#motherhood

Dissonance

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 12 Comments

One good thing a day — take joy in at least one thing a day — is my new mantra.

Swimming or drinking coffee. A colleague moved a rock in her garden — how happy that made me. Spying foxes down in the woods. My daughter’s pleasure in making bracelets. A giant swan floatie my daughters bought while I was at work one day.

I’m not hoarding; I simply note that one thing. The odd thing is, once I note that, I find endless amounts of good things — the Sweet William in my garden, laughing on the phone as I ask a librarian to put out a book for me, please, and then calling through the (closed) library’s door — thank you!

None of this alleviates or alters the world — that I live in a state of incredible wealth where thousands of people have lined up in their cars for eight hours to receive a box of free food. The future is utterly obscured — from a national level literally igniting, to a personal level, where so many people’s lives around me are in upheaval.

This summer, as my daughter steps happily into the driver’s seat, I sit beside her, cautioning — slow down for this intersection. Don’t expect others to turn their turn signals. Be wary of children on sidewalks.

The truth is, I resist this stage of parenting, of giving her the physical keys to head into that vast and confusing world. Yet, it’s her world, too.

So, I identify those good things, like stones in a turbulent river, as we undertake a crossing.

Dissonance
(if you are interested)
leads to discovery.

— William Carlos Williams

IMG_8031.jpg

Independence…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Just after dusk, I stand by my garden talking to a friend when all kinds of things begin happening — a luminescent full moon quickly rises; a fox appears at the edge of a nearby woods and watches us; and our kids burn sparklers. In the neighborhoods and hills around us, people set off fireworks. Colored sparkles decorate the horizon.

Like everything else — a completely confusing holiday.

In the night, I wake when a light rain begins to fall, and I get up and take in my sandals I’ve left on the back porch. For a moment, I stand in the darkness, breathing in the scents of damp soil and rain. Maybe for a bit, I wonder, it might be better to understand the world not as a whole, but piece by piece, beginning with the moon and the kids and the teenagers, the sandals I’ve taken in and that I’ll wear today, dry.

Many people find it easy to imagine unseen webs of malevolent conspiracy in the world, and they are not always wrong. But there is also an innocence that conspires to hold humanity together, and it is made of people who can never fully know the good that they have done.

— Tracy Kidder

IMG_8023.jpg

Greensboro, Vermont

 

 

Spiritual Crisis

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 7 Comments

Tanned and wearing overalls, a woman comes into my library and gathers a stack of library books for her children. For this moment, it’s just the two of us. She’s a woman who doesn’t usually check out books for herself, but she asks for a recommendation. I ask her what she wants — fiction or nonfiction? Something easy?

She pauses and then tells me, I need something good. I’m having a spiritual crisis. I’m turning forty and raising two kids and….

I add, And the world’s falling apart?

She laughs. Yes. That might be it.

I pull Maggie O’Farrell’s book off the shelf, and she doesn’t look at it, simply adds it to her pile while we keep talking. She’s a woman who seems, to me, to have been fortunate with finances, surrounded by family. We talk for a bit more, and then I offer that change is opportunity — painful as that might appear.

We step outside, take off our masks, and walk around the gardens, talking about cucumbers.

The things in life which don’t go to plan are usually more important, more formative, in the long run, than the things that do.

― Maggie O’Farrell, I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes With Death

IMG_7865

Driving

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

My 15-year-old, with her brand-new learner’s permit, has formally switched places in my car, from passenger seat to driver’s seat. The world, suddenly, is different for her, with the kind of freedom a rural kid gains with the keys to a car. The horizon is no longer a barrier but a temptation — move on, explore.

One year, I think, of us driving and talking — of everything from what to cook for dinner, to why I married her father, to the Black Plague. One year.

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be…

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath…

— Langston Hughes

IMG_7894

15

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

Fifteen years ago, I walked in the garden in the early morning, on the day I birthed my second daughter.

Those were the years when “peak oil” was the looming fear. Now, the country is burning up, broken in so many ways, with a madman ensconced in the White House.

Last night, while the grownups sat around the campfire talking about COVID and rioting, I watched my daughter and her friends walk through the cemetery, so happy to be together but spread out — “distance, please,” I called — wandering through the lilac-scented evening — these lovely, witty girls — talking and talking, as they jostled, each finding their place.

Here’s a few lines from Anne Sexton’s anti-Vietnam War poem, a love letter to her daughter, “Little Girl, My String Bean, My Lovely Woman.”

What I want to say, Linda,
is that there is nothing in your body that lies.
All that is new is telling the truth.

IMG_7839

#Porchlife

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 14 Comments

On the cusp of turning 15 — 15!— my daughter lounges, reading the newest installment in The Hunger Games. Across our short, dead-end street, the little boy digs in his sandy driveway with toy trucks, talking to himself, busy in his world. By the afternoon, his whole family splashes in the kiddie pool.

We are waiting for rain in our quiet corner of Vermont.

The cool breeze.
With all his strength
The cricket.

— Issa

IMG_7862