October
is in full regalia here in Michigan. Golden
leaves blanket the yard. Spiders web everything; I found one spinning
on the shower wall today. Reading
seems to be the only thing I can "accomplish" lately, which feels sad on
two levels. 1) It's sad I feel the need to accomplish anything when
I've just moved across the country with a baby and can finally
locate all my socks, all my baby's socks, my posters, pictures, jewelry,
and last but not least, the kosher salt. Hello, accomplishment! 2)
It's sad that I put so many
things in front of writing some days, then wake and think &%$!!!
Where have time and all my good intentions gone?
I
do have answers to that question. Or excuses - whatever you want to
call them. We went away for the weekend, to the lovely city of Madison,
WI. I've been walking, practicing yoga, and finding my stomach muscles
again, then layering those muscles with healthy bits of
homemade treats whenever possible. Earlier this month, I took Samantha on a
southbound train (Delta) to visit her grandparents, her
great-grandmother, family friends, and one delighted neighbor for whom
she did not stop snorting with laughter the whole twenty-minute visit.
This was also how she greeted my mother, like a long lost roommate.
Does she remember the first two weeks of her life when my mom heated
my coffee first thing every morning while I nursed a ravenous baby? How she cooked chickens and pasta, sang lullabyes on the
porch swing with only one little baby nose poking out of a blanket, accompanied her
to the pediatrician, and did approximately 1,873 loads of laundry in
our humble abode in Colorado? I read something today that said
grandmothers are the link between the past and the future. Yes, that's
right, I thought, thinking of the circle between my mother, Samantha,
and I.
Alas, I put off writing this blog post because I read Jonathan Franzen's memoir, The Discomfort Zone,
and loved it. I don't want this to turn into a Franzen fan site, but I
kind of do want to turn it into a book club some days. If I do that,
though, I'm going to have to talk about something other than J. Fran, or no one will come to my parties anymore.
I also read a great book called Show Your Work by Austin Kleon
and he has this advice that on your way to getting your work out in the
world: you should talk about your process. Well. The thought of doing
this makes me very nervous, which is a weird response from someone
absolutely obsessed with process.
Maybe it's a case of not fully
claiming who I am yet? I.e. that person who one hundred percent likes to
sit in circles, hold hands, and chant with strangers? Transparency, openness, and all that?
One
of my good friends regularly re-reads her journal and old letters. If I
did that, I would be paralyzed by the banality of all my former
entries which read like co-worker chit-chat: Should I make kale for dinner? I feel bad I skipped yoga to watch old Arrested Development episodes, etc. etc.
In any case, you can read my old journals or you can take my
word for it: I'm obsessed with process.
With
Austin Kleon in mind, therefore, I feel the need to come clean. I'm
working, okay? By which I mean, I'm writing. I just don't like to talk
about it because 1) I'm superstitious. Trotting out ideas before they
are in the physical form of words feels almost the same as chucking them
straight into the trash can. 2) I'm afraid I won't follow through. If
I don't follow through, I will feel like a jerk and a slob. Since it's
a fear of mine that I really am a jerk and a slob, I try to
minimize the ways I discover this about myself. I'd
rather pretend I spent the whole day hanging with my baby and staring
into trees than admit to my six crises around being
productive enough. And when I say productive enough, I mean as a
writer. Always. I am never not working, even when I'm watching spiders
in the shower. In a way, I love this part about being an artist,
because the job of an artist is simply to stay open, to take in the
world around herself, make sense of it, see it for what it is, and
someday give it back to itself in the form of a poem, a painting, pen to
paper, or maybe just an honest conversation between two friends.
A couple years ago, when I took stock of
the accomplishments in my life, I was delighted to find that my marriage
topped the list. I wasn't proud because I snagged a husband or anything
weird like that (although being a married woman is a trip worth a
collection of essays for sure). I was proud because building a marriage
is not unlike building a house, and keeping it straight and clean and safe
against the elements is, to me, an honorable undertaking, and it is one I thoroughly enjoy.
Without going down the righteous road of pride over a relationship (I recently joked
that the first person to get a divorce is the person who writes a
how-to book on marriage), what I'm trying to say is what I'm always
trying to say: I am interested in the light on trees, the shape of my
husband's front teeth, the pattern stamped on our living room rug, the pitch
of my daughter's babbling voice, the way her face smells like cereal and
pancakes even though she isn't eating "people food" yet. I am
interested in the moments that make up a day and how I feel about those
moments as a human being. My head is up my ass, for sure, but I like
to
believe that I'm also simply witnessing life sometimes and that some
days, being witness to the day is enough.
It's
a fine balance, though, this yin and yang of being alive. I find
myself exploring that balance all over again this season. In September, I told my friend
that plenty of my career's woes could have been solved if I had only
kept
on the paths I started down in my twenties. Instead, in
self-consciousness and fear, I dropped off a few dreams at the curb.
I'm circling back now to pick them up. Maybe that is how it
should be: is there any way to get to today's understandings, clear and
true, without the long embarrassing road that leads us to them?
Still,
when I think ahead to the grandmother I want to be someday, the words I
say to my still youngish self are: Keep Going. You don't have to know what
you are doing or how it is going to end. You just have to keep
going. You can do it. One foot in front of the other. One word after
the next.
And with that, like a baptism or an omen, I just
spilled coffee all down my front. Motherhood has made a klutz out of
me. Samantha sleeps across the room in her swing, a contraption I will
keep until she turns eighteen, and still my hands cannot be trusted, as
though they prepare me for our toddler days ahead, when the house will
get wrecked and the one smashing dishes on the stone floor of the
kitchen will be a blameless, toothless one.
With ink on my hands and a heart on my sleeve,
XX,
Kara
