So Much Mothering

I have been mothered by so many wonderful people. Tomorrow is my mother’s birthday. She would have been 82. And I have recently worked on a podcast where the first installment was about fathering. And I’ve been thinking of my academic mothers, one of whom I actually refer to as Doktor-Mutter. All these things have gotten me thinking about mothering.

Is mothering different from fathering, for instance? Does one need both? I think we tend to associate mothering with more nurturing and protecting, and fathering more with providing and preparing, but in my house parenting is pretty gender-neutral, and I certainly wouldn’t say one gender has the market cornered on any of these actions

Yet, there are certain people whom I think of when I think of being mothered. My mom associated mothering with warm bread and secret treats when I was feeling bad. Her job was to make me happy, and she did it well. When I had to leave school because I was sick, the car always veered toward the donut shop on the way home. When I was overwhelmed with school, she brought me a glass of milk and sat with me while I worked, helping where she could and offering moral support if she couldn’t. When I was sad, she made it her goal to cheer me up. She didn’t always get me, but she always loved me, and she made lots of things easier on me.

But in truth lots of women mothered me. My aunt, who recognized the moderately predictable drama of a “smartie” who wasn’t challenged enough in school, had a huge impact on me. Because of her, I parent both of my kids better than I would have. I had a tenth grade English teacher, who, when I was confused and anxious, helped me understand that mental health was just as important as physical health. It was a lot easier to learn that language at 15 than later, I can tell you.

I had professors whom I think of in very motherly terms. One, a Germanicist who taught me Old Saxon, Gothic, and Latin, also taught me how to teach people and how to be a woman in academia, especially a married woman with children. One was a nun--my Doktor-Mutter—who praised my creation of a child as much as my creation of a dissertation, who calmed my tears when I thought I had nothing to say, who bought me oil paints and told me to be creative if I wanted to find my scholarly voice again. She prayed for me even though I didn’t pray for myself, and she called herself a mother of my heart.

And these are just the biggies. I have also been mothered by men—by my husband, certainly, when no one else could have, and by a professor whom I didn’t even take classes with, but who, out of sheer generosity of spirit, coached me to interview for jobs and built me up when I was most insecure. I have been mothered by faculty mentors at my job and by friends who made my well-being a priority, and I even think I have been mothered, if briefly, by strangers who have only shared a few minutes in a shopping line or at the PTA or in a hospital room.

It seems to me, then, that it is incumbent upon me to do my part--to mother my children, my loved ones, my students, my colleagues, the world. Mothering is serious business. I have to pay that stuff forward and backward and sideways and diagonally. I must not seem ungrateful. I think of Angela Carter’s Little Red Riding Hood, who “has been too much loved ever to feel scared.” That’s some powerful mothering. We’ve got work to do.

(These images are of my mother, Marlene Turner Baker, Molly Weasley as played by Julie Walters, and a fox mama and adoring kit that I found on the internet a while back and now can't find an attribution for. And Angela Carter's amazing retelling of Little Red Riding Hood is called "In the Company of Wolves" and collected in her volume, The Bloody Chamber. The wonderful podcast I was referring to above is Steve Zelt's introductory offering on fathering at A Small, Good Thing, available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Og6QvKASQc .)

Ode on a Shortened Summer

The most glorious myth of academic life is the summer vacation. People who don’t teach sometimes assume the summers are one long, three-month margarita party. That’s never the case, of course, although some may start out that way.

Alas.

Instead, those who work at state universities, at least in my experience, spend a significant chunk of summer doing the research or creative work they don’t have time to do during the school year. Then there’s the planning of next year’s courses. This year that was dramatic and demanding, as my school converted from a quarter system to a semester system, so even people who have been teaching the same things for some time had to reconceive their syllabus, reading lists, and teaching strategies.

There’s also a very real need to rest one’s head and do something different for a bit, so you can come back strong. I try to reserve time to read things I will never have occasion to teach. I wrote a beautiful list and made a stack of books at the beginning of summer. In addition to three more novels in my lovely, pulpy, mystery series, I intended to read twelve books, mostly fiction, one a re-read of a book I haven’t read since college (Kamouraska by Anne Hebert).

This year's haul from Solvang. The Book Loft always has the best new fairy tales.

Looking at my list now, I only read four, started four more, and don’t know exactly what happened with the others. I never even pulled the mysteries off the shelf. I did, however, read a tall stack of new fairy tales I bought on a trip with my daughter, write a handful of blogs and a pitch for a children’s novel, and now I am plowing through three non-fiction books I just HAD to read before school starts.

I guess what I’m realizing that what’s valuable about summer for me is the ability to plan and then pitch the plan entirely.

From September to June everything has to be very carefully orchestrated. I keep list after list and plan and organize, so that all goes well in my classes and professional life. Summer is a welcome rest for my brain not just because I’m not prepping, teaching, or grading, but because I can afford to go unscripted for a while. It’s very liberating.

This summer, because we are shifting from quarters that ended in June to semesters that start in August, our summer is about seven weeks instead of eleven. And scripted or not, it has been jam-packed. We’ll be ready, because we must be, but we might all be starting out a little tired, which we usually don’t, I think.

I resisted this conversion for a long time. I voted against it. I grumbled when our vote was ignored, and we were simply told to convert. But now, staring down the barrel of my first week, I’m not worried. I’m glad I’ll have sixteen weeks instead of ten to get to know my students better. I’m glad to have more time to go deeper in the texts I teach and to assign more writing and more revision. I’m part of an academic family, so I’ll be glad to have more holidays match up and have some more time off in the winter. Mostly, though, I’m just always glad to go back. That’s the real perk of this job—not the summer break, but the fall return.  

Never Trust a Vowel

Vowels are shifty things. I teach literature, and when people have trouble making out words in the text that they haven’t met before, I ask them to try and take them apart to see if they recognize the parts; then they can guess at the word’s meaning. I teach medieval lit, so sometimes students are looking at Middle English or another older form of English, but just as often, it’s a Modern English word that’s flummoxing them, and the rules don’t change.

My reasons for not trusting vowels are:

1. Vowels can vary from language to language, so if we know the roots of words, we can see why the vowels are what they are. For instance, Latin “e” often corresponds to Greek “o” as in English “dentist” and “orthodontist.”

2. Vowels can vary to denote tense in English. Now if we invent a new word, we just slap an “-ed” on the end of it to make it past tense, but older forms of English had elaborate systems of vowel gradation, some of which we still have (“sing/sang,” “fly/flew,” etc.). So sometimes if a word has a funky vowel in it, you just aren’t familiar with its old past form.

3. Regional accents change the vowels mostly. Occasionally there will be a consonant difference, like the b/v variation in dialects of Spanish, but usually it’s vowels. The “You say potato; I say potato” song/joke/aphorism makes this pretty clear. It’s not potato/potaco (although I’d be willing to try a potaco). It’s all about the vowels.

So if you’re trying to deduce what a word means, there’s a process I advocate, and vowels figure absolutely last, the treacherous little buggers.

First, try and figure out the root word. Take off anything that looks suspiciously prefixey or suffixey, like “-ey” or “pre-.” Then look at the root in terms of the frame of consonants, not really looking at the vowels.  So if we’re trying to deduce, say, podiatrist, we’d first remove the “-ist“ which is a clearly a suffix. It indicates a person who does the thing at the beginning of the word (like artist or philanthropist). Next we cut off the “-iatr” from Greek iatros, meaning “doctor” (as in psychiatrist), and we are left with “pod.”

Pod. Pod. So how’s your Greek? English speakers are usually better guessing Latin than Greek because English borrowed so much from Latin directly, as well as from French, Italian, and Spanish. But Greek “pod” means ‘foot.’ In Latin it was “ped.” Never trust a vowel. English has more common words with ped-, like a bicycle pedal or a gas pedal, or different animals being bipedal or quadrupedal. But “pod,” not so much. Cephalopod. Arthropod. (These are literally head-footed things, like squids, and joint-footed things, like crabs or ladybugs. But we were talking about vowels.)

And now we’re done. But consider next time you have trouble understanding a person’s accent, just relaxing your head when it comes to hearing vowels. When you don’t recognize a word you read on the internet or in a newspaper, try it with different vowels, and see if you can figure it out. I think adopting a playful, puzzler’s attitude toward language is a recipe for easier understanding, less frustration, and maybe even compassion.

Mothering a Man

Have you ever noticed most fairy tale heroes and heroines have dead or missing parents? The obvious explanation for that is that kids need to forge their own identities in order really to mature.

Beauty doesn’t have a mom, and her dad actually gets in the way of her growing up. Cinderella’s mother is dead, and dad is MIA, so she has to negotiate the female authority in her household and to establish her mature, romantic relationship entirely on her own (once the godmother supplies the dress and shoes). Even Jack must leave his mom (no dad mentioned at all in most versions) and enter the giant’s realm without any guidance. In fact, he comes back and takes care of her; he’s translated from dependent to provider in a few pages.

Kids seem to need serious independence in order to mature and thrive.

But I’m rejecting that today, on the eve of my son’s 18^th birthday, and not feeling a bit guilty. Conflicted, maybe, but not guilty.

I moved out at seventeen. I moved in to a dorm for my freshman year of college, but I never moved back home. That was it. I had been working for a year, driving for nearly two, and I waved to my mom as she stood in the driveway in her bathrobe, and was gone.

Most kids don’t do that these days, especially in Los Angeles county. In fact, most of my kids’ friends don’t even drive. LA is a nightmare for traffic and hazards. My son doesn’t have a job yet. He’s not moving out. His independence is coming a bit later.

He is not alone. Many have noted the expanded adolescence. Laurence Steinberg’s The Age of Opportunity argues that adolescence is both starting earlier and lasting longer these days. Lots of kids aren’t moving out. They can’t afford it. And it’s not such a bad thing.

There’s a case for extended adolescence having neurological benefits. Their longer period of neuroelasticity is allowing them greater ability to learn later in life, both in terms of intellectual content (they have more spots in their brains to pin new information later on), and they have greater emotional understanding and impulse control.

However, there is a serious dearth of awesome stories about nineteen-year olds living with their folks.

Harry Potter doesn’t have parents, but he finds lots of surrogates. Percy Jackson has a mom, but he leaves for school like Harry, so she’s not solving any problems for him. Violet and Klaus (and Sunny!) Baudelaire are largely fending for themselves too, so our stories have not caught up to the culture.

I guess there’s nothing exciting about living in your childhood bedroom in to your early twenties. They can vote; they can be drafted; they can be arrested;they can smoke. But they’re not driving or working enough to support themselves. How do you parent them? 

They’re legal, but dependent.

Maybe I’m just making a mountain out of a molehill. Maybe 21 is the new 18, and 25 is the new 21, and we just chill and move on. But seriously, someone ought to write the thriller about the 19-year old who has tremendous adventures and still lives at home. We could use a script down here.

Here’s some further reading, if you’re interested:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/extended-adolescence-when-25-is-the-new-181/

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/11/metaplasticity/506390/

Steinberg, Laurence. Age of Opportunity: Lessons from the New Science of Adolescence. 2014.

Blessed are the Legend-makers, or My Favorite Poem

Do people still have favorite poems? Is it something people rate or collect, like songs or movies, and then there are too many, so you have to say your top ten?

Last week someone tagged me in a social media challenge to list my top ten movies, and I’m still deliberating. But I know my favorite poem.

My favorite poem is “Mythopoeia,” and it’s by J.R.R. Tolkien. It’s longish at 148 lines—longer than Poe said we are comfortable reading in his “Philosophy of Composition,” an essay he wrote about his process of writing “The Raven.” I love “The Raven,” but I love “Mythopoeia” more.

“Mythopoeia” is an occasional poem; that is, he seems to have written it on a particular occasion—following a discussion with C.S. Lewis, where Lewis argued that myths were lies, “though breathed through silver.” In the days and weeks following this event, Tolkien responded with poetry, as such an occasion demands.

He starts with an accusation:

                You look at trees and label them just so,
                (For trees are “trees,” and growing is “to grow”)
                You walk the earth and tread with solemn pace
                One of the many minor globes of Space:
                A star’s a star, some matter in a ball
                Compelled to courses mathematical
                Amid the regimented, cold, Inane,
                Where destined atoms are each moment slain.”

He’s taking to task all those who see the world with clinical, scientific, quantifying brains—those who assert we can classify and codify all, and that that is the best way to understand it. Tolkien accuses Lewis, essentially, of having no soul, or at least not having the ability to wonder at the mysteries and magic of the world.

Tolkien, a devout Catholic, called God the Creator, but posited that humans were, or could be “sub-creators.” God did the big stuff; humans create little worlds. When he created Middle Earth and The Shire, he was sub-creating. But he did so with a healthy dose of respect and awe for God.

Chaucer’s Franklin comes to mind (doesn’t he, always?). In the Franklin’s Tale, Nature (Mother Nature) claims that she and God are like a well-matched couple. He creates cosmically, and she creates on Earth. Tolkien’s mutual roles here subdivide a little differently—God creates the physical world (no Mother necessary), and artists create little, imaginative worlds. Still symbiotic; still complementary.

I’m not Catholic. Or Christian. Pagan love for Natura comes closest to my faith, I suppose, so I see nothing wrong with these thoughts of mysteries, and I love the idea of complementary creation. Humans, in constant awe at the natural world and its cycles and stories, make new art in our own fashion.

Tolkien goes on to explain how such storytelling takes place:

                He sees no stars that does not see them first
                Of living silver made that sudden burst
                to flame like flowers beneath an ancient song,
                whose very echo after-music long
                has since pursued. There is no firmament,
                only a void, unless a jeweled tent,
                myth-woven and elf-patterned; and no earth
                unless the mother’s womb whence we all have birth.

Two things strike me here: first, that primitive people made mystical explanations for the natural world, and we have been singing songs to explain and perpetuate those ideas ever since. But that might seem to lend support to Lewis, as the mythic view of things may have been part of our primitive past, but now we know better.

Tolkien says no, however. That each person is “primitive” as they come to understand the world. That childhood is our individual Neolithic phase, and we can choose to keep connecting with those impulses, those feelings of awe and wonder and joy, or we can walk solemnly with Lewis on his mathematical course. I’m not a Luddite, but I am a recovering biology major and the spouse of a biochemist. I vote with science, but my heart loves myth. This speaks to me deeply.

The last lines of the poem yell the loudest, in my opinion. It’s an image of paradise for poets, and one that resonates with some of my favorite images of paradise. Borges said he imagined Paradise to be a kind of library. I do too. So, it appears, did Tolkien.

                In Paradise they [poets] look no more awry;
                And though they make anew, they make no lie.
                Be sure they still will make, not being dead,
                and Poets shall have flames upon their head,
                and harps whereon their faultless fingers fall:
                there each shall choose for ever from the All.

So paradise is a place where poets are gifted with all the material they can ever use, like living in Chaucer’s House of Fame, but with flames upon their heads (like the blessed souls they are) and play their harps and sing new songs forever.

Paradise is doing what you love most, with limitless time and materials and with faultless results, and being blessed for it? You don’t have to be Catholic to love that.

Long live the Legend-Makers.

The Not-So-Lazy Summer Blog

My life runs on an academic calendar. I teach; my partner teaches, and our kids are teenagers—one in high school, and one starting college. The wheel of our year rolls around the semester system.

In some ways it feels more natural to me—seasons correspond to semesters and breaks. It starts in the fall, with the welcome reprieve from Southern California summer. But SoCal summer is where we are now. It’s hot. I’m wilting. If I leave the house, I come back annoyed and sluggish. But one must leave the house, right?

You’d be amazed how many days this summer my kids have not left the house.

But we grown-ups have been homebodies too. On an academic schedule, you bustle from fall to spring, and leave some things for summer, when you have more time. Planning classes. House repairs. Yard work. Vacuuming.

So summer is when we anti-hibernate and focus on our home. It’s too hot to leave anyway.

Our happy house sits near the top of a hill in a little suburban track, and we own the hillside beneath our back yard. This year we had four sets of squirrel babies on that hillside. The number of bird species I have counted from the patio reached thirty (the last was a road runner! I’m not even kidding—it flew right in my back yard). The skunks continue to visit in the evenings, hopefully taking care of the June Bug larvae, so our tiny lawn doesn’t die.

And we’re gardening—butterfly-friendly flowers in the back, and veggies in the front, where the squirrels won’t eat them. The big goal for outside is to xeriscape the front yard. I’m optimistic.

We’re slowly getting greener and greener, and I’m loving it. This is our first summer with solar panels, so our outlandish air-conditioning habit doesn’t feel so awful. The front lawn has been forfeit since the last drought, but since we’re only capable of sustained effort in the summer, it’s taken several years for us to make it around to that project. This is our year. It will be a tasteful mix of wood chips, stones, and native California plants, right up to the vegetable garden. One cannot live on succulents alone.

My husband has been doing most of the outside work, and I’ve been coordinating the annual purge of extra stuff we accumulate over the year. All year long little piles form like anthills, and in the summer, the donations begin. If I do my job well, by the time school starts in the fall there will be room for new school clothes, and all the things we lost last year will be found, unearthed from beneath stacked books and camping gear that never quite made it back to the garage.

The purge has gone well inside, and outside the garden is bursting with life, even in the heat. As a native Nevadan, I still marvel at how EVERYTHING grows in California. About nine things grow in Nevada, and the top three are sage brush. But here, sunflowers and pomegranate trees and ginger all happily grow about their business with minimal effort, really. I continue to marvel, even after sixteen years. (I should own that I have a very high capacity for marveling, but still—it’s amazing.)

We have a few more weeks of summer and still a long list of household and work-related tasks, but we’ll get as much as we can done before the march back to our various campuses. And while we can, we’ll enjoy the sunflowers.

The Glorious, Oft-Sung Art of Word-Collecting

I can remember always loving words. The first big word I learned to spell was ‘elephant,’ and because I ran around for maybe half an hour singing the letters, I still have an audio memory of their order. I grouped them in to e-l-e, p-h, a-n-t mostly because of the sound of those letters together, but 4^th grade me thought younger me was clever keeping the p-h together, since it spelled a single sound.

And that song evoked an elephant for me—every elephant tiny me could imagine, which included Dumbo and Pooh’s heffalumps, as well as more real ones I’d seen in books. As I sang, heffalumps danced in my mind’s eye with African elephants to the rhythm of my song.

That was just the first word I fell in love with.

Since then there have been so many wonderful words that have enchanted me—and I mean enchanted. They sing and they chant and they cast a spell. Mellifluous. Defenestrate. Nefarious.

Then I learned more languages. Éclat, mariposa, Kunst, grembo, uppivözlumaðr. I am an addict.

But I am not alone. And this is actually a blog about picture books.

In the last several years, there have been two picture books entitled “The Word Collector.” The first one was published in Spain in 2011 (La coleccionista de palabras) by Sonja Wimmer and features a girl named Luna, who lives “high, high up in the sky,” above people, apart from them, either in a lighthouse or in the clouds (or in a lighthouse in the clouds—the illustrations are delightfully ambiguous.)

The second book is by Peter H. Reynolds and features an African-American boy named Jerome (although the title is gender-neutral in English, of course—for just a second I had imagined another girl), who lives among people and draws the words he collects from his environment. He writes down words he hears, words he sees in the world, and words he reads in books on strips of paper and puts them away carefully.

Both of these children collect words of all different types, for all different kinds of affinities. Sometimes they like what the word means; sometimes they like how it sounds. But they also like words that seem to fit their referent—‘molasses’ tends to be drawn out, like a slow pour. That’s really a response to the inherent order of the universe, to my eye—to form following function.  And sometimes they just like how the words make them feel.

Their crises differ, though. Luna notices the world has become too busy to use—let alone appreciate—words, so she contrives to redistribute the ones she has collected like a benevolent goddess, sowing, weaving, and scattering words like seeds. She gifts the world with the fertile imagination that a substantial vocabulary fosters so well.

Jerome’s journey is both smaller and bigger than Luna’s. He drops his scrapbooks and boxes, in which he’d stored his sorted words, and ends up putting them back together in new, unexpected combinations, discovering poetry and music and seeing that they are good. He thinks about words, learning that sometimes the simplest are the most powerful—“I’m sorry” and “You matter.”

Finally, he comes to realize that his big word collection has improved his ability to understand who he is and to share his ideas and dreams with the world, and he wants that for others too. He releases his words from the top of a hill, and children below scramble to gather them.

Jerome’s story is about self-empowerment and paying it forward. Luna’s, with its visual artistry of the text as well as images, is more about sharing the gifts of beauty and connection to others. But they both begin with a sense of wonder at words and end with sharing their beloved words with the world.

Why do they both feel like gods to me when they dispense their words? Is that what Little Me was responding to—the power that words confer on their wielders? Maybe. That is old magic, as we know from lots of traditions (the songs of Orpheus, the logos of the New Testament, the runes of Germanic paganism, or the tradition of true names that can be used to control people or entities).

But so much of the appeal for me is wonder and joy at the music of a word or the perfect capturing of an idea, or—as Jerome discovers—the serendipitous collision of a few words that make something new, unexpected, and utterly splendiferous.

The Anglo-Saxons referred to language as their “word hoards.” (First—obviously—that's that’s why I fell in love at first sight with Anglo-Saxon.) Second—I am heartened to know this glorious tradition has not lost any ground in the intervening centuries. Words are still gemstones to be marveled at, collected, and shared.

E-l-e… p-h… a-n-t. I dare you not to see one dancing in your head.