teenagers

Shine On

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

The before-school mornings have now turned intractably toward dark, the air nippy at the bus stop. My older daughter argues against going to school. The truth is, I hated high school, I hated middle school, I hated elementary school, I probably even hated nursery school, the whole she-bang of schooling until I hit college. I remember insufferable boredom, staring through the windows in third grade at azure autumn skies, and wanting to be in the woods. I longed for the smell of dead leaves against my face. I’m sympathetic and yet, apparently, not that sympathetic. Still, I often stew about this daughter all day.

Driving along Route 15, as it follows the Lamoille River, I glanced up where sunlight crashed through a jumble of clouds, gray and black and white, as though the weather were confused, too. The light descended in immense heavenly shafts. Woodbury Mountain was scattershot with gold patches, intermingled gray where the foliage has already passed. Sprawled along the river was the transfer station, that pestilent site radiantly bathed in October light.

This afternoon, my daughter was glowing when I met her at the high school. She had been charged with a particularly difficult task, and there was no way she was getting out of this assignment. She sensed a real challenge, but one she could tackle, too, with no escape hatch, no back door possibility of complaining enough to me so I’d cut her slack and let her off the hook.

Buckling in for the drive home, she relayed with real joy a compliment she had been given. I, she said, am a shining star.

(My daughter) was sixteen years old. I hoped someday she’d remember how it felt, how invincible, how alive. I’d heard it said that one tenth of parenting is making mistakes; the other nine are prayer and letting go.

— Justin Cronin, “My Daughter and God”

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October. Woodbury, Vermont

Companionship, Mothering

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

When I went through my time of parenting two-year-olds, I thought that was difficult. Exhilarating, exhausting, maddening at times: but yes, difficult. Oh, how young I was.

To parent a teenager is in some ways like walking through a ring of fire. Going forward, I will doubtless be scorched, and my emergence is not guaranteed. Last night, my daughter asked me with genuine anguish, But why do people suffer? When I was sixteen, I asked this question, and I’ve continued to ask this question, in a multiplicity of ways, through decades. I can spew off varieties of answers, but ultimately, to my daughter, with her honest face, I come up short.

Late in the night, with my children sleeping, a solitary light burning, the windows open to the crickets with their sound of tiny shaking bells, I read a passage from a chaplain who had been at the scene of a horrific plane crash. When I finished the book, in those quiet, dark hours, I thought of my child. Just as she fought in her birth to be free of my body, I see this girl thrusting her way from the tatters of her childhood, striding so urgently toward what she believes is the golden realm of womanhood. Here I am again, ready to catch my daughter, wanting only to be here.

“… I don’t know why that young child was killed. This is a true mystery. And so I enter into it with you. I cry with you if you allow me into that space. I’ll walk with you. And this is something that a lot of chaplains I know that were involved in Iraq and Afghanistan–talking with their soldiers–they’ll say, Look, I’m gonna journey with you on this. I’m not here to explain it. I’m gonna journey with you. There’s a sense of humility there that I think connects with people, because I think in their heart of hearts we know, Oh, I don’t have an answer. So let’s walk into that mystery together.”

–– Laurence Gonzales, Flight 232

Gabriela/Photo by Molly S.

Gabriela/Photo by Molly S.

Chimney Sweeps

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

Until recently, I never really thought all that much about cleaning. A chore, an activity, play some music and make some headway. I’ve been in filthy houses, spick ‘n span abodes, the whole gray gamut of in-between. I once participated in an extremely late night board meeting in a school my children never attended, and towards the end of the evening I looked around the room, noted the chaotic clutter, and wondered how anyone worked in that classroom.

Today, as the cold weather begins digging in, I swept the ashes from my wood stove and readied my beloved stove for the months ahead when I will never allow the fire to burn out. The chimney, too–from basement to roof over three stories tall–needs cleaning. I pulled out the stovepipe and thrust my arm into its chimney’s cold center. I found thick layers of creosote, crumbly and pitch-sticky, two strange opposite and simultaneous qualities.

In the sooty, dirty basement I’ve knelt before the opened clean-out door and shoveled bucket after bucket of creosote scabs, then held a mirror flat in my hand and showed my little child the daytime stars in the heavens, visible only through that extended canal of darkness.

I’ve never cleaned this chimney before, but I feel certain my teenage daughter and I, with our strong backs and gritty muscles, could force that sharp-edged wire brush down that channel, scrape free the debris of last year’s long winter’s cold, and shove that brush, pole length by pole length, down to the chimney’s very root. This chimney is the lungs of our house, the passage of air and smoke that allows our hearth to burn, hot and truly. My teenage daughter is determined to begin this heating season with a scrubbed right chimney, and no fears of our house engulfed in nighttime flames.

Writing is a kind of revenge against circumstance too: bad luck, loss, pain. If you make something out of it, then you’ve no longer been bested by these events.

–– Louise Gluck

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Woodbury, Vermont

Reading with Daughters

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

When I first started to read, I was given a series of  books at school with stories about traveling through magical lands, unlocking doorways with magical keys, and appearing abruptly in green fields with Mt. Fuji-like mountains in the distance. I was tiny, so the books seemed large to me, like the size of the Vermont Gazetteer, which they couldn’t possibly have been, and the illustrations were koda-chrome beautiful. I have no idea what those books were; I’ve never seen them again (no doubt they’re out of print), but I keenly remember the joy I found, proficient at reading and slipping into that world.

Isn’t that one of the great joys of reading? Not leaving this world, but unlocking doors with unexpected keys and going down deeper into our own unpredictable world?

We’ve hit a new reading phase at our house. The other night at dinner my older daughter read The New York Times review of Harper Lee’s book aloud, with much discussion, and the next day she checked out Go Set a Watchman from the library. What a pleasure to read with her last night, as she periodically lifted her eyes and said, “You won’t believe this, mom,” while the younger daughter ate grapes, deep in her own fairy book series.

I’m reading Shape of the Sky, so keenly well-written I’ve put in a few late nights. Here’s Shelagh Connor Shapiro’s line about a teenage boy:  Within the song is both the pleasure and anger of being fifteen or sixteen or seventeen – the untapped potential of those years, and the yearning to be more than he is, to be in another place and time. And yet, to love where you are.

Ripening raspberry on the vine by Molly S.

Ripening raspberry on the vine by Molly S.