Please visit my new blog at www.oleoptene.com. Thank you!

I just barely had poor old Mama Chronicles up and running and separate from rinzai.com, which is really and truly my husband’s site, when I just found myself dragging to write it. Part of the reason had something to do with the title — somehow it feels like there should be some soft focus pastels with my kids saying adorable things and doing the darnedest things, and, shoot that’s just not who I am. I mean, my kids say cute things and do darned things in the superlative, and sometimes I want to write about it. I’m with them all the time, and so they do get prominent real estate in my mind. But that couldn’t possibly be who I am, or even how I really want to present myself to the world. Maybe my blog title is the victim of my frustration at the conflation of being something and doing something — polite small talk with a stranger at a party “And what do you do?” “Um, I’mhomewithmyfourchildren…” “I beg your pardon?” “I said, um, ‘I stay at home with my four children’”… “Ah, well, you must have your hands full!” and then the conversation dies. It’s not unlike being in school and people would ask how long until you graduate and what will you be doing then? and, yes, the philosophy major, interesting, so, um graduate school? and the conversation trails off. Which I guess is better than being a doctor and having strangers ask you to look at this rash — “Oh, a philosophy major? Hey, I have this existential crisis, would you just take a peek at it and give me your professional opinion?” (and what would they ask a mother? “I have this really tough piece of chicken, would you cut it up for me? Or, can you name all of Thomas the Tank Engine’s friends? Explain the difference between a digger and a backhoe? Identify this dinosaur over here?”) Yeah, I know the cocktail party is like the cliche of stay-at-home mom whining, truthfully I haven’t been to an all grown-up party in…maybe 8 years? He wants me to get a babysitter for one in a couple of weeks, and maybe I will, maybe I will. But lie about what I do for a living. I just can’t say I blog because, well, were someone to actually LOOK at my blog, it just might make them giggle at my pretensions.

Anyway, identity and roles (and if I put on a mask, a secret identity? Maybe? I have buried in some journal somewhere some thesis about the differences between Batman, who puts on costume to protect his Bruce Wayne identity and Clark Kent who puts on glasses to protect his Superman identity). And while I brushed my teeth I composed an introduction to this blog entry that went more or less: I am not the sort of person who thinks that everything was better in the time of Jane Austen, but when I read an Austen novel, I love that characters at a party NEVER ask each other what they do for a living. Of course, maybe that’s because instead of being defined by what one did one was defined by what one had, which is probably ten times more atrocious (unless we ask each other what we do in a more circumspect attempt to unravel the much more complex language of having and class — and where did you go to school?). But in any case, it seems like we all ought to resist kicking and screaming the little boxes we are always being put in, except it does make it so much easier when you do, back at the proverbial cocktail party, bump into someone who says, “You know, this reminds me of this funny thing I just read…” and skips the polite, disinterested questions altogether, to recognize that rare and precious kindred spirit.

Did I not, however, title this blog “Moving blogs?” Have I gone and buried the lead? I think I was trying to move away from blogs that read like the sort of essay my 12th grade English teacher really liked, with an introductory/thesis sentence and supporting details, the formulaic outline sticking out like and anorexic’s ribs, so I am going to 1) not go any further with that metaphor however tantalizing it seems, because, dammit, I have self-control and 2) in my efforts to blog stuff I would read if I weren’t me not go revising and editing and perfecting and re-writing when all it is is just, you know, a web log, and besides, despite my best efforts, embarrassing spelling errors sneak in 3) finally get to the point… I have gone and staked out a tiny piece of cyberspace with www.oleoptene.com. Now, if you look up oleoptene on-line apparently all you will find is “see eleoptene” which is, in chemistry, “the liquid or volatile part of an oil” from the latin oleo — oil, and the Greek Ptenos — winged. But at some point I had seen it defined as “having wings” and it struck me as a cool word. And apparently only me, since it was available as a domain name, see? And I’ve used it as a screen name, and it’s NOT related to my reproductive status at all. In any case, right now it has a dorky wordpress theme and the generic first entry “Hello world” “edit or delete this entry” (but the password is no longer password, I tell you!) so maybe, since it’s late and I really want to go read The Great Influenza by John Barry which my dad left for me before I fall asleep, I shall paste these words in there and they can act simultaneously as a closing of Mama Chronicles and a starting point for oleoptene.com?

So if a certain four year old is a pirate captain, to what role is his brother consigned? “He’s my hardy.” As in, “Avast ye, me hardies!” Clearly Soren has not been studying piratese on this website since they leave that term out.

A surprising number of my anxieties and guilts seem to trace back to an intense dislike of waste in any form. Probably the harshest form of waste though, is sand’s one way trek through the hourglass, and I wonder if the concept of lying fallow doesn’t offer some reprieve.

So one of the things about having three kids doing Suzuki music lessons at the same time is that in a given week only one of them ever seems to be “making progress,” that is stretching their abilities, doing new things, acquiring new skills. I had been feeling guilty about this, that perhaps it was my own limitation that I could focus on the progress of one child, consigning his brothers to “maintenance practicing.”

I tried to explain my idea of “maintenance practicing” to my mother last night on the phone; it comes from the observation over eleven years of marriage that our marriage seems to alternate between periods of maintenance and periods of growth — the growth periods often arising from a crisis brought on by too long in mere maintenance. During these maintenance periods, it’s not that we aren’t connected or that the rules of marriage don’t apply, it’s just that the work of marriage really isn’t the focus of either of our lives — we get distracted by things like kids, jobs, the house, friendships, writing and, while we try not to take each other for granted, well…

The thing is, my mother with her brilliant elementary school teacher’s insight was right back with the educational importance of the maintenance period, this is when a new skill becomes solid, ingrained, mastered so you can take it for granted. And I realize I’ve had other conversations with her about how, in her experience of teaching every grade of elementary school over the span of her career, some years involve a curriculum with the introduction of lots of new concepts, and some years are about practicing and applying concepts introduced the year before. And both are important. I think that, being part of a peer group of — what’s the gentle way of saying parents on the pushy end of the spectrum — it’s easy to see kids as these little bundles of potential on legs, just waiting for some brilliant teacher to activate this potential — so time spent on a review feels like time WASTED. And if you want to turn on the real guilt, start reading studies about “windows of opportunity” for certain kinds of learning, like acquiring a second language or musical ability.

I will say, in the defense of pushy parents, that it’s not necessarily competitiveness or wanting to be sure your child gets a place at an elite college that drives such pushiness. In my own case, it comes at least as much from this idealistic conviction that the universe is a feast to be devoured, full of ideas and sciences, facts and stories, that a lifetime’s nibbling can hardly ease the groaning board. There is no time to waste when it comes to learning the names of stars and trees, the songs of birds, reading Russian writers and learning French cooking techniques, becoming familiar with famous paintings and Beehtoven’s symphonies, the rules of baseball, the names of dinosaurs, the functions of the vital organs, poetic forms and the overwhelming variety of cultures and beliefs in the world. I remember loving the Galbraith’s _Cheaper by the Dozen_ for the efficiency expert’s approach to painting constellations on the ceiling and the morse code alphabet on the walls to facilitate quicker learning. And still I have this nagging feeling that anxiety doesn’t enable us to pack a lifetime more fully, that as valuable as all of these pursuits may seem in and of themselves, perhaps their importance is as part of the “great conversation” — that they create bridges between us and help us understand ourselves. But surely this is a process that must involve daydreaming of playing solitaire, or just goofing off and being silly with people we love for hours and hours, riding in circles on bicycles, and in minor doses, even vegging in front of the television sometimes, like Wittgenstein with his detective novels.

For myself and for my kids, for the sake of happiness, I am going to have to learn to look at how we choose to spend our time as this zero sum thing, time spent doing x is time one cannot spend doing y, that the time spent on math worksheets is time not contemplating the persistence of Greek gods and heroes, but rather to understand some sort of synergy. That recess and reading work together. That if biology is our guide, there must be value in sleep and in winter, in periods of dormancy… And as I willfully skip over another article on “mothers who opt out” and the latest version of the mommy wars, maybe I’ll be able to convince myself that this last decade when my classmates were getting MD’s and law degrees, I’ve been, um, creatively lying fallow.

Now I’m going to go re-read bits of Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek for exultation in nature’s wastefulness in an attempt to make myself more comfortable with my own.

Facing down a block.

I’ve signed up for the Art and Soul retreat in Portland in October, either encouraged or egged on by my best friend, and I waver between pinch-me excitement and anxiety that I’ll be in a room full of real artists and be seen as some sort of poseur, dreadful paralyzing fear of having nothing to say. Which has me wondering about the idea of “writer’s block” which implies something there, stopping stuff from coming out, stuff that is also there, which is not the same as the terrifying blankness, the search for anything more meaningful to say than that I get frustrated with routine sameness of emptying the dishwasher and emptying the dishwasher and pick-up after pick-up from school and, a life measured out in laundry scoops…

Somebody tonight asked if I wrote and I froze, no real answer — I am faithful with morning pages, much more than with my blog, but is that writing, or being too cheap for a therapist? And I wrestle with perfectionism that keeps me from wanting to publish a blog entry until I’ve written and re-read and erased a chunk and re-written, a few times. Which doesn’t make for prolific blog writing. And so if I say I write I feel like a fraud, but I cannot say I don’t. And I occasionally find an idea to mine or a turn of words that please me, and it’s hard to simply let it languish in pages that I can never bring myself to sift through again?

Anyway, blocked is sometimes being critical of the thoughts that come and sometimes it’s fear of not being good enough, fear of being found out as a fraud, I am not solipsistic enough to be believe that I am the only person to feel this, but sometimes it is blankness, wanting to curl up in front of the television and eat ice cream and be numb until the next load of laundry needs to be folded… But I do keep going with the morning pages, even when everything I write seems to be complete drivel. I am so grateful for the blogs I read which remind me that other people are out there struggling their own struggles and attempting to do more than watch tv and eat ice cream.

…clearly it’s bizarro world because I have stumbled on a scenario where I could sympathize with W…

It’s easy to pretend that faith is just a question of three more-or-less simple positions: I believe in God, or I think the whole notion of God is ludicrous, or God is a possibility, I haven’t enough evidence to make up my mind one way or the other. I’ll even grant that you could consider these positions a spectrum and that most of us find ourselves drawn to one spot on the spectrum and move a little this way or that way, but mostly we’ve got a gut feeling and construct philosophical world views that fit the gut instinct. But I am beginning to suspect that faith is a much more complicated relationship with authority.

I grew up (and remain) Bahá’í, which doesn’t make for a simple relationship with authority, since one important principle is individual investigation of the truth. We’ve got no clergy and every individual is responsible for their own spiritual progress, the institutions of the religion aren’t there to mediate for you — and a lot of Bahá’ís carefully build caveats into answers to questions you put to them — “my understanding of this is X based on citations Y and Z” or “many people have interpreted this thus.” At the same time, Bahá’ís believe that religion serves not just individual spiritual progress, but also the creation of social order, harmonious relations between people, even those with clashing opinions, and there is no higher principle than the creation of unity. So an individual who holds a different point of view than a consensus arrived at by the group, is obligated to concede to the will of the group even if the group is wrong and the individual is right, on the notion that dissension is more harmful than being wrong. This runs counter to a cultural icon we have the lone dissenter who sees reason, stands up to authority. The drama of the heat of debate is addictive and exciting, and I am often frustrated with myself by what seems like a lack of commitment in always getting both sides of an argument.

The chinks in my relationship with authority came with immersion in the world of midwifery and confronting this notion that not everything a doctor does is always in the best interests of an individual patient, which might not seem like such an epiphany, only it comes up again and again. When you try researching immunizations for children you find very intelligent, rational people looking at the same evidence and rationally arriving at different conclusions about what is best for their own children, and I don’t feel anywhere near wise enough to decide that half of these people are right and half of them are wrong. I met a mother who had a story about suspecting her child had some milk allergy and was reacting to the dairy in her diet when he was six months old and breastfed exclusively and had some eczema. But then a dermatologist told her the eczema was completely normal, so she merrily continued drinking milk. And then when he was one, the first time he had cow’s milk, he broke out in a huge rash and she kicked herself for not following her gut instinct. I commiserated with her frustration at not knowing as she was doing this for the first time, but it’s not like with son number four I’ve already made every mistake possible and so I go about all of this perfectly. And the people I know who are most sure of themselves are, um, a little fringe, they passionately advocate urine therapy and lotus births and things I can’t quite rationally justify. As if rationality were the criterion by which we all go!

This is the catch-22 of parenthood, and of life — there some things you can’t know without experience and the only way to get experience is to go out there and make a mistake, but there are things too crucial to risk big mistakes. Which doctor do you listen to? When do you get a second opinion, a third, a fourth? We all have crazy voices in our heads and it’s easy to suspect that our intuition that we shouldn’t get on an airplane tomorrow because it is going to crash is just a mask for other anxieties and fears. But then you get the stories of the people who didn’t go on Titanic, and you think “what if, this one time, it really is a gut instinct and it’s right?”

The authorities we have to trust aren’t just doctors — they are investment counselors and plumbers and auto mechanics and teachers and the friend who tells you you’re dating a loser. My relationship with my children’s violin teacher is where my drama is playing out right now — there’s this act of will and faith, trusting that months of practicing bow hands and holding the violin with the natural grace of the weight of the head rather than by clenching it between shoulder and jaw, of letting the weight of the back transmitted through the arm to the bow create tone rather than pushing and pulling against yourself, all before the fingers of the left hand ever come near the fingerboard — are going to make progress easier and more rapid once they actually do start with the Twinkles. But it takes so little to set off spasms of doubt — sit-ups for a seven year old to give him core strength to stand up straight holding the violin? Her theory that girls just innately learn faster? How long do I give this experiment before I go seeking elsewhere, what authority do I trust, how susceptible am I to flattery, and what’s to say I wouldn’t just be shopping around for someone willing to tell me how amazing my children are and what a great job I’m doing as their mother and violin coach? I really like the violin teacher, and then she makes me a little crazy, and I waver between wanting to give this a chance to work, and berating myself for not standing up and saying “this is crazy!” Where do I get my own personal version of the Iraq Study Group?

Another trip to InfernoMart

Good, penitent I, I try faithfully to attend my Sunday morning menu-making, grocery list generating, best-intentioned ritual — only demonic forces, then, remain as a plausible explanation of how at the unholy hour of 5:15 pm I find my minivan drawn into a line of cars oozing through the grocery store parking lot, desperate for a parking space that won’t require me to drag a two-year-old forcibly by the wrist five hundred meters past puddles and irresistible shiny things lying on the ground — oh, the magic of broken beer bottles! And I look around at the other zombie mom shoppers, their children surreptitiously pinching each other or outright throwing themselves on the ground in front of my shopping cart, and recognize that I am fully and completely doomed.

Yes, a demonic force, no hyperbole, I resist, I stroll, casually, confidently towards the elysian fields of good intentions, pyramids of polished and unblemished apples and coddled, misted greens that promise never to fade or wilt. I am going to make a beautiful salad tonight! And surely if I find the right way to prepare kale my three year old will see the error of his pizza-grilled-cheese-and-chicken-nugget-only ways and come to the light. This time I will not succumb to forces emanating from the ominous vortex at the center of the store, the happy humming of the refrigeration units the mists of condensation swirling against the glass doors of the freezers.

Here I add that I have a guide slightly less charming than Virgil in the person of that creative and dreamy child accompanying me. To think, I once thought that dreaminess and creativity were charming traits in a child, qualities I hoped for in the child in my belly, with secret plans to nurture and cherish all that potential. Only tonight when he steps carefully only on the beighe tiles, explaining that blues are water and oranges are lava, it not only fails to charm me, but apparently does nothing for the heavyset woman behind us ready to do jam her cart into my heels so she can get to the Froot Loops aisle faster.

Now we catalog the seven deadly sins of grocery shopping: 1) Envy is glancing covetously at the shopping basket of the woman five years younger than me, thin and not wearing sweats, but, oh, professional-looking clothes, shoes that shout out poise rather than comfort. Her cart seems — childless! Gourmet cheeses and a ridiculously thin baguette, champagne grapes and fancy bottles of water, and vegetables, that, were they to appear on the the character-emblazoned plastic unbreakable plates in front of any of my children would cause heads to spin and ominous voices to emanate a lá The Exorcist. 2) Gluttony: oh, too easy. How many forms does chocolate come in? 3) Anger: well, now it is my own offspring with surreptitious pinching and throwing themselves down on the floor and I can feel the heavy-set Froot Loops grabbing cow rolling her eyes behind my back — which, by the way, offends my 4) Pride, because I am a good mother, dammit! 5) Greed is the sale price on something I don’t need, but I save money buying two… 6) Lust is the senuous pleasures offere in the aisle of overpriced personal care items, the red lipstick that, in this seductive lighting, promises to transform me into that desirable, young childless woman, who — yes, she buys muesli rather than anything manufactured by General Mills! and I ignore the little voice in my head that tells me I’ll try putting it on before carpool in the morning and wipe if off because it looks ’slutty’, a voice which I must here interject is far easier to ignore than the tugging on my jacket, “Mommy, I need to go to the bathroom. Now!”

And in the interruptions that characterize my life now, I drag you, dear reader along with my four offspring, to the shadowy, secret corridor at the back of the store, at least I think this is where the poor employee in the produce section who, it turns out, speaks no English, was pointing in response to my embarrassed and apologetic “Excuse me?” And I can’t take the cart with me, as brother gets idea from brother and I realize I have to change a diaper and the case in my purse is, shoot, of course, out of wipes, and then waiting, and waiting, as the older boys who would die of mortification before setting foot in the women’s restroom take so long that I am quite sure there’s a child molestor in the men’s room, and, looking around to make sure no one’s watching I press my ear to the door and hear water running, “Stop that!” “No you stop!” “I’m telling Mom!” and figure no one is THAT perverted.

Finally, finally, we trudge back to where our shopping car was, only some helpful and efficient employee must have mistaken it for abandoned and reshelved our groceries — the endless doing and undoing that makes up life with small people! Which is how we find ourselves in the frozen center of the maze — and is it exhaustion or 7) sloth, me reaching for the gaudy colors of the box of frozen corn dogs?

I love my art supplies…

but what sort of self-esteem issues must you have if you feel you need a stencil to doodle?

This is, no doubt, intended for people whose parents bought them too many coloring books as children.

Is there beauty in loss?

This week, my life it had been a film, would be one of those artful atmospheric things, lots of shadows and sepia tones and big clouds and a soundtrack that would be this Glassian single plaintive line over a low rumble.

I got to parent alone while the other parent in the house flew to Boston for a conference — he was gone the week before and will be gone again next week, which is manageable, the kids help with everything from taking out trash and making their own lunches to reading to each other and helping each other with homework, but it still requires management skills on my part that are just out of reach because I sleep badly, having a hard time dragging myself to bed and then waking up wide awake with every creak in our old house. Halloween brought about an intense bout of homesickness for Dallas because the older boys missed the friends they went trick-or-treating with last year, when their father was, coincidentally at another conference in Boston — and by the time I got them to a party thrown by the Suzuki teacher, home, fed dinner, cleaned up and ready to go out, it was 8:00 and most of the lights were out in most of the houses in our neighborhood — three people on our block answered the door. This isn’t the most child friendly neighborhood, it’s friendly, it just still feels, um transitional? Bitter disappointment. And I recognize that this is not going to leave scars even though I feel guilty and terrible about depriving them of something they wanted. In any case, I suspect I am ambivalent about the whole trick-or-treating thing because I have a huge aversion to asking for things.

Holding a sobbing ten-year-old in my arms and hearing how lonely he is for his friends he’s left behind somehow left me susceptible to all of the other dark-cloud linings to a holiday that isn’t so much about the candy, back to the death of my grandfather a few days before Halloween my senior year of high school and my father’s annual melancholy at the end of October. A year later, the loneliness I experienced my first year at college and knowing my father was having a hard time of it and making myself sick trying to use chocolate as a drug to make it not ache — that bizarre feeling of eating compulsively and not enjoying it but not being able to stop and how frightening that was. Another vivivd Halloween/Dia de los Muertos memory is of walking through a cemetery in Prague with my three week old son strapped to my chest, ten years ago, on November 1st, aware of the All-Saint’s Day and amazed that a nation of atheists turns out en masse annually to clean up the graves of their family members and feeling overpowered by all the hormones and being so far from the graves of anyone I loved and sad for those graves that had no one visiting them and mortally aware of my powerlessness that I had brought a life into this world and that it comes with no guarantees and suddenly I am more vulnerable to loss than I have ever been.

If my life were a film this week, it wouldn’t be bleak, exactly, though it would feature the grayness and rain we’ve been anticipating since moving to Portland, but it would also stop your heart with the beauty of wet sidewalks plastered with bright yellow leaves, raging against the grayness, going not gently, almost it seems a counterpoint to the cherry blossom as this Japanese metaphor for the transience of life and beauty. I know there’s a metaphor to be tortured here. It’s been a weepy week, feeling alien in this city, again, not unanticipated, and I’m pretty sure it will get better — it has every time we’ve moved before — but this nagging fear is “what if this time it doesn’t?” and somehow my mind piles up evidence of all the sad and lonely people I know. But there’s this perverse side of my delighting in the cathartic weeping and just in awe of the beauty of the cold, the wet, the grey, the dark and those bright yellow leaves.

Is loss beautiful? There are facile answers, about the romanticization and idealization of things we have lost — I could be as lonely in Dallas as I am here; this is always what I thought “the only good woman is a dead woman” meant. There is the release from worry and responsibility and that paring down to essentials. There is the realization that you have survived a loss you thought you couldn’t, being surprised at your own strength. All possibly beautiful but not what I mean.

Maybe it’s just ridiculous to use the same word to refer to my realization that my favorite ring has slipped off my finger, to my ten-year-old’s feeling he has no friends here, to what a friend who just lost custody of a niece she had been bringing up with her own children for more than a year is going through. There are losses you hardly notice and losses with such pervasive force that every ordinary ritual of daily life has lurking this enormous weight ready to come down crushingly on your chest so you cannot breathe. Losses that hit you as soon as you wake up and so you try to scurry back under a cover of dreams to escape them. I am not romanticizing these things, I don’t think puffy red eyes make me sexy, I don’t want to tart tragedy up as a melodrama — but what I am finding inspiring and sustaining and, yes, beautiful, is that we endure loss and cycle around and it becomes part of who we are and we do eventually laugh again.