A Crazy Redhead's Reading List

Books that shaped me: Still Life With Woodpecker, Tom Robbins

Women Who Run With the Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estes, PhD

The Bible, God?

Cunt: A Declaration of Independence, Inga Muscio

Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston

The Color Purple, Alice Walker

Watership Down, Richard Adams

A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L'Engle and her Time Quartet A Wind in the Door, Many Waters, and A Swiftly Tilting Planet

Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosphy South, the philosophy of the Buffyverse. For real.

etcetera.

Books I'm reading now:

Outlander Series, Diana Gabaldon

High Fidelity, and anything by Nick Hornby, who makes inner psychological drama funny and interesting

I Love Myself when i am laughing and then again when i am looking mean and impressive about Zora Neale Hurston's crazy "rebellious" life

Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert

Women Who Run With the Wolves, Estes, again

Writer's Digest magazine

Literary Mama magazine

Collected Fictions, Jorge Luis Borges, whose stories fit no mold

Twilight series - it makes me horny - I have a long-time vampire fascination

Books I'd recommend from my online writing classes:

Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft by Janet Burroway

Writing Creative Nonfiction, ed. by Forche and Gerard

The 3 a.m. Epiphany: Uncommon Writing Exercises by Kiteley

Reading Like a Writer Francine Prose (really and truly, her last name is Prose)

The Portable MFA in Creative Writing New York Writer's Workshop

I never metaphor i didn't like Dr. Mardy Grothe

New class texts on deck:

Your Life as Story Rainer

The Best American Essays of the Century ed Joyce Carol Oates

On Writing Well, William Zinsser

Writing to Keep Sane

On my 21 years of writing: When I was 10, my parents gave me a diary. I wrote about my pets, my family, my school. As a teenager I learned that writing was the surest and safest way to heal any hurt. Embarrassing body changes, paranoia about what my peers thought of me, fights with my sister, anger at the world, fascination and obsession over boys - all of it poured into my diaries and helped me think through the bewilderment of being a kid and turning into an adult at the same time. In college I catalogued new hurts and new friends. I was an Ecology and Evolutionary Biology major but the classes that captured my mind were David Carrasco's "Religious Dimensions of the Human Experience" and "Mesoamerican Religion," and his words in class inspired pages and pages of prose.

I'm the kind of girl who loves easily and with everything I have. Falling in love, hard, four times, and losing all of them, was an affirmation of my belief that nothing good ever lasts forever. I wrote to comfort myself, to call upon my heart as my only friend at times, to say goodbye to them, to wonder what was wrong with me. I wrote myself into the idea that no matter how sweet the moment or how much two people love each other, it will end. Even now with my husband and son I have this feeling, almost a certainty, that it won't last forever.

Before The Old Man came along, and before The Kid, most of my writing was negative, a necessity to work through grief and pain and loss and loneliness. While much of what I write is still focused on this exercise, I've changed.

On writing as a mother: So, I'm pregnant back in 2005. Completely exhausted. Frazzled over my job. Worried sick over the prospect of putting a tiny baby in daycare one day. Worried about money. My body's changing. And all I want to do is write. Not write about the things I would have in the past, but write fiction, make up stories, write little celebrations of my life. Never before in my diaries had I celebrated anything, or written about my happiness. Now I write about my blessings. I document my blessings.

The Kid arrives in 2006. I don't REM sleep for what seems like eons. My body in a short time gained 50 pounds and lost it again. My joints are like - What the fuck? - I can't run anymore. I go back to work at 3 months and learn to pump breastmilk and get mastitis anyway and feel guilty for every second I'm gone from the baby. I write stories. I write emails. I live on emails from my friend from http://mamasapplecores.blogspot.com/2009/05/nap-versus-garden.html
because she's been through it before. I save the emails and refer to them like a book, and save my own as a future roadmap if I ever have another Kid. I write stories for my son, I make up stories for him, thinking he'll love reading them someday.

I begin to think that I want others to read what I write, no matter how choppy or long-winded. I need the connection. I need to connect with others who write. I find a writing group and I feel like I've been an alien my whole life and suddenly I find my own kind - those who enjoy the way a passage feels on the tongue and who get way too excited about beautiful words and a beautiful story. Those who realize a story that depicts degenerate human emotion and actions is just another way to cope with human nature and not necessarily an endorsement of living your life that way. I explore sex and love and adultery and parenthood and loneliness in words.

I had to get up at 5:00 am this morning to have time to myself because the rest of my day I will not pause nor have time to think. This itch to write is taking me in new directions. I'm taking online writing classes which are perfect - early mornings and late nights spent churning my creativity in taps on the keyboard.

I write to say goodbye - to vanquish poisonous thoughts that keep me in the past.

I write to say thank you for new blessings, for Annie finding her home.

I write to reflect, not to analyze.

I write to analyze.

I write to escape into my head to escape my job and my family and the energy they demand from me.

I write to fantasize, to entertain myself.

The Old Man usually works weekends but he's got tomorrow (Sunday) off. We're going to see "Up" in the movie theater and maybe we'll go out to breakfast beforehand. I have to pay bills, go to the grocery store, start reading for my online writing class...but all I really want to do is spend the whole, entire day with the ones I love.

Loneliness sets in on the weekends the Old Man works. It is amazing to me that even though we live together there are times when we say no more than two sentences to each other. Not because we're mad or because we don't want to, but because we literally have only five minutes alone after The Kid goes to sleep and before I go to sleep. Many mornings at work I call him after he's dropped The Kid off at daycare just so that we can talk. I usually make up a reason to call him - to talk about our calendars, or to ask him to bring something to the office when he comes - but the real reason I call is to hear his voice.

Cycles

I've become aware of times when I feel like interacting with no other adults - strangely, I'm OK with being around The Kid, but I want nothing to do with others, either online or in person. Rather than despairing over my apparent anti-social nature, I'm beginning to see this time as a clue to just take time for myself.

Back to Women Who Run With the Wolves by Estes, a book which seems to give me answers. If I had a Bible, I think this would be it.

Page 256: The psyches and souls of women also have their own cycles and seasons of doing and solitude, running and staying, being involved and being removed, questing and resting, creating and incubating, being of the world and returning to the soul-place. When we are children and young girls, the instinctive nature notices all these phases and cycles. It hovers quite near us and we are aware and active at various intervals as we see fit....Once, we lived by these cycles and seasons year after year, and they lived in us. They calmed us, danced us, shook us, reassured us, made us learn creaturally. They were part of our soul-skins - a pelt that enveloped us and the wild and natural world - at least until we were told that there really were only four seasons to a year, and that women themselves really only had three seasons -girlhood, adulthood, and old womanhood. And that was supposed to be that.But we cannot allow ourselves to sleepwalk wrapped in this flimsy and unobservant fabrication, for it causes women to deviate from their natural and soulful cycles and therefore to suffer from dryness, tiredness, and homesickness. It is far better for us to return to our own unique and soulful cycles regularly, all of them, any of them....

p.266 - It is ironic that we have made wildlife refuges for ibis, pelican, egret, wolf, crane, deer, mouse, moose, and bear, but not for ourselves in the places where we live day after day.

Home

Here's Domelandia. I grew up in a geodesic dome my dad started building in 1976 and has continued to add onto. In fact, this Memorial Day weekend he and ma are knocking out the kitchen wall to add a breakfast nook. The dome is powered by solar power and propane and in the winter months is heated by firewood taken from the land. A brainiac once told me that our 120 acres wouldn't withstand constant firewood harvesting. He was, after all, a forestry graduate of Colorado State University and knew about these things. But after 32 years of thinning the forests, the woods are healthy and robust and new grass peeks through the thinned patches and there are overgrown copses blocking light twisted with mistletoe disease that are waiting for the chainsaw.

The well water (delivered to the dome by a solar-powered pump) tastes funny to me now, although when I was growing up the unfiltered water tasted sweet.

I'm staying in my suburb home this weekend and resting, and letting The Kid rest and get over his illness from last week, but I'm thinking of home and how wonderful it would be to sit on the porch after a long day of knocking out the kitchen wall.

The Old Man's cell phone is programmed with a number called "Home," and it isn't my cell phone number, it's the phone number of his parents, the same phone number they've had since he was a little kid.

We're in our thirties but Home is still the place we grew our inches and left to go to college and now visit rarely.

This weekend my heart's with my family, those bums.

Aftermath

I want to be one of those laid back moms who doesn't spend most of her time cleaning, but who can actually sit back and relax and just enjoy the time she is given. But above is a photo of dinner aftermath only a two year old can produce. That's a little cheese and rice and it covers 48% of the table. I clean it up, and then find eight million other things to clean before I ever sit down.

Tom the Neb Guy

"Shake it. Shake it hard, then get a tight seal, then hit it. You can't overdose on this stuff, guys, you will not overdose. Do not be afraid to give it to him. Get a tight seal. Hit it. If you don't feel like he got enough, hit it again. Any questions?"

The Kid was watching weird Nick toons in the Children's Hospital last night, admitted for wheezing and difficulty breathing. There are two types of nurses. The bubbly, loud nurses try to make friends with children by taking their voices up an octave and a decibel and waving stickers in front of their eyes. The Kid cringes and turns away from this. Tom is the other type of nurse, matter-of-fact, treating kids like they're people.

Bubbles and Condescending Doc - "Oh, we don't call it a fever until it hits 101 degrees" - set my baby on edge as soon as they walk in the door. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure CD with her vast fever knowledge and Bubbles are great at what they do, but I take on The Kid's posture right along with him and slouch in the corner while they lift up his shirt and put their cold stethoscopes on his skin. "Do you want a toy, do you want to play?" and then "Hi, hi!" they say, as if they are going to turn his frown upside down and no grumpy gusses are tolerated at The Children's Hospital, no sir.

Tom demands no such thing. It's like he realizes The Kid is in pain and lets him be in pain. He is over six feet tall. He's got a tat of a wedding ring on his left ring finger. His head is shaved .25 inches from his skull. He looks tired, and I don't blame him, because it's 10:00 pm. He's got on black crocs and blue scrubs, and a gold watch. He doesn't address The Kid, but kind of moves at him sideways until he's got his stethoscope over the little blue shirt and is listening to the ragged breathing. The Kid actually sighs and I can feel his hand relax.

Tom brings back the nebulizer tubing and hooks it up to the wall, explaining the drug Albuterol which my asthmatic Old Man is quite familiar with.

"Buddy, you will learn that Mommies always win."

I place The Kid on my lap and he is wheezing loudly now in quick, jerky gasps. We place the mask over his face and he begins to scream. I hold his arms and the mask over his face, not knowing how I have so many hands, and Tom stands in the corner, watching. The Kid screams during the ten minute treatment, and struggles, but I do not let the mask fall from his face. The Old Man stands beside us, not knowing where to put his hands. The Kid's screams gradually become stronger and bust out of him at the volume I'm used to and I thank god that I can hear my child screaming like normal.

Tom comes over and takes the mask off, and I see The Kid contemplate throwing a haymaker at Tom and thinking better of it. Tom walks out of the room and I hear "Mommies always win, Buddy," as he leaves.

Quote That Makes Me Want to Soul-Spelunk - Alone

My wonderful mom sent me a book of quotes called Thoughts on Being at Peace: Words and Paintings Selected by Helen Exley. There are many good quotes but this one epitomizes me at this time in my life.

We are so busy we hardly have time to look at the people we love, even in
our own household, and to look at ourselves. Society is organized in a way that
even when we have some leisure time, we don't know how to use it to get back in
touch with ourselves. We have millions of ways to lose this precious time - we
turn on the TV or pick up the telephone, or start the car and go
somewhere.
We are not used to being with ourselves, and we act as if we don't like
ourselves and are trying to escape from ourselves.

--Thich Nhat Hanh, From "Suffering is Not Enough"

Work and Family Balance

Here are ten ways to balance work and families from the study Ten Adaptive Strategies For Family and Work Balance: Advice for Successful Families by Shelley A. Haddock, Scott J. Ziemba, Toni S. Zimmerman, and Lisa R. Current.

Plus one I added.

This study focuses on dual working couples with children.

1) The importance of family is the highest priority.
2) Both partners strive for equality in both earning income and caring for the family.
3) The couples described enjoying going to work and deriving meaning from their work.
4) The couples also create and enforce strict boundaries to keep work and family separate.
5) Productivity at work is not sacrificed.
6) Fun becomes the first priority rather than more work at home.
7) Dual earning is valued and embraced.
8) Simplicity is an emphasis.
9) Successful dual earner families tend to collaborate on decision-making and be mindful of their boundaries as they do so.
10) Time is regarded as a valuable resource.
11) Time alone, solitude, is regarded as a valuable resource.

Annie's Garden - A Pantoum

Annie's toes itch for sun-warmed earth.
She is from rock-rimmed canyons, from sage crushed under horse hooves, from warm sandstone on bare feet.
It's impossible to put roots into the earth in a dorm, in a loveless marriage, in a small cramped apartment with an alley view.
In her thirtieth year, she is home.

She is from rock-rimmed canyons, from sage crushed under horse hooves, from warm sandstone on bare feet.
Her garden overlooks long mesas that crack against robin-egg skies.
In her thirtieth year, she is home.
Garden gloves are too sterile; she needs to crunch and crumble between thumb and fingers.

Her garden overlooks long mesas that crack against robin-egg skies.
North light clings to the studio walls, yet Annie spades.
Garden gloves are too sterile; she needs to crunch and crumble between thumb and fingers.
Vegetable seed packets lean against potted, expectant tomatoes, rosemary, basil and thyme.

North light clings to the studio walls, yet Annie spades.
Sworls and hard mesa lines in paint can wait.
Vegetable seed packets lean against potted, expectant tomatoes, rosemary, basil and thyme.
The sun warms her back as she pokes seeds in tilled dirt swirls.

Sworls and hard mesa lines in paint can wait.
It is planting time.
The sun warms her back as she pokes seeds in tilled dirt swirls.
She flexes her muscles and stretches out to the mesas and promises her heart she'll paint soon.

It is planting time.
Too many nights she wondered if she was worth anything at all.
She flexes her muscles and stretches out to the mesas and promises her heart she'll paint soon.
The air and the dirt and the bird noise fill her blood and bones.

Too many nights she wondered if she was worth anything at all.
Now she says, "Tell me how much you love me, honey" and smiles because the answer gets better every time.
The air and the dirt and the bird noise fill her blood and bones.
She returns the favor and fills her garden with roots.

Now she says, "Tell me how much you love me, honey" and smiles because the answer gets better every time.
He wraps her in his arms and whispers in her hair.
She returns the favor and fills her garden with roots.
Annie's toes itch for sun-warmed earth.

Mother's Day messages

First, I received an email with an article about balancing work and family attached. There are ten "adaptive strategies," whatever the hell that means, and I figure The Old Man and I are good on about eight of them. Where I still need work:

Fun is the priority at home. I struggle with this. For example, this Mother's Day weekend, I have a long To-Do list with items that truly are minute specks of worry and busy work. I don't have "fun time" with The Kid anywhere on the list. The other item I need to work on is Simplicity is an emphasis.

Then, this message from Annie:

LIBRA
This notice appeared on a bulletin board at a local nightclub that features hip hop DJs: "Missing: my great-grandmother's necklace, which dropped off my neck while I was krump dancing last Saturday. It might have happened when I was doing a head spin. The necklace has three strands of pearls and a pendant engraved with 'To Florence, 1927.' Contact Monique." I call this to your attention, Libra, because I think it's possible that you'll have an experience somewhat akin to Monique's. Playing exuberantly in a very modern style could result in you losing something from the old days. Unlike Monique, though, I bet your loss will be liberating.

Finally, a gift from my boss, a refrigerator magnet with an old-time picture of a June-Cleaver-esque housewife, saying:

HAPPINESS IS relaxing with a bottle of wine and saying to hell with keeping A TIDY HOME.

So, being the insightful person that I am, I think the universe is trying to tell me something. This is a weekend to "Chillax," as Eric from Twilight says.

And blessings this week:

• A friend and I had a wonderful talk and discovered we're going on girls' vacation at the same time in June.
• The Old Man sent flowers to my office, then cleaned our hall closet AND the garage.
• I dreamed about good friends a lot this week. We were planning our vacation in June.
• I finally found a bike The Kid likes to ride, so I feel like I have won a small battle in the war over his couch-potatoedom.

To all the mothers (and fathers) out there, working or not, because we all know stay-at-home parents work their butts off, take time to chillax this weekend. I know, I'm one to talk.

Quote That Makes Me Want to Soul-Spelunk

Which of us, walking through the twilight or retracing some day in our past, has never felt that we have lost some infinite thing? - Jorge Luis Borges