teenagers

Why Love Teens

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

When my older daughter was a teen and invited over a posse of girls, I was always amazed by just the size of the girls — so much young female energy and just so much talk! They eat like crazy — and then eat like crazy again — but they’re just so darn enthusiastic, just so darn happy to be testing out the world.

Last night at our house, the six young teens, buoyed by a balmy early summer evening, slept outside. Why not? Under the stars, I could see my breath.

On the same day, the neighbors’ celebrated their four-year-old’s birthday. In the afternoon, he began riding a bicycle with training wheels. When my teens eat and eat, when I’m mired down in the complexities of living with teens, I remind myself that those sweet sippy cup days have now passed me by.

Tired, the girls struggled in bedraggled in the morning, hungry for waffles.

I emerge
from the museum
at dusk —
the blue Nile
floods over.

— Fumi Saitō

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Parking Lot Humor

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

A friend once remarked to me that my older daughter has a “very thin scrim” between her and the world. Last night, returning with the girls and their skis, we stopped at a supermarket in Waterbury and wandered through the mostly empty store. When we walked back to my daughter’s car, she stopped and remarked about the car parked very near to hers: What a dick move. She edged around to her driver’s seat and said with absolutely no rancor at all. This is the kind of parking job I would do.

I laughed. I mean — parenting? It’s hard. It’s darn hard. The thinness of that scrim gets to me. So any humor? Send it my way……

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Construction Paper

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

This morning, colored paper leaves spruced up our kitchen windows. My teenager had spent some late hours busy with arts and crafts and Netflix. Our house is the better off for this.

Which got me to thinking… what are the things a kid needs? The obvious ones, of course: steady meals and sturdy shoes and an arc of adult arms. But beyond survival, I see how my own children thrive into their imaginative spaces, busily not finding but creating their own niche.

As babies, their whole lives commenced literally turned into my heart to suckle, but now I see my kids intentionally widening their worlds, painting their bedrooms but also expanding their realms through deepening friendships and giggling nights, or their own journeys on foot or bicycle or down the highway.

What does a kid need? Perhaps what as an adult I need, too: freedom to spread out and explore, and a home to hold your artwork.

Here’s a few lines from what I’m reading now:

There was a period… with every painting or project when the life of that painting became more real to you than your everyday life, when you sat wherever you were and thought only of returning to the studio, when you were barely conscious that you had tapped out a hill of salt onto the dinner table and in it were drawing your plots and patterns and plans, the white grains moving under your fingertip like silt.

– Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

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What makes us who we are?

 

Knowing

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

When my daughter was five, she took Red Cross swimming lessons at Caspian Lake in Greensboro, and at the end of the two-week session, her coach guided the little kids to the deeper waters where they could then stretch down with their bare feet and touch a large flat rock named Big Yellow.

For my younger daughter, this is the summer of Big Yellow, a time of swimming with her friends to this nether region, flipping over in this gorgeously cool and clean lake, diving down with goggles, and surfacing with handfuls of smooth lake pebbles.

For generations, kids and adults have known this place in the lake through name and through experience. Watching the girls this late afternoon, I reminded myself again that knowing is both language and action. The name is essential, but so are the water-logged fingertips digging into the sandy lake bottom. As a writer, I often take that combination into the less sparkling areas of adult living; as a mother – and a woman – I’m taking my turn in these pristinely August Vermont waters.

But what is the way forward? I know what it isn’t. It’s not, as we once believed, plenty to eat and a home with all the modern conveniences. It’s not a 2,000-mile-long wall to keep Mexicans out or more accurate weapons to kill them. It’s not a better low-fat meal or a faster computer speed. It’s not a deodorant, a car, a soft drink, a skin cream. The way forward is found on a path through the wilderness of the head and heart – reason and emotion. Thinking, knowing, understanding.

– Laurence Gonzalez, Everyday Survival (a book well worth the read…..)

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Thorny Land

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

My teenage daughter fears snakes. Walking in the arroyo yesterday, this Vermont girl quizzes her grandmother about the possibility of encountering a rattlesnake. Never seen one, she’s assured. Moments later, a rattler slithers near her feet, and she screams.

She glares back at me, as if I’ve magically created what she considers a devilish creature. Between us lie spiny cholla cactus, red sand, thumbnail-sized wildflowers I don’t recognize at all. We are no longer in the lush land of the Green Mountains.

Searchingly, she peers into a cluster of tumbleweed and then back at me.

Gone, I say. She waits a moment longer and then offers, You can go first now.

The unexplainable thing in nature that makes me feel the world is big fat beyond my understanding – to understand maybe by trying to put it into form. To find the feeling of infinity on the horizon line or just over the next hill.

– Georgia O’Keeffe

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Santa Fe, New Mexico

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

In my weekly commute to Burlington, some mornings I hit traffic, and some mornings I don’t. Today, waiting in a long line, I listened to Garrison Keillor read poetry.

“Despair” by Billy Collins

So much gloom and doubt in our poetry—
flowers wilting on the table,
the self regarding itself in a watery mirror….

Today, with the sun blazing in the trees,
my thoughts turn to the great
tenth-century celebrator of experience,

Wa-Hoo, whose delight in the smallest things
could hardly be restrained…..

Sitting alone in my little Toyota, I laughed out loud.

It’s the fragrant apple blossom season in Vermont. Dandelions are rampantly blooming. My teenager daughter texts me at work of her misery, the stark unfairness of the world. Of course, I text back, but go for a run. The ten-year-old skips on our evening walk. I’m just so happy, and I don’t know why.

How many decades has it taken me to relearn what I knew when I was ten? And to laugh about it? The black flies are out and biting fiercely, but the sparrows are singing mightily.

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