Wednesday, May 27, 2015

Broken Bird

Since my last post, I have been ticking items off my To-Do list, in preparation for my departure to Michigan. I am feeling the pressure of time, a growing awareness that I will not get to everything. When my sister texts to ask if I could meet for lunch, I have a tiny meltdown. Then I move a couple of things around, erased a couple of items from my To-Do list, which, wisely, I had written in pencil.

I think I am doing okay. I think I can, I think I can, I think I can....

Then I get the call that every mother dreads. 13 has fallen and broken her arm. She says, I am like that baby bird that Murphy stepped on, a bird with a broken wing.

In an instant, all my plans go out of my head. But I notice something else: so does all my anxiety about leaving. My panicky feelings about leaving my kids goes away, because I decide right then that 13 will be coming along. 17 has already changed her mind. She had found a barn where she can help with trail rides in exchange for free riding time, and she has landed a summer job hostessing (mom plug: they said she had too beautiful of a smile to bus tables) at a restaurant in the little town near our place. Now, I decide, 13 will come along too. She will lie in the hammock and read I am Malala and The Glass Castle. She will go with me on hikes in the woods. She will spend the summer away from malls and television and concrete sidewalks.

That quickly, in my mind, the anxiety of getting ready for a summer alone becomes my joy at having the kids by my side on this journey. And it isn't an avoidance of doing my work.

Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple, has an essay appropriately titled "Writing the Color Purple." In it, she shares her plans to write the novel that was growing inside of her. She would write while her daughter was in school, and in the afternoon, she would put the book aside and be a mom. Each morning, she would sit down. Nothing would come. The protagonist, Celie, remained silent. Then her daughter would come home, and Celie would begin to speak. Celie, whose children are taken away from her and sold to a childless couple, could only tell her story in the precence of a child. Or was it Walker who couldn't compartmentalize her life that way? Walker has also written about the challenges of being both a writer and a mother, saying that a writer should have one child, otherwise she will not be able continue her work.

I am already caring for seven children when I read these essays.

And yes, the writer in me is turning the 13's fall and her broken bone and my feelings into a story. My new book, at its core, is about how the growth of one species inevitably has an impact on another, often in unpredictable ways, how we do not have as much control over our lives as we believe we do. The balance is tricky, momentary, and leaves us wanting, grasping for the fleeting feeling we get when everything exists in harmony. I imagine that I will be spending the summer trying to find that sweet spot. It is not a thing I can catch and hold onto. It is constant motion, the way a hummingbird, its wings beating a hundred times a minute, looks more beautiful in real life than in a painting or picture, which attempts to hold onto its stillness. It is the movement of wings up and down, constantly changing, that captures our attention.

 

Tuesday, May 19, 2015

The Way to A Character's Heart is Through Her Stomach

More than once I have spent an afternoon cooking one of my character's favorite foods.

For "Kneading Mother," I baked a batch of German kuchens.

For "Doors," it was angel food cake. I hand-whipped one dozen egg whites to stiff peaks, baked the batter in an ungreased tube pan that I found at a garage sale, placed it upside down on a glass coke bottle to cool, and cried when it fell, the result of baking on a rainy, humid August afternoon. I stared into the bowl of one dozen yolks, wondering how to keep them from going to waste. I would not have known any of this without putting my hands to work.

My newest character is Tatum Birdnest Summerfield. Her name comes from cities I found on a map of Texas. Her middle name used to be Beatrice but when the kids at school start calling her Birdnest, she decides to adopt it for herself. On her 13th birthday, her parents allow her to legally change her name. She likes cooking with wildflowers and plants that she finds in the woods behind her house. She has found some abandoned bird eggs and is going to try to hatch them herself.

In the creative writing workshop I teach to middle school students, we made paper dolls of our characters.

You can see from the photo that Tatum is a bit of a wild thing. What I didn't realize, until some friends pointed it out, is how much Tatum resembles me. Here is a self-portrait I took to compare.

This is the first photo I have shared with my gray Crone look. But back to the topic of food.

This afternoon, my young writers and I are baking dandelion bread, something Tatum makes from flowers she collects on her walks. I want to show them how we can bring characters to life with our hands and allow us to write about them more authentically.

I am trying to find ways to learn more about Sophia's life, beyond copying pages of her husband's manucript. I discovered that the Tolstoy's grandson operates a cafe at their former estate, now a museum. He serves Sophia's most-loved recipes: Anke pie (a lemon pie with a crumble crust named after a friend of the family) apple dumplings, mushroom stew, and potato pudding. The Museum launched an app that allows users to access to Sophia's recipes. The app is available only in Russian but an English version should be released later this year.

Yulya Vronskaya, head of international projects at Leo Tolstoy's Yasnaya Polyana Museum Estate, says the Tolstoy's diet "may have been slightly plainer and and more modest than that of other noble families of the same status, because the Tolstoy family wasn't inclined to serve luxurious feasts." When Leo adopted a vegetarian diet, his wife accomodated him but did not become a vegetarian herself. She ordered two meal options each day: meatless dishes for Leo and their daughters, meat for her sons and herself. I find this a curious family alignment, the way the sons stood by their mother and the daughters flocked to their father's side. From what I have read, this division extended beyond the dinner table.

I have not decided which recipes I most want to try from the Tolstoy's family cookbook. I'm leaning toward macaroni and cheese; I wonder if my kids will notice the turnips. I may even re-enact an entire meal, sons and mom at one end of the table, my husband and our daughters at the other. I'll let you know if they will play along.

For now, I'm off to pick dandelions.

 

Sunday, May 17, 2015

Leaving the Nest

Every summer, Sophia Tolstoy moved her family to their summer home in the country. Most people who could left the city. Even in Soviet Russia, the government provided summer homes to almost everyone. And while no every summer home was alike, it was always a welcome respite to spend the hot summer months in the countryside.

This year, I too am fleeing to the country for the summer. In three weeks, I will be heading to Michigan.

Unlike Sophia, I am leaving my family behind. I have resisted publicly announcing this move. Moms aren't supposed to leave their children behind and go off to play for the summer. I am supposed to be driving 13 to band camp. I am supposed to be waiting up to make sure the teenagers come home on time. I am supposed to be stocking the pantry with snack food and telling them to bring their friends over to hang out in the basement.

Instead I am making a packing list as if I am the one leaving for camp.

Our lake cabin is more like a peasant's home than it is the Tolstoy's estate. Small, basic, lacking in modern ammenties. No dishwasher, no washing machine or dryer, no television. When we bought the cottage last year, I found an old wringer washer in the basement, and a more "modern" tabletop machine by Kenmore from the 1940s, both of which still work fine. The only remodeling I intend to do is install a clothesline out back. There are three small bedrooms filled with mostly, well, beds. There is one small bathroom; when the water warms up, we bath in the lake.

I will not miss any of these amenties nearly so much as I will miss my children. I know this.

And yet, I can't wait to be without them.

When my kids were little, I loved summer break. We went on hikes and joined the summer reading club at the library. We sat in the grass on blankets, eating popsicles. We took bike rides. We spent hours at the pool, coming home sunburned and exhausted the way only a day in the sun can make you feel.

Now all but one of my kids will be working summer jobs. One will be in Michigan with me, but I won't to see much of him. Another will be in LA for a summer internship. The three children I gave birth too will be spending a good chunk of the summer with their dad. Am I worried? You bet I am. Am I going anyway? Yep. And when I suggested otherwise, my kids were the first ones to tell me that I have to go.

Last week, I heard from a literary journal that they wanted to publish one of my stories. When I read the email, I cried, then I laughed, then I texted my daughter. Within an hour, all the other kids were texting me with congratulations. One of them, 18, a high school senior, wrote "I know how hard you have worked." 17 said, "I'm getting teary." Their happiness for me was better than any greeting card message about being a good parent.

I know I am going to take some hits from other mothers for this one, but I believe our children need to see us succeed. They need to see us work our asses off for what we are passionate about. They need to see us sacrifice and push ourselves. They need to see us putting ourselves out there, facing fear, being rejected, and getting back up to try again. This was a hard lesson for me to learn, and my children spent years teaching me. I was applying for a fellowship when 17 was about nine years old. I was sitting at the computer, contemplating not submitting my application. She stood in the doorway and said, Mom, you just have to do it.

"We will be okay," she said.

And when I was writing my Master's Thesis, all four daughters chimed in together, You can do it! I can still see them standing in the kitchen, pointing their fingers at me, telling me not to give up.

When our oldest daughter, 24, a midlde school teacher, heard that my three children were going to their dad's house, she looked at me and said, You're still going to the lake though, right?

There was a time when I would have given my life for children. It was easy to do, much easier than writing a story and sending it out into the world to have a life of its own.