fire, is to stand in the dark and speeding belly of the train and shovel coal endlessly into its insatiable flames. But if the woman shoveling coal dies, the whole train stops, so sometimes I do have to eat. So when the food is finally ready, and the children who have been clinging to my legs unlatch and make a dash for the dining room, I load up plates, throw them on the table, and run. Because by the time I get back to the kitchen to make myself a plate, and return to the dining room with it, there will be four expectant faces over four empty plates wondering who gets what I’ve just brought. If I actually put the plate on the table, it’s as good as giving it to whomever can get across the table and to my plate the fastest.

So I don’t even go back. I load up everyone’s plates, including mine, take all theirs to the dining room, go back and get mine, and slip around the corner to hold my dish in the air and inhale my food. That way I can actually eat, without the reproachful looks of all the starving children who can’t actually be starving at all. That way I can have food that is at least halfway hot before I have to go back and dish out a second round.

And so I wonder, as I throw back my bowl of morning oatmeal, standing alone in a corner just out of sight, if they would ever actually eat everything that’s available and leave me to starve completely to death. Surely not. I’m overreacting. I’ll just go in and sit down and act like a civilized parent. So I do. I take my first helping and gingerly set it down among the remnants of their third, and they look up at me and say, “Are you going to eat that?”

ballet

There are two TVs in the waiting room of the local dance studio. This past Tuesday night, one of them showed a room full of advanced-dancer teenagers. They wore cutoff shorts, knee length tights, and one-shoulder T-shirts, and stood slouching around the room looking disinterested. Then their teacher turned on the dance music and they snapped into a precision team, executing a well-oiled routine.

As the small group of mothers watched the TVs, the dance studio owner spun for us the tales of each teenager’s woes. This one’s brother had lied to his parents about her. That one was grounded from driving her parents’ car. And the hormones, she said. The hormones!

On the other TV was a room full of little girls in pink and purple leotards, hair pulled tightly back, nervously watching their teacher in their first ever ballet lesson. My daughter was in that room. The little girls stood in a straight row, and I watched as their teacher taught them first position, then second position, and they all held their hands just so…except one. Katie couldn’t do first position hands, second position hands, because she had to play with her skirt.

She’d been dancing that afternoon ever since I finally said, “Okay. It IS time to go to ballet now.” She danced while she ate, danced as we did her hair, danced her way into and out of the car. She’d been singing, “I haaave a purple leotard and piiiink tights…” But as soon as she put on her brand new purple leotard with silver swirls and a purple skirt attached, her hands had not been off that skirt. Nor, it appeared from the waiting room TV, were they ever during her first ballet lesson.

At least from what I could see on the practice room hidden camera, Katie’s first ballet lesson appeared to be every inch the little girl party she’d been begging for for months. They danced in beautiful, heartbreaking, awkward lines and circles. I glanced at the other TV, knew that only time separated those two rooms full of girls, and felt relieved that Katie was still in the pink and purple room. I felt a little guilty about feeling that way, a little smug in my custodianship of an unspoiled little girl, and grateful for the years between now and then.

The classes ended, the TV screens cleared of dance students, and Katie returned to me, flushed and happy. I asked her how her class was, and she said breathlessly, “I want to go home and sleep and when I wake up, come back and do ballet until I get tired again, and every day I want to do ballet!” And I was walking to the car with her, there in that beautiful little-girl moment, and thinking, how simple and wonderful the world is when a purple leotard will make you completely happy. I think that the purple leotard had almost made me completely happy, when she stopped and turned to me there on the sidewalk, hands on her hips, and laid this one on me.

“Madeline has a princess backpack and mine is only pink. Why do you want me not to have a princess backpack and just to have a pink one?" The accusation in her voice completely shrank me. Popped my purple-leotard bubble. And then I realized maybe I got a little carried away. All that growing up? Maybe it’s not going to take as long as I think.