Other Duties as Shall Be Required: A Mother's Work

Every morning, I pull out a 3 X 5 index card from a bulldog clipped deck, uncap my black felt-tipped pen, fire up my online calendar, and make my to-do list. Some items on the list are mandatory: keep a deadline or appointment, pay a bill, pick up kids. Others are more like the Pirate's Code; to be thought of only as suggestions. It's a given that some of them will be carried over to tomorrow's list, or the next day's, or the next day's, until the action has either been done, or done without.

While I was writing my book, the daily notation to "finish Chapter ___" loomed so large, it made the other to-do's seem manageable by comparison, even if I wasn't actually managing them very well. But with the focus off my manuscript--at least until I get the next round of edits--I've been amazed at how much work goes into keeping a household running--just functioning, I mean, never mind extras like decorating, entertaining, or deep cleaning. As Betty Friedan observed in the Feminine Mystique, housework will always expand to fit all available time and space. How ever much time you're willing to give it, is as much time as it takes.

I've had a little bit of time to give it these past two weeks, and I've mostly enjoyed the novelty of being able to check off a few more items from the list each day. But I'm well aware that the list is self-regenerative; that it's up to me to make sure big things don't get crowded out by the little ones. If you have to fill a jar with large stones and small pebbles, goes the analogy, put the large stones in first. The pebbles will fit into the spaces around them. It's harder to find space for the big stuff when you've already filled the day with inconsequential things.

Of course, the making of a home is not inconsequential. As Karen reminds me, it can be a profound discipline. I only have to sit in my friend Pearl's house to be reminded how essentially and immersively creative it can be. If homemaking is your vocation, I think it is a noble one. But it's not everyone's calling, nor is everyone who feels called to it, in a position to pursue it as such. I realize I am extraordinarily privileged to have the choice to be at home as much as I am -- or so I try to remind myself when driving around on a 90 degree spring day in a seven year-old minivan with a broken air conditioner. I could always be driving a new car back and forth to an office job, and working 40-plus hours a week. Lots of moms work outside the home full-time, by choice, necessity, or both. Like my friend Amy.

On Monday, after a full morning of making appointments, filling out paperwork, making the week's budget and menu plans, and the bare minimum of housework, I had an afternoon's worth of errands to run before picking up the kids from school. One of them took me near Amy's office, so we went for lunch. I told her how busy my days have been since wrapping up my book.

"When do you do all this stuff?" I asked her. I was genuinely baffled. I know she doesn't get home until six most nights. If you earn enough money, you can outsource some things, like the cleaning. But the administrative aspect of mothering --the calendar keeping, the appointment making, the planning, the financial management and the unbelievable amount of paperwork--you need to be a celebrity or CEO with a personal assistant to outsource that kind of thing. Or you have a wife who stays on top of it.

How do you it, I asked her. But what I meant was, how do we do it? How does any mom--whatever acronym she uses to describe her place of employment--manage the work of running a home, so much of which is taken for granted by society? How do you manage? What are the big things for you, what do you think of as the small stuff, and what's the stuff that falls between the cracks? What are the choices you've made, or the choices you wish you could make, about working inside or outside the home?

Bring out your jar of days. Show me how it's filled.

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Pulling it Together

I wake up in a field of forget-me-nots, blooming all over the walls of my niece's room. Beyond them, the house stirs, softly at first with my sister and brother-in-law's muffled voices, then comes wide awake with children's chatter, like a flock of starlings swirling in the hall. I reach for my phone to check the time. Five in the morning in Arkansas. Half-past seven in Newfoundland. I face the open closet door in my mind. Which panic attack to wear this morning? The so very late final chapters of my book? The scholarly talk I'm scheduled to deliver here on Friday, and have yet to write? Tax returns waiting for me when I get home next week? Choose one, I tell myself. You can't wear it all. Oh but I can try, says my frantic brain, like my little niece running up and down the stairs last night to put one more adornment on to show Auntie.

Wait. Just one more thing. Adding the tiara, the bracelet, the high heel shoes I sent her at Christmas time, one sprint at a time. Auntie Kiki, Auntie Kiki, see this. She twirls and then waits for my praise.

So beautiful, darling. Perfect.

Wait. One more thing.

Her satin heels clattering over the stairs. The breathless return. The offering of self. The self-appraisal. The little frown.

Always one more thing between us and our most pleasing, perfect selves. Always, the same damn set of stairs.

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Dare.

Notre Dames des Victoires, Quebec

Did you know there was a sequel to the Artist's Way, an "intermediate" course for people who are doing their art? Neither did I. It's called Walking in this World, and I'm listening to an abridged version from audible.com. (Did you know about audible.com? You should.) I hate abridgments, but I don't have time or attention span for the workbook right now, so I'll settle for the gist.

So far, it's reminding me of all kinds of things I'd sort of forgotten. Like the power of audacity, how the universe inclines itself toward daring like a satellite dish toward a clear and strong signal. I shouldn't need reminding. In the time since I began this blog, my life has been manifest evidence of that truth. I've been going back through my archives a lot in the shaping of this book and I come across posts that make me cringe. I've really put it out there sometimes: hope, hurt, fear, desire. Did I really put out an a.p.b. for my dream agent and editor? And did I really pray that I wouldn't have to go get a job, even as I was getting form rejection letters and our home was about to be foreclosed on?

Gah, says the inner critic. I can't believe you did that. Let's take it all down when the book comes out, and hope no one remembers what a dope you were.

But the dreams came true. The prayers were answered.

Well, don't push your luck.

I don't think it was luck.

The book could be a flop.

I know.

There are others who are more deserving of the opportunity.

Without a doubt.

And you're fat.

Thank you, that will be all.


I believe in the law of attraction, though not in the way The Secret describes. It's not as simple as cause and effect. But something shifts when you say what it is you really want. Things start happening. I'm beginning to think that the internet has a way of amplifying those signals. All around, I see people emboldened to "put it out there": plucky life lists, passionate opinions, audacious schemes. I think of these posts as little down payments. They leverage big dreams. And not just for one dreamer. Lives are being changed. It revises the idea of what is possible--what, really, is asking for too much?

I bet every one of those posts were composed while an inner critic shrieked "Don't you dare!" They dared. So should everyone dare to get behind their dreams. Why you? Why not you? To paraphrase the guy who paraphrased Goethe*, whatever it is you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. And maybe blog it.

---

*The full quote is "Whatever you do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it." Apparently, Goethe never wrote it. But as they say with regard to the authorship of Shakespeare, whoever did was a genius.

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Push

When I get to the end of writing this book, I could probably write another on the process alone. I am having to draw on every tool I have to manage the pressure, the self-doubt, the self-criticism, the infinite self-made distractions, and every other challenge my internal saboteur can conjure. Maybe I'll develop a quest-style video game: So You Think You Can Write.

A teacher of mine used to say self-awareness happens in a spiral. You think you've dealt with an issue, only to find you've got to work on it all over again at the next level. I must have heard it, and preached it, a hundred times. And still, I've been so surprised to meet enemies of creativity I thought I'd vanquished a long time ago. They've gotten much sneakier while they've been laying low.

It's taking everything I've got to keep moving past them: deep breathing, white noise, a lot of caffeine, a little alcohol, chocolate, and a whole lot of prayer. It's barely enough. But maybe the prayers leveraged some kind of cosmic cheat code. Last week, I came across this thoughtfully written piece, drawing on some of the principles of The Artist's Way. I've written about my recovery from creative jealousy myself, and if you've hung around here for a while, you've probably come across my big prescription pad that is preprinted with that title. I recommend it liberally to everyone. I whipped that pad out again as I shared the envy post on Kirtsy and Facebook, so glad to be cured, myself.

Some people get the sudden epiphany, the burning bush. I don't, and even if I did, I'd probably be all, "Do you smell something burning?" and walk right past it. I mean, it takes me a while to realize that the finger is not just held out for me to sniff, but is actually pointing somewhere. I linked to that post in three places before it occurred to me to ask myself what I have been envious of recently. Like I said, the enemy gets sneakier. It's easy to identify envy in the form of covetousness. Contempt and cynicism (addendum: let's throw in cleverness) are its more sophisticated guises, and unfortunately, they blend in perfectly with the zeitgeist.

Of what or whom I was envious is beside the point. What it pointed to, as the Artist's Way teaches and as the blog post reminded me, is that I have been depriving myself of two very powerful and very basic tools of creative life: play and kinship. AW calls them "the artist's date" and "sacred circle." I have a really hard time with phrases like that, the way my cousin Erika refuses to order gimmicky menu items by name. And that's okay, as long as neither of us starves over it. A little irony is good ballast for flights of imagination. But you don't want so much that you can't budge.

I could stand to cut a sandbag or two loose. I take time to relax and socialize, but how often do I really play? I have wonderful people in my life, but how much do I let myself lean? Not often. Not much. Not lately. I would like to learn to do more of both.

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Return to Me

If you are going to stay away from home for four years, you have to come back long enough to shed your own strangeness. A week is only sufficient to remind you how much you've grown away from your roots. A nice place to visit, you think. But it's true what they say, you can't go home again. By week two, the place begins to feel less like an artifact, and more like a living place that exists independently of your own history. People live here, you realize. Out of choice. You chose differently. You wonder why and what if.

Somewhere after the third week, you come home. Every morning, you laugh at the three pairs of high heel shoes in your suitcase. Whose are those? What was she thinking? You walk around the corner to your sister's house in your flats, across a lane that descends at a 60 degree angle to the bay. Your hair is as wild as seaweed in a churning sea. The styling products you brought languish in your luggage, rendered useless by the salt air and wind. Forgotten words and phrases drift into your speech, roll off your tongue smooth as beach glass.

Last night I came back to Innisfree, the land my grandparents lived on, and where my parents had a cottage during my growing up years. The sign gives it another name now, and rental chalets stand in the old orchard. The cottage is gone, as is the house my grandfather died in. But the tall grass still grows in the upper meadow, the birches still stand, the hedge of wild roses still blooms. The river goes on and on, the ashes of my grandmother and father mingled in the silt beneath.

I know every root, branch and hollow as well as I know the lines of my own palm. I pressed my bare soles to the soil. Dug my fingers into the clay. I've come come back to you, I whispered through the birches. Come back to me.

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Can you hear me NOW?

I guess I'm going to Memphis. Because of the 3X rule.

The 3X rule is this: if I get three unrelated nudges about something, I sit up and pay attention.

*

Nudge one: I caught a sale online the other day for restaurant gift certificates. It was such a great deal, I broadened my search beyond my own postal code, and wound up buying one for a sushi joint in Memphis.

"WHY?" said Patrick, when I boasted of my scoop. "We don't live in Memphis."

Well, I had noticed.

"We might," I ventured. Memphis is two and a half hours from Little Rock. We used to go all the time before kids, but the last time I drove across the Mississippi was two summers ago.

**

Nudge two: later that day, I had a message from a Facebook friend in Canada. She's going to be in Memphis for two weeks this month, and would love to see me.

I'd love to hang out with her, too, but we are going on vacation ourselves at the end of June, and my schedule is tight. I said I would try.

***

Nudge three: I wrote the previous post this morning, about the saga of trying to buy my new macbook. Two of you told me I should go to the Apple store in Memphis.

****
I came home and placed an order with apple.com instead. Called my bank to be sure the debit transaction would clear. I hit "send order."

A freakishly sudden storm came up and blew out our internet at that precise moment.

What part of GO TO MEMPHIS do you not understand, exactly? said the universe.

Alright. Okay. I get it.

Not really. But a full explanation up front isn't part of the 3X rule.

So I guess I'm going to Memphis sometime pretty soon. I'll let you know what I find there.

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Forcefields Down

It was just she and I in the waiting room of the optometrist's office. We sat down one seat apart and pulled out our mobile devices, electronic umbilici, connecting us to our children, mothers, mates, friends, colleagues, calendars. The connections we've chosen to nourish.

What if we were stuck here by ourselves, I wondered. Just us, the receptionist, and the Bass Angler spring catalog strewn on the chair between us? Would we make contact? Small talk? It was late in the afternoon. Small talk with strangers costs energy. I was glad not to have to spend any. I checked my email, mapped my son's bike route to a playdate, read Facebook updates.

"Okay, Kyran, come with me." I startled. I am old enough to have grown accustomed to being called by my last name in waiting rooms. It felt too intimate. Fresh, was the word that came to mind, followed by, who are you, the Queen Mother? Get over yourself. But I was cool to him, trying to patch the hole in the wall before it got larger. PLEASE TURN OFF CELL PHONES the sign in the pre-exam room said. Forcefield down.

"You're a writer," he observed cheerfully, looking at my chart. There's about a three minute script that follows this opening statement, and I should get down on my knees every time and praise Jesus, Allah, Shiva and William Randolph Hearst for my lines in it. Today's performance was so lackluster, I should have been sacked on the spot, and an understudy brought out from the supply closet.

"I'm sorry," the assistant said finally, after a series of one-word answers. "I just think that's so interesting."

"No, it's okay," I stammered, totally chagrined. "It really is. It's a great gig." I peeped out through the hole in my wall and smiled, but the pre-exam was over.

"The Doctor will be with you in just a second."

***

"Is this better? "This?"

Dr. So-and-So didn't mention the writing. Usually this means they don't know/don't care. Sometimes it means they already know everything. From time to time, I encounter a stranger whose end of the conversation is so conspicuously absent of certain standard small talk questions, I know they've probably read the blog.

I doubt Dr. So-and-So has, but I wondered, because his conversation was pointedly political. Bookended by discussion of summer vacation plans, punctuated by refrains of "this better or this," he let me know exactly where he stood on the automobile industry bailout, taxes, Mexico, and government in general. Did he know he was talking to a bleeding heart liberal? Because it sort of sounded like maybe he did.

Earlier today, I posted a twitter update expressing my alarm over extremist elements in this country breeding hatred and violence, prompted by yesterday's murder of a doctor in his church, allegedly as an act of protest against abortion. Depending when you read this, that thought may still be displayed in the sidebar. It's hyperbole to suggest that events leading up to the Rwanda genocide in 1994 are comparable to what's happening here with ultra-conservative broadcasters, record sales of firearms and one, deranged act of violence. You could argue I was spreading a little terror on my own.

The fact is, I don't listen to those radio shows. I don't read those websites. I don't know personally know anyone, pro-life or pro-choice, arms or no arms, who thinks socialists are coming for their guns and that a person who shoots someone like that is anything but unhinged. I don't hang out, online or in the flesh, with any of the people referred to as the "subculture."

I don't like that word, "subculture." It's too close to "subhuman." It's the dehumanizing of others that allows events like Sunday's murder, and genocide, and all of man's cruelty to man, to happen. And our marvelous electronic umbilici that connect us ever more with those we choose, keep us ever more apart from those we don't choose. Make them ever more "other."

Someday soon we won't have to go to an office to have our eyes examined. We won't have to make small talk with strangers in the waiting room, or the assistants, or doctors. We will be buffered even more than we are now from people whose appearance, mannerisms or beliefs make us uncomfortable. We won't have to push through our own pre-occupations to smile and connect with someone we don't know. We won't have to be confronted with the humanity of someone whose politics are threatening to our own values. We won't have to realize that they still love their families and take vacations and crave lobster like we do. There will fewer and fewer occasions for us to stray outside our chosen communities, to question our own certainties, to find what binds "us" to "them." Unless we try.

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Before blogs, we had to transmit wisdom using the inside cover of our algebra books.

"I must learn to love the fool in me--the one who feels too much, talks too much, takes too many chances, wins sometimes and loses often, lacks self-control, loves and hates, hurts and gets hurt, promises and breaks promises, laughs and cries. It alone protects me against that utterly self-controlled, masterful tyrant whom I also harbor and who would rob me of human aliveness, humility, and dignity but for my fool." -- Theodore I. Rubin, MD

Provenance: Maggie Mason's post, begat by Joanna Goddard's post, begat by Creature Comforts post. Thanks to all for passing these words intact to me. Never break the chain.

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All the Lonely People

A few weeks before Christmas, we dropped in on a holiday party, where friends were gathering to watch the fireworks that cap off Little Rock's annual Santa Claus parade. It was the house of merry and bright, heady with fragrant mulled wine, jammed to the corners with kids and adults, cookie crumbs and a smile on every pair of lips.

It was enchanting, in the true sense of that cheapened word.

I could have stayed for hours, but Patrick was hungry for more than gingerbread, so after the fireworks we took the kids for dinner at a favorite restaurant, Doe's Eat Place. Doe's is something of a local landmark. It was written up in Rolling Stone and People magazines as the unofficial headquarters of the first Clinton presidential campaign. Like certain people in that campaign, the joint has a low-brow seediness that suggested authenticity and character at the time, but now reads as a little decrepit (you decide whether we're talking about Clinton or Carville). But the steak and tamales are still damn good.

And pricey. We go about once a year, splitting a T-bone between us, sharing the toast and fries with the kids, catching up with the manager, a friend of ours, if she happens to be in. The steaks are enormous, and there is always plenty enough leftover for steak and eggs the next morning, with hash browns made from the leftover fries.

Just down the street, there is a Salvation Army homeless shelter. Dusk was coming on. Little Rock winters are not generally cruel, but it was no night to sleep on the street. People were starting to gather in front of the doors as we passed. The string of happy, colored light wound around my spirits began to dim.

As we took our seats, and looked at the menus, I began mentally calculating what it would cost to bring all those people outside the Salvation Army doors inside for a steak dinner and all the trimmings. Maybe fifty or sixty of them, at most, at fifty dollars a person? I did the math. Three thousand dollars or so? Beyond my reach certainly, but not beyond the realm of philanthropic dreaming. You'd have to rent out the whole restaurant, of course. And then there's the question of what to do about alcohol. It would be nice to pour everyone a decent wine, but that might be doing some more harm than good. And there's no doubt that imaginary five grand would go a lot further in the hands of a worthy aid agency.

And then my bulbs started to short and burn out. Because I wanted to give my poor imaginary friends so much more than a steak dinner. I wanted to give them a warm house party to go to, filled with friends they loved and people who smiled to see them come in. I wanted to give them children's mittened hands to hold while they watched fireworks and sipped something warm and spicy. I wanted to send them and their doggie bags to a home where they would wake up to fries and onions cooking and coffee brewing. A kiss good morning and the newspaper waiting.

I couldn't do the math for that.

I'm no saint. I didn't want to take one of those people and their problems home with me. I know a little bit about the kinds of circumstances that lead people to fall between society's cracks. I know something about mental illness, and addiction, and the kind of holes in a soul that money, and even love, won't fill.

It's so overwhelming, this question of need. I think my response to it is pretty typical of most people. I don't have the answer, so I shut down. I forget that it isn't yes or no, all or nothing.

As with most things I forget, I've got my kids to help remind me. There's a freeway exit we use where there's almost always someone standing with a sign asking for money. Sometimes, rarely, I've rolled down the window and given some. Most times, I idle uncomfortably waiting for the light to change, averting my eyes, pretending not to notice. Then I began to notice the kids not noticing.

The capacity to feel pain is a terrible thing. I have a few choice words about it for whomever's in charge. But the capacity to not feel it is a thousand times worse. If those are my only two choices —and if they are, let me register my strongly worded complaint —I'll go with feeling it. I want my kids to have compassion, to feel, even and maybe especially in the face of their own helplessness to fix another person.

Lately, when we've pulled up next to the panhandlers on the freeway exit, I've started saying aloud what's running through my mind.

"Look at that person with the sign. I wonder what his story is, if he is really hungry, or if he wants money for drugs. I wonder why some people are hungry and homeless. I don't really know what the best thing is to do in these situations. Sometimes I give a little money, even if they do spend it on drugs or alcohol. Sometimes I give money or clothes to an organization that knows better how to help people in need. I don't know. I wish this wasn't a problem."

And so on. A lesson in the math that never adds up.

And then I say, "What do you think?"

And they don't know the answer either. It hurts. But it feels so much better than pretending not to see.

On Martin Luther King Day, the boys and I took our new President up on his challenge to honor the day with an act of service. It was nothing grand or even difficult, and talking about it here cancels out any Brownie points I might have earned otherwise. We had a couple of gift cards, traded them in on a few warm blankets and some canned wieners, and brought them to that Salvation Army shelter. Hardly steak dinners for the masses. Not enough to save the world, or heal even one wounded soul.

Except maybe, just a little bit, our own.

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Crooked Road

I've been craving a moment of quiet so I can write down some goals and intentions for the New Year, but quiet fled out the back door when the kids came home from the last day of school and isn't expected back until Monday.

I've become a believer about being specific about the things I want to happen. As a departure point, anyway. Life seems to unfold along a course that lies outside the familiar highways and byways of my imagination, but I figure you've got to start somewhere, or you don't get anywhere.

My resolutions are an itinerary written in pencil, not ink.

This year, one goal has to do with relationships. I've got a decreasing amount of time spread across an increasing number of people, and I'd like to find the magic ratio for tending the relationships that matter most, while staying open to the new ones.

Then there's the usual "exercise more, eat less, live better" darts thrown up on the map.

I guess they are all coordinates in the eternal quest for balance.

Somewhere, I read or heard the idea that a life in motion is necessarily one of perpetual imbalance. Just as we shift our weight from side to side in order to walk, ambulating through life requires us to sway back and forth. Balance isn't static; it's a process of correction. A little more of this, a little less of that, and so on.

It's stood me in good stead. Frankly, I've come to think that the culture oversells us on the idea of the balanced, well-rounded life. I think it's a very pale rainbow we keep chasing, and maybe even shorthand for mediocrity. The most vibrant people I know are not models of balance. Some of them are decidedly off-kilter. But they shine with passion, vision and drive.

I think that's worth a few dropped balls.

"More balanced" is an oxymoron, but it's what I'm lurching toward in '09. Not perfection. Not a pie chart sliced into nice, equal sections. Just some (oops) more of this, some (oops) less of that.

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Digging In

Over the course of a decade, you become intimate with the land you live on. It's the kind of physical familiarity you develop with your mate and your children, the cellular knowledge of their scent, their hair, the body's topography. Your hand wanders absently along the beloved's vertebrae, your fingertips small hounds on a knobby trail, stopping at the tailbone, muzzles pressed to the base of a tree. This place. I know this place.

I had that intimacy with the yard on Spruce Street. After ten years of gardening, raking, picking up toys, bringing out trash, letting out dogs, calling in kids, I knew every root and leaf, every shadow and season. It was weedy, as untidy as a little boy's unbrushed hair, but I loved it in detail and in particular. The scarlet of the Japanese maple at a certain hour, on a certain day in November, when the sun hit at a certain angle. The golden green of a patch of moss behind the spirea hedge in winter when the canes were laid bare. The exact weight of the back garden gate, laden under tentacled ivy.

I knew that place. It was home.

It's taking time to get to know this place. I haven't done anything with the garden yet. I thought I would watch it cycle through the seasons first. I guess I've been shy.

The kids aren't so hesitant. From the day we arrived here, they set out across the property like a small conquering tribe. They spent most of the summer spreading manifest destiny across the backyard. I got back there last week to do some long postponed fall clean-up, and I was staggered at their impact on the landscape, like reading statistics on how many tons of dirt earthworms can move. Literally, no stone was left unturned. As I dismantled rock cairns and stacks of deadwood that appeared to be constructed for trapping heffalumps and woozles, I rehearsed a lecture on respect for one's environment that would have been the equivalent of installing an electrified fence around the perimeter of the yard.

Then I softened, realizing they were doing what all animals do with their natural habitat: ordering it, owning it, digging in. We humans just do it on a grander scale than the others (except maybe the earthworms). Even the small ones among us. What looks destructive to me is reconstruction to them. I revised the lecture before delivering it. The relocation of the flower bed border stones has to stop, but I want them to keep digging in our little bit of earth, turning it over and shaping it as it shapes them. What gets planted in the holes they make is more important to me than perfect turf. As long as I don't fall in one.

Also, if they can move that many rocks and sticks, they can rake and bag leaves. Use your powers for good, I told them. I'll pay you five dollars.

Yesterday, late afternoon, I crossed the front lawn to bring the recycling to the curb. Coming back under one of the pecan trees, I automatically glanced down where I knew I would see the disc-shaped fungus clinging to the exposed roots like mollusks. It's one of the places I've come to know, a threshold into this new geography of ours.

I looked up as the lowering sun was streaming in through the forsythia hedge, and ran in the house to grab my camera the way I do when I want to capture the boys in a moment, the way I used to do when the Japanese maple on Spruce Street was in full flame. I stood there shooting a few minutes, tweaking settings on the camera until the display showed what I was seeing: something beloved, something known.

This place. My place. Home.

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Very Near

By almost any standard definition, I am a woeful Christian. I attend (irregularly) a liberal-leaning, liturgical church, because I love ceremony, metaphor and story, and because it orders my otherwise unbridled time. I like how it forces me into community with people I might else not associate with. I like singing the hymns and I like communion. When I can't get behind a single article of faith, I can always get behind the simple truth that "we many are one body, because we all share one bread, one cup."

Neither is my participation merely intellectual, though I am glad to have found a church where intellect is welcome. I have had a few true, numinous moments in the pew and on the altar step, when, like Carl Jung, I didn't believe, I knew.

But if someone were to ask me about my relationship with Jesus Christ, I would quite frankly choke. Relationship? Uh. Um.

Maybe all the gory Jesuses of my Catholic childhood spooked me. Everywhere I looked at school and church there was a crucified, bleeding Jesus, whom the priests and nuns assured, died horribly because of me.

It was a bit off-putting.

I know a lot about Jesus. I'm just not very Jesus-y. The word "Jesus" doesn't exactly roll off my tongue. He's not really part of my vernacular.

So I was surprised yesterday how natural it was to reach for some of the words ascribed to him when my children were speculating about the nature of heaven.

"Maybe you come back and live in a different form," my seven-year-old posited.

"Maybe it's another dimension," my nine-year-old said. "Maybe heaven is like a wormhole that brings you really close to God, really quick."

"Maybe God is already really close," I offered. "Jesus said the kingdom of heaven was very near."

"Maybe it's all around us!"

"Maybe," I said. Someday I will tell them— and you—about one of my numinous moments on a New Brunswick beach when I vividly knew this to be true.

My nine-year-old was caught up in the quantum grandeur.

"Maybe God is so big, he's holding our whole universe in his hand."

Well, it's nice to think something or someone has everything well in hand. It's only natural to want your god to be mighty. No half-assed, minor deities for me, thanks. In phone trees and in prayer, I much prefer directing my complaints to whomever's in charge.

Mighty is good. Especially when you are small. But I wanted them to know something else.

"Know what else Jesus said?"

"What?"

"He said that God loves us so much, every hair on our heads is counted."

Those words always remind me of the first few days after each of my children was born—the dreamy, long moments spent gazing over every cuticle, every fold of skin.

"I love you more than I could love anyone, or anyone could love you, and I don't know how many hairs are on your heads. So maybe God is not just big and everywhere, but so close to you, he can count your hairs."

Maybe he loves to bend over you and breathe in your hair in the mornings, I thought. Maybe she smoothes your hair at night when you are asleep.

But I don't want to interject my ideas —or even Jesus' ideas— about God too much in their questioning. I want them to keep asking and keep imagining new answers. I think the Jesus of my understanding, the one who said a person needs to think like a child in order to understand heaven, would back me up.

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Restitute

The man was clearly on his way to work. I wondered if he would get his nice suit dirty, removing the nuts from the hub, handling the spare. The woman stood beside her car. Because I was on foot, and overheard, I know that he was saving her from a long wait for a tow to the service station.

Not that I would know, but he seemed to have the procedure well in hand. They probably both resumed their separate ways by the time I opened my front door. There was nothing remarkable about the scene at all: just a couple of ordinary people in an ordinary situation.

But to me it played like it was it was slo-mo, hi-def, as the most ordinary scenes have these past few weeks.

Most of you have probably heard by now that a Little Rock television news anchor died here on Saturday, after being savagely beaten in her home, in a "safe" neighborhood, not far from us. I don't watch the local news much, and I didn't recognize her name until I saw her photograph and remembered meeting her very briefly when I took my Tiger cub den on a tour of her station last year. She was very young, and very pretty, and they say she was good at her job. I'll leave it to people who knew her to eulogize her properly.

The attack has shaken many of us here to the core. An assault like that is not an assault on one person, it's an assault on an entire community. The intruder breaks in through one house, and enters everyone's. We lie awake at night, listening for footsteps, cars stopping, dogs barking. Our faith in humanity, in the safety of our homes, in simple goodness, has been vandalized. Trashed.

I don't believe such events are purposeful. I don't think they are part of "God's plan." We all lament, "why," but the answer is something our bodies are born knowing: we are mortal. We feel, we hurt, we die. Cancer cells multiply, food gets caught in an airway, a mind twists and breaks. And coldly, logically, there is death. No mystery at all, really.

The meaning is not in the tragedy. There is no order in the chaos. The meaning is in life. The order is in the ordinary. A man kneels on the side of the road to change a woman's flat tire. He picks up a lug wrench, turns the nut, and you remember, this, this is how we are.

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Maps and Legends

My nine year old son woke up before dawn to read the last pages of T.H. White's The Sword in the Stone. I peeked over his shoulder to read these beloved old words:

A Snake, slipping easily along the coping which bounded the holy earth, said, "Now then, Wart, if you were once able to walk with three hundred ribs at once, surely you can coordinate a few little muscles here and there? Make everything work together, as you have been learning to do ever sice God let the amphibia crawl out of the sea. Fold your powers together, with the spirit of your mind, and it will come out like butter. Come along, homo sapiens, for all we humble friends of yours are waiting here to cheer."

The Wart walked up the great sword for the third time. He put out his right hand softly and drew it out as gently as from a scabbard.

Everything I need to know about being human, I learned in The Once and Future King, of which The Sword in the Stone is but the first part. It is my favorite book in the whole wide world, and has been since I was a little older than my son.

I kissed his head.

"You remind me of Wart," I whispered. One of my choices of names for him was Arthur. It would have suited.

The greatest books are maps of our own journey. The characters who resonate most are proxies for our own deepest truth. In this house, The Lord of the Rings trilogy is practically a sacred text. For Patrick, it is Sam Gamgee's story, whereas for me, it is Aragorn's. One is about persistence and faith; the other, like Wart's, about becoming what you are. You wouldn't have to know either of us very long or especially well to know that those are our stories.

Who tells yours?

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Public Health Alert

A childhood that does not include the deep, cheek-to-bark, tailbone-to-root, limb-to-limb friendship of at least one tree is a malnourished childhood, lacking in nutrients essential to the prevention of rickets of the soul.

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The Kindness of Strangers

Looking in my closet yesterday morning was a lot like scrolling through 200-plus channels on tv and not finding anything to watch. Good Housekeeping magazine gave me a six thousand dollar wardrobe this spring, and I had nothing to wear.

No, I haven't changed my mind about the garments I fell in love with when I wrote my article about investment dressing. I still say if you have five hundred dollars to burn, you could do a lot worse than a Prada pencil skirt. I wear the hell out of mine.

The bones of my wardrobe are good. It's just that I don't have much to flesh them out with. I've been getting by all summer on the same few t-shirts and tunics, but now it's fall, and I doubt the Loro Piana cashmere will hold up to five days a week of peanut butter sandwich making. I really needed some new tops.

There were a lot of ironies inherent in my doing that particular story, not the least of which is that I don't like to shop very much. But I was feeling a little blue to begin with yesterday, and I told myself that a little retail therapy might not be a bad thing. I'd have loved to been whisked off to 5th Avenue where beautiful and kind shop girls would bring me frothing hot cups of cappuccino and chrome racks of couture, but this is real life, so off I went to the mall to rifle through the clearance racks.

I must have spent an hour and a half doing just that. Then a half an hour in a fitting room. Then another 30 minutes in the checkout line, where I realized it was "Bring Your Mother, BFF, and Boyfriend to Forever21 Day." Only to ring up my selections (a half dozen painstakingly matched t's and cropped sweaters to the tune of forty dollars) and realize that I had left my wallet in the car.

(insert expletive of choice here)

So much for retail therapy. My mood had gone from blue to black. No problem, the sales clerk told me. She'd bag the clothes and hold them until I got back, just come straight to the counter.

I would have just gone home and called it a day, but I had too much invested already. So I ran to the parking lot, grabbed my wallet, and ran back down to the store.

"Excuse me, " I said to the person at the front of the line, as I dashed up to the cash register and handed the clerk my debit card. The person was one of the boyfriends. He was called immediately to the next register, but he looked thoroughly pissed off all the same. As soon as he stepped up to the counter, he complained about "people breaking in line."

"I'm so sorry," I said to him. "I left my wallet in my car and had to come back."

He was not even a little bit appeased. He didn't care where I'd been, or how my morning had been going, or where my day now seemed headed. He had been waiting in line with his girlfriend and her BFF, and I came out of nowhere and took his place at the register. As far as he was concerned, that was my whole story.

I felt so terrible. I really wanted to stop him and explain that the sales clerk had told me to come directly to the register. That I was having a really bad day. In fact, kind of a bad time, and I'm not sure why, except that I feel very much apart from lately, and not much a part of, in a way that I haven't since I was about thirteen. That I'm really a good person. At least, I think I am. I try to be.

Thinking all this, and realizing how badly I needed to make this total stranger be okay with me, IN THE MALL, FOR GODSSAKE made me feel so pitiful, I can't tell you.

Like falling through a rabbit hole and landing back in grade eight, a door I can't fit, a key I can't reach, no matter how big I stretch or how small I shrink.

It's frightening to me, as a mom, to think how terrible children can be to each other. Worse to remember how hard a child can be on herself. My parents told me all my life I was beautiful and lovable, and I believed them until a few "mean girls" told me differently. Then I was angry with my parents for lying to me. Especially my father.

"You have to think about what you do, Kyran," he told me once, in the middle of one of his interminable lectures. "People will pay attention."

What I felt then went beyond anger. It was rage. How could he say that? Didn't he see that I was nobody? Who would ever care what I did or said? How would it ever matter? I stared at the carpet and hated him for being so blind to my reality.

I kept my head down a lot that year. I stared at the sidewalk as I walked to and from school, so I wouldn't have to endure the bus. I stared at my lunch box at the cafeteria table. I stared at my feet in the locker room. I stared down at the grass the day my father introduced me to an old friend of his who was in town for a folk festival.

"Jesus, Al," Brooks said, "she's beautiful."

I looked up quickly to see if he was making fun of me. His kind face was sincere. I looked back down, confused. He had to be lying, but I didn't know why.

Brooks Diamond, where ever you are, God love you for that off-the-cuff comment you probably forgot in a second. It took a long time, but it was in that second I began to believe you. I think of it every time I see a gangly thirteen-year-old hanging his or her head down, who has let ideas about "pretty" and "cool" keep them from believing in their own beauty.

I was a long way from pretty or cool. I was a gawky girl with thick glasses, big lips and bad skin. I guessed everyday at what to wear, what to say, how to act, and almost always guessed wrong. I showed up at junior high at a particularly awkward moment, and just as Boyfriend decided yesterday that my story is Rude Diva, my new classmates decided that mine was Loser, from cover to cover. All she wrote.

I don't think they were really mean girls. I think they were acting out a familiar bit of human theatre where someone has to play the Outsider, and that part fell to me and a few unlucky others. I'm willing to believe that Mean Girls was a page or two in their own story and not the whole book.

A thirteen-year-old doesn't have that perspective, doesn't understand that the opinions of others, good or bad, are just vehicles speeding by, dust on the horizon. I believed those girls had it right and my dad had it wrong. For someone to see us as we exist beyond that one difficult moment, to affirm that there is more than meets the eye, restore to us the dignity of context--well, that is the ultimate kindness of strangers, isn't it? A kindness that sometimes flows less freely between people who are cast more intimately together, where the tendency is to nail down roles, forgetting that this theatre is improv, every single day.

Brooks was my good Samaritan that day. I was in another kind of ditch yesterday. As I got back in my van, I checked my Blackberry and saw that a reader had taken time out of their own Saturday to sit down and compose a note telling me how much my article meant to them (thank you, Kim). Then in the supermarket, another very lovely someone stopped to tell me the same about my blog.

My head was far down enough that I had to fight the old urge to dismiss. Yeah, but...

...you wouldn't think those nice things if you knew me day in, and day out, if you had to deal with my thoughts as they roll off my tongue and not arranged and considered carefully on the page or screen. If you lived with me and felt shut out sometimes when I turn inward to process something and then appear to share it with the whole world as if you didn't rank any higher than a stranger halfway across the world. You'd get fed up with hearing me whine or gush about the latest rejection or big break. You'd know that I sometimes yell at my children, that I am often not ready for a close-up, that there are no coffee mugs in our kitchen cupboard that say World's Greatest anything. You'd get tired of me. I do.

I'll never have to be thirteen again, thank God. But a little thirteen will always be in me. A while back, I caught a snippet of a Radio KSUX over the airwaves. I turned down the volume, but I guess I hadn't realized I'd left the tuner on that station. It's been on so constantly, at such a low level, I hadn't really noticed that "Not Good Enough" had become background noise.

I think plenty of people near and dear to me have been trying to interrupt that broadcast with an Important Service Announcement You Dummy. My girlfriend Lennie and my husband for starters. But sometimes it takes an unfamiliar voice to break through, to winch you out of the ditch. The kindness of strangers.

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If God Had a Face

"Who made these mountains?"

"God." (plate tectonics—same thing)

"No, he didn't!"

"Sure he (she, it) did. God made the whole world."

(chuckle) "God didn't!"

"Who, then?"

"I did!"

"It's beautiful. Thank you."

"I made it when I was three years old. Don't you remember?"

"I do now."

"I made the mountains and the trees and the bushes and the rocks and the houses and the fences and the whole world. When I was three."

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Spilling Over

By way of a coda to my recent post on fear of aging, I happened to catch that American Express commercial with designer Diane Von Furstenberg last night, and thought to myself, now there is a vision of mature beauty. I went googling around to see what she might be like on the inside, and found this interview.

Scanning down the page, my eyes lit on this:

At 40, you can no longer just count on your beauty or on your seduction power…it is time to become a myth...meaning, stand for something...

A friend of mine who is writing a book on life stages says that aging is the shift to a state that transcends personal ego, in which you come to "belong to the ages."

To me, the above photo says the same thing. I'm drawn to self-portraiture for all the reasons I love writing memoir. It's an attempt at clarity, an opportunity to stand apart and see where I really am. When I made this photo earlier this summer, I couldn't put into words what was going on with me; I don't think I knew, and honestly, I'm not sure I can articulate it now. But this image captures it. I'll spare you the all the lazy, florid metaphors about flowering womanhood and blazing emotion. Suffice it to say my focus is shifting, the way I see myself is changing, and a 38-year-old body turns out to be an inadequate container for all that life keeps pouring into it.

I think it's a picture of my life beginning to spill over.

When I decided to run toward, instead of away, from my writing, I set out purposefully to find examples of writers (and other artists) who ran counter to the negative stereotypes of a life in the arts. Once I started looking, they were everywhere. We become what we believe.

So I'm building a new belief about what it means to age, training my eye to pass over the negative stereotypes and focus on the people who defy them, inside and out.

I've always loved collage for that kind of re-imagining: going through a stack of magazines with a pair of scissors or sometimes just tearing pages with my hands, literally deconstructing the visual creed of popular culture and reassembling it. It's a trick I learned from the Artist's Way, and it packs some mighty mojo.

If I had an afternoon and a stack of magazines, I'd collage myself a new map for growing older and prop it up on my dresser. I don't have that luxury at the moment or anywhere in the near future. I've got three boys to outfit for school on Monday, and some big writing deadlines looming. I shouldn't even be here in my "create post" window.

But I've been holding that little scrap of wisdom from Von Furstenberg since last night, and I had to glue it down somewhere. That photo and my friend's observation seem to go with it. Help me out with the rest. Bring your own quote, image, person, song or story that represents an alternate vision of growing older—growing more— and glue it down it the comments section. It doesn't have to make sense, it only needs to speak to you. Let's re-imagine this thing together.

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Wildflowers

The summer has bolted like a neglected garden. Early this morning, while the temperature was still in the double digits, I walked around the yard to assess just how far everything has gotten away from us. Trumpet vine has taken over the dog fence. The fig tree is turning yellow, and the birds are beating me to the ripened fruit I thought I would be devouring by now. The dogwoods and forsythia are wizened with thirst, beggars in my path.

The children are wild. If I am lucky, I catch glimpses of them through the hedges, running half-naked with handfuls of hard green pecans and tall pointed sticks (yes, there have been injuries). Everywhere, there are hidden caches of sticks, rocks and nuts. Provision or ammunition, I can't tell.

I have let it all go, myself included, and it has been the most luscious, rambling summer I remember in years. Non, je ne regrette rien.

But it's time. Time to pull back the lovely tangle of vines before they choke the life out of something, time to beg forgiveness from the dogwoods and forsythia so they will love me again in the spring, time to brood even one fig into full sweetness. It's time to give Peter his thimble and gather in my lost boys.

"Should we cut your hair before school?" I asked them yesterday. They were adamant and unanimous to a man. "No."

They are going to public school in two weeks, and are delighted to be emancipated from the "hair code" of their old parochial school. Me too. I like a touch of wild.

I am going to have to insist on shirts, however.

There's a Tom Petty song that Patrick used to sing to me over the telephone, late lonely nights under the gabled ceiling of my childhood bedroom in my mother's house, while I tried to figure out what kind of garden I wanted to grow, the best ratio of order to chaos for my life:

Run away, find you a lover
Go away somewhere bright and new
I have seen no other
Who compares with you
You belong among the wildflowers
You belong in a boat out at sea
You belong with your love on your arm
You belong somewhere you feel free

I did. I do.

Here are my wildflowers. I told them I wanted pictures of their freckles.

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It began like this,if that tells you anything.

My cab pulled up to the house a little past the appointed time, at 4:30 in the morning on Thursday to take me to the airport. Patrick and I kissed goodbye in the darkness while the driver, an unusually tall white man with a hunched back and long, grey hair and beard put my my carry-on in the trunk. I got in. The driver got in. Instead of turning the key in the ignition he rested his hands on his thighs and spoke to me.

"I've got no gas," he said. "I've been two days in a homeless shelter, and they gave me a car with no gas, and a lady just ran a red light and hit it, and now the computer is all messed up. I'm broke, I smell bad, I'm hungry, and I need this job. I'm embarrassed to ask this, but can you pay for some gas? "

Crap. I don't have time for this, I thought, defaulting to the place most of us go when confronted with variation #19,775 of "down and out, need cash." I tensed. In the first place, I was annoyed. It would take another 30 minutes to get a new cab. But below that, there was fear. Maybe this guy wasn't the cab driver. Maybe this wasn't his car. Maybe he was drunk. I looked out the car window at my house. I had gotten away without the children waking up. I took a long breath, checked in with my gut.

Ten dollars isn't going to break you, it said to me. You can afford the benefit of doubt this time. Let's see where it goes.

"There's a gas station just up the street," I said. "And an ATM across from that." In for a penny, in for a pound. "Let's go."

As we pulled into the gas station, he lamented the recent closing of a secondhand bookstore around the corner. "They had great chess books," he said.

"Do you play?" I asked. "My nine year old does too."

"Oh, encourage him," he said. "It's a great way for him to learn to think mathematically."

Apprehension melted to curiosity. "Where are you from?" I asked him. What's your story?

His name was Christopher. He was from Washington, and was a Harvard educated mathematician. He met his wife on a vacation to Jamaica, an island fling. "You'll be back," she teased him. "I don't think so," he said. He came back and they were married within a week.

He was department head at a New England alternative prep school, where his wife worked as a registered nurse. Then he took a job in Washington, D.C., to work on Tomahawk missiles. His wife didn't want him to, he said, but he was thinking of their future.

"I chose the money," he said. "It was the worst mistake of my life."

In 1982, he told me, his wife was murdered. She was eight and a half months pregnant.

"And then I kind of flipped out," he said, almost apologetically. "That's a long time to be still not over something, isn't it?"

"I don't know how you ever get over something like that," I said softly, thinking his child would be twenty six now.

"I saw you and your husband kissing goodbye. It made me think of her. How long have you been married?"

"Ten years."

"Do you still love him?"

"So much."

"Man, cherish that."

Christopher drove the rest of the way telling stories about his wife, most of them sweet and funny, some of them ribald. For sure, he was still not swimming in the mainstream. There was no telling how much of his story was factual. But I took it to be true. When I gave him the fare plus an extra ten at the airport, I noticed for the first time that his eyes were rimmed below with half-circles the color of purple eggplant skin.

"I'm the richest man in the world," he said, smiling at the tip. The ride had cut deeply into what I had for my San Francisco ground transportation. I'd figure that out later. Or it would figure itself out. I had the feeling that from the time I said "let's go," this whole trip had taken the nearest exit off the straight and narrow.

"Take care, Christopher," I said, unknowingly leaving my favorite, coziest sweater on the back seat.

"Good morning, Ms. Pittman," the counter clerk said. "Anything to check today?"

Yes, I need to check my judgement. Also, fear and defensiveness—the reflex to close myself off to others because they're different or wounded somehow. While we're at it, let's jettison the urge to clamp down on curiosity because I might feel something, might lose something. Can I leave all that here? Because I'm going to a conference to be with 1,000 people who each have their own story, and I don't need any of it there.

"I think I'm good to go."

---

(I had a YouTube clip of Aimee Mann's video for "Save Me" here, but I guess it must have been bootleg because YouTube pulled it. Sorry, I do try to respect artist's copyright and abide by fair use. I thought the song made a nice coda to the post.-k.)

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