mothering

Here In Kid World

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

My daughter sends me a photo via email with the subject line “Awesomeness.” How cool is that?

Yesterday, home after work, with dinner not yet made, and the house messy with potential buyers expected the next morning, a litany of chores from unwashed breakfast dishes to a fish tank bubbler needing repair, I first opened the box with my laptop battery. A $15 replacement I’ve put off for months.

The heavy lithium battery lay in my hand, and I guiltily wondered what strangers had made this toxic thing.

My daughter held the plastic bubble wrap. “Can I pop this? Please?”

I put her off, wanting to know if I’d ordered the right-sized battery, not paying any attention to my child at all, still thinking of my afternoon with its entanglements of adult problems.

From the plastic, she squeezed a bubble and held it up to the little lights in the house. Look through this, she asked. And then I’m finally smart enough to lay aside my jumbled thoughts and peer through her vision.

Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.

R. L. Stevenson

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Photo by Gabriela

Not Quite Janis Joplin

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Years ago, when I withdrew my daughter from a private school and home schooled, I had an incredible sense of freedom. That private school had been incredibly rigid, so tightly constrained the parent handbook suggested how to run birthday parties. What on earth was I thinking then?

When I enrolled my kids in the local public school, I discovered a freedom I hadn’t expected from my dismal memories of school. Perhaps it’s simply the diversity of kids, who come from homes with parents running the gamut income-wise, but also in home life, with mothers who range from stay-at-home moms to professors with PhDs. Maybe one of the best aspects of rural Vermont schools is their encompassing, egalitarian qualities: the kids are literally all in it together, and by and large, the kids don’t mind.

Oddly, the end of my marriage was also a pivotal point of incredible freedom. If not this life I planned, then what? I seized that breaking as an unexpected opportunity to rethink how the heck I got to here. What breadcrumbs do I want to follow to get myself unlost from this forest?

Here’s pre-dawn reading before my wood stove….

Much of contemporary feminism uses the language of power. Girls need to be “empowered,” women need to fight for “self-empowerment,” “girl power,” etc. There is little conversation about what that power is to be used for, because that is supposed to be obvious: whatever the girl wants.

But growing up in a system that measures success by money, that values consumerism and competition, that devalues compassion and community, these girls and women have already been indoctrinated into what to want. Without close examination, without conversion into a different way of thinking and acting, what that girl wants is going to be money, power, and, possibly, her continued subjugation, because a feminism that does not  provide an alternative to the system will still have the system’s values.

…. Moving beyond that (patriarchal) structure means forgoing the rewards that structure doles out for participation. But it also gives you back your agency.

Jessa Crispin, Why I Am Not a Feminist: A Feminist Manifesto

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Where else but Hardwick, Vermont, in the first days of spring?

A Condensed Parenting Manual

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

There’s an odd line from Lee in Steinbeck’s East of Eden that’s always stuck with me, since I first read the book when I was sixteen or so: I will not put my finger in any human pie. What a strange metaphor (as if we’re baked goods?).

Tomorrow is Woodbury Pie Breakfast, the community-wide sit down to pie and coffee, live music and cabin fever conversation. This afternoon is pie baking in my house, as I suspect it will be in many Woodbury kitchens. The question around town is, What kind of pie are you baking? Or, wishfully muttered, I hope I get some of Skip’s chocolate with raspberry swirl this year.

Pie is easy – crust and filling – but human pie? Human creation? A family member this winter drove to North Dakota and joined the Standing Rock Protests, then disappeared underground, in a variation of Five Easy Pieces, with not a word to family he had left behind. He must have profoundly believed he was called to that Jihadist path, leaving behind a grief like earth crudely harrowed up but untended, uncultivated.

Steinbeck is likely at the heart of my own raw parenting philosophy. As one daughter steps into adulthood, and the other teeters on adolescence, my mantra repeats Socratic self-examination: What the heck are you doing – and why? What an annoyance it must be to have a mother more concerned with keeping the darkness of Nihilism at bay, rather than building a really stellar college application.

March is always the season of entropy, cabin fever, quarreling. We’re surrounded by depths of snow: Currier and Ives picturesque, and a real complication, too. And that’s another metaphor.

I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one. . . . Humans are caught—in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too—in a net of good and evil. . . . There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well—or ill?

– John Steinbeck, East of Eden

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Chipped Lives

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

It’s so darn cold here I woke up in the dark this morning with the cold scraping my cheeks. Leftover pork bubbles on the wood stove with red chili and beans: we need heat and bright color.

Despite the cold, the March light is sparklingly beautiful. My young neighbor and I slid around the ice surrounding the sugarhouse, covered with a few inches of sugary snow. I offer him salvaged doors and windows, piles of wood; he’s happy.

Less here; more down the road. This morning, while my wood stove slowly warmed our house, I remembered a Hemingway line about the surprise at the end of Ulysses. Finishing Finkel’s new book this morning, I discovered an incredible surprise in his ending. The line I snipped below is perhaps one of the few pieces of advice I could truly offer my 18-year-old daughter, this young woman who has already met the hole in her heart with burning rage.

The neighbor loads his Subaru. I’m relieved to have these potential pieces of home travel down the road. Build a greenhouse. Plant more seeds. Thrive.

I think that most of us feel like something is missing from our lives, and I wondered then if Knight’s (the hermit) journey was to seek it. But life isn’t about searching endlessly to find what’s missing; it’s about learning to live with the missing parts.

– Michael Finkel, The Stranger in the Woods: the Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit

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Radius of This Afternoon

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

The cold hammers down around us again, returning with March’s powerful jaws, reminding me of all those years when my daughters were little, and we were housebound around the wood stove. Always, I bundled up the baby and walked out into the cold, even in the rawest of days, and the house’s warmth welcomed us on our return.

My friends would bring stacks of Sunday New York Times, and I would read months-old news before the wood stove, children playing with dolls or wooden frying pans, devouring the news aptly while eating popcorn. Such was the world of living with little children…. Today is merely a dip back in my mothering days, a memory when the girls couldn’t zip their coats or read a book.

I’m glad to welcome this reprise from the world-out-there of news I’d rather not hear but will make its way to our door, one way or another, eventually. For now, I’ll shake down the coals, lay on more wood, and brew tea.

March is the in-between season, of library books, knitting, board games. End-of-winter pause.

The light stays longer in the sky, but it’s a cold light,
it brings no relief from winter.
My neighbor stares out the window,
talking to her dog. He’s sniffing the garden,
trying to reach a decision about the dead flowers.
It’s a little early for all this.
Everything’s still very bare—
nevertheless, something’s different today from yesterday.
We can see the mountain: the peak’s glittering where the ice catches the light…..

From Louise Gluck’s “March”

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Melody

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Remember Robert J. Lurtsema and Morning Pro Musica’s sweetly singing birds?

My family had an orange cat named Oliver who would swipe at the window when he heard this opening, searching for birds. We believed that cat brilliant, God rest his feline soul.

Mozart’s music has been gracing our early mornings, these first few days in March. I’ve been skimming through a biography of Wolfgang – until I stopped suddenly at this excerpt from a letter from Mozart himself.

I have now made a habit of being prepared in all affairs of life for the worst. As death, when we come to consider it closely, is the true goal of our existence, I have formed during the last few years such close relations with this best and truest friend of mankind, that his image is not only no longer terrifying to me, but is indeed very soothing and consoling! And I thank God for graciously granting me the opportunity (you know what I mean) of learning that death is the key which unlocks the door to our true happiness. I never lie down at night without reflecting that – young as I am – I may not live to see another day. Yet no one of all my acquaintances could say that in company I am morose or disgruntled. For this blessing I daily thank my Creator.

Enough said.

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West Woodbury, Vermont