{my topography}

To be a mother means to kneel a hundred times a day; to kiss a damp and tousled head after a nap, or to rub away some sticky mark upon an upturned cheek (and to wonder, was that oatmeal, or something worse?) It means pressing my knees into the floor, so I can look into the wide eyes of a small person who knows how to press all of my buttons and also how to unlock inexplicable emotions in heart, and to explain where people go when they die, or about the tooth fairy, or that no, the lollypop displayed alluringly at checkout is not an option. Being a mother means perpetually navigating a fine line between the profound and the mundane—a line I’ve discovered is often at floor level… and it’s there where the tantrums get thrown.

To be a mother means that my hands are always full: with the soft-jelly limbs of my baby Sprout, or with the eager sweaty palms of my Bean, bigger now, perpetually on the brink of dashing out into traffic, or climbing over fences, or scrambling down rock strewn ravines. And just as it means that I am carrying things, it means that my hands magic. With my hands, I accept imaginary cups of tea, paint dozens of pictures, rinse a thousand dishes, type a hundred thousand words.

But maybe it’s really about this: being a mother means becoming adept at the imaginary; at telling stories about monsters, or fairies, or of mice that drive dump trucks…. and its this capacity to imagine that makes enormous, extraordinary, things possible for my children, because I dare to dream them. Just as it’s this same capacity that allows me to imagine a time in the future without sleep deprivation…when my short-term memory will return… (it will, right?) and I’ll have just a little more time.

It’s been twenty days since I launched A Field Guide To Now, and in those twenty days I have been more intensely creative than I’ve been in over a year.

I’ve been forced way outside my comfort zone. My word for the year was action, and this project has forced me to take action on behalf of my career as a writer and artist in ways I couldn’t have conceived of when I first took the plunge. I’ve had to learn how to query and research and push the limits of my ability to create at night after small boys go to sleep. I’m working on this book project, my novel, paintings, and a few other big projects that are under wraps with fingers crossed.

(I am also working part time, at a job that is pushing me to learn In Design and Photoshop, always under deadline. The child-free hours of my day are spent thusly: designing ads and view books and writing press releases. The rest of my day is spent juggling, with a single-minded focus pounding in my head like jungle drums.)

I am compelled, determined, wired, moody, thrilled, exhausted, inspired. When I sleep my mind is active in a way that is almost new to me. It’s frenetic and repetitive: gnawing away at the creative tasks I’ve left off from before bed. This past week I’ve begun dreaming of whales—and they’ve inspired some of the newest art for A Field Guide To Now. Here is a glimpse (in progress.)

Incidentally, when I looked up what it means to dream about whales, this is what I found: Whale reintroduces us to our creative and intuitive energies to show us a talent we’ve forgotten about or haven’t been aware existed. How spot-on is that?

I’ve had more coffee and less sleep; more wine, more sex, more dreams and less rhythm. I’m spending less time on laundry and dishes (and the house is in probable shambles because of it) and more time perched on the stool in my studio painting, with gauche on my fingers. Less time taking leisurely walks with my boys; more time trying to multi-task while they’re under foot.

It’s made me think about my identity, about who I am and how I define that. For a while, after Sprout was born, I slipped wholly into the identity of mother, and felt my world narrow to the small, domestic orbit of that life. It was restful, to be there. For a while. Sprout was such an easy baby that I enjoyed his babyhood in a way that I never fully did with Bean—who cried more and was more needy, just as I was newer and more anxious at the whole mommy thing.

But now, Sprout is walking. Bean is 5. The house is littered with legos (Sprout holds lego helmets in his mouth like a chipmunk. I’ve checked his diaper but he’s never actually swallowed one. Go ahead call me neglectful. YOU just try to keep legos off the floor with two boys in the house, four years apart.) There is a constant stampede of activity and peanut butter sandwiches and glasses of milk that get spilled. The vacuum is out all day long. Money is tight. Bean has outgrown all his pajamas. Sprout is starting to say words.

And.

And in the midst of all this messy, simple, regular domesticity, I’ve begun to long fiercely for myself. For myself not as a mother, but as someone entirely separate from my children.

Truthfully, I’ve always had an uneasy relationship with the definition of motherhood, and now, more than ever, I am enjoying my boys and wanting to be distinct from them, in my own right. A writer. An artist. Right now my mind is preoccupied with the craft of writing, with images, and also about self-doubt, and longing…

How do you define yourself? Where does your definition of motherhood (if you are, or want to be a mother) shape you? What are the words you use to tell yourself the story about your life as it is at this current moment?

Flipping through a book of poems by e.e. cummings I found flower petals by the dozens from a time in my life when love was a dreamy and girlish thing (embodied by the poem, above–one of my favorites.)

I wanted to be loved the way e.e. loved his women in his poems. I understood little, if anything at all about how love endures and changes; how things get messy and slip; how you become soft in the middle, or are caught like plastic bag rustling and rustling in the bare branches of a tree before spring comes to mask it with blossoms and green.

I haven’t seen flowers for months (it’s still winter here, for another month at least.) And I think about the girl I was then; how I I had a crush on everything beautiful; how my life orbited around boys and their attention (specific boys, and also the general boy populous); how I had abundant energy and time, but no certainty or focus.

I wonder if I would have believed me–describing who I am today? I still have a crush on everything beautiful. And my life still orbits around boys–three, specifically; the biggest of whom still brings me flowers. Somethings stay the same.

What were you like then? Before you knew what your life would be like?

What is your greatest human intent?
Where we are and where we’ve been
Cherry blossoms
One year ago, today

What are you up to today?

Beneath the covers when the day first sets in, I’m not quite here, not quite anywhere else either. Hello, Monday. It’s already 6:03 and the night was a slapdash mess of wake ups. The teeth, they keep coming. Arched back wailing at 3:27a.m. for ten stagger-around-the-room minutes, searching for Tylenol, and then again at 5:06, too early and too late for more or better sleep.

I lie awake, face in the pillows, the thudding of my heart reverberates in my head. My breath moves my ribs up and down, up and down, but I am not here, not all of me, not yet.

Under the weight and softness of my stomach my wrist bones, carpals and metacarpals, are crumpled like soft bits of clay and as I flex my fingers, pins-and-needles set in.

Somehow our boys, both of them, are already in bed between us.

This morning I can feel the way I’m sort of pushing around at the outline of myself with my mind. Hello, day. Hello, memory. Hello, this life of mine. I feel myself begin, reluctantly to inhabit my vertebrae, lungs, buttocks, thighs; in the nick of time I roll out of the way. Bean’s at it already: making a pirate ship out of the covers. Sprout, miraculously stays asleep (of course, now after a night of it) and he is perfect, perfect, perfect here beside me. Rosy, tousled. His hair smells sweet like only him.

The day comes fast then: wooden slats of window shades pulled up; snowmelt; shower steam; the fragrant bar of French lemon soap slipping from my still slack-fingered grip; coffee. The boys are both underfoot (vacation until Wednesday) which gives new meaning to the phrase “work from home,” which is what I try valiantly to do, meeting four deadlines, non-stop screen time, CS4, phone calls, 37 emails, everything interrupted by the repetitive cacophony of BOY.

The day is gray, and the is light translucent and dull, but I like the way the thermometer climbs to 38 before 11am, and how on the south facing fields I can see bare patches where the grass pokes up. I’ve been looking at the trees for signs every day now: the buds are swelling with the secret lives of leaves that wait for chlorophyll, for sun.

Inside, the boys and I are barefoot, and I look at them and feel the fragile container of my ribs nearly snap open with the thunk-thunk-thunking of my little hammer dulcimer heart. Bean with his thin arms and messy hair and growing-in-crooked teeth and ski-jump nose, and Sprout, who has been trying to run from the minute he learned to walk and whose gait looks a wee bit like a cross between a high stepping horse and Frankenstein. Some days I hardly have words. I have two sons. I don’t think this wonder ever goes away.

And so without stopping it’s night already. We visit friends after work and arrive home late. The sink is crowded; the cat wants fresh water; the refrigerator needs to be cleaned. Instead I let the boys stay up another minute. Bean and I eat toast with cloudberry jam.  Sprout carries pot lids around the room. Nonstop, there went Monday.

How was your day?

PS–I have a super-duper exciting giveaway for tomorrow, that I can’t wait to share!

PPS–Did you see? I made some pretty Field Guide To Now blog buttons. Please grab one, if you’d like & spread the word. 30% funding tonight is awesome. Who want’s to be the one to push it to 3K? Just $35 away…THANK YOU Tahereh! What a great way to start TUESDAY.

Nearly two feet of snow tonight, and the plow truck is in the shop (timing is everything.)

Shoveling snow in the gathering dark, the fat flakes melted on my cheeks, still hot from crying.

Sometimes it’s like this, and today it was (although tonight we’re better.)

It felt good to throw my body into the rhythm of pitching wet snow, after arguing (sometimes we’re in direct competition for the same things: time, mostly.)

And I have begun to be aware of how everything is always close, always just under the skin of the moment. Starts. Finishes. Hurts. Exhaustion. Glee. Laughter. Eggs cracked in a skillet. Post-it notes rumpled and forgotten. Self sabotage. Determination. Making it through the day.

The snow, tossed to the side of the path was aqua blue beneath each nook and chink, where the chunks would fall and align, making shapes, silhouettes of other-worldly castles in the dark. Today it was like this. Some tears. Some self doubt. Some frustration. And snow. (It’s still falling.)

When things get messy, what do they look like for you?

Little Sprout:

We danced today, you and I.

You wound your way between my knees, around my swivel chair, across my studio floor scattering things about, mouthing everything, drooling, laughing. And I, well, I was busy dreaming; stringing words together, watching sunlight, reading things and feeling hopeful. I was also trying to get just about a hundred things done. Eighty nine still wait, but so? We danced.

You unwound spools of thread and uncased CDs and pulled the contents of every low opening drawer onto the floor: mostly paper, some postcards, a pile of forgotten wallpaper from when we first staked a claim here, in this house. I watched. I reached for you. I picked you up. We twirled. You laughed.

I watched the havoc gathering on my floor and let it gather. I made paragraphs, and sought after things; I discovered, replied, and tried to cover my ears so that the simultaneous voices of optimism and fear would drown each other out. All day I kept going after the things that beg for words and time.

So much is happening right now, and it feels like the moment a crow lifts dark and sudden from a quiet branch, and all around it the air is filled with the sudden, invisible eddies of movement. That is what the moments are like right now. Like flight. Or perhaps the moments just before, when the bird is neither on the branch, or off it, but in motion, lifting off.

We saw a crow like this, later, running. We startled it from a pine; its feathers black and glossy in the sun. You wore a red fleece snowsuit, and hugged a raggedy stuffed moose in the stroller. I ran hard, feeling resistance from thighs that skied all yesterday afternoon. I almost quit a dozen times. The road was mud and slush, and you weigh no small amount, but instead I began to tell you how things go.

In panted breaths I told you how there is always this resistance; how there is always a whispered voice that taunts give up, and you might just fail. And how the only answer is so what?

So I ran until I could feel my heart thunking hard in my chest, and my hands were numb and my cheeks flushed bright red with cold and exertion, and I finished.

By then you were asleep, your head tilting, slack against your shoulder. I carried you inside, and in the sudden warmth you woke, eyes still dreamy, and looked about—smiling ever so slightly when your gaze landed on my face. And so we danced. I held you close, breathing in the fragrance of your warm, rumpled hair. You pressed your cheek against my shoulder, and pulled your knees up and tucked close as though your body still remembers when you grew below my heart, tucked just so.

And so the day went by. Things happened, things got done, your brother came home from his grandparents, the sun set, and dishes accumulated in the sink. And in between we shared the succulent sections of a ruby grapefruit.

You liked each wobbly gem colored morsel, the bitter skin removed, and mushed them in your little hands before sticking them into your mouth. I learned about clipping paths on Illustrator. You pushed a ball around the floor. And today, like every other day, we danced.

You are one year old. I love you so.

Today I am thinking about how some people say that we are only in this body; only the ligaments and bones that comply with gravity and beg for sleep; that we belong only to a body that thirsts and swells and lunges with awkward elbows towards the things it wants.

As if this could be enough; as if it is. As if these alveoli that hold our breath are all of it. As if the way when you look out at the landscape in the morning after it has snowed again and everything is a tableau of white on white and wince, it is only reflex and not a gypsy longing for the time when buds will swell fat with spring.

As if white on white and skin and breath are really all of it.

I’m thinking about this because last night after falling asleep, Sprout woke up just after midnight and fussed (which is unusual) and after he was quiet again, I kept feeling strangely tugged back to the present tense, yet not entirely. I couldn’t sleep, and yet I couldn’t fully feel awake. I could feel myself falling asleep over and over literally—and the falling suddenly terrified me and I’d lurch to consciousness again, heart suddenly thundering, my mind a herky-jerky montage of images and words.

Has this ever happened to you? Have you ever found yourself dislocated just beyond yourself, not awake entirely, but not deeply asleep either? This is what I know: that to fall asleep means to loosen your hold on this life. It means to slip, to disengage, to become permeable and huge: a thing of memory; a thing of dreams; a thing that exists beyond this body; a thing not in this bedroom or beyond it, but somewhere else entirely where time doesn’t follow itself like a dog chancing its tail, hour after hour.

Do you have a better answer?

The world is white this morning: the sky, the trees, the ground. The pair of crows in the dying maple are cinder stark. The contrast is so abrupt, I almost want to cry. This is what waking up tired feels like now: I am overcome by everything. By the sooty feathers of crows as they lift, circle, fly of cawing. By the way everything starts up again each morning. The washing machine is on the spin cycle. The woodstove is hot with embers. Sprout is fussing in his crib, just frequently enough to let me know he is still awake, between longer stretches of quiet where I forget for a moment where I am, who I am, and feel the way tiredness lifts me outside myself again and then yanks me back, as though today my arms and legs are really the finely wrought pieces of a elaborate marionette doll with someone unskilled and abrupt pulling at the strings.

This is the way the day begins. This is the first day I have to myself in the cycle of the week. The first three are crowded now with work and meeting deadlines, and I always feel a little in shambles by Thursday, here, but not entirely, somehow trailing myself.

Sprout took his first steps on my birthday! He’s been venturing out into the wide expanse of floor ever since and it melts me every single time I plunk him down on his little feet and he makes his way towards me hesitantly, grinning ear to ear. I wish you could all meet this kid. I am so smitten with him. I know that’s all I ever say about him–but it’s so true. He’s so easy going and funny and laid back. When he makes it all the way to me he throws his arms around my neck and practically gnaws my cheeks off with drooly kisses and seriously: MELT.

Also: in the middle of making carrot muffins yesterday afternoon as a snow whirled past the windows the phone rang and it was the Red Hen Press calling! To tell me I won the June 09 Short Fiction Contest judged by Judith Freeman . AWESOME.

And: I am thisclose to launching my KICKSTARTER project. It’s so exciting. I’m up to the gills in creativity, which makes me very happy indeed. My only barrier: TIME. I’m hoping I’ll have it up tomorrow. Stay tuned.

+ + +
Tomorrow I want to share a bunch of links with you of beautiful blogs and good things I’ve been eating & reading and enjoying for the past couple of days… And I’d love to hear about your favorites right now: what magazine do you love to read? What do you love to have for breakfast? What is one thing you’re going to do this week that you’re a little scared of doing? (That’s right. Commit to that last one.)

xoxo!

Practice breathing in and then out and then in again with nothing else in your thought but your breath.

Practice walking down the road with your small boy, just looking. Bring your camera. See if you can see things differently, even though the road and each individual tree and rut have become familiar to you, now, finally after a little more than four years of living in this place.

Trespass onto the neighbor’s field and look back at the road you’ve been walking on. Notice how everything is different. From here, your house will look small and perched, like a storybook house up on a hill, white and gabled and distant, and for a moment allow yourself to be astounded by the way your legs have carried you all this way, down the road and out into this snowy field where the tracks of voles and fieldmice make fidgety paths between patches of dried grass.

Consider your legs and lungs and breath, and feel how together they have moved you to here: each capillary thundering in minute harmony; each muscle bunchy and sure beneath your jeans, beneath your skin.

Watch your son dash pell-mell ahead and then stop. Watch how your shadow overtakes him; swallow’s him. Hold your breath as you come up next to him and watch his breath rise in the air in a cloud. Together you will look to the tree line, one that you’ve never been to, on property that is not yours. Against the snow it will look abrupt and dark with a thick row of pines just visible over the slope of a snow covered knoll.

Look down. You’ve been standing on coyote tracks. In the dusk when you aren’t present they traverses this field, tongues lolling, breath rising in frothy clouds from their mouths. They’re close, even now. You can feel them. Just there, beyond the fields, somewhere in the woods, maybe asleep or maybe watching with yellow eyes, alerted by your footsteps and the sharp ringing sing-song of your son’s eager voice.

Remember how this is always the case: how the line between you and the wild is thin like the bit of thread you find coiled in your pocket. Your fingers tease it, wanting to know how it’s wound. This is always the way: you always want to know. The thread is yellow and snarled and comes from the windowsill in the room above the garage where you write. You picked it up in the morning meaning to throw it out, but kept it accidentally.

It was from this same window that you saw the foxes last week. The ruckus of the chickens alerted you, and when you looked out a fox was right there in the snowy driveway, so close you could see the way the fur on its chest was clumped with ice.

When you pounded your fist on the glass and began to yell, it looked up, right at you, but didn’t move a muscle until you ran down and out into the snow without your hat or gloves or jacket, boots unlaced, shrieking like a madwoman. Of course it ran then, though not far at first. Just to the top of the hill by the woods and when you followed after, another joined it—they’d staked the chicken house out for sure.

Remember how you felt your heart, hard and raw and pumping in your chest after running through the snow, hair flyaway, clapping your hands. Remember how their fur was rust colored and how when they ran, they became streaks of umber like twin contrails in a dream. Remember how they were so beautiful you started to cry.

Your eyes well up now too, as you bend down with your son to examine some marks where something struggled. Wing marks make fractal circles in the snow. The air is still. The sky is pale and filled with cirrus, and along the road starlings sit on telephone wires calling to one another and lifting and alighting in sudden unison.

Put the thread back into your pocket and take a breath. Take some steps towards the road over wind blown snow. Listen. Far away down the road two men are working on a silo. They have huge cranes and their tools make hard metallic sounds that travel to you in a certain rural morse code. Clink. Clink. Clink. Hold on to this.

In your fingertips you can feel your pulse as you take hold of your son’s mittened hand.