#raisingdaughters

Hot Goods

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

One fine Friday afternoon, walking to my daughter’s soccer game, my friends pulled me into their woodworking shop and asked me to take… a sign from an old telephone booth.

Really?  I mean, really?

Your girls will love it, they insisted. I asked, since they were giving away things, could I take a quart of motor oil instead. They said I could have their parrot, and if I really didn’t want the parrot, how did I feel about kittens?

So I took the sign, carrying what was doubtlessly stolen goods from intercity Boston decades ago, and went back to the high school.

My daughter said, You’re kidding me? Her friend remarked it wasn’t particularly attractive. These comments made me point out that, years ago, this stuff was well-made, and the sign was darn heavy. As an additional plus, it doesn’t talk back to me, unlike a parrot.

….a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. I have learned this the hard way….

– David Foster Wallace

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(I don’t make up all this stuff.)

 

Rain This Way

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Cricket songs and screeching starlings. In little flashes, the world around us brightens in bits of red, preparing for autumn.

My daughter, busy with middle school and soccer all day, leaves her hula hoop as a calling card for any stray visitors. Reading the lines below, I think they may apply equally to parents of young children. In theory, we might believe our babies will one distant day shoulder a backpack and venture into their own journeys, but in practicality lies the rub….

We typically take the world of our day-to-day lives far too much for granted, assuming without much thought and despite all evidence to the contrary that what we see before us is just the way things are – and presumably always were. This is, I think, especially true of many young people….

From William Cronon’s Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England

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A Single, Superlative Sentence

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 7 Comments

Like this cold September (what? covering gardens already?), reading Knausgaard is both exasperating and mesmerizing. Does he really live in a house with small children and can write about minutiae?

Reading at the kitchen table, my bare toes rub over the sugary effluvia of lime-green macaroon making on the floor. I keep reading.

The children wander in for more macaroons, my daughter’s afternoon vision yielding these quarter-sized airy sandwiches with a pink sweet filling.  While I was in the other room, trying not to listen while tediously working on a paid project, the girls, left to themselves, experimented with baking whipped egg whites (Wow, that’s weird), periodically carrying in a baking sheet of baked samples, the hot sugar still bubbling from the oven, asking my unskilled opinion. In the end, they assembled two dozen uneven tiny cakes, dripping filling. Extremely satisfied, they stand back. Look.

Writing this, I realize (again) our life is all minutiae. Maybe that’s the gem of having children – tiny things mixed in with cosmologically-sized love – Blake’s world in a grain of sand.

Check out this sentence about ancient triceratops and reading to children at bedtime.

That petrol (in a puddle) was extracted from crude oil, which was brought up from reservoirs deep under the ground and consisted of transformed organic matter from a time when human beings didn’t exist, only dinosaurs, those gigantic but simple creatures, and when trees and plants too were larger and simpler, and that it was the prehistoric force of that zoological and biological matter which now unfolded around us, all this made sense – the kinship between the bulldozer and the dinosaur was obvious to any child – but not the connection between the power of petrol and the mysterious beauty of the small trembling rainbow swirls in the many puddles of the 1970s.

Karl Ove Knausgaard, Autumn

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Library Book Find

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

These early August morning, mist nestles around the house. Laundry left overnight on the line wets again. I’m reminded of the first three days I lived in Vermont – 18-years-old, in unbroken mist, concealing this new landscape. I had no idea where I had arrived.

Reading Knausgaard is akin to entering fog – uncharted, mesmerizing. Years ago, on a long expedition with my girls, I insisted we would take only what we could carry. At one repacking stage, my older daughter lifted a heavy hardcover book from my backpack and demanded, What’s this?

Knausgaard. Here’s a few lines from his latest:

What makes life worth living?

No child asks itself that question. To children life is self-evident. Life goes without saying: whether it is good or bad makes no difference. This is because children don’t see the world, don’t observe the world, don’t contemplate the world, but are so deeply immersed in the world that they don’t distinguish between it and their own selves. Not until that happens, until a distance appears between what they are and what the world is, does the question arise: what makes life worth living?

Karl Ove Knausgaard, Autumn

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Photo by Molly S.

 

Art? Why?

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Yesterday, while the 12-year-old girls swam in Greensboro’s perfectly clear Lake Caspian, I read on the beach, just me and a few gulls, a pair of kayakers pushing off. An older woman wandered down and waded into the water and said only kids could swim in that water, and then left, too. The girls had swam out and were experimenting with laughing underwater.

Later, we went to Bread and Puppet’s outdoor theater, sprawled in the hot sun. Coming home, the girls swam again, while I eavesdropped on a pleasant conversation between our former pediatrician, his wife, and friends.

I kept thinking, What does art matter, anyway?, all this barefoot and Blundstone-shod performance in the field? What does poetry, fiction, song, mean, anyway? The more I thought, I wondered if my question was wrong, if the answer lay in who was listening, like myself listening to those 12-year-old girls. Maybe art is like that a cappella hymn, voices raised in harmony and confidence, to the variated audience, the shape of the earth, the enormous pine trees, and all that sky, blue and shifting with clouds, over field and forest, highways and water, on and on, and on.

Maybe my question, like a koan, holds the answer.

A painter should begin every canvas with a wash of black, because all things in nature are dark except where exposed by the light.

– Leonardo da Vinci

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Growing

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Some friends have a baby who won’t sleep through a night. A gorgeous, round-cheeked laughing beauty of a baby.

I’ve restrained myself from laughing, from outright teasing: I’ve never heard of a baby who keeps her parents up at night. My first baby, at nine months, woke up every hour for what seemed years, although it may have been only a week or two, or possibly months. I first noted then that this parenting thing might never plateau out and remain static.

My 12-year-old daughter made a new friend yesterday. When I picked her up after work, she was losing mightily and happily at Monopoly, while the girls hatched plans for a sleepover. Later, the three of us biked slightly out of town, abandoning our bikes and walking through the dusk rapidly rising, the girls laughing on swings my daughters used as very little girls. The friend was wearing my daughter’s sweatshirt, and my eyes kept snagging on the turquoise. Truth is, my daughter’s grown so much this past year, I look twice at her often, before I slow down and recognize her as mine.

Stories teach us in ways we can remember… Positive stories shared by women who have had wonderful childbirth experiences are an irreplaceable way to transmit knowledge of a woman’s true capacities in pregnancy and birth.

– Ina May Gaskin

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