Parenthood
At two, she clings fast
And then she is twenty-two,
calling once a week.
One for the Road
We’re pulling away
Laden with baggage and snacks
heading for elsewhere
While I Try to Work
The man next to me
thumps the bench and sings along
then reads this and leaves
The photographs I chose to include for “The Unexpected” challenge are ones I took to document a science project for my education blog. I was simply trying to capture the procedural steps, but ended up being mesmerized by dry ice and everything about it. Like sublimation, for example:
Or, if you add dish soap and water, the way the potion bubbles for hours.
But the best surprise of all occurred when I left food coloring, soap, and dry ice in a pyrex measuring cup in the sink for a couple of hours…and it grew an ice cave.
Yesterday, The Daily Post issued a haiku challenge for the week: five haikus in five days. Please be kind; I’m a little rusty. I haven’t written one of these since puberty.
Iceland
Volcanoes erupt
from bare rock like cone-shaped swords
A land with no trees
There is nothing I like more at the end of a long day than my bedtime routine.
I don’t answer the phone in the midst of it; I don’t even like to answer questions. I might nod, but I don’t listen to anyone or anything. I am off-duty.
Not long ago, an acquaintance walked into my entryway and stared at a photograph I had taken of my daughter holding her pet hamster. “Is that guy dead?” she asked me.
I suddenly felt very, very uncomfortable.
“Uh, yeah,” I said, unsure whether to feel embarrassed or ashamed. I picked both.
She looked at it for a long, uncomfortable moment before announcing: “That is sooooo Scandinavian.”
I had no idea what she meant, but since I’m 100% Norwegian, I figured she might be on to something. It was time to investigate.
I have relatives who swim daily in the ocean off the coast of Oslo, and run around their mountain cabin naked in the middle of winter–no doubt after a good dose of Aquavit. I can assure you that this is not what it was like for me in my childhood home. My parents are the sort that drink a thimble-full of red wine for medicinal reasons, and comport themselves in a dignified manner at all times. I think I’ve heard them raise their voices three or four times in my entire life.
Growing up, I was carted off to Junior Sons of Norway on Saturdays, where I learned the Norwegian national anthem–which I can be easily enticed to sing, with great enthusiasm–and Min Hatt, Den Har Tre Kanter (My Hat, It Has Three Corners, a deep and lyrical song, as you ca imagine). I was fed Lutefisk (fish soaked in lye) once a year, and taught to say grace in Norwegian whenever we excavated the dining room table and broke out the china.
I associate my ethnic roots with a palate-numbing dose of pickled herring, passed like treasure in a tiny, silver-rimmed dish at Christmas dinner. In fact, Christmas arrived with a long list of Scandinavian things I can’t and/or won’t eat: Swedish meatballs, fruit soup, lefse, herring, rice pudding. (Sorry, Mom. I love you.) My mother would hide an almond in the rice pudding, and whoever found it got an extra present on Christmas Eve. I loved this tradition, but despised rice pudding. I would shove a spoonful around on my plate, and if I couldn’t find a nut, try to reorganize it in a polite way which simulated ingesting an honorable amount.
But I think it goes much deeper. Those Norwegian immigrants were unflinching, hardworking, stoic powerhouses in the face of the adversity and desolation of the Plains. In fact, my name was plucked from Ole Rolvaag’s Giants in the Earth, a chronicle of Norwegian immigrants in the Midwest. I have visited his house multiple times, read articles, and listened attentively to stories about him, but I have never, ever been able to make myself read the book. Here’s why: from Wikipedia, “The novel depicts snow storms, locusts, poverty, hunger, loneliness, homesickness, the difficulty of fitting into a new culture, and the estrangement of immigrant children who grow up in a new land.” What’s more, I heard my namesake has a paralyzing case agoraphobia.
“Is it true Beret goes crazy in the book?” I asked my mother. “Why would you name me after a character like that?”
There was a quiet pause.
“She really pulls it together in the second book,” my mother said, finally.
How Scandinavian.
The moment you announce that the free ride is over, that this parasite had better get out of your uterus, a tiny tyrant emerges, and you wonder if you might possibly cram it back inside, just to secure a few more moments of sanity and solitude.
This wee, adorable creature demands all of your time, attention, energy, and soul. There is nothing and no one else that matters as much. This is why cherished friendships shrivel, marriages are raked over the coals, and newish parents become unbearable. You are suddenly up at all hours of the day and night. You cannot finish a sentence or focus on anything uttered by an adult. Worst of all, the things you smirked and said you would never do, you see and hear yourself doing without apology.
A little shame, perhaps, but no apology.
The boundaries blend. It is not possible to distinguish where you end and where the child begins. You anticipate their needs, and punish yourself when you can’t identify or remedy a discomfort. They are the center of your universe.
And they grow.
Imagine that you are beside yourself because you are stuck playing Barbies yet again. Each minute stretches into an eternity. You can feel yourself devolving, while politically astute essays you composed in a past life unwrite themselves in your head. You parade a stupid piece of malformed plastic around, babbling the required perky gibberish–all while secretly wondering, “what is the meaning of my life?”
And then, the very next time the Barbies come out from under the bed, just as you are mentally muttering obscenities, your daughter turns to you, and from her lips come the most surprising news.
“Mom.” Accompanying eyeroll. “We are playing in here. Please shut the door.”
A lump forms in your throat. You were already gearing up to feel resentful for the next 45 minutes. What are you supposed to do now?
I wore the same fairy costume for four years running.
My getup consisted of someone’s worn and baggy blue dress, a cardboard tiara, and a star covered with Reynolds’ Wrap and taped to a piece of dowel.
Back then, the time change came earlier in the Fall, so it was nice and dark early on the big night. Unfortunately, it was also ridiculously cold, and because my parents loved me, I had to wear a coat covering my costume. They probably did not recognize this as the great disappointment it was, especially since everyone had seen my costume numerous times already.
I’m pretty certain my sister was asked to look after me, but what junior high student wants a baby sister tagging along with her posse after dark? Consequently, I had free reign of the neighborhood from a staggeringly early age, and my candy was only stolen once. No other tragedy befell me.
I would wander, giddy and anxious, mesmerized both by the boisterous clumps of people I wasn’t sure I knew, and by my paper bag, swelling with forbidden sweets. I would take them home and count them, chart them, graph them. I would eat two or three pieces, then squirrel the rest away, doling it out so it would last until Easter–the next time we got a statistically significant dose of sugar.
Once I got a bit older, I branched out and tried new costumes, always outdone by the girl who lived catty-corner from us. How did she predict my costume three years in a row? My mummy costume was made out of an old sheet torn into strips, and held together by an array of safety pins. It drooped and exposed my sweat pants in embarrassing patches. Julie’s father was a doctor, however, so hers was made out of surgical wrapping that clung magically to her gloating face.
Multiply that stinging feeling by all three years. I suppose I would have developed lingering unpleasant feelings about the holiday were it not for the Halloween party we had in our basement the year I turned eleven.
In my opinion, all basements are inherently cold and creepy, and ours was no exception. Scariest of all was the storage room, with concrete walls and floors, and rickety metal shelving loaded with spider webs and long-forgotten boxes. We shoved a few things out of the way so we could guide blindfolded kids one at a time into its clutches.
Perched here and there on the shelves were a variety of bowls into which we plunged their unseeing hands. One held eyeballs, or peeled grapes, and another brains, which was clammy cooked spaghetti.
Things got weirder.
Once a year, my parents purchased a side of beef, which was cut and meticulously wrapped and nestled in the extra fridge in the basement–the one without a handle, that we wrenched open with a dish towel and a finely choreographed hip maneuver. We had no shortage of strange cow parts in the basement freezer, so we thawed a variety of organs to fill the other bowls.
Given the location and ingredients, I suspect that our haunted house would have been just as creepy without the blindfold. And though this may reflect poorly on me, I reveled in the yelps and screams of our guests, and later, their wide-eyed wonder when we revealed the bowls’ actual contents. I think most of them had hoped that what we passed off as a heart might not really be a heart.
The piece de résistance of the evening was the Ghost Cake with Flaming Eyes, however. I remember so clearly that feeling of triumph when we turned out the lights again and lit the eyes.
Ever since that night, Halloween has been my favorite holiday.
I wrote a whole post about my Ghost Cake on LobeStir. Here’s the link–you could make one, too!
Happy Halloween!
A bookish fellow
Studied God on weekdays,
Then made his way to Chaska,
To woo the schoolmarm there.Mercifully patient,
He waited six months of Sundays
For an answer
To his question.Instead, they wandered the cold town,
Discussing only anything else,
Turning back before it was too dark
Or too late.They parted ways then,
She to pore over lesson plans,
He to wend his way to the boarding house
Beside the tracks.He wondered,
Hardly daring to sleep,
While freight trains thundered
Through the wee hours,
Through his thoughts,
Shaking the tiny, strange bed.At long last:
Yes.
**********************************************************
A note from Beret: I wrote the preceding piece in response to a photo prompt posted on 100 word story. They post a new prompt each month…plus it’s chock full of amazing 100-word stories, as you might imagine.
Though going to art school was inherently non-rational, I approached it in a methodical, uptight manner which might seem out of character. As a non-traditional, second-degree student and mother of two, I was not at a point in my life where it was acceptable to dabble and meander and find myself. I took the requisite courses, in the prescribed order, and checked them off my list.
But one summer, realizing I had a single elective to squander, I inexplicably found myself signing up for a sewing class in the Fashion Design department. I did not admit this to my classmates in photography, however. It seemed shallow and irresponsible. Maybe a tad shameful.
It was also ridiculously inconvenient. It met two evenings a week, from 6-10 pm, which meant that my husband had to rearrange his work schedule, and home life was turned upside-down for half of the summer. In order to get to the first class, I had to leave my family stranded and carless in Tahoe, drive three and a half hours, eat Taco Bell in the car, and change out of my sweats in the parking lot of Sports Basement. Then I drove back.
Meanwhile, I wondered…why would I invest so much time and money on this class when I already knew how to sew? I could sew on a button; I could hem pants. It wasn’t like I wanted to sit around and make homely, ill-fitting clothes in all of my ‘extra time.’ How would this help me in my art practice? How would this contribute to the world? What was I doing?
But I went anyway, and after covering everything I knew in the first twenty minutes, what unfolded thereafter was a complete surprise.
We were a small and motley crew: a paralegal, a woman from student affairs, a RISD student in the Bay Area for the summer, a chipper, chatty nineteen-year-old obsessed with lingerie, and a tough guy who worked in the wood shop. Plus me.
Outside, it was freezing in the San Francisco summer way. The fog would roll in right at the start of class, casting a gloomy pall over our fair city as I hunted for parking. Inside the sewing room, however, it was eternally close and sweaty. We hunched over our commercial machines wearing as little as socially acceptable. We lingered long after the official class ended–often staying until midnight–sewing an imaginary world made of fabric and thread.
We talked, ate picnic dinners on the cutting tables, and commiserated over the evil overlock machine, but mostly we just sewed in a zen-like stupor. Fans oscillating, music cranked, we listened to an endless loop of loud, meditative dance music selected by the club-hopping RISD kid.
I made a skirt I sort of like, an ugly, uncomfortable shirt, and two princess dresses–the last of which was my masterpiece. Including the muslin mock-up, I must have spent thirty or forty hours on that thing. But when I brought it home for my five-year-old, she wore it once and let it languish in the back of the closet. A little peeved, I asked her about it. “I’m not really into princesses anymore,” she said. “I’ve started my rock star phase.”
First of all, #$%*()@!
Second of all, what five-year-old talks like that?
Still, it doesn’t really matter. That class gave me endless joy.
To this day, when I hear the first couple of bars of Breathe by Telepopmusik, I am immediately transported to those long, hot, unstructured stretches of happy time. If something important is due, if I am frustrated or inconsolable, if I have 30 seconds to sit in the car before picking up my kids, I pop in my headphones, and there I am in the sewing studio again: feeding fabric, clipping threads, watching the needle go up and down. I let thoughts float and disperse like clouds, fixing on nothing in particular. Just breathing.
Bad Parenting 101 