#motherhood

Wedding Bells: Chop Wood, Carry Water.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 20 Comments

Van Morrison’s Enlightenment begins with a riff on the Buddha’s Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. Didn’t I first stumble into that koan in Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, that little white paperback my sister and I checked out of the public library and handed back and forth between us? Those were the adolescent years when I devoured literature — Dostoyevsky, James Joyce, Sylvia Plath — so hungry, those years of amazement, at how literature could sing. So hungry I was in those years that merged into that Vermont mountainside college where I often stayed up most of the night, talking, drinking, often sleeping under the dazzling constellations. In the mornings, we trekked to seminars in the former cow barn and debated Plato and Kant.

Those years, I believed I could wrap my mind around life, that understanding was possible in more than ragged snippets. All my adult life I’ve leaned into a daily version of chop wood, carry water, that three-legged stool of raising children, writing books, earning a livelihood to keep shelter and home whole for my tiny family. An insanely complex equation.

With great merriment, my oldest daughter marries, we host a party, folks arrive, cake is eaten. The night before, we stay up late, the girls decorating the cake, my brother on a kitchen stool, shaking out the stories of our memories together. Such happiness to have a full house of youth and laughter. Monday morning, awake long before dawn, I labor at my version of carrying wood, those Van Morrison lines humming through my mind. Illusion? Nonattachment? Perhaps all my life I’ve thought about this koan in the wrong Western way, an either/or. Cold dew washes my bare feet.

As for the cake…. I’m still handing around leftovers, sweet luck.

the leaves believe
such letting go is love
such love is faith
such faith is grace
such grace is god
i agree with the leaves
― Lucille Clifton

The taste of fallen leaves, pond water, crumbly earth…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

In any lifetime, there are dividing events, the Before, the After. In my years, the most recent schism is Before Cancer and Everything Else. But the most profound? Before Motherhood, and the clanging, crying, joyous Everafterward, my truest realm. Happiest of birthdays; spring is in the offing, darling. 

A child is born and doesn't know what day it is.
The particular joy in my heart she cannot imagine.
The taste of apricots is in store for her. — Nan Cohen

Giving the slip….

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 23 Comments

Back again at Dartmouth, anyone entering my room dons a yellow gown, inadvertently hiding staff name tags. Two nurses enter yesterday and pause. My daughter and her boyfriend stand at my bed’s foot.

A nurse asks, Are you two the main medical team?

The three of us look at each other. In these days where not much has been funny at all, I’m tempted to roll with this, but my daughter jumps in and says, We’re family.

Oh, the nurse says, the Main Team. You looked so intent.

I add, Talking politics….

I’d been in the ER for two nights. The fact that I didn’t care is evidence of how lousy I felt. Due to my contagious infection, I’d been squirreled away. Wheeled through the hallways, I see how jammed this place is, people waiting in hallways, tucked into corners.

In these days, my daughters arrive with their cheery energy, with stories of their lives, their patience with me. I tell them my dream to start walking again…. A few warm days and I’m imagining the four feet of snow have vanished into mud. Not so.

My girls laugh. We’re going to have to Apple chip our mother so she doesn’t wander off….

No fear of my wandering in the (very near) future. But how I’m hungering for that. Just where, exactly, would I look for that chip? Under my boot sole? In the hem of my jacket? So I can give the slip when spring calls…..

High School in the Time of Covid

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

My daughter’s high school varsity soccer team, the Lady Cats, advanced into the playoffs — local joy against rising Covid rates and the election hurtling along.

I didn’t play sports as a student, the lone wolf who ran long solitary runs — pretty much what I’m doing now, except these are short solitary runs. But to be a kid on a local team who wasn’t expected to do well at all — that’s a big deal.

Friday, I’m home briefly in the middle of the day. My daughter and her friend have finished school for the day. In the living room, they’ve set up this year’s version of high school, each with their notebooks and a school-issued Chromebook, surrounded by piles of my library books, their cleats drying beside the wood stove. The room is sunny and warm, and the girls are intently working at whatever assignment — chemistry or algebra.

I fill my thermos with espresso and ask my daughter’s friend if she’d like a cup. I’m joking, but she happily accepts. I’d love an espresso.

So, in a little china cup painted with blueberries that my daughter once used for milk, I serve this girl an espresso, who thanks me.

Before I head out the door again, I look back at these two. I’m happy to be employed, heading to interesting work, on this sunny autumn day, in my Shire of Vermont. But goodness, I’m grateful for girls and warmth. The whole world matters — disease and political collapse — but this afternoon matters, too.

I open the kitchen door, call I love you, step out into the chilly afternoon, and close the door carefully behind me.

Half Moon

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

I step around the barn in the twilight and see the half moon shimmering above the barn’s back corner, like a surprise.

I empty the ash bucket and set it on the cement step, waiting for my daughters and our twilight walk, as the dusk shakes down.

A year ago, my oldest was in New Mexico, visiting my parents and hanging out with my brother and his girlfriend. After a wild wind and rain storm, the power went out, and my youngest and I ate take-out by candlelight. Always, at this time of year, as the days perceptibly shorter, I realize how profoundly cold and dark has wound into my life, spread physically and metaphorically into the life I’ve shaped as a woman and a mother.

What’s different this year is the collective darkness of disease as the rates of Covid increase around our little world, of the unraveling political world relentlessly marching along.

And yet — there’s that ancient silent moon.

My daughters are laughing as they walk towards me.

What? I ask.

They look at each other again, and my oldest says, Nothing, Mom, and then they laugh again.

“I am more convinced than ever that we are shards of others.”

— Jenn Shapland, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers

Photo by Molly S.

Ordinary Day

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

Like so many parents, the impending opening (or not) of school looms over us. My 15-year-old is desperate to go. Every afternoon, picking her up from soccer practice, my friend and I stand in the parking lot, talking. As we share trivial and not-at-all trivial snippets in these few moments, I eye the sprawling brick high school, thinking, Really? How is any of this possible? Lumping teens together, here or in any other building? Does this make sense at all?

What my kid wants is clear — to hang with her friends, to rise up in a real challenge, to learn, to begin finding her forward to her own adult life. Basic stuff.

I’ve hit places of indecision in my life before, like when I uncoupled myself from a marriage. But now? My friend and I stand in collective indecision. Finished, our girls walk towards us in their cleats, sweatshirts slung over their shoulders, masks dangling from their hands. They’re looking at each other and at us, laughing, maybe making a joke about the two of us, or maybe simply happy in this sunny August afternoon, tired from practice and hungry for dinner.

My friend and I look at each other and remark on our girls’ happiness — thankfully. We lean against our cars, talking.

For this moment, there’s no school, no tomorrow, no next week, not even these past lonely months.

And because my mind works this way, I think of how a river turns when it meets an obstacle, never bullying forward, but shifting with the lay of the land. The lay of our land has changed.

The girls look at each other, giggling, and I’m suddenly sure they’ve been laughing at my friend and me. I’m utterly happy about that.

“Life is always rushing away from us.”

— Stephen Kiernan, Universe of Two