#motherhood

Bright Spot

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 11 Comments

Walking by my daughter’s room, I answer a math question, which delights me immensely. I can do math. More accurately, I did a lot of math in high school, some in college. This particular problem isn’t even all that challenging. But high school math class is somehow buried deep, deep, in my mind, and possibly no longer even accessible.

And yet, like so much else, I feel obligated as a parent to just know this stuff. I grew up in a household where, no matter what the homework, my physicist father could answer my questions — although he always made my siblings and I sharpen a pencil and show your work, legibly. 

I know I can do plenty of things as a mother, or at least competently enough — including keeping a solid roof over our heads — but still, there’s that glimmer of pleasure as I walk by with my arms full of laundry: can cook dinner and do geometry, too — at least for one evening.

The snow doesn’t give a soft white damn whom it touches.
― E.E. Cummings
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Little Kid Yellow

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 9 Comments

Two summers back, I bought a gallon of paint for $10. At the local hardware store, the clerk had inadvertently mixed the wrong color and offered it to me. What a score, I thought. The color approximated the hue I once used to paint windows in a cupola — a color I christened Little Kid Yellow.

Not everyone in my household has been an enormous fan of painting our front steps bright yellow. Afterwards, even I wondered, Why do I do these things?

Likely, because of January. Because of November, too, and December, and February. Heck, March and April. By the end of May, tiny blue squill will sprinkle the greening-up grass.

But right now, color in northern Vermont is hard to come up. And the little bits of brightness — that’s gold.

The winter wind
flings pebbles
at the temple bell

— Buson

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Jan Thaw

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Rain pours. My daughters return, full of excitement of the ocean, of staying in a city, of a friend, and — for my younger daughter — driving around with my brother, stepping into his cool life.

They have brought me a wooden box of green tea and a tin of red goji berry tea.

Time seems suspended in the endlessness of January, but it’s not: the rain will slick to a landscape of ice, the days are already lengthening.

Again, from poet Kim Stafford:

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Bright Lights, Sparkly City

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

This stepping out of the nest thing?

Wow, has the internet changed the world from my 20th-century youth. Via I-phone, my rural Vermont daughters rented their first solo AirBnb in Maine, to check out a college. My older daughter texts: It’s busy here. So much is happening.

Ocean, lights, dinner in a hippie place kind of like Vermont.

Meanwhile, the cats and I have holed up in my office, eating curry and drinking espresso. Plenty happening here, too.

I’m fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in.

— George McGovern

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Photo by Molly S.

Wild Honey, Tough Salt

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments

Sunday afternoon found my family unexpectedly at a memorial service at the high school, standing in the cold and snow around a bonfire. That evening, my daughter sits  on the couch beside me, reading Robert Frost’s poem “Fire and Ice.” Why, she asks, is she required to memorize poems and recite them aloud?

Because poetry is who we are, both the beauty, the sheer ugliness at times, and the unexplained complexity of life. Here’s a poem by Kim Stafford:

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Quiet Day

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

Pea soup with scraps of leftover ham bubbled on our stove all day — a weekday more like a Sunday. Walking through town, I met no one.

At the end of the holiday school break, I head out before dinner to empty the compost pail in the bin. Amazingly, the afternoon is light yet, not dim as the afternoons were not long before the holiday. I stand there for a moment, watching wet snowflakes twirl down, the snow and I heedless of any time.

A radiance rises from the snow-covered town cemetery just behind my garden, bright despite the granite stones.

More so than other years, this holiday my daughters and I seemed to have rounded that bend from the divorce. Maybe it’s nothing more than the distance of time and physical space. Maybe it’s simply that time doesn’t cure, but it does scab over. Oddly this season, I kept thinking of Mary Oliver’s line about her box of darkness, and how that, too, was a gift. Maybe that’s part of this whole holiday season, too: that light does, inevitably, come of darkness, always.

Happy wishes for another decade of living: 2020.

Snow was falling,
so much like stars
filling the dark trees
that one could easily imagine
its reason for being was nothing more
than prettiness.

— Mary Oliver

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