Category: Uncategorized

I Hate Housework, Two

Earlier this year, I published a post on this blog (“I Hate Housework, Too”), in which I confessed my tormented ambivalence towards housework: Having grown up in a spotless house, I have high standards for cleanliness, but I hate the actual effort needed to reach those standards. I admitted that my own house suffers from “creeping kids’ stuff,” which I handle through a combination of breaking the cleaning into manageable pieces, and shrugging off any oversights with the “I have three kids” excuse.

While I was writing that piece, and for about five minute afterwards, I felt great. I felt like I’d finally found equilibrium when it came to the state of my house.

And then, because this is real life, I went right back to stressing  about housework. In fact, my husband will tell you that housework is almost always the straw that breaks my mental health — and with it, the overall mental health of our family. I can handle the kids screaming and the dog barking, but if I feel like the house is spinning out of my control, I start to become unhinged. “I need some degree of neatness in order to think!” I’ll wail to my husband, who will in turn catch my stress, and so on, until the whole family is entangled in my stress cycle.

Of course, with three young children and now a DOG, the house is constantly spinning out of my control, and any effort I put into wrestling it into a state of basic neatness is undone minutes later. HOWEVER, just the other day I had a revelation that I think may change my perspective for good. It came to me, oddly enough, while washing the dishes. Here it is:

MY HOUSE IS NOT ALIVE.

That seems like an obvious statement, and it is. But to expand a bit: I am surrounded by living things that, at this moment, depend on me for their physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual growth. My house is not one of them. My house has no chance of ever going out into the world and making a positive difference. No matter how I care for it, my house is slowly breaking down, and will continue to do so until the day (decades hence, I hope) when some young, investment-banking couple from Manhattan will arrive to gut the place and install granite counter-tops and jacuzzi tubs.

My house is not going to attend my funeral and eulogize me for the amount of care I gave it. And while we’re on the subject, have you EVER been to a funeral at which it was said of the deceased, “She was so CLEAN!”?

No, my house is not alive. But my daughters, and my husband, and my dog, and my family, and my friends, and mySELF, they are alive. Am I prioritizing my time and energy and mental health accordingly?

It my be that I’m alone in this war with myself over the state of my house, this pointless battle to maintain a baseline of cleanliness. But in case I’m not alone, perhaps this thought will help you, too: your living space is not going to feel hurt if you neglect it a little. The living beings who surround you, they’re another story.

Here’s hoping that you and I can let ourselves off the hook for good this time!

Craft Update: Owls and Mermaids and Chickens (Oh My!)

At first, my husband didn’t read this blog — at least, not regularly. He was more like a “check in every few months” type of reader. But when I gently told him that he might be missing major insights into my inner life, that some 300 readers might possibly know me better than my own husband, and that I might just post embarrassing stories about him, he subscribed to the blog feed.

Now that he’s a regular reader, Erick is my most honest critic. So, he tells me that things have been getting a little…heavy…on this blog lately. I know, I know: What’s WITH all this life and death and introspection?!? Where are the cute photos of our girls, the puppy updates (coming), the humorous anecdotes about our pest-control problems?

All I can say is: those cycles of life and death that I’ve been writing about apply to blog topics, too. And what with autumn’s darker and colder weather, the butterfly that never hatched, and the backyard chicken massacre, lately I’ve been kind of on the death side of the cycle.

But that’s about to change; the upswing is starting with this very post. Because, my friends, today I am writing to gloat — er, SHARE — about my latest craft projects!

Those who’ve been reading for a while will recall that, when we moved to Vermont, my mother gave me her old sewing machine. Last winter, I decided to start becoming a craftier person by sewing some dresses for the girls.

Well, my craftiness took a vacation for the summer. But now that it’s fall-becoming-winter, I’M BACK! It gets dark at about 5 PM now, and I’ve got to find something else to do around here at night. We seldom go out after dark, since that involves babysitters (i.e. MONEY) and driving down empty country roads with the brights on. We don’t have a TV, and there’s only so much reading and writing and cleaning a person can do. Bring on the crafts!

Here’s the thing I’m most proud of: I didn’t use a pattern for any of the crafts below. They’re all things that I dreamed up in my head and then made real. Which is a lot of fun, and probably takes me to the next level of craftiness, don’t you think?

CRAFT #1: The Owl Pillow

We have a beige couch and beige chair in our living room, and I was feeling the need to inject a little color and fun into the place. So, I decided to sew an owl pillow. Why an owl pillow? you ask. Well, we have a whole bunch of barred owls who live in the woods around our house. All night long we can hear them calling Who-who-who-whooooo! I love these owls; they look stately and wise, and whenever I hear them I think, You go, owls! Eat those mice!!!

So, here’s what I did with some burlap, fleece, felt, and embroidery floss from Ben Franklin’s:

CRAFT #2: The Mermaid Fins

One of Fiona and Campbell’s best friends decided to have a Pirate Party when she turned five. There was no way I was getting my girly-girls to dress up in pirate garb, but MERMAIDS are another story. I designed these fins to work like wrap skirts. They look great, are super-comfortable, and the girls have been wearing them for dress-up long after the party. I may have to make one for myself.

CRAFT #3: The Chicken Stuffie

Okay, so first of all, my girls call stuffed animals “stuffies.” I have no idea why; it’s certainly nothing Erick or I ever said.

ANYWAY, when their 2-year-old cousin Aiden came to visit us in Vermont last summer, we weren’t sure if he’d like it here. Aiden lives in Orange County, CA, which is pretty much the epitome of planned suburbia. He lives near Disneyland. How would he handle our crazy Vermont-woods girls?

He did great, and it turns out — huge surprise to all of us — that Aiden is NUTS about chickens. When we took him to Shelburne Farms, that kid was chasing after hens bigger than himself and catching them with his bare hands. He couldn’t get enough of our chicks (R.I.P.), who were then still fluffy and cute in the brooder box in our garage.

So, when I started thinking about a Christmas present for Aiden, which I do early because (a) I have only one nephew, and (b) I’m clueless and terrified at the prospect of gifts for BOYS, the obvious choice was: make him a chicken stuffie! That way, he could have his favorite part of Vermont in Orange County — only it would be much more hygienic (and hopefully have a happier outcome) than the real thing.

I’m sharing this here because I’m pretty sure that Aiden doesn’t read this blog, and I’m trusting his parents to keep it on the down-low:

Of course, the predictable outcome, which I somehow failed to anticipate, was that once I showed it to the girls, Campbell said, “I don’t have a chicken stuffie.” So I suspect there may be a few more of these in my future.

There you have it: a little peek at what I’ve been up to in the evenings. See? It’s not all deep thinking around here!

The Problem With Ping

Sometimes, when reading stories to my children that were read to me as a child, I discover how truly dark and twisted children’s literature can be. Or perhaps it’s really how innocent I was as a child, and how my memory has failed me. Two sides of the same coin, in any case.

That’s how I stumbled upon the problem with Ping.

Ping, of course, is the title character in the classic 1933 children’s book The Story About Ping, by Marjorie Flack and Kurt Wiese. I remembered this book fondly as a story about a naughty little yellow duck who doesn’t want to get spanked. The other week, Fiona was, as she put it, “really into Ping,” so I had occasion to read her The Story About Ping five times in one sitting. When you read a book repeatedly like that, you start to notice things.

Ping is a young Chinese duck who lives with his large duck family on “a boat with two wise eyes on the Yangtze river.” The tension in the story is that, at the end of every day, the boatmaster calls the ducks back to the boat from the riverbank, and the last duck to cross over the gangplank always gets a spank on the back with a stick. Ping really, really does NOT want to get a spank on his back. But one day, when he’s upside down in the river catching a fish, Ping doesn’t hear the boatmaster call. When he resurfaces, it’s clear that he’ll be the last duck across the plank. Rather than suffer a spanking, Ping hides along the riverbank.

It was Fiona who pointed out a major issue with the book’s exposition: “Why does the last duck always get a spanking?” she asked. I explained that this was the boatmaster’s way of getting all the ducks to hurry up. NObody wants to stand around waiting for a bunch of ducks to straggle up a gangplank, right?

But I couldn’t deny the fundamental injustice of the boatmaster’s system. Because, of course, when you have a group of ducks waddling up a narrow gangplank, somebody’s always going to be the last duck. That’s just common sense. And it doesn’t necessarily mean that the last duck is a slacker. Take Ping, for instance: he wasn’t doing anything wrong, he was just unlucky enough to miss the boatmaster’s first call. I’m sure he would’ve busted his tail once he realized that it was time to go home, if he wasn’t so afraid of that spanking.

I started to wonder if maybe Ping was really a fable about capitalism, or unions — something like that. I don’t know; there’s only one economist in this family, and it ain’t me, babe.

In any event, once Ping runs away, the story unfolds in a familiar “journey-and-return” sequence. Ping spends a lonely night on the riverbank, and then travels down the river to find his family. Along the way, he has some sobering experiences: Ping sees a fisherman who uses captive birds to fish by fastening metal rings around their necks so that they’re dependent on the small pieces of fish he rewards them with, and then Ping is captured by a boat family who would’ve cooked him for dinner, if not for the mercy of their young son. At the end of this adventurous day, Ping hears the boatmaster’s call and sees the boat with two wise eyes — his home! Although he’s clearly going to be the last across the plank again, this time Ping presses on and submits to the spanking, before snuggling up with his family.

The moral of the story, as I always understood it: there are rules to being part of a family, and sometimes you have to accept discipline in order to live in love and safety.

Except that by about the third reading, I started to wonder: Just how safe WAS Ping’s life with his family? What was REALLY going on in that boat with two wise eyes? I can’t be sure, of course, but somehow I doubt that the boatmaster was raising all those ducks as pets, or simply for their eggs. I married into a Chinese-American family, and I know what happens to ducks. My guess is that Ping and his whole family were going to be Peking-ed before too long.

I sat for a while, letting this bother me. What gives, Kurt and Marjorie? You put Ping through a brush with death and force him to submit to unjust punishment, only to have him end up hanging, roasted, in the window of some restaurant?!?

But then, I realized that it was possible to consider another moral for this story, one that made a lot more sense to me.

We all know that life is unjust: there will always be a last duck over the gangplank who gets unfairly spanked. We also know that we’re all headed for death, eventually. In the meantime? You might as well snuggle up with the ones you love. Go home.

That Crazy Tree

I’ve been reading The Artist’s Way this past month. This is the sort of book, marketed as “A Course in Discovering and Recovering Your Creative Self,” that I’d usually avoid. Really, who has the time? Its author, Julia Cameron, claims to have helped countless “blocked artists” discover “a spiritual path to higher creativity.” I bought this book back when I was a legitimate artist, having just completed a photography degree in New York City — but apparently it didn’t work for me back then, because I made it to the third chapter and then quit photography.

I’m not sure why I decided to pick up this book again, since I wouldn’t describe myself as an “artist” — unless by “artist” you mean “someone who started writing a blog about her kids and then got tired of writing about her kids.” Nor would I describe myself as “blocked,” although I’m sure there are some who WISH I’d develop a little writer’s block.

I guess I just hate to have a book in my house that’s partially read. And it’s turned out to be pretty good. My FAVORITE part is when Cameron recommends taking yourself out on a weekly “artist date,” where you go off alone to do something fun and restorative. That seems like a good idea for anybody, artist or no. So, the “artist date” was on my mind when Erick took out all three girls on a recent Saturday morning. I figured I’d give it a try; beats cleaning the house.

I decided to take a hike. I love walking, and looking, and thinking. When the girls are around, I may be able to walk short distances, but I have to watch THEM instead of the scenery, and there’s always too much chatter for me to hear myself think. A nice, quiet hike seemed just the thing for my first artist date.

The problem is, hiking by myself makes me a little nervous; I’m still too much of a city girl. I worry about things like getting killed. And where we live, the options for hiking tend towards two opposing but potentially dangerous scenarios: rugged wilderness trails, or the narrow shoulders of winding roads along which cars drive waaaay too quickly.

But there is one exception: the TAM. TAM stands for “Trail Around Middlebury,” and is a 16-mile loop around Middlebury through conserved land owned by the Middlebury Area Land Trust. I opted to walk a small section of the trail that starts at the Middlebury College golf course and ends close to town. The assurance that retirees with golf clubs would be within shouting distance was enough to make me feel passably secure.

It was a beautiful, sunny late summer day. The section of trail that I walked is mostly wooded, with a few open fields between the trees. It felt secluded and quiet — I passed no more than five other people along the way. Then, in one dappled green stretch of woods, I looked up and spotted this tree:

I know the photo isn’t great — I snapped it with my iPod — but LOOK at that crazy tree! I can’t see the leaves well enough to tell what kind of tree it is, but I think it’s an oak. Oak trees — the ones in my yard, at least — usually grow up straight and strong and tall. Certainly all the trees around this one were growing straight, or else I wouldn’t have noticed it. Something happened to this tree, something was strange enough about its environment that its trunk veered off in one direction, and then abruptly changed course and doubled back upon itself. From the looks of it, this may have happened several times.

And yet, the tree survived. It’s healthy, thriving there in the woods. And isn’t it beautiful? Much more interesting than all the straight arrow trees around it.

There are a couple of points in life — usually around age 18 and 21 — when people make Big Decisions. Decisions about school, work, life partners. We tend to invest these decisions with a sense of great importance; we worry that we’ll make the wrong choice, and then we worry that we did make the wrong choice. By “we,” of course, I mean “me.” I went to college with no idea where to focus my attention, then bopped along through a series of decisions: graduate degree in education, teaching job, graduate degree in studio art, photography freelancer, nonprofit manager, mother. I love what I’m doing right now the best, but whatever you call this life I’ve cobbled together, you can’t call it “employment.” And that’s what tends to matter on paper and at cocktail parties.

When I saw that crazy tree, though, it reminded me of my life — and not just my life, but the lives of so many people I know and love.

So, I decided that when my girls reach the age of Big Decision Making, I’m going to show them the picture of this crazy tree — or take them to see it in person. And I’ll say something like this:

You’re worried about making the wrong choices, and your choices DO matter, but you don’t need to worry so much. Check out this crazy tree. This tree didn’t worry, it just grew towards where the most light was at each stage of its life. It’s okay if you change your mind later, or if you look back and feel like you were all over the place. As long as you’re growing towards the light at each stage of your life, you’ll be okay. And when you stand back to look, it’ll be beautiful.

College Town

‘Does it hurt?’ asked the Rabbit.

‘Sometimes,’ said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. ‘When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.’

-from The Velveteen Rabbit

What happens when you end up living in a college town that’s almost a carbon copy of the town where you spent your own undergraduate years?

I went to Williams College, a small liberal arts school of about 2,000 students in Massachusetts’ Berkshire Mountains. I now live near where my husband teaches: Middlebury College, a small liberals arts school of about 2,000 students in Vermont’s Green Mountains. When he was interviewing for his job, Erick knew that I had some concerns about the deja vu aspect of this move, so he specifically asked his future colleagues how Middlebury differed from Williams. “Oh,” they scoffed, “Williams is out in the middle of nowhere. It’s tiny. Middlebury is much more of a town.”

I found — and still find — this comparison hilarious. It’s like arguing the relative difference between a flea and a gnat. In fact, as of the 2000 census Middlebury’s population was 8,183; Williamstown’s was 8,424. (And please note that those numbers include the  2,000 undergrads who descend on each town for nine months of the year). Both towns are centered around a single main street. It may be true that Middlebury’s main street is slightly longer, with slightly more offerings that Williamstown’s. But I’m living in essentially the same town where I went to college.

So far, it’s been interesting how little I’m aware of living in a college town. Sure, my husband goes off to work at the college every morning. Sure, I’ll occasionally notice students walking around downtown. Roads and restaurants are busier during special weekends when the students’ families come to town. Many of our friends work for the college in some capacity — but by no means all of them. There’s an unofficial “college pew” at our church where all the students sit together. Our daughters take swim lessons taught by members of the college swim team at the college pool. We’ve even had students from Erick’s senior seminar over to our house.

That sounds like a lot of interaction with the college, but it’s such a vastly different experience from when I actually attended college that I seldom feel any deja vu. As a mother of three, more than a decade out of college myself, I’m in a different world. We’re a 15-minute drive away from campus, and — what with the three young kids — we don’t attend many campus events. Shockingly, the undergraduate population tends not to breakfast at 7 AM, hang out in the children’s room of the public library, frequent the local playgrounds, or eat dinner at 5:30 PM. So we don’t see much of them.

When I do see groups of undergrads going about their college lives, they seem very young, and very loud. Their confidence and energy make me a little nervous. They appear to float on their own potential; most of them haven’t yet felt life’s hard blows that cultivate humility and empathy.

I look and them and think, NOT FOR ANYTHING WOULD I WANT TO BE BACK WHERE YOU ARE.

College was not a particularly happy time for me. As I understand it, many people look back on college as the best years of their lives: years when they forged lasting friendships, joyfully experimented in both the academic and personal arenas, and emerged after four years having found themselves.

For me, college was when I lost myself.

This may come as a shock to some people who knew me during college — perhaps even to most people who knew me then. I put up a very good front, as I’ve done for most of my life, because that’s what good girls do.

When I arrived at Williams, many of my peers seemed to already know who they were and where they were headed. They’d survived the proving ground of high school, and now they were ready to soar off on their talent. Sure, some edges needed to be smoothed, but at a basic level they were who they would be. Maybe it only seemed that way, but over a decade later these college friends and acquaintances still appear to be fundamentally who they were back then.

I was not that undergrad. I came to college looking like I had it all together, having spent the first 18 years of my life being perfect: working hard, getting good grades, going to church, and trying to make everybody happy. High school wasn’t much of a proving ground for me; I more or less breezed through it with a group of like-minded peers.

Problem is, trying to be perfect and make everybody happy for 18 years doesn’t leave much room for becoming a real person. I was 18 years old and I didn’t have a single opinion of my own. Going to church didn’t help me with identity formation, frankly, because if you’re perfect then you completely miss the point of grace. How can you receive forgiveness and love despite your failings if you’ve never actually failed?

No, when I arrived at college, I was more like the description of a crab cake I once saw on a menu: “Just enough binding to hold it together.”

If this were a novel or a movie, what would happen to a protagonist like that? Clearly, they’d have to fail. Something would have to rip apart the binding of their fragile self so that the pieces could be put back together more securely. It’s an old story. It’s The Velveteen Rabbit: the toy bunny needs to be discarded on the trash heap with a broken heart in order to become Real.

And, thankfully, that did happen to me: I made mistakes. The specifics aren’t important. These weren’t major crimes against humanity; they were the kind of mistakes that happen when you wander through four years of college without knowing who you are. But they were major to me, because I wasn’t supposed to make mistakes. And it wasn’t pretty; the ripping apart of my binding that began in college resulted in a three-year post-college morass of depression and anorexia, during which time I distanced myself from friends and family. It wasn’t until I found grace and Erick — almost simultaneously — that my pieces started to come together again.

I missed my college reunion this year (because our California family was visiting) and I’m very sorry that I did. None of this was college’s fault; I still have fun memories, and I made some friends whom I hope to know forever (and whom I wish I saw more often!). I wanted to be at that reunion, because I think that most people who knew me in college didn’t really know me. I’d like to have a chance to get re-introduced.

So, these are the thoughts that enter my mind when I come into contact with undergrads these days. I’m glad for those moments, for living in a town that allows me periodic flashbacks to the lost-est time of my life. I wonder how many of these students — underneath their pulled-together, confident exteriors — are just as much of a mess as I was back then. (For that matter, I wonder how many of my own college peers were just as much of a mess as I was back then? Probably a fair amount).

NOT FOR ANYTHING WOULD I WANT TO BE BACK WHERE YOU ARE, I’d like to tell these undergrads, BUT NOT FOR ANYTHING WOULD I HAVE SKIPPED IT.

Here’s what I would have skipped: My panic and shame at having my perfect front deconstructed. It was that panic and shame that I took out on my body, my family, my friends. And for that, I’ll always be deeply sorry.

So if I were to give advice to any undergrad who, like me, arrives at college as a hollow shell of “perfection,” it would be this: DO NOT PANIC when you discover that you’re not perfect after all. Welcome it as the thing that will make you who you are, as radiation therapy for your soul. But don’t wallow. Show yourself some grace. Gently pick up your pieces and start looking for the tools to put yourself back together again.

In a recent segment on the NPR program This American Life called “The Ghost of Bobby Dunbar,” a woman from a family that had suffered tragedy, deceit, and mistaken identity concluded, “If you hate that it happened, then you hate that you are.”

If you hate that it happened, then you hate that YOU ARE.

You should never, EVER, hate that you are.

Living Without Blinds

Because we live in the woods, our yard is very beautiful and our house – particularly during those times of year when all the leaves are on the trees – can get very dark. Probably for both of those reasons, our house was constructed with many windows. We have eight windows on the first floor alone, plus an entire wall of floor-to-ceiling windows in the Sun Room and five sets of sliding glass doors.

When we moved in, every single one of these windows was covered by blinds.

There were heavy wooden horizontal blinds hung above each window, and vertical blinds to cover the sliding glass doors. It was kind of the previous owners to leave us their window treatments, which were in good shape and had probably been installed with much effort and expense.

One of the first things I did after we moved in was to remove all the blinds from the first-floor windows.

Okay, I didn’t remove the blinds; at the time, I was busy unpacking, painting, nursing a three-month-old, and supervising two rambunctious toddlers. But when my parents, who were helping us move in, asked what I wanted to do about the window treatments, I said, “Take them all down!”

A friend recently lent me a wonderful book of essays by Shauna Niequist called cold tangerines. In an essay titled “basement,” Niequist makes the case that our homes are like mirrors for our selves: the rooms we love the most often contain qualities of who we’d like to be; the rooms we hate the most reflect facets of who we fear we are.

Yes, this is going to be a metaphor for my life. Because it’s like my house knew, even before I did, the kind of life I wanted to lead.

I’ve realized over the course of this year that I want to live a life that’s open, unobstructed: a life without blinds. I’ve spent so much of my life with the blinds drawn, trying to hide parts of myself from the outside world, trying to protect myself. But you know what? It’s a lot of work having to continually raise, lower, and clean those blinds. And they get in the way of my view; it’s hard to see clearly through my blinds to other people, to the beautiful world outside.

Writing has been a major — if not the major — step towards taking down the blinds of my life. This past winter, I started writing (and publishing) more of what I was really thinking and feeling. I admitted that I wasn’t perfect, with perfect kids and a perfect house. I wrote honestly about my faith for the first time ever — something I’d always been terrified to do for fear that people would assume I was going to start judging them or trying to convert them. These were all big steps for me.

I’ve been amazed by the grace with which people have responded. My favorite thing about writing — and life — is that it allows for so many “You, too? Me, too!” moments. Because trying to write as my honest self is very, very scary. It’s scary for the same reasons that some of my family members were horrified that I had no blinds on my first-floor windows: “But people can look right in and see you!” gasped one relative.

Of course, it’s much easier to live without blinds on your house than to live without blinds on your life. My response to “But people can see you!” is: What people? We no longer live in Manhattan or Berkeley; for much of the year, we can barely see our neighbors’ houses through the trees. Somebody would have to go to an awful lot of trouble to look through our windows. And even if they did, So what? They’d see a family, going about our normal, loud, crazy, loving business. We’re not cooking meth in the kitchen or torturing chipmunks in the living room.

It’s much harder to apply that logic to my life.

I’m writing this as a prelude of sorts: within the next couple of days, I’m going to publish one of the most personal things that I’ve ever written.

I’ve written about what happens when you end up living in a college town that’s almost an exact replica of the town where you yourself attended college: the thoughts, memories, and emotions that get dredged up. To leave out this aspect of our move to Vermont would be a major omission.

Don’t get too excited or worried: this is a big deal for me, but that’s because I’ve been living with the blinds drawn for so long. There are no bodies in our basement, no fourth Gong child stashed in our attic, no secret bank account in the Caribbean.

I’m going to publish this piece, and then I’ll probably go back to writing about our mice and bugs and wacky daughters. This blog is about our life, and our life these days is mostly about mice and bugs and wacky daughters. I’ve no interest in starting down a path of gratuitously emotional soul-baring.

You see, as much as I want to live an open life, it’s important to set appropriate limits. I removed all the blinds from our first-floor windows, but I left up all the blinds on our second-floor windows. Not because that’s where we cook the meth or torture chipmunks, but because there are things we do on the second floor — where most of our bedrooms and bathrooms are — that are and never will be anybody else’s business.

So there you have it: my philosophy of life, writing, and home decorating all wrapped up in one little metaphor. It’s a little scary, a little less safe, this life without blinds. But the views are amazing and there’s a lot less upkeep required.