#raisingteens

Wanderlust, Home

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

We’re at the Burlington airport at four in the morning, in a rainy darkness, in that discombobulated airport way — where the everyone in town seems to be at the airport and then, outside, it’s just me and my teen driving through intersections amped down to blinking lights.

The way is familiar, but the night is so solid — and, honestly, I’m so tired — that we might be in upper New York state for all I know, and not Vermont, or maybe wandered farther away, all the down to mountainous Virginia.

The commuter traffic begins only as we’re nearly home. Then, with still an hour and a half before high school starts for the day, my daughter walks around the house, doing this, that, and finally stares at me on the couch. I close my lap and ask simply, Yes?

She looks out the window where the dawn is trying mightily hard to push away some of the dusk. Wanderlust, I see. There’s nothing more to say.

“There are days when I feel I am becoming good at what I do. And then I wonder, what does it mean to be good at this?”

— Francisco Cantú, The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches From the Border (elegantly written by a former border patrol officer — I can’t recommend this book enough)

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Photo by Molly B.

Domestic Chaos, Evening Pleasure

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 7 Comments

We’re eating pumpkin pie made with not enough maple syrup. In the scheme of things, that’s pretty darn minor. The kids, I’ve noticed, have stored the maple syrup in the cabinet above my head — which, no biggie, I could easily stand on a chair per usual and help myself. Nonetheless, why bother?

The bathtub drained is plugged, the chickens wandered on the back porch and shit, we’ve eaten brown rice for three days now and no one seems in the least interested in leftovers. It’s autumn, sometime, pretty leaves all fallen and withering.

Dusk, I walk a few loops around the high school. A flock of starlings sweeps over the sky and perches in the bare branches of a maple tree, chittering. Back at my car, my daughter and her friend are on the hood of my car, laughing at something — maybe me? — hungry. They’ve been making “guts” for a Halloween project, but ran out of red food dye to mix with their Vaseline and corn starch.

Really? I say. What’s the recipe? In the thickening gloaming, I sit on my car hood, too, listening, as if there’s all the time in the world.

…we are everything, every experience we’ve ever had, and in some of us, a lot of it translates and makes patterns, poems. But, my God, we don’t even began to touch upon it. There’s an enormous amount, but we can touch such a little.

— Ruth Stone

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Teen World

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

This blog has been jammed with soccer, soccer and even more soccer all fall — a little odd, from a woman who ducks every time the soccer ball heads even anywhere near me along the sidelines.

But the soccer field and the locker room and the school bus is the terrain of my teenage daughter this year. The night of the game under the lights I walked across the field afterward — in a coat and hat and scarf, the first snowflakes tiny glitters — and realized I was treading in her familiar space.

It’s such a cliché — the days crawl and the years fly — but there’s truth in all these clichés, too. When she was an infant, I realized — busy as I was then with another child and that relentless maple syrup business — that this was all I was going to get in this life. Just this second time around of being a new mother. That sentiment has carried all through her life, crazy and jumbled as it’s been, defined as a single parent household. And yet here she is, on a soccer field, laughing and happy with girls and their ponytails. I can’t help but wonder curiously, Where will all these running steps on those soccer fields around Vermont carry her in this life?

We create meanings from our unconscious interpretation of early events, and then we forge our present experiences from the meaning we’ve created. Unwittingly, we write the story of our future from narratives based on the past…

— Gabor Maté, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts

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End of September

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

To counteract this seasonal shift from summer to autumn’s short days, I take the cleaver to gardenstuff — a carrot, a leek, an onion, garlic, parsley — and stew them with lentils and salt. Lentils, once the bane of our household (not lentils, again?). The younger daughter, still in her sweaty soccer practice shirt, eats hungrily.

Her older sister takes a knife to apples, listens to Stephen Colbert, rolls out dough. Pie, at least: it’s autumn.

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Mooncrazed

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Walking beneath the full moon last night, my younger daughter remarks how quickly the moon rises. Our conversation winds into the complexities of the moon phases, and I finally I admit I just don’t know the answer, but my father would.

Although we’re wearing jackets and jeans, the evening’s particularly warm for fall, the moon creamy and luscious. In the dark, flying geese overhead honk.

I mention something about “heavenly bodies,” and — despite my vehemence that this is, indeed, legitimate, these heavenly bodies — my daughters insist that’s too weird.

I don’t use my past reply about common knowledge, because my kids now have this kind of common language that might as well be from some remote Amazonian tribe to my ears. Apparently, I’m one of the last humans in their world to know this term “VSCO girl,” although the subtext beneath the so-called VSCOing activities and accessories remains a little vague to me. Likewise, when I shared some historical lore about the preppy movement (I notice Amazon has helpfully described the official handbook as facetious in case anyone missed that), I’m met with disinterest until I mention the flipped-up collar trend.

That’s just bad taste, both daughters immediately agree.

In 30 years, the full moon will grace Friday the 13 again. Walking along a dirt road in a light breeze, the girls mention how old each of us will be in 30 years. 30 years, I say, is a long time. And then: I was 30 when I became a mother.

Few lights shine in houses along the road. There’s no one else around. Back at our house, the moon is barely creeping over the horizon. We sit on the back porch while the moon rises, quickly. A luminous, heavenly globe.

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Ordinary Pick-Up

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

In the high school parking lot, we stand waiting for the kids to return from a soccer game, the air wet and unexpectedly warm. I remember the sunny crispness of that 9/11 morning when my two-year-old tricycled around the kitchen. There’s none of that, in this day alternately soggy or overly warm.

The bus comes, the kids get off, the bus goes, and still we stand there, talking and laughing, with our girls holding their bags now. The coach drives home.

One girl looks around. “It’s just us,” I say. Overhead, the clouds lift and moonlight shines down. We pause, and the mist ambles in.

Want “meaningless” Zen?
Just look — at anything!

— Old Shōju

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