Maternally Challenged

Mommy, What's a Liberal?

This was a question my 10-year-old posed to me one day last week as we were driving somewhere in the minivan. Hard as it is to refine political discourse into something a 10 year old would understand, it's even harder to do in rush-hour traffic. Which was why, I guess, the best answer I could come up with was, "Well, it's not a dirty word"--assuming that she'd heard it in some pejorative context. I fumbled through some explanation about how liberals were concerned with the poor and needy, but even as I spoke I realized that implied conservatives are not interested in them, which I knew was wrong--but by the time I'd gotten that far, she'd lost interest. Today I was reminded by the comics.  "Get Fuzzy" poses the question: how many conservatives does it take to change a light bulb? Answer: Nobody knows! They won't release that information! And: How many degenerate liberals does it take to change a light bulb? Answer: They don't change anything, they just cry over the broken bulb!

Very funny. But really, I'm still stumped. Here is the best description I can devise so far for explaining to a 10-year-old the differences between two very different but equally defensible world views. (Note: I'm not talking about the current occupant of the White House; the only group George W. Bush belongs to is The Party of George.)

Anyway: a liberal is a person who believes that one of government's top priorities, aside from national defense, is making sure that everybody--including the poor, the aged, and the very young--have the basic necessities of life (a decent place to live and access to health care), and who is willing to pay taxes to make sure they get that. A conservative is a person who believes that society works best when the poor and needy are given the tools they need to help themselves, and that government should reward individual initiative by interfering as little as possible in its citizens' lives.

Is that fair? I'd be interested in what other people come up with because, frankly, I could use some help.

Falling Back in Love with Writing

I have been out of love with writing for awhile, for reasons which have partly to do with having been sick (that last episode of depression last winter was a killer, folks), partly having to do with the inevitable letdown of having finished a book, and partly having to do with....I dunno. Midlife crisis, I guess. It's been at least a year since I've really wanted to write anything but the briefest of dispatches; producing an essay I agreed to write for an upcoming anthology, The Maternal Is Political, to be edited by Shari MacDonald Strong, was like pulling teeth (and yes, Shari, I know I'll probably have to do a rewrite, so I'm not done yet). All writers get writer's block, but this wasn't writer's block, it was pure-D writing aversion. Which, in the great scheme of things, doesn't matter a damn; the world is full of people who can write, and even fuller of people who think they can write and, to paraphrase Abe Lincoln, my absence would be little noted nor long remembered.

I note this only because this morning, it came back. The joy, I mean. Which is really the only reason for creative endeavor of any kind. Smokin' sales numbers are nice, don't get me wrong, but ultimately the only reason for any creative endeavor is the joy you get from doing it, and if there is no joy in the doing (and yeah, sometimes anguish and hair-pulling too), it's called W-O-R-K, and if that's what you're doing there are usually lots of ways to get better pay. But if you create something and it's yours and you took pleasure in creating it, then it's worth it. Perhaps you have made the Sistine Chapel and perhaps you have made a lopsided clay pot, and I'm not saying the ultimate worth of these two things is equal or that either one will pay the rent. But in terms of nourishment they gave to the soul of their respective creators, they might well both be priceless.

Anyway, this morning I had to get in my study to prepare for a talk I'm doing next week at the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore, and my 10-year-old was whistling, which she likes to do but which drives me nuts. So for the first time in a long time, I went through my CD stack and found some headphones and did what I used to do a lot, which is plug in some music to listen to while I am writing. By chance I happened to come upon my copy of Ralph Vaughan Williams' "Variations on a Theme by Thomas Tallis" and so I hit "play."

Now, there is some history here. The only reason I know this piece of music is that when I was in high school, a cultured friend of my father's (my dad's own taste in music ran to the likes of "The Cowboy Isn't Speaking to His Horse") gave me instructions to look it up. My dad was taking us on a trip to London that year, and my dad's friend said, "Go to Harrod's, ask them for this recording and tell them you want to hear it in the listening room." Back then, and I'm not even going to tell you how long ago this was except that the Beatles had just broken up and we listened to music on big black vinyl things called "records," Harrod's had a special listening room where customers could sample their proposed purchase in big soft easy chairs equipped with huge, state-of-the-art headphones. (Yes, I know. They actually had salespeople, too, and they actually waited on customers!) Anyway, I did as instructed. This particular summer's day was gorgeous and sunny and warm; the windows in this room were on the second floor, open to the outdoors. Some slight street noise came in, but it was muted, and a light breeze occasionally lifted the curtains. So my first impression of this music is indelibly mixed with that sensual pleasure--the light, the feeling of the warm summer air on my skin, the wonder of being in a strange and exciting new place, combined with the lush violin score of a signature work of a very, very English composer. There is a violin solo in the middle of this work which one critic, and I wish I knew who so I could give proper credit, described as being like "the sound of the wind running underneath the house," and if you have ever been in a poor shanty of a house built up off the ground where the winter wind does indeed blow, maybe that description, not to mention the music which inspired it, will make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, too.

Anyway. I sat down this morning in front of the computer and plugged myself in and--KABOOM! It was back. I looked out my window over the grass in the back yard, and with that gorgeous music filling every space in my head thought with a kind of anticipation I have not felt in many months: I have several hours of writing ahead of me. And it was joy.
 

Quantity Time

When I was a kid, summers were unplanned. This sometimes meant stretches of excruciating boredom, but for the most part it was pretty heavenly. In my memory, those summers--I am speaking here of the period from when I was six to, say, 12-- stretched out for impossibly long periods, and they constitute a kind of golden era of my childhood. My sister and I woke up each day with no particular plan, no camp to go to, no program of self improvement. This left us free to explore the neighborhood and do things like perfect the art of making mud pies and bring them into the house. We attempted to dig our way to China via the back yard; we created elaborate "pretend like" games in the back yard with the rooms of our "house" marked off with sticks. We read a lot of books--my mom took us to the College Park Library, which I recall as a dark place with heavenly air conditioning and shelves of endless delight where I made the acquaintance of Walter Farley's "Black Stallion" series. In the spirit of scientific inquiry, we once made catnip tea with some catnip leaves we found in my mom's cupboard, tasted the results and decided it tasted worse than ditch water, and then had the brilliant insight to tie the used tea bag around the cat's neck. (Note to file: cats can, if sufficiently motivated and while under the influence of a mind-altering substance, climb a tree backwards--and no, I would not encourage my own children to do this.) There was also Vacation Bible School (we were given no choice, and besides my mom was the director) and ironing, which was one of those chores that never ever went away. And we watched TV. Every day at 11 it was "Hollywood Squares," followed by re-runs of "Father Knows Best" at 11:30; this was followed by the "News at Noon" on WSB-TV, which was followed at 12:30 p.m. by "Armchair Playhouse," which was a two-hour movie, usually a re-run of some 50s fare. Obviously, the fact that I can recall this schedule in minute detail 40 years later tells you that I lost entire brain lobes to the Boob Tube--and that, I tell my kids, is why mommy is not a Nobel Prize winner today.

Anyway, we have been experimenting with this approach to child rearing around her for the past three weeks, and I can report mixed results. On a day-to-day basis, life has been pretty free-form: lots of breakfast eaten in front of the TV, lots of running of mundane errands, lots of time at the community pool, lots of playdates. It's been fun to wake up each day and think, What shall we do?--and to do some of the things that are on my list of Neat Things to Do That I'll Probably Never Get Around to. Suzanne and I explored the Aquatic Gardens in Washington, D.C., which is one of the city's least-known botanical treasures; we got there early one morning and watched the lotuses open. Heavenly. Rebecca and I have gone to a family wedding in Alabama, and tasted the dubious joys of wilting in our best clothes in 90-degree Birmingham heat because the bride must've decided sometime last winter that the Birmingham Botantical Gardens would be a lovely spot for a reception. (Not in June, honey--at least, not in Alabama.) We've gone paddle-boating at the local park. We've watched the Fourth of July fireworks on the lawn of a local office building, camped out in lawn chairs. The kids have been berry-picking; we've explored a local horse farm. We've hosted sleepovers. We set up the sprinkler in the back yard and ran through it; we had a picnic. I have introduced my oldest daughter to ironing, carrying on a mother-daughter tradition (unlike my mother, though, I don't make her iron her dad's shirts; it's pillowcases and napkins only).

But in the interest of journalistic objectivity, I must report also that there have been days from hell, when the kids seemed to take sadistic delight in discovering every single one of each other's psychic buttons and using this knowledge to inflict sophisticated types of psychological torture, usually while in the back seat of the minivan. There has been a fair amount of screaming, "I'M BORED!!" in tragic tones, and more than once I have gone upstairs to lie down with a headache, exactly the way I remember my own mother doing when we were kids. These past three weeks have also been a brief experiment to see if my kids could ever OD on TV, and the answer is: no. Their capacity for endless hours watching "Fairly Odd Parents" and "Spongebob Squarepants" and "Drake and Josh" is exceeded only by their memory of every plot twist in every episode, because they have seen them all before at least six times. My 10-year-old, in particular, is capable of spending the whole day parked in front of the tube--an amount of TV viewing which many an elderly stroke patient in a nursing home would have trouble tolerating, and they have an excuse.

On the whole, my conclusion is that there's something to be said for Quantity Time, as opposed to Quality Time. That picnic in the back yard, for instance, would never have happened if I'd planned it; it was a wildflower of a moment that just grew out of the circumstances at hand: the day was gorgeous, the kids were out there playing already and I decided at the last minute to order pizza for dinner. But Quantity Time is a delight which, like really good chocolate, a person should taste only in limited quantities.

Anyway, the kids start camp next week. THANK. GOD.