Projecting

Posted on July 13, 2010 by Kristen @ Motherese| 60 Comments

So you know how I told you last week that I was having technical difficulties?  I’m happy to report that they have been resolved, thanks to my sassy new laptop.  (A PC, by the way, despite the strong Mac lobby that emerged in the comments section of my last post and on Twitter.  What can I say?  Once a PC, always a PC?)  So I’m back up and running and online and ready to blog.

But the thing is…I kind of don’t want to be.

I don’t know if it’s that old summer vacation feeling setting in after years of practice as a student and then as a teacher.  Or maybe it’s the “summer blog syndrome” Kelly referred to in a recent comment.  Whatever it is, I know that I enjoyed those days of being off the computer.  I really did.

And I’ve got some projects I’m working on.

One is those boys up there.  Big Boy and his pile of curls and his impossible questions and his last few weeks at home before starting preschool.  Tiny Baby and his inconceivable eyelashes (I swear that kid could do an advertisement for Latisse…) and his walking and his first words.

And then there’s their dad, my beloved husband.  My guy.  My man.  My one and only.

And there’s that pile of books on my bedside table and that Adirondack chair on our deck.

And there’s a pile of visitors and vacations and day trips and nights out.

And some juicy new projects.  Personal and professional.  Hatching, evolving, buffering.

So I’m going to grant myself a little summer vacation.

But instead of pulling a typical Kristen and declaring my intentions for exactly how often I’ll post or setting a deadline for when I’ll get back on schedule, I’m not going to set any expectations for myself.  I’m going to give myself some time to do what so many of you seem to do so gracefully: blog when it works for me.  And leave it at that.

So – I guess – I’ll see you when I see you.

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Technical Difficulties

Posted on July 7, 2010 by Kristen @ Motherese| 34 Comments

I am experiencing technical difficulties.

I had a great weekend.  (Yay!)

But my computer didn’t.  (Boo!)

I’m getting a new one.  (Yay!)

But it hasn’t arrived yet.  (Boo!)

I hope to be back in business soon – reading and writing and commenting as usual.

In the meantime, be well and happy blogging!

Image: Computer Rebuild – Testing Motherboard(s) by tjameswhite via Flickr under a Creative Commons license.

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Bad. (But Honest.)

Posted on July 5, 2010 by Kristen @ Motherese| 38 Comments

Growing up, we had an expression in our family that I think originated with my grandmother: “Bad, but honest.”

This expression was usually deployed when a child either readily admitted to a wrongdoing (“Kristen, did you knock over your brother’s Lego tower?”…”Yup!”) or provided an opinion that lacked social grace (a hopeful, smiling “Kristen, do you like Aunt Linda’s zucchini bread?” met with a defiant “Nope”), causing the adult to say of impish me, “She’s bad, but honest!”

I thought of this expression often last week while reading Tove Jansson’s The True Deceiver.  This slim novel, set in the Scandinavian winter, tells the story of village outcast Katri Kling, her brother Mats, and Anna Aemelin, the children’s book illustrator to whom Katri ingratiates herself.  What’s remarkable about the book is the way in which Katri insinuates herself into Anna’s life.  Lacking financial resources, she makes it her mission to be invited to live with Anna.  But, instead of conning the gullible old woman, she overwhelms her with honesty.  She tells her about the shopkeepers who have cheated her and the townspeople who gossip about her.  She persuades her to reevaluate her worshipful attitude toward her deceased parents.

At one point after Katri and Mats have moved in with Anna, the older woman remarks

Now don’t take this the wrong way, Miss Kling, but I find your way of never saying what a person expects you to say, I find it somehow appealing.  In you there’s no, if you’ll pardon my saying so, no trace of what people call politeness…And politeness can sometimes be  almost a kind of deceit, can it not?

Despite her concern that Katri might take her words as an insult, to Katri’s way of looking at things, Anna could not have offered her a greater compliment.  Indeed, Katri is obsessed with truth and objectivity and her honesty gave her an unusual level of power and status in their village.  Katri’s attitude is best summarized by a passage she narrates early in the novel.

But you never know, you can never really be sure, never completely certain that you haven’t tried to ingratiate yourself in some hateful way – flattery, empty adjectives, the whole sloppy, disgusting machinery that people engage in with impunity all the time everywhere to help them get what they want; maybe an advantage, or not even that, mostly just because it’s the way it’s done, being as agreeable as possible and getting off the hook…No, I don’t think I made myself especially agreeable.  I lost this opportunity.  But at least I played an honourable game.

And reading this book and thinking of my family’s saying made me really consider the “machinery” that many us take part in every day.  The small lies we tell ourselves and others every day to lubricate conversation and maybe, just maybe, get us the things we want.

That skirt looks great on you.

I love your new haircut.

What a cute baby!

I value kindness.  I value politeness.  I judge people on whether they give up their seat on the subway to a pregnant woman or whether they interrupt their cell phone call to hold the door for the person behind them at Starbucks.  I say “please” and “thank you” and want others to do the same.  I go out of my way to give compliments.

But I wonder: is valuing kindness a way of undervaluing honesty?  Is politeness indeed a “kind of deceit”?  Are “empty adjectives” kindness or dishonesty?

Which do you value more: honesty or kindness?  Is there room for “empty adjectives” within an otherwise honest life?

Image: What?!? It Wasn’t Me!!! by stephen031 via Flickr under a Creative Commons license.

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Summertime

Posted on July 2, 2010 by Kristen @ Motherese| Comments Off

We’re coming up on a holiday weekend here in the States and I’ve got big plans.  Quality time with my family.  Berry picking.  The farmers’ market.  Our small town July 4th parade.  The Tour de France, Wimbledon, the World Cup.  (My remote control finger is getting tired just thinking about it!)

So in honor of Independence Day, Canada Day, and summer-loving people everywhere (and with apologies to Tracy and my other Southern Hemisphere friends and to those of you who will tell me that these lyrics from Porgy and Bess are about death and/or slavery and are not actually a celebration of summer), I am turning off comments and leaving you with a bit of Gershwin.

Summertime,
And the livin’ is easy
Fish are jumpin’
And the cotton is high

Oh, your daddy’s rich
And your mamma’s good lookin’
So hush little baby
Don’t you cry

One of these mornings
You’re going to rise up singing
Then you’ll spread your wings
And you’ll take to the sky

But until that morning
There’s a’nothing can harm you
With your daddy and mammy standing by

Summertime,
And the livin’ is easy
Fish are jumpin’
And the cotton is high

Your daddy’s rich
And your mamma’s good lookin’
So hush little baby
Don’t you cry

Happy weekend!  Happy summer!  May you spread your wings and take to the sky!

Image: Picked berries by cmbjn843 via Flickr under a Creative Commons license.

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On Faith, Safety, and George Corrigan

Posted on June 30, 2010 by Kristen @ Motherese| 47 Comments

Last week I read Kelly Corrigan’s bestselling memoir, The Middle Place.  I was deeply moved by Corrigan’s hilarious and heartbreaking account of balancing her roles as daughter, wife, and mother within “the middle place – that sliver of time when childhood and parenthood overlap” and during her battle against breast cancer.  But what resonated most deeply for me was Kelly’s relationship with her father George – and how his life and his parenting centered around what I realize to be one of my central desires as a mother.

This winter, Lindsey at A Design So Vast started a conversation that has run through my head over and over and that provided shape and depth to my experience of reading The Middle Place.  In her beautiful post, “Safe,” Lindsey wrote

Perhaps most vitally, though, I want to be safe from myself. I want to be clearly seen for who and what I am – something that I have truly felt so rarely in my life – but also loved in spite of it. I know I misbehave, I know I am far too emotional, reactive, insecure. I want to be kept safe from those monsters running in my head: I want someone to wrap their arms around me and tell me that I am safe from my own rampaging emotions…

I want to feel safe. What will it take? How do I build a life around those people, places, and experiences that provide that? How do I not transmit this irrational but deeply destabilizing fear to my children? How do I learn to control my own reactivity so that more people might be willing to be here, so that I can trust that they will keep me safe? I don’t know the answers. I’m only barely seeing the questions shimmering up through the morass of roiling thoughts in my head. I turn back to Rilke, and commit yet again, as another day turns towards morning, to living the questions.

Since reading Lindsey’s post, I have reflected often on this idea of safety, how we attain it and how we impart it to our kids.  In a guest post at Lindsey’s place, I mused that faith, a by-product of my religious upbringing, might be the force that has allowed me to feel fundamentally safe throughout my life, in spite of my tendency toward anxiety.  But, I worried then and still worry now: how will my boys feel that same deeply-seated sense of safety given that they are being raised outside of any religious tradition?

While reading The Middle Place, I discovered in George Corrigan a living, breathing, joking model for the parental safety net.  According to Kelly Corrigan, her dad is a lacrosse-obsessed, Irish-Catholic salesman whose “default setting is open delight.”  He pleases and is pleased by the world around him, embracing optimism and faith and eschewing long odds and doubt.  He chats up the prickly clerk at the deli, he bestows everyone with nicknames, and he hands out compliments to passersby.

And it seems that no one is more positively affected by George Corrigan (aka Greenie) and his golden touch than his three kids.  About him, Kelly writes

He makes me feel smart, funny, and beautiful, which has become the job of the few men who have loved me since…He defined me first, as parents do.  Those early characteristics can become the shimmering self-image we embrace or the limited, stifling perception we rail against for a lifetime.  In my case, he sees me as I would like to be seen.  In fact, I’m not even sure what’s true about me, since I have always chosen to believe his version.

While reading this, I realized that this is the way I also felt as a kid.  Regardless of how thick my glasses were or how awkward my clothing choices, my parents told me I was beautiful.  No matter how loudly my grade school classmates sent me the message that being smart wasn’t cool, my parents celebrated my curiosity.  Like Greenie, they saw me as I wanted to be seen.  As, and as a result, I came to see myself that way too.  I felt good about myself and felt safe in a world that I thought should and would see me as they did.  Of growing up with her parents, Kelly Corrigan writes, “I could only deduce that the world was a safe place…beyond safe – it had a sense of humor, it knew your name, it was waiting for you.  Hell, it was even rooting for you.”  I felt that way too.

And it occurred to me that George Corrigan’s most singular characteristic is his faith – and not just his commitment to Catholicism, which is deep.  (Indeed, when the going gets tough, Greenie gets to Mass.)  He – like my own parents – embodies faith not just in God, but in “the human spirit,” and in his kids.  And it is this wide-arching brand of faith that makes everyone feel like their best selves in his presence.  He has faith in you and so you have faith in yourself.

In George Corrigan, I found a parenting role model and a new version of faith that I think might help me create a buffer of safety for my boys.  I don’t know if I will ever again feel as at home as he does in a Catholic church.  I don’t know that I will ever share his faith that God will guide me or a loved one through cancer.  But I believe – I have faith – that I can borrow and apply much of his type of faith.  I can believe in myself and my choices as a mother.  I can believe in my kids, in their beauty, and intelligence, and wonder.  I can help create and make them believe in a safe world that will welcome them.

Hell, one that will even root for them.

What helps you feel safe?  If you are a parent, how do you make your kids feel safe?

Image: Father & Daughter by Difei Li via Flickr under a Creative Commons license.

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Posted in childhood, deep thoughts, parenting, poetry and literature

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Turn, Turn, Turn

Posted on June 28, 2010 by Kristen @ Motherese| 67 Comments

Tuesday night is date night chez Motherese.  Last Tuesday, just after I had changed out of my maple syrup and strawberry encrusted t-shirt and shorts, Beloved Babysitter had arrived, and I was headed out the door to meet Husband and some friends for drinks, Big Boy burst out in floods of tears.

Assuming he was sad at the idea of my leaving, I (arrogantly, apparently, and misguidedly) tried to comfort him: “Beloved Babysitter is going to give you and Tiny Baby dinner tonight.  Daddy and I will be back soon, Big Boy.  I love you.”

Turns out Big Boy wasn’t sad to see me go; he was sad about something much more profound.

“Tiny Baby is going to die someday.”

Woo, boy.

It all began, I suppose, with Big Boy’s fascination with dinosaurs.  What started out with one silly board book quickly blossomed into an all-out obsession.  He asked questions; we answered to the best of our knowledge.  (And please note that my own knowledge was thrown for a loop when it was revealed to me that brontosaurus is no longer considered a dinosaur.  Say what!?)

And talk turned, eventually, to why the dinosaurs aren’t around anymore (Jurassic Park notwithstanding).

“Well, they’re extinct.”

“What’s ‘ecktinct?’”

“Well, scientists think that an asteroid hit the Earth and that the temperature changed and that all the dinosaurs died out.  They became extinct.”

“What’s ‘died?’”

So there it is.  The first of the Big Questions.

And one that led us into a discussion of the fact that all living things are born and then, eventually, die.  Some things live only a day, if they’re lucky.  Like the mayflies that I remember lining the deck of the steamboat that hosted some of our annual childhood summer vacations.  Some live decades longer than humans.  Like the Galapagos tortoise from one of Big Boy’s storybooks.

And some can expect to live to 78.2.  Like us.

And maybe we shouldn’t have gone there.  Maybe we should have stuck with the “all dinosaurs evolved into birds” theory and saved a discussion of birth and life and death for another day.

But we didn’t.

And now this: “Tiny Baby is going to die someday.”

So what did I do?  How did I respond?

First, I hugged him.  To comfort him, of course.  To try to make him understand that no one in this house is dying on my watch.  To comfort him, yes, but also to think.

But the funny part is that my mind went blank.  I didn’t have THE answer, but I did have AN answer.  And I gave it to him.

“That’s right.  He will.  Someday.”  And that’s true.  “But not for a very, very long time.”  And I hope that’s true too.

And he looked up at me with his giant two-year old blue eyes, his tear-moistened eyelashes thick like flower petals, and he cried some more.  Cried at the idea of his brother dying someday.

Then he stopped, his body still heaving occasionally as his breath regulated itself, and he looked at me.

“Like the dinosaurs, Mommy?”

“Yes, baby, like the dinosaurs.”

And he seemed to get it.

But should he be made to “get it,” I wonder, at age two?  Should I have told my baby that his little brother is indeed going to die?

The trouble is, I’m not ready to answer these Big Questions for him when I’m not yet sure how to answer them for myself.

But what feels right is to be honest.  To channel the book of Ecclesiastes via Pete Seeger and the Byrds:

To Everything (Turn, Turn, Turn)
There is a season (Turn, Turn, Turn)
And a time to every purpose, under Heaven

A time to be born, a time to die
A time to plant, a time to reap
A time to kill, a time to heal
A time to laugh, a time to weep…

A time to build up, a time to break down
A time to dance, a time to mourn
A time to cast away stones, a time to gather stones together…

A time of love, a time of hate
A time of war, a time of peace
A time you may embrace, a time to refrain from embracing…

A time to gain, a time to lose
A time to rend, a time to sew
A time for love, a time for hate
A time for peace, I swear it’s not too late

My friend Liz at …but then I had kids faced a similar conversation with her son, Ben, last week.  Please check out her post to see how she and her husband handled Ben’s Big Question.

How do handle the Big Questions with your kids?  How did your parents handle them with you?  Is honesty always the best policy?

Image: Rhithrogena germanica subimago on Equisetum hyemale by Richard Bartz via Wikimedia Commons under a Creative Commons license.

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Pizza Pie Perspective

Posted on June 25, 2010 by Kristen @ Motherese| 53 Comments

You know how sometimes people claim to see the face of the Virgin Mary in a grilled cheese sandwich?  Well, last weekend, I saw something profound in a pizza.

The boys and I spent the weekend at a dear friend’s house.  A group of us, connected by a man who died ten years ago, gather every summer at his mother’s home in upstate New York to try to honor his life and continue some of the work he did as a teacher and an artist.  (More on that in an upcoming post.)

On Saturday, after a day of work punctuated throughout by laughter and tears, we commenced our usual routine: a trip to a sinful ice cream shoppe (believe me, this place is not just a shop; it’s a full-on shoppe) followed by sweaty and unskilled backyard volleyball.  Later that night after I had gotten the little boys off to sleep and most of the others had burned off their ice cream (and injured their 30-something bodies with a few too many sets and bumps), talk turned to the evening’s traditional activities: pizza and board games.

Now ordering pizza for a group of seven adults is a task that might be best left to a drill sergeant.  How much?  From where?  What toppings?  But never one to shy away from an organizational challenge (on the contrary, I live for organizational challenges), I took charge.  Polled the group, accepting, rejecting, and coordinating various requests (anchovies?  seriously, people?), and called to place our order.

But here my plan hit a snag: the number of the pizza place we had decided on was out of service.

In that moment I felt frustrated.  As I tend to feel in tiny moments like these when my efforts to control and organize the world around me are dashed.  Pathetically small moments that remind me once again of my lack of resilience in the face of adversity.

“No worries,” offered our host.  “Why don’t we just drive over there and order in person?  Then we can pop over and pick up the drinks while they’re making it.”

Just like that, an easy solution to our non-problem.  And one that came from a woman who knows a real problem when she sees it.

You see, our host last weekend is the strongest person I know.  The toughest.  The most resilient.  And I see that even more now that I am a wife and mother, neither of which I was when I first met her.

I first met her ten years ago in an apartment in Washington, DC.  I was there on the saddest errand of my life.  My friend Dan, her son, had been diagnosed with testicular cancer.  He was 28 and he was dying.  I was 23 and was there to visit him, to bring him whatever cheer or comfort I could, knowing that this was one situation we couldn’t laugh our way through.

We had met two summers before in Houston, where we and a few hundred others gathered for six weeks to train for our new jobs as Teach for America corpsmembers.  I want to write more about Dan, about his life and the impact he had on me in the short time I knew him, about how his network of friends and family have become part of mine.  And I will, but today I’m thinking about his mom.

Only after Dan’s death did I get to know his mom.  Only later did I learn that she had nursed her husband during his own losing battle with cancer just a few years before watching her son die from the same damned disease.  And then her daughter got sick too, less than a decade after she watched her husband die, only a few years after she watched her son die.

Her daughter is okay now.  And the amazing thing is that Barbara, the mom, is okay too.

Sure, she gets angry.  I’ve heard her rail against the CEO of BP, against the irritating protagonist of a book, and, yes, against cancer.

But this is a woman who doesn’t complain about out-of-service phone numbers.  Or a lack of compromise on pizza toppings.  Or the fact that a disease has claimed two members of her family, two pieces of her heart, and has tried to rob her of a third.

She lives.  She loves.  And she keeps going.  She’s adopted a ragtag group of her son’s friends and motivates us to help the kids he would have dedicated his life to helping.  She troubleshoots, she problem-solves, she prioritizes.

She’s a mom, a friend, and a heroine.  Just knowing her, being able to conjure her face and her voice and the feeling of her hugs, reminds me that I can do better.  That I can whine less.  That I can feel sad and mad and process and then suck it up.  That I can keep going.

That I can and should and must find a better way to deal with non-problems.

Image: Chicago Deep-Dish Pizza: Whole Pie by Jeff Cushner via Flickr under a Creative Commons license.

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Bigger Picture Moment

I’m linking up today’s post to Bigger Picture Blogs, a new blog community dedicated to celebrating life’s bigger picture moments.  Be sure to visit Hyacynth’s place to check out some other bloggers’ big picture moments.

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The Accidental Memoir Project

Posted on June 23, 2010 by Kristen @ Motherese| 55 Comments

I know this happens to you too.

You’re minding your own business, driving to the library to return a book or sitting on the floor playing Legos with your kids, when suddenly a crystalline memory washes over you.  The sights, the smells, the dialogue.  It all comes back.  Or at least as much as the filter of time lets through.

I have never been a journal keeper.  Sure, I have a few lock-and-key diaries from my girlhood.  Tiny notebooks in which I recorded the names of my best friend du jour or some slight that befell me on the playground.  I also have a few scribbled pages from my adolescence, almost all connected to a love affair (real or imagined).  And then there are the beautiful books I kept during my pregnancies and the early months of the boys’ lives, in which I lovingly, exhaustively, and exhausted-ly recorded every false contraction and every nursing session (left side 12 minutes, right side 8, and so on).

But unlike some of my writerly colleagues, I never routinely documented my life in words.

Until recently, that is.

Lately – and maybe more since I’ve started thinking of myself as a writer – I’ve noticed more and more of these fully-formed memories dancing in my head.  This happens to me so often now that I’ve started to wonder if I might be able to trigger even more memories simply through the act of writing down the ones that bubble up to the surface.

So I’ve started a little experiment: The Accidental Memoir Project.  A sort of retroactive journal keeping.

I’m taking notes on my memories as they come to me, writing episodes of my own personal history in the process.  I now have a fledgling document on my laptop.  Here is what I wrote the first day:

laying on the green carpet, on my belly, watching TV while Mom washed my blankie – summer, I think, because I can recall the sensation of the carpet on my bare legs, the coolness of the air conditioning and the way blankie felt when it came out of the dryer – warm when I didn’t realize I wanted warming up

—

Sarah R. gave me The Cat in the Hat Dictionary for my (5th? 6th?) birthday.  Instead of wrapping paper, it was covered in Reynolds Wrap.  For some reason this anomaly made me ask her: “Oh, is it fragile?”

To which she replied, “Yes.”

Was that the same birthday party we went to McDonald’s, a gaggle of tiny girls packed into a crescent-shaped booth?  Amy B., Michelle G. were there.  There’s a picture somewhere.

Or the same birthday I got two small ceramic jewelry boxes, each with gold accents?  From the two Patricias.

—

At Dad’s company Christmas party, bright fluorescent lights in the hall, walking with Dad and Older Brother when around the corner appeared a man dressed as Darth Vader.  Terror.  I started to cry.

Older Brother, my protector, kicked him.

Was that the year at the company party that I received a radio with a headset?  I thought it was a Walkman when I first opened it, but there was no tape player – just a radio – not so cool

As a writer, I’m intrigued by the idea of memory mining and memory creation.  I’m also interested in the idea of leaving a document of my life for posterity’s sake.  (Who in posterity would care?  I’m not so sure.)

But, as a student of history, I wonder if I’m doing a disservice to reality by recording only what I remember now, decades later.  How good is my memory after all?

Is my record of my life any less accurate 30 years later than it would have been if I had written it at the time?

Are our words ever really true?

Do you have seemingly innocuous memories that surface again and again when you least expect it?

Do you keep a journal?  Did you as a child?  How does your journaling affect your writing?

Do you think my accidental memoir will be less “true” than a journal would have been?


Image: stack of journals by paperbackwriter via Flickr under a Creative Commons license.

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Life After Yes: A Q&A with Aidan Donnelley Rowley

Posted on June 21, 2010 by Kristen @ Motherese| 16 Comments

For the past few weeks, I have thoroughly enjoyed our discussion of Aidan Donnelley Rowley’s debut novel, Life After Yes.  Thank you to everyone who has read and contributed to our lively conversation.  Today I am thrilled that Aidan has agreed to join us to weigh in on some of the themes and questions that came up during our discussion of Life After Yes.

—

Motherese: At one point in the novel, Avery tells Quinn, “[Y]ou’re not a bad person.”  Quinn then muses to herself, “There’s a big difference between not being a bad person and being a good one.”  As you were crafting her, did you see Quinn as a good person, a not-bad one, or simply a real one?  Does she change from one to another over the course of the book?

ADR: As I was crafting and creating Quinn, I saw her as human. Real. Full of flaws and fears and fronts like the rest of us. Over the course of Life After Yes, Quinn does evolve and mature. She begins to scrutinize self and soul and ask some hard questions. Questions about life and love and loss. Questions about good and evil and reality. At different points, depending on the existential and emotional torrents in her world, Quinn is good, not-bad, and real. I think this is true of us all.

Motherese: What do you think Quinn’s encounters with Cameron and Phelps give her that her relationship with Sage doesn’t?

ADR: Quinn is afraid of growing up and all that she perceives growing up to entail. She fears stability and predictability. For Quinn, Cameron and Phelps come to represent risk and rebellion and youth. Sage, on the other hand, symbolizes maturity and adulthood and commitment.

Motherese: Quinn’s father plays an important role in her life and in the novel.  Given what we learn about her father, what advice might he have given her as she commences her marriage?

ADR: Quinn learns a painful lesson: her parents aren’t perfect. (Don’t we all learn this lesson at some point?) If he were around on the eve of her wedding, I think Quinn’s dad would sit her down on that old porch swing and tell her that no one is perfect. That flaws are what make us. He would tell Quinn that even the best marriage is work. Hard work. Constant and confusing work. And also the most exquisite work.

Motherese: A character in Life After Yes who intrigued me, but didn’t get much airtime in the book club, is Fisher, one of the partners at Quinn’s law firm.  Given the importance of fishing as a theme and metaphor in the novel, why did you choose that name for this particular character?  Can you talk a little bit about the role you wanted him to play in Quinn’s life?

ADR: Fisher was a good name for this man because even though he was up there in years, in the groove of middle age, he was still fishing. For happiness. For understanding. For meaning. In Quinn, he found a kindred soul and spirit. A vicarious second chance. Though his role in her life was fleeting, Fisher was important to Quinn. He was the portrait of what she could become if she did not open her eyes, ask, and dream. Fisher also played something of a paternal role at a time in Quinn’s life when the absence of her dad was a conspicuous hole in her existential fabric.

Motherese: Quinn’s drinking was the subject of much debate and discussion in the book club.  Even if her drinking (not to mention her “workaholism”) is well within the realm of the real for a woman in her situation, to what extent do you think the way Quinn uses alcohol as an emotional anesthetic is problematic?

ADR: I think the way Quinn uses alcohol – to anesthetize, numb, spice, sweeten – is both exceedingly problematic and exceedingly common. Quinn is the prime example of the functional alcoholic. She depends on her drink to navigate her days and her doubts. And this dependence is more than worrisome, but it has also become a complex piece of her identity. Ultimately, Quinn sees that Sage will not let her drink like this forever, that he will challenge her patterns, and this makes her love him and respect him even more.

Motherese: The ending of Life After Yes leaves a lot of questions unanswered.  Will we be seeing Quinn again?

ADR: I spent a lot of time and emotional energy on Life After Yes’s ending. It was very important for me to avoid the lurking temptations to tidy loose thematic strings and answer lingering questions. I did not want to close with a pretty pink Hollywood bow. Instead, I wanted to leave things satisfyingly open. No one knows what Quinn’s future holds. Including her creator.  :)

Thank you, Kristen, for leading such a thoughtful discussion of my work. Reading your words and those of our comrades in this digital world has been immensely rewarding for me. I am incredibly honored and humbled that you selected my rookie novel for your burgeoning book club. Your unwavering support of me and of my writing has meant, and continues to mean, so much.

Image courtesy of Aidan Donnelley Rowley.

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Every Choice Changes You

Posted on June 18, 2010 by Kristen @ Motherese| 19 Comments

Today I am pleased to offer you a guest post by Judy of Just One Foot.  Judy is a writer, wife, mom of four, and amputee of six years.  At Just One Foot, Judy writes lyrically and eloquently about motherhood, personhood, partnership, and friendship.  I am grateful to her for offering this piece – one that I know many of us will find moving  and resonant – to the Motherese community today.

Thanks, Judy!

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Every Choice Changes You

by Judy @ Just One Foot

I knew it was coming. For eighteen years I’ve been told, by aunts and grandmas and strangers in the grocery store, “they’ll be all grown up before you know it!” It was believable; I understand how time and aging work. But not really comprehensible.  How could I believe it would all end some day when every day felt the same? There were always baths to be given and homework to be checked. Grass stains to battle and noodles to boil.

But here we are. In two weeks my daughter graduates from high school. My first born, my only girl, the survivor of a childhood full of little brothers. She became “legal” six months ago, on that magical eighteenth birthday. But she becomes officially a grown up once she walks across that stage and grabs onto that diploma.

I am filled with mixed emotions, as all parents of graduates are, I suppose. Did I teach her all I wanted to in all those years I had her under my wing? Does she know enough about life skills to fend for herself in the big world outside our nest? Did I instill enough compassion in her heart to care for the people who cross her path and enough obligation in her soul to make sure she gives back to this very needy planet we’ll someday hand over to her generation?

I’ve thought about this a lot in recent months. I’m a mom and I’m a writer, which tends to make me doubly reflective. I’m so aware that a good chunk of the lessons I’ve taught her are by example. I’m reminded of it every time she doesn’t bother to get a glass and drinks directly out of the milk jug in the fridge. I can’t blame her father for that example. But for every bad habit I’ve taught her, has she absorbed a good one? A meaningful one? One that will lead her in a positive life direction?

From the time we  had our first real talk about sex I’ve drilled one theme into her head. Good life choices. The things you choose today can affect your whole future. She heard the lecture enough. Every time I dropped her off at a middle school dance, every time I watched her walk out the door on a high school date, “Have fun, sweetie…and make good life choices!”

Of course she’d roll her eyes. Many times she interpreted my prompts  as indication that I didn’t trust her. I had to point out that it was my job to remind her of the bigger picture. I had to have peace with the fact that I’d said the words, in case she ultimately decided not to choose wisely and we all faced the consequences.

But now the consequences will fall more on her shoulders. If she decides to not pay her bills, her electricity gets turned off, not mine. If she picks the wrong guy to hang out with, he knocks on her door in the middle of the night, not mine. She will have life experiences I may never know about. After spending almost two decades actively involved in her daily health and welfare, that’s a surreal thought to process.

So in honor of her graduation I’ve decided to upgrade my life advice mantra. My new message for my girl is this – Every choice changes you. If the statistics are correct, she has a long life path in front of her. The big things, like a career, will come to her slowly, over the course of years as she figures out what she’s best suited to do. But I want her to see that the little choices, that she makes every day, are very important too. They have the power to change and shape who she is and how she sees herself.

Every time she decides to pass on that adorable shirt (that’s on sale!) at the mall, and put that money away in case her car needs repairs, she’s choosing the kind of person she wants to be. As she pushes her own grocery cart through the store and fills it with fresh oranges and low fat yogurts instead of fudge covered Oreos and Pringles, she is choosing who she’ll be. Like foundation bricks in a house under construction, she is building a base for her own identity.

I’m very aware that by the time her youngest brother graduates from high school, in a decade, she might be attending the ceremony with a spouse. Every guy she becomes friends with, every guy she goes on a date with, has the potential to lead her to an altar some day. When she puts up with even a second of unacceptable behavior in a boyfriend, it changes who she is. It changes how she sees herself and what she’s worth. When she stands up and bravely boots him to the curb, even though doing so leaves her feeling lonely and sad, it changes who she is and how she sees her value.

Once she finds that one, that special one,  sharing a life with him will change her. His opinion of her, his acceptance and encouragement, will change her in more ways than she can imagine. I know, I have lived it for the past 21 years. I plan to dedicate a book some day to this incredible man I married, with the inscription, “I have come into my own, only because you took my hand and showed me the way there.”

I want that for my girl. A life partner who brings out the best in her and helps her to find her true self. But it will only come as she makes the right life choices.

Two weeks from now, in the midst of the chaos of hosting out of town family and making sure there are enough party supplies to turn the dining room into a real live graduation celebration, I will have so much more on my mind. I’m sending my girl out into the world and it’s scary for both of us. Well, it’s scary for me. She’s still in the mode of pure excitement.

But I’ll give her a hug on that day, after heirloom pictures are taken and the graduation robe has been hung by the door, ready for its return to the rental facility, and I will probably cry. But I know deep down she’ll be okay. Because I know she gets it. She’ll make some wrong choices, but hopefully they’ll just ricochet her back to the right path.

Because I know that somewhere, in the back of her brain, she will be hearing her mama’s voice. In my most firm but loving tone I’ll be there to remind her what it takes to get the life she wants. What it takes to be who she really wants to be. “Remember sweetie, every choice changes you….”

Image: CrossRoads by NKPhillips via Flickr under a Creative Commons license.

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