mothering

The Constellations in Motion

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

In an acceptance form letter for an essay, an editor suggests reading that slim college handbook, Strunk and White. For a mini-refresher lesson, I click on the link, since it’s been many years since I opened my copy. (Do I still even possess a copy? I’m a little worried I may have jettisoned that in my move…)

Between useful directions like Enclose parenthetic expressions between commas, I read Writers will often find themselves steering by stars that are disturbingly in motion.

Last night, my daughter and I stood outside in the cold, talking with a neighbor, looking up at the small white lights my daughters strung over our barn. The neighbor tells me about the man who last painted the barn before I bought this property, how painstakingly he prepped the clapboards and sealed each nailhole.

I lean against the cornerboard, thinking of all that hard work. Clouds have blown in, and the moon is obscured. Rain and more rain predicted for today.

Inside our house again, my daughter carries the cats up to her bed.

Fortunately, the act of composition, or creation, disciplines the mind; writing is one way to go about thinking, and the practice and habit of writing not only drain the mind but supply it, too.

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Amazing Things

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

Years ago, when I was a board member at the Stowe Farmers’ Market, I stopped in at bookstore before a board meeting to buy a child’s small sticker book. Board meetings often ran three hours long; I had my four-year-old with me, and for a dollar or two, I was looking for an usual activity for her, something to sweeten some of that time.

While my daughter picked out her book, I browsed through the new fiction, and bought a book I’ve long since lost, passed along to other readers.

Why? The novel is one long melody, one continuous song of the beauty and harshness of human life.

What did my little girl choose? A birthday party sticker book, with cake and candles, balloons, wrapped presents on a table beneath an oak tree – also a song.

He says my daughter, and all the love he has is wrapped up in the tone of his voice when he says those two words, he says my daughter you must always look with both of your eyes and listen with both of your ears. He says this is a very big world and there are many many things you could miss if you are not careful. He says there are remarkable things all the time, right in front of us, but our eyes have like the clouds over the sun and our lives are paler and poorer if we do not see them for what they are.

– Jon McGregor, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things

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December morning

Beyond the Friend Realm

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

I send an electronic request to my teenager, asking to see an Instagram account. Mom, she says. That’s all. Just: mom.

I see her Instagram of flowers, mountains, dirt roads, definitely of meals, of us. I say that’s fine, and it has to be fine, I know.

I call this college freshman at her dorm room and ask about her day and what she’s doing right that minute. While talking to me, she’s applying makeup. She says she’s headed out. Out, wherever that may be. I imagine her, bending near the mirror, painting her eyelashes.

I’m at the dining room table. A cat rubs beneath my bare foot.

As she approaches 19, I remember reading Toni Morrison’s Beloved in graduate school. Everyone in my small department read it then, passing around a few copies, asking, Have you read it yet? Near the very end, a single line amazed me, a secret unfolding. You your own best thing, Sethe. Have I taught my daughters this? The feminine strengths they need to know?

I don’t ask for her secrets again – this tall, quick-witted, cleaver-tongued gorgeous young woman. But dear Lord, I’m listening.

Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.

– Toni Morrison, Beloved

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Hardwick, VT, post office

 

Dinner

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

The December my youngest daughter was two, snow fell every day – some days just the merest trace of flakes; other days, it snowed and snowed and snowed. By New Year’s Eve, so much  snow had accumulated on the porch and slid off the roof that I had to stand on a chair to see over that barrier through the scrim of visible window. I joked with my older daughter that we lived-in a snow dugout.

One midwinter day that year, I wiggled my toddler into her snowsuit and boots seven times, and then I thought I would never go outside again until spring – a nearly unbearable thought.

The girls come and go with their 12-and-18-year-old lives now. Driving home from work last night along the ancient Winooski, the river that’s flowed through the Green Mountains all through their glacial formation, I thought how one of the trickiest things for me about parenting has been how things constantly change. Baby sleeps through the night; now baby wakes every 30 minutes. Baby crawls, then runs.

And yet…. last night, my daughter who’s rooming at college, walked in while I was chopping cabbage and sat down at the table, hungry for talk and supper.

…one of the worst things about being a parent, for me, is the self-discovery, the being face to face with one’s secret insanity and brokenness and rage.

– Anne Lamott, Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year

Knitting Circle

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Note this: a Vermont November day in the fifties. My girls toss text notes to me from Hardwick to my windowless desk in Burlington: Who did you loan the pie pans to? When will you be home?

The teenager and her friend are hatching a plan to pick up an old friend at the airport which requires, first, that ancient human activity: waiting.

The friend, nervous, taps her phone.

I take out the hat I’m knitting, and – like that – the girls ask for needles and yarn. My teenager, former Waldorf student, knits quickly, weaving in a second color. The kittens leap from one ball of yarn to another. Our needles, fingers, and voices work, in this other old activity: women at handwork.

Twilight comes to the little farm
At winter’s end. The snowbanks
High as the eaves, which melted
And became pitted during the day,
Are freezing again, and crunch
Under the dog’s foot. The mountains
From their place behind our shoulders
Lean close a moment, as if for a
Final inspection, but with kindness,
A benediction as the darkness
Falls….

From Hayden Carruth’s “Twilight Comes”

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Thread of Thanks

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Before I turned off the lights and went home from the library the other day, I checked out a ‘thanksgiving’ tree a child had made and left behind, maybe to dry, maybe because the project was forgotten. Branches were stuck in a mason jar, with colored leaves tied on with white yarn, handwritten with the child’s thanks.

Whoever this child is, she or he had painted the jar a brilliant turquoise blue, and the branches were so large, they nearly tipped the jar over.

I read a few written in purple marker in a child’s handwriting: mom, my bike, the sky, chocolate.

These November days, the dark is ubiquitous. I rise in the dark with the mewling kittens. Before I begin dinner, the dark has already wrapped us again, familiar, like a long-term visitor we must endure. The heady days of an evening swim in the lake, of splashing while the late sunset descends, will return.

Here’s my own offering, from Julie Cadwallader-Staub’s Milk:

… and it was all too much then –
the endless stream of groceries meals
bills illnesses laundry jobs no sleep –
so to sit in the rocking chair was sweet respite,
to do just one thing:
watch the baby
drain the profusion of milk out of me
watch the baby
become so contented that nursing faded into sleep…

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