raising daughters

These Few Days

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

Christmas is an apt holiday for this northern time of year, a solstice pause when the light will begin turning around, slowly, before it returns by my daughter’s early February birthday in racingly long days. More than anything, I think of this time of year as intense juxtaposition – utter dark, crystalline snow – of giving and receiving – of domestic warmth and external cold.

As a young child, maybe six or seven, I remember listening to a Christmas story on the radio. My sister and I were confused about this place called Bethlehem, and why were Mary and Joseph wandering around on a donkey just before she had a child? How did this mysterious star appear? The most mesmerizing part of the story were the angels who appeared to the shepherds, camped out with their woolly flocks in night. The angels linked those two worlds – sandal-wearing staff-bearing shepherds, sitting around their nightly fire – with the profoundly unknown heavens, embodying juxtaposition: enchanting beauty and stark fear.

So it seems to me, this year perhaps in particular, that Christmas is a holiday for the pleasures of childhood – of play and eating and a ferocious appetite for life. The immense star that joined a newborn and his wandering parents to anonymous shepherds and wealthy kings alike shines yet over our polluted and ailing, and infinitely precious and beautiful planet; the story is yet alive.

And they came with haste, and found Mary, and Joseph, and the babe lying in a manger.

And when they had seen it, they made known abroad the saying which was told them concerning this child.

And all they that heard it wondered at those things which were told them by the shepherds.

But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart.

Luke 2, King James Version

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Elmore, Vermont/Driving home

Gifts

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

My teenager has been on a fudge-making bender this week, sizing up recipes, sourcing out inexpensive tins, buying ribbon to neaten up her gifts. Last evening, while I was lying gracelessly on the floor in my end-of-long-day stupor, she busily cut peppermint-stick and walnut-studded chocolate fudge and carefully packed the pieces with tissue paper into her bright tins.

She offered up her extras as gifts for me to give away. To the new neighbors, for instance.

Mom, she said, I’m making you look good.

I closed the Shirley Jackson bio I’m reading and looked at her. It’s been a long – perhaps too long a time – since I cared all that much about looking good. Somehow, in the years’ jumble of babies and breastfeeding, sugaring and bills, basketball games and sleepovers, I shifted to “not looking all that bad” as satisfactory enough.

Truth is, the girls do make me look good. Years ago, I would have considered this ancillary boon a trivial notion, hardly worth anything at all. How the world does change. I’m going to walk down the icy road to the neighbors, knock on the door, and offer up that gaily-wrapped fudge in full disclosure of its creator – with great joy.

Here’s a few lines from my library book….

Shirley Jackson saw herself, it seems clear, as a version of a writer…. (whose role) was to draw back the curtain on the darkness within the human psyche…. thousands of unsuspecting readers who opened The New Yorker on June 26, 1948, were confronted by a story (“The Lottery”) unlike anything they had ever read before. They admired it, they raged at it, they were puzzled by it; but no matter their reaction, it illuminated their world.

– Ruth Franklin, Shirley Jackson, A Rather Haunted Life

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Photo by Molly S.

A Whale’s Heartbeat

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

In these subzero nights, I’ve abandoned my room of windows on the top floor and started sleeping in my daughter’s lower bunk bed, in her room cozily located over the wood stove. Upstairs, my older daughter’s room is just across the hall from mine, and we generally talk before sleeping. My younger daughter is pleased with her turn at companionship. Plus, she doesn’t complain when I read late at night with the lights on.

Last night, before falling asleep, she told me a whale’s heart beats about 10 times per minute, while the tiny shrew’s heart can pulse away at a 1,000 jumps per minute.

I reached up and snapped off the light. In darkness, we imagined how voluminous might be a whale’s heart, hot blood churning through its chambers. She told me about a trip she’d taken a few years before with her father, to Provincetown, where she and her sister walked through the ribs of whale skeleton. In the warm dark room, we lay imagining what it would be like to live in the belly of a whale, and late in the night when I woke to feed the fire, I was still dreaming of that dark, living interior.

A good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce a good thing–more’s the pity.

– Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

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Magical Realm

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

As the kids and I drove into Barre, Vermont, this afternoon, the little boy in the back seat said,  I really don’t like Barre.

I’m with the kid, I’m reluctant to say, for reasons no doubt wholly different than the boy’s. We were headed to The Nutcracker, in the gracious Barre Opera House. On the way there, I drove behind the county courthouse, repository of windowless hallways and claustrophobic rooms, countless tears of human misery.

But I trusted ballet could rewrite my experience of that city, and the magical dance did not let me down. At the performance’s very end, high up in the balcony, I realized  – in what should be a, well, duh, moment – that ballet was all about the transformative might of imagination.

All the way home – and here’s yet another driving story, yet another journey – we drove on icy roads through the smokey blue-black twilight, and then arrived in our own home town with full darkness ringed all around, velvety and deep, and the village lights twinkling white. The town itself might have been the opera house stage, lit-up and beautifully arrayed for the holidays.

When I was twenty, I worked nights for a summer. I loved driving at night as a young woman; the darkness around my two Volkswagen beetle headlights felt ripe with possibility, and I believed myself invincible with youth. In an odd juxtaposition, nearly thirty years later, possibilities stretch out even more infinitely before me. Although I now know the illusion of invincibility, I think I’ve traded that for something deeper and far more valuable in those sparkling lights.

Unamuno might be describing the artist as well as the Christian as he writes, “Those who believe they believe in God, but without passion in the heart, without anguish of mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, and even at times without despair, believe only in the idea of God, and not in God himself.”

– Madeleine L’Engle, Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art

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Writing & Money

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

The other day, my Facebook-loving teenager casually mentioned to me that, on average, writers make $149K per year. “You’re doing something wrong, mom.”

These lines are full disclosure that, in fact, I am not earning $149K per year. The children and I are, however, still afloat. While I know all kinds of writers, many of whom are terrific writers as well as decent people, no one I know has ever undertaken the vocation of writing for money. Writers may be many things, but we’re generally not stupid.

When I taught a one day class at Johnson State College a year ago with Dede Cummings, my most useful piece of advice for aspiring writers was two-pronged: write and keep your expenses low. I really wasn’t kidding on either count.

Money is merely practical. Writing is art. Both are necessary – in my life (and my daughters’ lives, at least). So it was with real pleasure that the day I received a royalty check from my novel, I also met a woman I hadn’t seen for a few years. She had read my book (– and loved it; I write this with real pleasure), because another woman gave her the novel and told her to read it. That woman didn’t know me and didn’t know I had any connection to her friend. She is my ideal reader: someone who loved my book and passed it to another reader, as I do with so many books I love.

What a piece of luck was this chance encounter in the co-op’s coffee aisle, on a subzero and sunny day.

Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

– E. L. Doctorow

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Living Room Windows, Mid-December

Little Song

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

The December my youngest daughter was two, she and I did a sweet little one-day-a-week Waldorf mother and child program. One song she loved had the line Look at the snow falling down….

By the end of that December, snow had fallen every day, and our kitchen window was majorly obstructed. I took to gazing out the window and murmuring Look at the snow falling UP…. just to crack the monotony and mix things up a bit.

Those eternally long afternoons with a two-year-old. On a walk this afternoon, my now 11-year-old looks slightly down at me, so merrily proud she’s taller than me, and certainly no longer chubby-cheeked. Same lovely girl on our familiar dirt road, with sparkling winter all around, but always, eternally, in motion.

All things are in flux; the flux is subject to a unifying measure or rational principle. This principle (logos, the hidden harmony behind all change) binds opposites together in a unified tension, which is like that of a lyre, where a stable harmonious sound emerges from the tension of the opposing forces that arise from the bow bound together by the string.

– Heraclitus

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