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Stirring the Pot
Ongoing August Syndrome
Passions
Artistic License
Well I Won't Spoil It
I've Fallen Down and I Can't Get Up
Will It Work This Time?
Summertime and the Living Is... Vague
Strings, Excessively Attached
Return Flight
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Stirring the Pot
The city seems to be crowded with these hefty dragonflies that pause in inconvenient places, like this subway grate in Soho and midtown. If nothing else, this tired non-swarm is attractive and is pointing out that finally the seasons are shifting. (I have to assume they're doing this out of some ingrained habit-- that the mass appearance of large dragonflies is some kind of migration.)
I'm hovering too, so I'm feeling a certain kinship with these critters. I'm desperate for the children to go back to school so that order can once again be imposed on my floppy household. I made a substantial decision about work during this phase where you've heard very little from me-- a decision that came with heart palpitations and insomnia, angry internal monologues and headache. I don't know if I'm doing the right thing but it seems like, of the couple of choices I have handy, the one I can make without feeling an unpleasant sense of doom in my gut. Now I just need to generate more professional possibilities.
But one thing I won't be doing to create them is trying to make manifest dead, or at least tired, arguments about maternity that don't really mean anything just for the sake of controversy. I'm thinking here of Katie Roiphe's late summer entry into the already wrung-dry "Mom Wars": her piece for the Slate Double X blog about feminists not acknowledging the pleasure of babies. Not inclined to shirk from commentary, not even if the thing that requires observation is as lame as Roiphe's essay is, Salon's Broadsheet women even staged a roundtable to discuss this. And I guess I'm the fool because I am pointing out these links here while saying that I don't understand why this is something Roiphe needs to think about. She's got a lively career, and a second one in which she writes silly, bragging pieces like this one. What's the point of fishing for a fight? It's a good thing when parents (not just mothers) love their children and it is a fact of life that the rest of the world may or may not care so much, but asking for people to draw lines, doing what Roiphe is doing and trying to find line draw-ers where there probably aren't any is just ridiculous.
Roiphe even engages in a completely unattractive "either/or" situation: "Here, sitting in the garden, looking at the eyelashes, would you trade the baby for the possibility of writing The House of Mirth? You would not." Most women aren't faced with Faustean kid exchanging trolls who offer them all sorts of advantages if they just give up their children, but I think it unlikely that things would be much different even if there were some sort of child-sacrifice-for-art economy. I guess, though, that it is reassuring that Roiphe wouldn't reject her baby for literary status.
posted by Elise at 3:31 AM
3 Comments
Ongoing August Syndrome
It has been a while, to be sure, and all sorts of things went on in the last eleven days or so, most of which point to some sense of progress. Home repairs have happened, leaving the promise of more home repairs in their wake. Terrifying computer corruption collapse happened and seems to have been fixed (touch wood). Various professional decisions on my part were made and unmade, sort of remade and are now festering. The children learned more stunts. I have lost my temper a few more times than I find comfortable.
I can't wait for school to start again. September always arrives with tremendous promise, perhaps it is all delusion that comes in the wake of the relief of having to sort out the deadly weeks of August where nothing at all manages to happen and all questions and problems go unanswered and unresolved, but I love it. This year both of my children will be in school, so that itself is interesting and terrifying. I have been assured that my younger child is ready for school but I do wonder if the institution is ready for him.
It's been sort of interesting to see how much this feeling of intractability is in the air. All over the place there's news about the impossibility of everything.
This week the New York Times ran a story about the pain of the urban ice cream truck because parents can't stand arguing with their children about not giving them frozen treats. (I don't mind these disputes, myself, and have never minded saying "no" to my children about these things or being quixotic-- sure some days they get ice cream, most days they don't.)
And then Slate's Double X blog talked about an article called "The Case Against Having Kids" which seems written to get everyone's dander up in the cruelest month. I have not read it but predict that it discusses the selfishness of non-parents, the selfishness of parents and the horrible harm everyone does to the environment. These articles keep popping up and people keep getting all bent out of shape about them in spite of the eternal mystery of why anyone cares about other people's non-harmful life choices.
But September is coming and with it I see order and productivity, an end to savage humidity and hair that looks less like I've gone a few rounds with the electroshock machine, and the return of a few folks whose presence I realize I rely on.
Are you out there languishing in the eighth month or is it a big vacation party for you?
posted by Elise at 10:00 AM
2 Comments
Passions
An obsession started about a year go. Ten months, really. Felix decided on a "theme" Halloween costume last year: he would be a butterfly and Sebastian would be a flower. I greeted his decision with glee. Here was a costume I could throw together without much trouble or expense at all and no one would wonder what the Hell the kids were got up as. (I still remember the year my mouse oufit was greeted at one door with the question: "Why are you dressed up as a dirty ballerina?" so I have a small interest in costumes being identifiable-- not enough to make my own highly detailed costumes or fight the kid to keep his antennae on.)
Since then, butterflies have fixed themselves int he minds of both children. They pretend to be butterflies. We have gone to butterfly visiting areas (at the Bronx Zoo and on vacation). We now have butterfly documentaries handy (though I haven't actually found a good one-- any thoughts anyone?) Soon, as a late-summer several-week-long project we'll encourage caterpillars to transform in a butterfly garden set-up at home. There have been numerous butterfly art works in the last few months, culminating last week when the children were permitted to do a butterfly-based art project with someone who knows a lot more about butterflies, and art, than I do.
Don't think there's a lot of memorization or learning going on here. Felix hasn't done that thing small children sometimes do where they sit down and memorize all facts about everything (Yankees line-ups, dinosaurs, snakes, princesses-- those seem to be popular obsessions). No, in this case, butterflies are more like friends who get discussed a lot. They get talked about generally.
Only a couple have really distinguished themselves enough to be particularly memorable: the Monarch butterfly (easy to remember, interesting migration, cool colors) and the Atticus Atlas Moth. While visiting a butterfly farm in June, Felix and I each had the pleasure of holding one of these critters. There is something remarkable about feeling the weight of a gigantic moth (I'd say it was about as big as a small plate-- or Sebastian's head) in your palm. They are hefty critters, hovering between exquisite and grotesque.
Anyway, I approve of this obsessive phase. I like the subway one too. But I know that there are good chances they'll be drawn to sports statistics and vehicles.
On another note... posting here has been sporadic due to some technical issues that have been dogging me for about a month now. It is still not quite clear what the problem is but there is some hope that I'll be able up and running, or running better soon, so my apologies.
posted by Elise at 11:45 AM
1 Comments
Artistic License
A friend of mine who designs things big and small-ish professionally once came up with a plan for a way to deal with the copious amount of art that children generate. She has yet to enact anything and in the meantime, I am faced with a couple of kids with copious creative output.
Now, you may think because I'm a bit chilly and unpleasant towards people who fetishize aspects of childcare and who brag incessantly about their kids that my black little heart is impervious to sentiment. Actually I have a strong nostalgia streak that somehow manages to bypass the rancid little muscle that circulates my blood and anyone who knows me is a little surprised that I snap bad photographs constantly, that I get too much amusement over my kids' haircuts, that I hate to miss any sort of first (whether it is walking, words, rollercoasters or, yes sadly already, stitches-- though that wasn't remotely a pleasure).
So I have a lot of artwork. In the wake of the move I weeded through some of it and I found ways to get rid of the less original, more sticker-based stuff before it anyone could notice, but I still have quite a bit of work that I want to keep. I actually want to look at it again and not just have it as some sort of addition to the reliquary.
What does one do with it all, though? Much of this is rather 3-D and doesn't fit nicely in portfolios and Container Store acid-free boxes. I can't remember at all what my friend proposed (and I suspect she didn't do anything about it because eventually she gave up and started a more rigorous editing technique in her own home).
Right now I have a big box serving as a warehouse for a substantial amount of creative expression, but it won't do for too much longer. What do people do?
I'll take suggestions.
posted by Elise at 9:17 AM
1 Comments
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