What I learned from my mother

I'm still processing my mom's death, but since it followed a ten year decline in to paranoid schizophrenia, part of me feels like I should be farther along.  In some ways, after all, I've been mourning her loss for years. I mourned the absence of a grandmother in my children's lives, the fact that she was "here" but couldn't hear our triumphs and setbacks like she used to, the fact that every visit took her farther away from me, but not so far I could find any closure. 

Once she was medicated out of the terror-inducing delusions, she was still left with delusions. I had a mom, but not my mom, or at least it didn't feel that way.  Her passing is allowing me to close some doors and open some that were too painful to deal with. It was too hard to think about the happy memories when I was faced with her suffering at every visit. But now that has passed, I can redirect my thoughts of her to the good ones--and there are many--and give myself permission to roll around in them. 

Upon some reflection, I feel like I've had something of an epiphany. I think I got my mind from my dad—my curiosity, my sense of wonder, my joy in learning.  But I know I got my heart from my mom. 

The middle child of seven, she grew up around kids and couldn’t wait to start her own family.  When she miscarried twins at 22, the doctors declared her broken and unable to have her own children. That broke her heart, but when it healed, or when the desire to raise a family overcame the failure of Plan A, my parents adopted two children.They told themselves it was better, even, because they could choose how to plan their family—a son first, then a daughter. So they made it happen. And she loved those babies like crazy.

Then she had me at 35. She didn’t believe it at first, the “broken” comments about her body still as fresh and wounding as they had been years before. She asked the doctor if one could be “a little bit pregnant.” But there I was.  And she loved me like crazy, too.

She loved lots of people and lots of things--painting and music and reading and traveling--and she was a model for me for how to have a heart open to the world.  Mostly, though, above all else, she loved her family:  her parents and siblings, and then her husband and children, her heart growing with each marriage and birth.

I found an anniversary poem she wrote for my dad on their 38^th anniversary, where she described their family like a complete set—first came a blond boy, then a red-haired girl, then a little dark-haired baby. Genetically, of course, we’re all different, but she described us so sweetly, like a lucky kid getting all three colors out of the gumball machine. This was all framed in an ode to her husband—the best prize she’d ever won. She loved us, and she made it her life’s goal to make a loving home for us.

And she did. Warm, supportive, comforting, cozy, cinnamon-scented, celebratory home-life, I learned from her. And I am ever grateful. 

Lots of Work, but No Less Play: Observations on Academic Worklife and Personal Happiness

Every once in a while a student who’s considering going in to academia asks me how I manage to maintain a happy work/life balance.  I certainly don’t feel like an expert, but I am happy. But he first answer to that question has little to do with me:  find a partner who supports you and likes seeing you happy.

Rob and I got married very young. We were both sophomores in college, both enjoying college, and both invested in a long haul, education-wise. We were also both youngest children, so a friend of mine who was interested in Birth Order and personality warned us that “Two youngest children will spend each other in to the ground.” 

I suppose he wasn’t wrong.  We’re still paying off student loans, even as our children get ready for college. What we both brought to the relationship, whether from birth order or some other reason, was a conviction that we deserved to be happy, and joy at seeing the other person happy. That was enough to be getting on with.

Some of the ways that has been borne out over the years are by spoiling ourselves and each other by spending money on our respective hobbies. One of the vows we wrote in to our wedding ceremony was “to encourage each other’s development as an individual, through all the years and changes of our lives.” One thing about getting married at 19: growing up and changing needs to be understood and embraced. He plays WarHammer, a game which involves dropping a ton of cash on plastic bits you can’t even play with until you’ve built and painted them. It also means I happily spend $20 on a single stamp set, seeing it as an investment in my future happiness. 

It also means we’re protective of each other’s time. He’s quick to point out that a free weekend is sometimes worth more (cosmically) than what I would make grading Graduate Writing Tests, and I was overjoyed when my raise meant he could drop a class at the school that was both farthest away and the least fun for him.

Mostly, though, it means we have each other’s back in terms of support. When he’s got grading to do, I safeguard his time by picking up slack around the house. When I have something to write, he packs the kids off to Magic Mountain for the day. 

Perhaps what’s most surprising about this is not how stinking lucky I am (I am—I’m aware!), but how this balance happened in a single generation.  My mom was delighted to be a Stay At Home Mom, and my dad was delighted to be a Provider.  But somehow as they raised me, it never occurred to me not to work outside the home. And Rob, who was raised by a single mom, always knew he wanted to be an involved dad.  

Maybe that’s a place to start, or in my case, end—start from the understanding that you need to work—to contribute—but with the knowledge that a) there are different kinds of work, and home-making counts, and b) if you work at something you love, you’re already halfway to balance.  Second, remember that no matter how much you love your job, it is a job.  As such it supports your life, but is not your life.  This is the difference between living to work and working to live, right?  You owe it to yourself and to your family to have a full, happy home-life, and if you have kids, to model that for them. 

And then, if you can, get on the Scheduling Committee, so you can write your own schedule. 😏

PS:  The Robbian Corollary to Work/Life Balance requires far fewer words.  He believes you need to be challenged to be happy, but also supported.  So the best way to do that is to have a demanding, challenging job and a relaxed, happy home.  Hard Job/Easy Home, rather than Easy Job/Hard Home.  I could be wrong, but I expect that’s his advice for everything from choosing a career to choosing a mate to the Grand Secret of Happiness on Earth.  He’s much more succinct (and dramatic) than I.  

Beginning Bibliotherapy

Confession:  Last week was horrible. 

I don’t really have the energy to blog.  But I thought maybe I could share some books that cheer me up.  You know, a top ten list of my Bibliotherapy favorites?  Here’s what I’ve got. 

1. The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster.  Kids’ books count, y’all, and this one is an absolute delight. Part allegory, part quest, part punster’s dream, this book never fails to make me laugh.  I found it as an adult, actually, reading it to my kids.  But now I recommend it to everyone I can. Like you!  Enjoy.

2. Julio Cortázar’s Blow-Up and Other Stories.  Even though some of these have a dark edge to them, many of them are so surreal that I find myself able to dissociate their tragedy from mine, which is a step to looking more clinically at my own problems and sorting them out.  I particularly recommend “Axolotl,” “The Night Face-Up,” and “Letter to a Young Lady from Paris.”  You won’t regret it.

3. Fairy Tales.  Most will do, but here I’ll recommend a lovely collection of Baba Yaga tales; nothing makes you feel back on your game like overcoming a witch, over and over again.  Baba Yaga: The Wild Witch of the East in Russian Fairy Tales translated by Sibelan Forrester.

4. Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet.  These are searing, beautifully written letters, that I discovered in college when I needed them most.  I still return to them, and they never fail to soothe.

5. Poetry by John Keats or W.B Yeats.  Not just because their names visually rhyme.  Because their speak of beauty like a friend, and to read them is to feel connected to that transcendence.

Ok.  5, not 10.  But it’s a start.  Spenser only wrote half of the Faerie Queene too.

But what would you add?  Do you have a book you recommend to make people feel better? Bibliotherapy is becoming a thing, you know, and we need to be ready with our prescriptions.  

Stones and Stories

Last week was my kids’ spring break, so we hopped in the car and drove to Utah, staying two nights in Bryce Canyon and two at Zion National Park.  My kids are teenagers in the 21^st century, so by nature sedentary and attached to their computers and cell phones as if to IVs.  They are also my kids and Rob’s, so they have the added bonus of being bookish, imaginative, and mildly introverted (I totally was an introverted kid—I think I’ve grown up to be an ambivert, but I still LOVE my downtime, for anyone snickering), so they resist long adventures and would naturally choose to stay home and “chill” for spring break.  Unfortunately, for their short-term goals, I think it’s important to a) unplug, b) explore the natural world, and c) encounter and begin to understand the rest of the world.  Poor kiddos.

Bryce Canyon awoke my inner rock hound.  It is a geologist’s playground, and we soaked up both breathtaking vistas (literally—it’s roughly 9000 feet elevation, so the air was thin!) and scientific descriptions of the rock formations. “Hoodoo,” for instance, is the glorious term for the pillars of stone that form as the walls of limestone erode from walls to a line of individual spires. Of course we went to the geology talk with a ranger, where we learned about the eons of formation and erosion of the canyon as well as the strata of stone and mixture of minerals that make it so beautiful—pinks and oranges and reds of the stone against the green pine trees, the blue sky, and in April, the white snow. 

But the best part for me was when he told us the legends.  He barely hinted, just teasing us with one story, really, that the Navajo told about Coyote luring all the bad guests to a spot where he promised them a banquet, but instead turned them all to stone. Those hoodoos, man. They look like people.

Because they form in rows, they look like lines of people, like families or groups of people interacting.  I usually have one eye on wildlife and find myself repeating “someone lives there” every time we see a cave or an obvious shelter that could be a den, but here I was muttering the whole time, “They look like people,” so I may have been smug when the ranger told us this tale. And I was struck by the common theme of hospitality, remembering my Odyssey, and my Beowulf and all the other tales that teach us about being good guests and hosts, “lest we entertain an angel unawares.”

Tolkien said “he sees no stars who does not see them first of living silver made that sudden burst…” (and some more great stuff, in my favorite poem, “Mythopoeia.”)  This was that kind of moment.  I could not see the stones as stones completely until I had my imaginative moment about them.  I know they’re masterpieces of sediment and erosion, but they look like people—people in line, people walking together, people with animals (some were shorter and decidedly canine-looking, or maybe I was getting carried away...).

I had a momentary affinity with those Navajo all those years ago, who looked and saw stories. I wasn’t expecting that.  Beauty, yes.  Nature, yes.  Geology, yes.  But not kinship.  That’s another reason to keep waking the kids up and shoving them in the car and dragging them out in to the beautiful world. 

Cinderella Stories

Why do we love Cinderella so?  It’s a rags-to-riches story, so it teaches us that no matter how low we feel, there is always the chance that we can escape our dismal situation and live like a princess or a prince.  (There are Cinder-fella versions as well, naturally.)  There seem to be two strains:  either the inherent nobility of Cinderella is revealed—she turns out to be of noble blood somehow; this is most prevalent among European variants, or she is truly poor in material wealth, but rich in spirit--a diamond in the rough--and her circumstances ultimately rise to match her nature.

The first kind is now as common as the Disney version in America.  Cinderella’s plight stems in part from being originally noble, a lord’s daughter or higher, who after her mother dies is reduced to servant status in her step-mother’s home.  This is the Grimms’ version, the Disney version, the film version of Ever After.  Some of this Cinderella’s trauma stems from that fall, from the shame of having to act like a servant, when she is not born to it, and her credit stems from the grace with which she adapts to her servitude.

But there are LOTS of versions of Cinderella.  The ones where she starts low have their own appeal, and maybe it lasts longer.  Wishing your nobility will be discovered is an increasingly dated notion.  Rather, the idea that there is a distinction between nobility of spirit and circumstance seems more believable.  It is an old, old notion that nobility is tied to beauty and goodness, and one propagated by the nobility.  Medieval expectations that beautiful souls resided in beautiful bodies operate on the same understanding as the axiom that “might makes right.”  God wouldn’t be so cruel as to put an ugly soul in a beautiful body, any more than he would allow a bad guy to win a duel. 

In an age where those expectations are deemed foolish, though, Cinderellas who are poor but virtuous do very well for themselves.  Some come to us from different cultures, without the monarchy baggage that Europeans carry.  I’m thinking of my picture book collection here, which contains “Mufaro’s Beautiful Daughters,” an African tale from Zimbabwe where the girls are poor, but beautiful, and the king tests them in strikingly similar ways to Jesus testing his believers, to see who are virtuous--generous, and gentle in their dealings with others. Or there is the Native American story “The Rough-Face Girl,” about a girl whose face is scarred by sitting too close to the fire, and who wins her future husband by her ability to see his true nature (as a spirit being in the heavens, riding the swaths of Milky Way for sled runners). 

In these versions, the kindness of the girl is rewarded, as well as her humility.  Those qualities are rewarded in the gender-bent versions as well.  Helen Ketteman’s “Bubba The Cowboy Prince” may be my favorite of these, where Bubba is just a farm hand who wins the hand of the wealthiest landowner around, Miz Lurleen, with the help of his fairy god-cow.  (I’m not kidding.  It’s glorious--both the fairy god-cow and the fact that the magic glass slipper has been replaced by the manky, mucky boot of a "real cowboy.") 

The upshot is the same, though, in all of these versions.  If you’re kind and humble, you’ll be rewarded by a step up socially and a happy marriage.  Those who try to trick or wheedle their way in to riches will not win.  Nice gals (and guys) do.  Maybe that’s why we keep rewriting Cinderella.  We really want that to be true.  

Reading Rock Stars

When I was in grad school I took a Dickens seminar, and it was awesome.  Not only did I have incentive to read a bunch of long novels (which I instinctively shy away from), I enjoyed learning about the author in a way one doesn’t get to outside a Major Authors course. There were biographical tidbits throughout the semester, and I left with the feeling that Dickens was someone I would have liked, despite his foibles. The thing I loved the most about him was that he was characterized as a rock star, drawing huge crowds, and doing public readings in the way one thinks of concerts today. He had fans clambering for the next installment of his novels the ways we impatiently wait for our favorite bands' new releases or anticipated sequels to movies.

It also made me nostalgic for a time I never knew—when an author could have that status.  I’ve been to book readings and signings, and they’re always modest but wonderful moments, perhaps the more wonderful for their intimacy. But I’m never under the illusion that books are as powerful a draw as musicians or movie stars. I’m still not. But I was pretty close last Thursday night. 

I took my family to see “An Evening with Neil Gaiman” at the Segerstrom Concert Hall, which seats close to 2000.  It was pretty full. I had no idea what to expect.  Would he read?  Would he chat?  Did he have a performance shtick? Incidentally, it’s hard to sell an outing to teenagers without really knowing what to expect. They’re well-behaved, but they were… reluctant. They both would have stayed home if that had been an option.  But they both had a great time.

It turns out “An Evening” means some reading, some impromptu chatter, and some responding to question cards that audience members filled out before the show.  In all, Gaiman read seven pieces, from a chapter out of his retelling of Norse Myths to a poem he wrote after visiting a Poetry Brothel for his stag party. There was even an encore piece. We clapped; we stood; we sat back down, and he read one more short story. It was utterly delightful.

I left heartened about a world that seems to be super digital, but wherein crowds still form to hear stories. They cheered for him when he mentioned his books and their success, and they cheered when he told a story about his toddler son. They listened, rapt, when he discussed the serious shift in culture from when his novel American Gods was written, and why and how it’s become contentious in an atmosphere of recent travel bans and immigration issues.It was a wonderfully human evening.

Gaiman has a diverse audience, from tweed jackets to tattoos and cargo shorts, and we fit in just fine: another family raising readers, happy to listen in real time to a great story.  

Living the Dream--a view from last summer

Rob recently washed my car for me.  I’d been meaning to, but never got around to it, and he did it for me, understanding my main motivation.  He approached me with two stickers in his hand and announced that it was time.  When the car was clean, I could put on the stickers we got on our vacation this summer—one from Yosemite and one from Muir Woods.  Across from the Yellowstone sticker we got last summer, I look like quite the budding naturalist.  Or granola head.  Or, given the fact that my car is a hybrid, an environment-conscious human.  Guilty on all counts.  He smiled:  “Look at you.  Hybrid car, garden in the backyard--you’re living the dream, aren’t you?” 

I am!  My life right now tends dangerously toward perfect.  The garden has always been a dream, and we’ve tried several times, with mixed results.  The most success I think we had was the herb garden, where I grew seven or eight different herbs, all of which were intended for use in the kitchen.  I made a really terrific marinara once with entirely home grown herbs and tomatoes (the tomatoes had grown rogue, the result of a happy bird population, not our purposeful planting).  It was delicious.  It took way too much time.  I made it once—photographed it, otherwise documented it, and moved on.

This year’s garden is the result of many years of drought and of our increasing awareness of the value of water.  In the last few years, as water restrictions have tightened (and we tightened even more than the restrictions—we were VERY good Californians) all of our lawn has died, front and back.  We’ve decided to xeriscape the front, but for the back, we let the dog decide.  Ok, that’s not entirely true, but close.  When the kids were little, it was important that we had a grassy backyard for them to play in. 

Now that they’re mostly grown, they don’t play outside like they did.  But the dog….  A few months ago we got a Bassett Hound puppy.  The first time we walked him around the block, he couldn’t make it; we had to carry him home.  As he got stronger, he made it around the block by pausing now and again in people’s lawns for break—like he plops right down on a neighbor’s grass and expects you to wait a few minutes while he catches his breath.  Then he got stronger, and we started to suspect he just liked the feel of the cool grass.  

So we got some sod for the backyard.  For the dog.

The backyard is too big to fill the whole thing with lawn again, though, so we just made him a patch to sit on.  It’s more of a run, really, eight feet wide and about twenty feet long, and when we showed it to him, he was delighted.  It’s perfect.  And it doesn’t take much water for a lawn that small.  But the yard is twice that size.  So we planted a garden. 

Now my backyard is half grass and fruit trees and half garden.  Sunflowers, corn, cucumbers, zucchini and yellow summer squash.  For the past few weeks, we’ve been eating home grown food, and it has filled a happy little part of my heart.  It’s wonderful to feel self-sufficient (I’m not under any illusions I could survive off-grid, but eating my own zucchini is marvelous), and it’s wonderful to decorate with a garden.  

It reminds me of my mother who always proclaimed she decorated with books.  Talk about blending the functional and the beautiful.  Books on the walls, and greenery and flowers in the yard.  Add to that our pretty happy positions at work (Rob is teaching a bit less, to pursue other interests, and I am at a comfortable spot in my career, where I can take some time to learn Italian and call it research), our kids who are actually enjoying high school, and the burgeoning little community of our two cats, two dogs, and countless itinerant outside critters including birds, squirrels, skunks, lizards, butterflies, and bees (who are so pleased we planted sunflowers!), and he’s right:  I’m living the dream. In the world and of the world.  Physical abundance and mental contentment.  Watching my garden grow.