#humor

Female Rage & FB

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

In the midst of an argument with my oldest daughter, I glance down at the subtitle of the book I’m reading: Female Rage and My Passage into Motherhood.

If I wasn’t so angry, I’d laugh.

Motherhood. Odd how all how reading all that Plato as an undergraduate works into parenting…. The unexamined life is not worth living.

Stop pretending, I insist — I crab at her, really — could you please stop pretending anyone on the planet has a Facebook life? That living includes love of sizzling bacon and three-layer chocolate cake and cappuccino, of merry friends, of loving your cat who licks butter from your fingers? But our bones also hold the sorrow of loss, and rage at the universe.

Our evening ends with Yahtzee, broken bits of dark chocolate, laughter.

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Kid and Cat Hanging Out

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

With both my daughters in their teens now, I spend a stupid amount of time thinking over what makes our lives, what fills our days, how has their childhoods unwound?

Yesterday, looking up from my laptop at the kitchen table, I realize this — kid with cat — is the main action around here. Thank goodness.

Before a Cat will condescend
To treat you as a trusted friend,
Some little token of esteem
Is needed, like a dish of cream…

— T. S. Eliot

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Our Kitchen, Hardwick, Vermont

Community Bonding

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Written with a finger on a muddy car door in Montpelier: Spring is here! Hooray!

I mention this to my daughter at dinner, saying, I think a kid wrote this….

Why a kid? she asks. Why not a little old lady?

Why not?

A single day of rain has pushed up green.

As January’s bitter cold links people when strangers comment about the cruel weather, spring does, too. It’s finally here. What a day….

This dewdrop world
Is but a dewdrop world
And yet —

— Issa

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Hardwick, VT, Sign of Spring #2

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

A sign of spring, I suppose, is small-talking with the other parents on a slushy soccer field, watching our kids in a nordic ski relay. Sure, that’s spring in Vermont, borne with the usual good-humor of nordic ski families, and well compensated by an eclectic and unbelievably delicious potluck. At how many potlucks do you find a wedge of homemade sheep’s milk blue cheese?

But a more heartening sign is breaking out the lawn chairs for afternoon in plein air studying. Note snow.

Stop acting so small. You are the universe in ecstatic motion.

— Rumi

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Cold Spring

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

A lover I had for a very brief time complained I wasn’t good at accepting gifts. Pride, he noted. About that, he was right.

And yet a life without pride in yourself and your actions? Lack pride and you become a muddied doormat. So here’s the theme that surfaces over and over in all our lives — where to find the sweet spot of balance.

Hard things have a way of bending you, and that bending can go either way, I tell my daughters. In this long cold spring, that sentiment runs deeply.

cherry blossom petals
blown by the spring breeze against
the undried wall

— Masaoka Shiki

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Parking Lot Humor

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

A friend once remarked to me that my older daughter has a “very thin scrim” between her and the world. Last night, returning with the girls and their skis, we stopped at a supermarket in Waterbury and wandered through the mostly empty store. When we walked back to my daughter’s car, she stopped and remarked about the car parked very near to hers: What a dick move. She edged around to her driver’s seat and said with absolutely no rancor at all. This is the kind of parking job I would do.

I laughed. I mean — parenting? It’s hard. It’s darn hard. The thinness of that scrim gets to me. So any humor? Send it my way……

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