motherhood

Why Read?

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

February — surely the freaking longest month of the year in Vermont.

Unable to endure the unremittingness of winter, I’ve taken over the couch with my laptop and Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive. Unableto tell my friends and library patrons about this book — as then I might be forced to hurry, hurry and read, read, to pass this novel along — I’m sunk down deep in this story. What to love? The book is the American road trip (and I’m a sucker for road trip stories, a veteran of innumerable mishaps along my own blue highway adventures), told by a mother who understands the importance of buying coffee for grownups and cookies for the kids, of unrequited lust, of a marriage bending, of the thrust of creative work, of how all those pieces fit and don’t fit together.

I slept on this couch for over a year after my husband left, unable to sleep in our former bed, the room we built with the balcony and double glass doors, the windows on three sides, the moon rising over my prolific garden. The couch, I discovered, was enormously comfortable, and the (former) marriage bed a possible remnant from the Middle Ages.

I purchased this book with library funds, with actual property tax dollars from the taxpayers in Woodbury, many of whom I know. When I’m finished with the novel, I’ll pass it along, happy to hand it over to my reading friends. But in the meantime, I spy many February days on the calendar remaining. I’m in no particular rush to finish. The brighter and warmer days of spring are most likely an illusion — and I’m hoping for a breathtaking ending to this novel…..

But the sea
which no one tends
is also a garden…

― William Carlos Williams

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Sunny Sunday

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

We’re in the February funk, with every family I know sick in one variation or another and a silly amount of snow and ice. Wealthier Vermont families make plans to fly elsewhere, the rest of us reveling in the days of longer light. Snowbanks to the contrary, every day carries us along towards spring.

One of the Saturday morning knitters at my library bemoans she always chooses turquoise yarn. The women around her ask. What’s the problem with that? Turquoise is beautiful. She’s unconvinced.

Turquoise, gem of the deserty red Southwest, exotic color in our snowy north.

Gently, a woman reminds her that knitting need not be about the finished mittens or sweater, but the pleasure of putting it together. Metaphor for winter? Perhaps…. Certainly, that’s easier to acknowledge on a sunny morning like this one……

Really, all you need to become a good knitter are wool, needles, hands, and slightly below-average intelligence. Of course superior intelligence, such as yours and mine, is an advantage.

― Elizabeth Zimmermann

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Postcard From the Edge of Snowland

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

10 degrees out when I head to the post office. In a sort of collective ah, screw it to concerns about global warming, many of the cars around town simply keep running—some, no doubt, to keep drivers’ toes warmish, others simply to maintain juice running through the battery.

Home with a cold, my daughter spreads out her photos that arrived in the post office box this morning. Despite my ontological hesitations about linear time, she strings together her memories. When did we go to Burton Island? Prince Edward Island?

On the couch, drinking coffee beside the sleeping cats, I keep writing cheerful pieces about spring—paid work for a family magazine—encouraging folks to get out. I believe in these things, and I’m glad for the work. I’m particularly happy for this work on days when I need to be home, in my ratty jeans with soup bubbling on the stove.

But spring? Daffodils? Lying on the grass between the blueberry bushes?

Possible. But not all that probable.

Unless, of course, my kid is right, that time is linear, and we’re not trapped forever in this vortex of midwinter.

…..and though the questions
that have assailed us all day
remain — not a single
answer has been found –
walking out now
into the silence and the light
under the trees,
and through the fields,
feels like one.

— Mary Oliver

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Birthing Day

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Twenty years ago, I labored to bring my daughter into this world.

Childbirth parts the scrim over our mundane lives, parts the clouds of our everydayness. Childbirth is just so much. The day descended into darkness, and yet I labored, the one work I absolutely had to do. The end of that labor carried me into darkness, into shivering cold, into fear, ferrying me beyond language.

A roomful of strangers in the middle of night saved my baby’s life, and likely saved my own. I was given—gratis, not a single string attached—utter joy when countless women in other times and places met agony.

The everyday world washed back into my life—as it must for all of us. The stuff of our working lives is made of mother’s milk, chopping leeks for soup, tending our hearths. But each day is imbued with the holiness of a birthing day for mothers. Our lives may tarnish this radiance in our lives, but it’s there yet, unbreakable by human hands.

All human life on the planet is born of woman. The one unifying, incontrovertible experience shared by all women and men is that months-long period we spent unfolding inside a woman’s body.

— Adrienne Rich

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Living the Dream—With Pie

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Twenty years ago, I was about to cross over into motherhood. I was incredibly curious to see my baby’s face, to meet this brand-new person who had been growing and swimming within me for nine months. Eventually, she was born via an emergency caesarian. On the table, my first flooding impulse, when the surgeon held up my baby in his gloved hands for me to see—even before the flooding relief that she was born healthy and well— was I know you. Her eyes were wide open. Across that cold and noisy operating room, she stared directly at me.

Twenty years later, so much living has gone down between us. Playdough and Charlotte’s Web, a million meals, diapers to driving, broken hearts and happiness: the stuff of life.

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Hey? Where’d I Park the Honda?

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Not far from our house, a few months ago the neighbors parked an old Honda, circa 1990s, right along the road beside their house, and after the last storm, the Honda completely disappeared in the snow. Between the roof shedding snow and the work of the town plows, only a massive snow bank remained.

This week, the upper edge of the car’s roof returned. I noticed a window in the backseat had been left unrolled, just an inch.

In a weird kind of way, I’m keeping my tabs on the Honda, just out of sheer curiosity or what my kids would call nosiness. I’m pretty darn sure I’m not the only one in the neighborhood who’s interested to see how this story evolves. What’s the plan?

This week, we’ve had a mighty snowfall, a full day of rain, freezing rain, miserable cold, t-shirt balminess. Yesterday morning, I worked at our sunny kitchen table all morning while the cats slept on chairs beside me; in the afternoon, snow squalls surrounded the kids walking home from school.

In our domestic life, we’ve tears, laughter, and rage.

Yesterday afternoon, while the 13-year-olds baked chocolate chip cookies, their snowy clothes hung up to dry, I walked in the blue-hued twilight. And there it was — millions of snowflakes falling, utterly silent, from an origin unknown, steadily going about the work and beauty of winter.

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