Two three break

A perfect example

What I want for my daughter, from friends and family, for her second birthday (or for Christmas, or any subsequent gift-giving occasions):

-Above all, clean air, water, and earth:  to remember that what we want most for our daughter is a future unpolluted by plastic waste, uncorrupted by vast consumer monopolies, and that our most ardent wish is that money not be spent in her name on things that are destroying her future.
-tools.  Actual tools, sized for a child’s hands, tools that actually work and do things, not sets from Amazon or Target or Walmart.
-sports equipment
-an actual basketball or football or soccer ball
-a baseball bat or baseball glove
-a tennis racket
-a ukulele
a small-sized lacrosse stick (preferably used)
-real, small-sized things, made of cloth or metal or wood, not plastic.  Homemade things, things made by artisans, or craftspeople, paid a living wage.
-framed art
-real rain gear.  Not something cute from a box store, but something that will keep her dry and warm if we decide to go and play in the rain.
-Brownell binoculars
-a sturdy wooden steps tool with two steps
-a crinkle cutter
-child-sized baking and cooking implements (not sets; not toys)
-a Waldorf hand kite
-a Waldorf art book
-anything from these sites:  michaelolaf.com, How We Montessori, amightygirl.com
-anything from etsy.com
-anything from a B corporation
-solar panels for our house
-an electric car [Karl learned to drive when he was 3.  Just saying.]
-a spaceship
-rock-climbing holds
-a child-sized guitar
-a go-cart
-a magnetic chess set
-art or music or gymnastics or children’s yoga classes, which we find it difficult to afford
-two days a week at Montessori school
-peace on earth
-that you match whatever you spend on gifts for hers dollar for dollar with investments in her college fund, or in divested mutual funds
-To remember that we are raising our daughter as an anti-consumerist.  To remember that you are not just buying her gifts but you are spending your dollars on a future for her—either one with an ocean emptied of fish and flooded with plastic soup, or one with a functional, joyful civilization not riven by climate chaos.  To remember that *you* are the one supporting that future for her in how you spend your dollars.  In fact, how you spend your dollars is the only real way you are building a future for her—one way or another.

Upon the bitter green she walks

Why feminism is worth fighting for

My second post of 2018, and my first since June.  I am writing less briskly but I am still writing. That’s important.  Last year we moved to Wareham, Massachusetts.

I spent last summer driving back and forth to Maine for Sagan’s immunizations, and working on the new house.  The move was in September--a whole year ago now--and the walls and windows remain unfinished and the house itself is a work in progress.  Also, and we may be the only family in New England to have consciously made this decision, we are living without internet.  The discussion continues to be whether or not there is a way to get internet (including smart phones) that would not involve having life taken over by it—and I can’t think of a way.

So I am living without it, like the Amish.  It makes it difficult to maintain a blog, although I’ve been intending to since Sagan’s birth.  In order to put these words on paper, and then onscreen, I must close myself in a room with earplugs, and harden my heart to the banging on the door, and somehow find a way toward a creative self.

My last adventure was attending all three days of the “International Fiction Now” conference at Brown University, a 50-minute drive from Wareham, just for the gorgeous pleasure of hearing sentences strung together.  It was a celebration of the work of Robert Coover, to whom I can’t help but refer now as “Bob.”  It was a stunning assortment of writers.  And also rather misogynist.

One of the things that happened in my two-year hiatus, in addition to me birthing a daughter, was the #metoo movement, to which I listened, enrapt.  (When one does not have internet, one listens to the radio during all waking hours.  As if one lived in 1944.)  Having a child makes you realize the inequities between men and women like nothing else.  I was struck by Robert Coover’s story the final night.  Yes, it was absurdist.  Yes, experimental.  It’s more or less a story as a joke, a story as a concept—but like so many of his stories there’s much more going on, and underneath the surface is a wife cooking and cleaning and raising children for a man, a man she has sex with in the moonlight, a man for whom she toils.  And I kept finding these women at the edges of the conference.  The wife at the end of Jonathan Baumbach’s story “Baby,” who announces to the author of the story—busy writing his collection of short stories with a one-year-old baby as main character—that lunch is ready.  Were I so lucky as to have someone announce that lunch were ready for me.  Dorcas Palmer in Marlon James’s reading from “A Brief History of Seven Killings.”  Even the beautiful younger women, in their sixties, or seventies, accompanying the decrepit male writers who read at the conference, in their eighties and nineties.  These women, most second or third wives, were the ones doing the child-rearing, the dishes, the laundry while their male partners wrote.  I thought this, as I thought of my own daughter at home.

In absolute numbers the percentage of women writers reading at the conference, in the sessions I attended, was 38 percent—11 men to seven women.  It reminded me of this interview I heard on NPR: “If there's 17 percent women, the men in the group think it's 50-50.  And if there's 33 percent women, the men perceive that as there being more women in the room than men.” —Our Feminized Society
[the quote is from Geena Davis, and her Institute on Gender in Media--lots of great stuff in her interview, and at the Institute's Research page]

Even that doesn’t represent the truth of it, because 100 percent of the late-night sessions—the key evening speakers, the elder statesmen of the conference—were men:  Ben Marcus, TC Boyle, Bill Kennedy, Don DeLillo, Paul Auster, and of course, Bob Coover.  The women, even such impressive names as Edwidge Dandicat and Siri Hustvedt, were relegated to the afternoons.  And the highest percentage of women was in the first-night session, with six readers—four women, two men. Six readers crammed into one session that went late into the night, at a smaller venue, with each reader given less time.

As the New Yorker so succinctly puts it:

But the balance is so hard.  Especially now that I understand the visceral tug of motherhood.  I mean that literally:  I feel it in my viscera.

Most of it is the sheer pleasure of mothering.  It’s pleasurable.  The oxytocins bursts after childbirth and during nursing—the largest injection of the love and happiness hormone that human beings ever experience.  I understand why women keep doing it.

“Joy has been the great surprise of motherhood.”  —Karen Russell, "Orange World," @NewYorker [again] #karenrussell #orangeworld

From the novel “Motherhood” by Sheila Heti:

“On the one hand, the joy of children.  On the other hand, the misery of them.  On the one hand, the freedom of not having children.  On the other hand, the loss of never having had them—but what is there to lose?  The love, the child, and all those motherly feelings that the mothers speak about in such an enticing way, as though a child is something to have, not something to do.  The doing is what seems hard.  The having seems marvelous.”

Spoiler alert:  she decides not to have kids.  Spoiler alert:  and still has time to write a novel.

My main feeling after hearing “Orange World” by Karen Russell was jealousy.  She, too, had a “geriatric pregnancy.” Her discussion of breastfeeding and the joy of having a child into your late thirties can only be autobiographical.  So I assume, without having the time or inclination to google. But she took that time and wrote it, used it to make this exquisite, violent, crepuscular story.

I’ve been doing some spectacular reading though.  During the course of Sagan’s incubation and infancy, I read all seven volumes of Proust.  If we named her after the Princesse de Sagan, then I knew I must read the entirety of “In Search of Lost Time."  That is the gift Sagan gave me by being born, the gift that K. gave me by originally suggesting we name her after the astrophysicist—that now I have become acquainted with these other Sagans, too.  The ultimate aristocrats for Marcel Proust, and the nom de plume of Francoise Sagan.

My favorite Frenchism within "In Search of Lost Time"—he spends a lot of pages describing aspects and vernacular of the French language, some of the funniest parts, if you're acquainted with French—was how Francoise, the housekeeper and a much more important character than you’d expect—called the Princesse de Sagan “la Sagante.”

La Sagante.  That’s my daughter all over.

Francoise—another woman who hangs around doing the cooking and cleaning for a man that writes. Or doesn’t write, but sits and broods about writing.  (Not dissimilarly to Coover’s main character.) She dusts his pages.  And rearranges them.

As does Francoise Sagan—her book Bonjour Tristesse stunned me.  Somehow also she rearranges Proust’s story and retells it, all those hundreds of thousands of words in 100 slim pages.  How is it that more people don’t read this book, or talk about it?  Or know about it?  Because it was written by a nineteen-year-old girl?  It strikes me that there are so many teenaged girl heroines because it’s not until later in life that women get beaten down by being told what they are not to do.  Joan of Arc, Francoise Sagan.  Albertine.

I am writing about misogyny in a blog post I will never publish because I am afraid of a misogynist backlash.  What will Bob Coover think?  What will Rick Moody think?  What will William Kennedy think?  Will any of them ever read my novel in which a nineteen-year-old girl is beaten by her boyfriend?  Is it misogynist that I have written this scene?  Or is it misogynist that we don’t have more novels in which this ubiquitous violence is explored, discussed?  Two women die every week at the hands of their domestic partners.  Not in the US, in Britain.  In the US it’s four a day.  And it isn’t even news.  When was the last time you heard a story about domestic violence on TV?  Or are you too busy watching puppy videos?

My daughter makes me want to be a better feminist.  I want this violence not to touch her.  I want discrimination and self-doubt not to hamstring her as it has hamstrung me.  Most men, and many women, still claim such discrimination doesn’t exist.  Yet I see how already it affects her.  How all of the characters in Winnie the Pooh (save Kanga, the mother--natch) and Sesame Street are male.  How people respond strangely when she collects spiders, or spends half an hour staring at a bulldozer—and respond gushingly when she kisses a stuffed animal.  I see how my friends with boy children are embarrassed when their sons clutch at baby dolls.  Children aren’t stupid.  Millennia of evolution have caused them to be exquisitely sensitive to our every nonverbal, subconscious response.

Girl children know.  I know.  You know.  They know.

Every man got the right to decide his own destiny

A new post, my first since Sagan's birth, and she is nineteen months old, so that's a nineteen month hiatus.  I suppose that's about the length of time it takes for things to normalize.  Not that they have or ever will—I don't want things to go back to "normal"—she is a joy, and every minute I get to spend with her is a gift.  Nevertheless I am beginning to understand, now, why there are so few mothers who are also artists.

It is difficult to manage motherhood and any kind of creative life, especially if you also include self-care.  Balance is challenging.  I know it gets easier every day, as it already is, as I have time to write these words, and I actually want to cherish each of these days to the best of my ability.

Everyone says it goes so fast, and already it does.  Knowing how fast it goes doesn't change its speed, and I am still surprised by the experience of it.  Of course I also have bad days, including this week.  It's easy to feel like I am squandering, already, my daughter's childhood, with fear and self-doubt and recrimination.

Nothing changes when you have children.  It's just an overlay atop the person you already are, the fears and doubts you already had.  And of course everything changes when you have children.  Every cliche about parenthood is true verbatim.

She is still willing to cuddle close to my breast, to snug up beneath my chin, to come to me without hesitation to kiss her boo-boos.

When things are hard, all I have to do is remember how astounding she is.  She is uniquely herself, as, of course, all babies are, all humans are—but still. She is herself.  She is amazing, and I can't take any credit.  She's so independent, and easy-going, and creative.

Since her birth, I've been reading about Dr. Maria Montessori, the Italian doctor and feminist who invented the "Montessori method."  If I had to sum up her philosophy, I'd say that she insists on the autonomy of each individual child, that from birth we are learning through experience, and our job as parents and teachers is to present the world in such a way that children can develop confidence in their own abilities, to be able to care for themselves independently as soon as they are able.

I am shocked by the dysfunctional consumerism that has arisen around children in our culture.  How many contemporary parents have children kept forever in cages:  cribs, high chairs, walkers, strollers, car seats, playpens.  All made of plastic, all cheap, all destined for the ash heap of history.  Often these babies have screens as their only companion.  All in the name of "safety." The devil has been renamed "safety" by our culture.  People are so afraid of their children bumping their heads or scraping their knees that they'd rather yell at them, suppress their every instinct toward freedom, independence, creativity, adventure.  This is selfishness. Our fear taking precedence over their self-development.

"We cannot know the consequence of suppressing the spontaneity of childhood.  We may even suffocate life itself.  That humanity which is revealed in all its intellectual splendor should be respected with a kind of religious veneration."  —Maria Montessori

All human beings are uniquely special, especially precious:  all of us have our cargo to carry into the world.  As my epigraph says:  we each have our race set out for us.

"…you are happy for your child because you know that she is happy.  You are happy not because your child is a 'super baby.'  At any age, developing an inflated idea of self leads eventually to isolation and loneliness.  Our goal is to help children appreciate that they are unique human beings and special to us.  However, we want them to realize that all other human beings are unique, too."  —Paula Polk Lillard and Lynn Lillard Jessen, "Montessori from the Start"

Yes, this has become a "mommy blog."  Sucks for you.  Although I can't help thinking that if someone like Jonathan Franzen or Philip Roth decided to write online about parenting, their website would be called "a series of short essays on fatherhood," and not a daddy blog.  Yet another example of the diminutive way we refer to motherhood, the saccharine bromides that steal away the resonance of mothering.  We cheapen and diminish the experience of women and infantilize mothers because to do otherwise would mean that we would HEAR THEIR VOICES:  how deep the experience is, how terrifying, how hard.

But really, how easy she is.  Her needs are simple: food, water, comfort, new experience.  She is filled with joy at being in the world.  Even when she is having a hard time it's for a reason that makes sense and all she really needs is reassurance, love, attunement.  

I love how she makes this face when she nurses, as if milk is the most delicious substance known to creation, this little quiver in her eyebrows as her eyes lower, as if she's a critic tasting the most delicious wine of all of history.  There's how she clutches my fingers when I'm trying to do something, just to be closer to me.  To keep me focused on her.  How she wraps her arms around my boob like it's a huge beach ball, or a body pillow.  How she utters this deep sigh, pulls off, and rests her head gently against my breast.  Her laugh.  It's the most beautiful sound in the world—deeper than expected, almost guttural, like a chuckle—oh.  It is darling.  It makes my heart hurt.  How smart she is, how she's been signing since she was four months old, and how hard she tries to communicate with us, how interested she is by the world, especially new things, new people, new places.  How beautiful she is, even for a baby—her porcelain skin, her gorgeous birthmark, her little curved thumbs, her almond eyes, bow mouth, perfect nose, wide cheeks.  These are the cliches but they are also true.  How strong she is.  How when she tries to do something she pushes with every ounce of her muscle.  How hard she grips my fingers, so hard she can dangle from them.  How she jumps, how hard she tries to do what we're trying to do.  There are so many ways to love her.  The way she looks at me, as if she's drinking me in, just so curious about who I am and what's going on, no matter what I'm doing, as if she could just stare at me for decades.

I wrote this paragraph a while ago and already she has grown so much.  I keep thinking that all of these words I have written on this site, for twelve years now, are actually for her, for no one else.  I just didn't know that when I wrote them.  The dear grad student to whom I address my journals:  her.  And she'll have to read through all my self-hatred and ingratitude too.  She makes me want to be better, and teaches me how to be better.

[Some good Montessori blogs, for the curious:

Transitioning to a Floor Bed - Montessori - how we montessori

Video: Mark's Science Lesson on Circuits! | Montessori On The Double

This Merry Montessori – joyful parenting, joyful child ]