mothering

Some Hard-Core Adolescence Advice

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Here’s a great thing about living with a teenager: after making (and consuming) wontons, you linger at the table and discover your daughter is searching for a penguin.

A penguin?

Apparently, a mate for life, although the last I’d read some penguins are seasonally monogamous. Apparently, that’s a technical point.

I offered advice, which, as my daughter pointed out, might actually be useful, as I’ve messed up my penguin quest.

I rattled off the general look-for list – respectful, responsible, disciplined, generally decent and humorous – and finally said, Think about what he fills his life with, and what you fill yours with. Does he pursue money? Sports? Video games? Career? Will what he pursues bear out, decades later?

We ate the second batch of wontons. I mentioned what drove her father and I apart, in the end, was what we each love most. We kept talking, around and around, about little bits. She offered me the last wonton.

Here’s a few lines from an incredible essay my father emailed me. If you read nothing else this September, read this.

In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.

– David Foster Wallace

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Library Book Find

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

These early August morning, mist nestles around the house. Laundry left overnight on the line wets again. I’m reminded of the first three days I lived in Vermont – 18-years-old, in unbroken mist, concealing this new landscape. I had no idea where I had arrived.

Reading Knausgaard is akin to entering fog – uncharted, mesmerizing. Years ago, on a long expedition with my girls, I insisted we would take only what we could carry. At one repacking stage, my older daughter lifted a heavy hardcover book from my backpack and demanded, What’s this?

Knausgaard. Here’s a few lines from his latest:

What makes life worth living?

No child asks itself that question. To children life is self-evident. Life goes without saying: whether it is good or bad makes no difference. This is because children don’t see the world, don’t observe the world, don’t contemplate the world, but are so deeply immersed in the world that they don’t distinguish between it and their own selves. Not until that happens, until a distance appears between what they are and what the world is, does the question arise: what makes life worth living?

Karl Ove Knausgaard, Autumn

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Photo by Molly S.

 

Art? Why?

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Yesterday, while the 12-year-old girls swam in Greensboro’s perfectly clear Lake Caspian, I read on the beach, just me and a few gulls, a pair of kayakers pushing off. An older woman wandered down and waded into the water and said only kids could swim in that water, and then left, too. The girls had swam out and were experimenting with laughing underwater.

Later, we went to Bread and Puppet’s outdoor theater, sprawled in the hot sun. Coming home, the girls swam again, while I eavesdropped on a pleasant conversation between our former pediatrician, his wife, and friends.

I kept thinking, What does art matter, anyway?, all this barefoot and Blundstone-shod performance in the field? What does poetry, fiction, song, mean, anyway? The more I thought, I wondered if my question was wrong, if the answer lay in who was listening, like myself listening to those 12-year-old girls. Maybe art is like that a cappella hymn, voices raised in harmony and confidence, to the variated audience, the shape of the earth, the enormous pine trees, and all that sky, blue and shifting with clouds, over field and forest, highways and water, on and on, and on.

Maybe my question, like a koan, holds the answer.

A painter should begin every canvas with a wash of black, because all things in nature are dark except where exposed by the light.

– Leonardo da Vinci

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Postcards from Charlottesville

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

My daughter and her friend dug into boxes of records and gleaned out The Beatles, set up the stereo and record player in our barn, and cranked up The White Album. They hung up the hammock, strung lights around the walls, and then – needing a disco ball – smashed a mirror and hot-glued shards on a soccer ball.

While I wander around the edges, moving from chore to chore – nothing egregiously awful, but edgy and dissatisfied, preoccupied with I’m thinking – the girls are in the barn, creatively busy, smiling, wanting only a break to go swimming and eat ice cream sundaes.

Later, in the dark, I go for a walk in the adjoining cemetery, familiar enough with these paths that I can walk both by the scant light and my memory. The crescent moon rises in the black sky, over the mountain ridge and our house, where I see the girls’ string of Christmas lights shining. I pause, noting the moon’s hue. Tinged amber? Faintly orange?

Then I wise up and just stand there, shivering a little in my sweater, admiring this slice of moon, autumn creeping near.

… I have been there all along and this, I suddenly and certainly know, is motherhood; this mere sufficiency, this presence. With every cry she has tutored me, in what is plain and hard: that my affection, my silly entertainments, my doting hours, the particular self I tried to bring to my care of her, have been as superfluous as my fury and despair. All that is required is for me to be there….

– Rachel Cusk, A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother

My sister, Tanya Stanciu, who lives in Charlottesville sent these photos.

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Growing

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Some friends have a baby who won’t sleep through a night. A gorgeous, round-cheeked laughing beauty of a baby.

I’ve restrained myself from laughing, from outright teasing: I’ve never heard of a baby who keeps her parents up at night. My first baby, at nine months, woke up every hour for what seemed years, although it may have been only a week or two, or possibly months. I first noted then that this parenting thing might never plateau out and remain static.

My 12-year-old daughter made a new friend yesterday. When I picked her up after work, she was losing mightily and happily at Monopoly, while the girls hatched plans for a sleepover. Later, the three of us biked slightly out of town, abandoning our bikes and walking through the dusk rapidly rising, the girls laughing on swings my daughters used as very little girls. The friend was wearing my daughter’s sweatshirt, and my eyes kept snagging on the turquoise. Truth is, my daughter’s grown so much this past year, I look twice at her often, before I slow down and recognize her as mine.

Stories teach us in ways we can remember… Positive stories shared by women who have had wonderful childbirth experiences are an irreplaceable way to transmit knowledge of a woman’s true capacities in pregnancy and birth.

– Ina May Gaskin

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Summer Sustenance

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Swimming in the lake last night until the children were shivering and laughing, the rosy sunset spilling over the still water, I imagined myself like the black bears around us, storing not calories but summer’s barefoot warmth, the ease of lying on the sand, the way you might swim with your eyes at the lake’s surface, all that water stretching from shore to shore, filled with the teeming mysteries of animal, vegetable and mica-flecked rocky life.

An acquaintance once gave me a piece of advice: if I wanted to change my life, do one or two changes well, and see how that spins things around. In those toddler-raising days, I chose two things: I baked our family’s bread and learned to knit. O, once upon the time as a very young woman, I teased and mocked the domestic, little knowing its ancient power and life-carrying grace. Once upon a time, too, I brushed off August swimming as frivolity, back in those days when I chopped my life into pieces, ranked weeding the garden above sand between the girls’ toes, misunderstanding how that lake nourishes our human hunger.

…Slow, slow!
For the grapes’ sake, if they were all,
Whose leaves already are burnt with frost,
Whose clustered fruit must else be lost—
For the grapes’ sake along the wall.

– Robert Frost, “October”

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