A Mother's Meditation

Sipping a thoroughly steeped cup of Ceylon tea, a pleasant semi-daze occupies me at the breakfast table. Moby’s Natural Blues plays from the laptop (I have a need for hip music in the mornings; it breaks up the monotony of the cereal-bowl-juice-cup-assembly line – I think of T.S. Eliot here: I have measured out my life with coffee spoons).* The three boys have already devoured the morning spread; charged with a baffling excess of energy, they are wrestling in cardboard boxes one room over. I am alone as it gets.

Beyond the finger-printed, sliding glass door, the suspended, empty-paper-towel-roll-turned-totem-pole tickles the morning air, powered by a subtle breeze blown in from the San Francisco Bay – a sliver of which can actually be seen from our balcony, if you really challenge the eye. I study whatever catches my glance with pensive interest – the blue jay, shamelessly stuffing coco moss from my planter into his beak…the yellowing pines, not quite tall enough to hide the houses across the way. I examine the blackened windows in the houses and wonder about the bodies behind the glass: what other mothers are doing with their mornings; what they are sipping on…thinking about; if they measure out their lives with coffee spoons.

Outside, the shadow of the lattice railing sleeps on the deck’s splintery surface, filled with a hundred parallelograms of sunlight. A reflection of watery light from our inflated pool in the backyard licks the ceiling tirelessly in a movement like flames. My totem pole twists in on itself, then unfurls at twice the speed, like a dancer’s perfect pirouette. I painted the totem pole in an inspired afternoon of recycling projects with the boys (they didn’t want to hang their poles, but naturally turned them into swords instead). Admiring my totem pole, a simple truth occurs to me: I like seeing the work of my own hands sway in the wind for a change. The kids’ masterpieces are everywhere – the fridge, the walls, the doors…even our entire garage has been converted into an art gallery. While I adore the consecrated strokes of my children’s earnest hands, and while I savor the privilege of gazing on the expressions of holy secrets in their budding souls – lately, I have been looking for the secrets in my own soul; because they are, it occurs to me, no less holy, and no less destined for expression. One secret reveals itself in the morning’s solitude: whatever else I do (change diapers, pack lunches, put on Band-aids, drive, cook, clean, unpack lunches, fold laundry, drive some more…) I must write! I must photograph and create; because it makes me happy, but also – because how else will each of my children learn to value their unique existence and contribute their one-of-a-kind gifts to the world? I must lead by example.

Between the morning’s fleeting epiphanies, the music, the intriguing light-forms, and the indigenous, watchful eyes of my totem pole, I enjoy a small sense of transport – like a simulated Burning Man experience for a woman and her tea at the breakfast table.** Recently, my free-spirited, semi-nomadic, twenty-something, fairyesque cousin made her annual trek to Black Rock Dessert for Burning Man, an event in which people come together for the purpose of radical self-expression – to sprinkle, like sand grains, the secrets in their artistic souls over the one thousand square miles of desert. This strikes me as the ultimate unattached woman’s thing to do, now that I am married with a family. Sometimes, attached or not, I think of going. I think:

I Could Go

I could stretch out,

layered in gauzy

skirts and scarves,

hair tangling with

feathers and beads

in desert breeze –

all ten of my

toes propped and free

on the rear view mirror

of a 1976 Volkswagen bus,

catching the warm —

the fast wind;

I could hula

in a ring of fire

on the playa,

the dry balls of my feet

pressing into alkali

salts in sand. I could play

my palms on a drum

under a muddled hue

of silver and orange

spotlight begotten

from fire and moon:

a hue I’ve not seen

in a long, long time –

if ever.

But alas… while I may head for the desert someday, for now, I am here in my hometown, Castro Valley, doing the important work of existing in a chair at the breakfast table – the work of considering my life: as it is, and as I’d like it to be. The moments of solitude I find sustain me; they are soothing, like small handfuls of warm, desert sand. A mother of three, constantly in motion as I tend to the endless needs closing in all around me, the importance of this time to think and reflect, to be taken captive by a moment of dream in which the mysteries and possibilities of self can spin freely across the limitless expanse of desert – cannot be underestimated.

-This post is dedicated to my cousin, Megan, whose artistic soul has long inspired me.-

*This line comes from T.S. Eliot’s poem, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

**To learn about Burning Man, visit: http://www.burningman.com/

Haircut

Well, it happened: our nearly-eight-year-old son now has an opinion about his appearance. Although on some level this is reassuring (he has been divested in his appearance to the point of heading for school with unbuttoned pants) I find myself in a subtle state of grief. It’s not like he’s going Goth or anything, but he recently announced that he wanted to do away with his long locks. We were in the minivan driving to our triannual haircut when he sprung it on. Expecting to hear he’d endure the usual one-and-a-half-inch trim, I asked, customarily, what kind of do he wanted. Instead, I had to lower the volume of Philadelphia Chickens to clarify what I thought I’d heard: I want it short this time. It’s hard to explain why these six soft-spoken words initially gave me a lump in my throat. It may help to understand that James has a head of hair three times thicker than my own, as blond as I pay to color mine, and that the wavy locks have been approaching shoulder length for nearly four years now. Furthermore, the hair in the back curled like an ocean wave and bounced tirelessly when he ran. Once, we were even stopped in Safeway by a woman seeking extras in a movie; she was ready to cast James on the spot based on his “gorgeous head of hair!” Not exactly fond of a spotlight, James politely refused.

And that’s always been the thing about James; he’s never been the center stage type or even the stage type. Until recently, he was the boy who hid his face comfortably in the golden curtains of his hair, who liked to wear hoods and not just on cold days. But James is changing, and maybe sometimes we forget that kids are allowed to change; that, in fact, it’s their job to transform before our very eyes. From an early age, kids might seem to possess a certain temperament (for James it’s the classic introvert) making it perhaps too tempting to box them up and seal them with a label, as if we already know who they are. But of course, they don’t even know who they are at times; and all of their life long, they will be figuring it out – who they are and who they want to become. Furthermore, unexpected experiences, events and relationships will come along to help determine the outcome of their unfolding identity, causing an even greater deal of mystery. Identifiable temperament or not, it’s possible, even probable, that just when we think we have our kids figured out, they will surprise us, maybe even shock us; they will teach us and re-teach us who they are. (One would have thought that the erratic sleeping, eating and napping habits of infancy would have cemented this idea of inconstancy early on). But we’re parents; we're busy, tired, sentimental;and we like our kids the way they are -- it’s familiar. We aren’t necessarily ready for them to change (unless it means they're graduating from the tantrum stage or that they’re finally clearing their own dinner plates). It’s the bittersweet privilege of parenthood that we get front row seats to the rapid viewing of our children’s constant transformation; it’s thrilling to see a unique identity emerge yet we are aware all the while that something is being left behind.

That momentous day in the van, when James voiced his wishes for a haircut, it all came together for me like a sappy series of flashbacks in a Hollywood film. First, I recalled that in recent weeks, I’d found him on the bathroom stool trying to flatten his curls with a spray bottle (when I used to have to remind him an annoying number of times just to run a brush through it before school). Can you help me get this hair flat, Mama? he had inquired rather desperately, worry lines forming like quotation marks between his two long-lashed lids and hazel eyes. And I recalled the look of horror on his face when I explained to him that with no amount of water would his curls lie down flat. The final flashback came from a recent trip to Target when low and behold, James expressed the first of his wardrobe opinions. While I’d previously been accustomed to tossing any needed clothing for the kids into my cart with toilet paper and cat food, suddenly, James was retracting the jeans from the cart and inspecting them, only to politely inform me that the jeans I’d selected were several shades too dark. So at the end of age seven, James picked out his first pair of jeans (and come to find out, he likes a very pale, worn-looking denim).

So the signs are all there; the oldest of my three sons is coming into his own; he’s, yes, changing --figuring out what he likes and doesn’t -- all of the things he is supposed to be doing. While I did briefly mourn my longhaired James, I am happy to report that his short, becoming haircut brought with it a profound sense of rejoicing, along with a generous dose of pride pooling in my mother heart. I realize I am on this journey, too. After all, I got to teach him how to flip through magazines for hairstyles, and -- per his bold request -- I even had the privilege of molding his first faux-hawk. The new bold James inspires me. And I can’t wait to see what’s next: Rock on, James! And I’ll rock with you.

Cyber Shack

My pocketful of girlhood dreams always included at least three things: being a wife, a mother and a writer. And perhaps since my undergraduate days (despite my ignorance of the consuming ways of motherhood and family life) I envisioned for myself a writer's shack: a modest 10 x 10 wooden structure situated at the far edge of a lush backyard lawn. Inside: a desk, a chair, a carpet sample; a place to nurture my writing self without distraction.

I witnessed my first writer’s shack eleven years ago, in the backyard of my MFA professor’s charming Berkeley flat. Tucked among patches of Lavender and poised stems of Queen Ann’s Lace, the cottage, as she referred to it, was complete with tribal rugs, a nature lover’s art pieces and inspirational quotes tacked to the four saffron-yellow walls. I suspect the spirit of Virginia Woolf is getting a groove on over this first-rate “room of one’s own.”* Inspired by what a writer’s shack could be, I have been collecting quotes and clippings for my own ever since.

Though I do not yet have my backyard fantasy shack (I suppose owning a house comes first) I am at last honoring the foresight of my twenties, if only in spirit, with the construction of this here cyber shack. While a blog is almost certainly not what Woolf had in mind eighty years ago, when she asserted women writers need a room of their own, and though her groove may not be quite as on as it is with the aforementioned Berkeley cottage, I think she could be pleased with this modern concept of a writer’s own room -- both because her essay* refers more to owning the right to create than an actual room, and because for now, for this woman writer and mother of three, a room in cyber space holds all the promise of calling me out of the godforsaken laundry room (not to mention all the bedrooms hopping with vexatious little dust bunnies and, God help me, the monopolizing kitchen) into a space I can at least call my own; one fashioned for the sole purpose of nurturing these ancient ambitions I have to write and create.

It’s not that I haven’t relished the dreams-come-true of wife and mother; on the contrary, I have embraced them! And it’s not that I’ve written nothing over the last ten years; it’s that what I’ve written ends up in clammy cardboard boxes underneath the house. It’s that I’ve scribbled out lines on receipts at stop signs or on stolen magazine pages in the dentist’s office. On the rare occasion that I clean out my car or my purse, I find myself weeding through random papers with the guiding question, is this a receipt or a poem? This sorting ritual has become a commentary on my writing life and the rather undignified place writing has occupied since finishing grad school and having kids. The writer has been lost in the pocket of girlhood dreams like an anonymous piece of lint; but I am determined now to find her and to restore dignity to the words she has to say. From increasing experience, I know that added attention to the whole of my life’s aspirations will only serve to expand my joy as a wife and mother and increase my sense of purpose as a separate and finite human being. So I am eager! And while eventually this pursuit of wholeness could mean I’ll be heading back from Home Depot with cuts of lumber hanging out the mini van windows, for now this little cyber shack will do.

*The essay I refer to, “A Room of One’s Own” by Virginia Woolf, can be found online at http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/w/woolf/virginia/w91r/.