Read Elsewhere: Overwhelmed

From the book Blue Mind by Wallace J. Nichols:

Too many of us live overwhelmed -- suffocated by work, personal conflicts, the intrusion of technology and media. Trying to do everything, we end up stressed about almost anything. We check our voice mail at midnight, our e-mail at dawn, and spend the time in between bouncing from website to website, viral video to viral video. Perpetually exhausted, we make bad decisions at work, at home, on the playing field, and behind the wheel. We get flabby because we decide we don't have the time to take care of ourselves, a decision ratified by the fact that those "extra" hours are filled with e-mailing, doing reports, attending meetings, updating systems to stay current, repairing what's broken. We're constantly trying to quit one habit just to start another. We say the wrong things to people we love, and love the wrong things because expediency and proximity make it easier to embrace what's passing right in front of us. We make excuses about making excuses, but we still can't seem to stop the avalanche. All of this has a significant economic cost as "stress and its related comorbid diseases are responsible for a large proportion of disability worldwide."

Read Elsewhere: Anna Quindlen

From Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake by Anna Quindlen:

"Sometimes I tell my children - well, actually, frequently I tell my children - that the single most important decision they will make is not where to live, or what to do for a living, it's who they will marry. Part of this is the grandchild factor; I want mine to have two great parents if at all possible. But part is because the span of their years will be so marked by the life they build, day by day, in tandem with another."

Read Elsewhere: Benediction

"What if we said to our enemies: We are the most powerful nation on earth. We can destroy you. We can kill your children. We can make ruins of your cities and villages and when we're finished you won't even know how to look for the places where they used to be. We have the power to take away your water and to scorch your earth, to rob you of the very fundamentals of life. We can change the actual day into actual night. We can do all of these things to you. And more.

But what if we say, Listen: Instead of any of these, we are going to give willingly and generously to you. We are going to spend the great American national treasure and the will and the human lives that we would have spent on destruction, and instead we are going to turn them all toward creation. We'll mend your roads and highways, expand your schools, modernize your wells and water supplies, save your ancient artifacts and art and culture, preserve your temples and mosques. In fact, we are going to love you. And again we say, no matter what has gone before, no matter what you've done: We are going to love you. We have set our hearts to it."

Read Elsewhere: Half a Life

From Half a Life by Darin Strauss:

"I'm surprising myself by grinning now, just recalling this. There's a pleasant, weird vibe you get from remembering a moment of early closeness with someone, in the time before you realized this closeness was going to become your life."

*****

"I find it an amazing stroke of luck to be married to (her). To be a parent with (her). That's the meter you come up with, as you approach forty. If your relationship fills you with a sense of luck, you've chosen well."

*****

"Things don't go away. They become you. There is no end, as T.S. Eliot somewhere says, but addition: the trailing consequence of further days and hours. No freedom from the past, or from the future.

But we keep making our way, as we have to. We're all pretty much able to deal even with the worst that life can fire at us, if we simply admit that it is very difficult. I think that's the whole of the answer. We make our way, and effort and time give us cushion and dignity. And as we age, we're riding higher in the saddle, seeing more terrain.

So it's an epiphany after all. You have it in your hand the whole time."

Bread & Wine

One day in February, when the wind was whipping and the snow was falling and I felt nothing but a vague dread that winter was never, ever going to end, an advance copy of Shauna Niequist's new book, Bread & Wine, landed on my front step. Ripping it out of its envelope, I knew even before I peeked inside that I would love it. First of all, I'd loved both of her previous books (Cold Tangerines and Bittersweet), and I read her blog avidly. But I also feel a small kinship with Niequist because of the many similarities we share: I live in Grand Rapids, where she once lived; she summers in South Haven, where I once lived; we both have one brother, husbands who love music, and two little kids; we've both run the Chicago Marathon; we both take plenty of Instagram photos of food, love summer, and read constantly. So it's no surprise that I loved Bread & Wine, too. The question is, will you love it?

I think you will. Bread & Wine is a collection of essays about a variety of topics, but I'd say it's mostly about relationships, community, travel, growth, God, courage, authenticity, and food. Niequist is especially interested in the way that food brings people together and nourishes them both physically and spiritually, so she's included a recipe at the end of almost every chapter. Think of a mash-up of Ina Garten, Molly Wizenberg, Anne Lamott, and Ruth Reichl, and you're getting an idea of the book. And though her writing is not as darkly funny as Lamott's and her foodie credentials are not as stellar as Garten's or Reichl's, what Shauna does have is the honest, encouraging voice of a neighbor or sister, whispering gently in your ear, Go ahead, just give this gather at the table thing a try.

I packed up Bread & Wine in my red suitcase and brought it to Jamaica, where I let its words wash over me when I woke up every morning to drink coffee on the balcony before the girls woke up. It was easy to breeze through each chapter, folding down the corners on the pages that spoke to me. A few of my favorite passages:

On travel and adventure: "We travel because I want my kids to learn, as I learned, that there are a million ways to live, a million ways to eat, a million ways to dress and speak and view the world. I want them to know that "our way" isn't the right way, but just one way, that children all over the world, no matter how different they seem, are just like the children in our neighborhood - they love to play, to discover, to learn."

On perfection: "What people are craving isn't perfection. People aren't longing to be impressed; they're longing to feel like they're home. If you create a space full of love and character and creativity and soul, they'll take off their shoes and curl up with gratitude and rest, no matter how small, no matter how undone, no matter how odd."

On taking a stand against Christmas madness: "The irony, of course, must not be lost on us: a season that is, at its heart, a love story - a story about faith and fragility, angels, a baby, a star - that sweet, simply beautiful story gets lost so easily in a jarring, toxic tangle of sugar and shopping bags and rushing and parking lots and expectations." This chapter, in particular resonated with me so much and reminded me of an old blog post I wrote called This is My Introverted Christmas Wish, though Shauna does a wonderful job of advising readers just how to let go of those expectations and live in the present moment more simply.

It's one thing, of course, to read encouraging words about food and community, nourishment and courage when you're on a balmy balcony in Jamaica to celebrate your brother's wedding. It's quite another to put those principles into practice when you return, it's March in Michigan, and it's still snowing and blowing. But Bread & Wine made me want to do just that.

In the weeks after I read it, I found myself returning to it again and again - this time for the recipes. In short order, I made Real Simple Cassoulet and Annette's Enchiladas, both of which are perfect for weeknight family dinners, and both of which were delicious and comforting. They've won spots in our usual rotation, for sure.

Next, my eight-year-old daughter wanted to celebrate her half-birthday. It fell on a busy school night, but, encouraged by Shauna's reminders to mark occasions big and small, I decided we could make the Simplest Dark Chocolate Mousse. It was indeed simple enough for my daughter to make with almost no help from me, resulting in a dense, rich dessert that reminded me more of my favorite pudding at Marie Catrib's here in Grand Rapids than any other dessert I've tried. No matter what you call it - mousse, pudding - it brightened up a certain March day for our family.

Then last week, I had the chance to really practice the gospel Shauna's preaching. It was our street's annual progressive dinner, and I was paired up with a neighbor I don't know very well for the soup and salad course. We've lived on this little block of older houses squished pretty close together for over six years now, and our winter progressive dinner is a tradition I cherish. It's a chance for us to gather during the darkest, coldest days of the year, when otherwise we're running as quickly as possible from our cars to our houses. I reached out to Emily: would she be interested in making a soup from Bread & Wine if I made a salad? She was. So last Saturday, I made the Green Well Harvest Salad and brought it down to Emily's house just before 6:00 p.m. Though we've watched our kids run through sprinklers together in my front yard in the summer and I often see her walking her dog, Olive, as I head out for my run, I'd never been inside her house. We talked about the story behind the beautiful painting in her dining room, about our children's hand washing techniques, about the way the soup tasted great but looked just the tiniest bit like vomit, and we made a hasty plan to ladle it into bowls and garnish it ourselves before serving it to the guests. (It worked: topped with bits of prosciutto, chives, Parmesan, and balsamic, it just looked like Winter White Bean Soup, not vomit-y at all.) Both soup and salad, I should add, were delicious, and our group of eighteen neighbors devoured both recipes completely.

Last Saturday reminded me that there's something irreplaceable about gathering in our homes to eat the food we enjoy with the people we enjoy. Shauna's gift is in making her readers feel simultaneously more vulnerable and more confident about doing just that. She reminds us that there is magic in opening our doors to let the world see our messy kitchen, that there is just as much connection to be found eating pizza on the floor as there is in candlelit dinner parties. She makes you want to be more generous with your invitations, more inclined to break out the champagne flutes for a friend's good news. She  gives you permission to feel less anxious about the dust bunnies in the corner, less worried about making everything perfect.

"This is what I want you to do: I want you to tell someone you love them, and dinner's at six. I want you to throw open your front door and welcome the people you love into the inevitable mess with hugs and laughter. I want you to light a burner on the stove, to chop and stir and season with love and abandon. Begin with an onion and a drizzle of olive oil, and go from there, any one of a million different places, any one of a million different meals.

Gather the people you love around your table and feed them with love and honesty and creativity. Feed them with your hands and the flavors and smells that remind you of home and beauty and the best stories you've ever heard, the best stories you've ever lived."

This book, Bread & Wine, will make you want to be a person who throws open the front door, who shares a meal with a neighbor, who pours wine and stays up too late talking around the kitchen table. It will make you remember what's important. It will make you hungry.

Read Elsewhere: The End of Your Life Book Club

Excerpts from The End of Your Life Book Club by Will Schwalbe:

"We found ourselves discussing the three kinds of fateful choices that exist in the . . . books: the ones characters make knowing that they can never be undone; the ones they make thinking they can but learn they can't; and the ones they make thinking they can't and only later come to understand, when it's too late, when "nothing can be undone," that they could have.

Mom had always taught all of us to examine decisions by reversibility - that is, to hedge our bets. When you couldn't decide between two things, she suggested you choose the one that allowed you to change course if necessary. Not the road less traveled but the road with the exit ramp. I think that's why we had all moved, at different times in our lives, to various foreign lands without giving much thought to it. If you stayed at home, you might not get the opportunity to go to that place again. But if you went, you could always come back."

*****

"No one in the family has ever gotten over (his) death. We talk of him daily, recounting stories and imagining what his reactions would be to new books and recent events. He remains for my family the perfect model of how you can be gone but ever present in the lives of people who loved you, in the same way that your favorite books stay with you for your entire life, no matter how long it's been since you turned the last page."

Read Elsewhere: How Children Succeed

I devoured Paul Tough's book, How Children Succeed, on vacation, dog-earing so many pages that it's clear I need to go ahead and return this copy to the library, then buy one for myself. Before I do, though, a few of my favorite excerpts:

"When we consider the impact of parenting on children, we tend to think that the dramatic effects are going to appear at one end or the other of the parenting-quality spectrum. A child who is physically abused is going to fare far worse, we assume, than a child who is simply ignored or discouraged. And the child of a supermom who gets lots of extra tutoring and one-on-one support is going to do way better than an average well-loved child. But what Blair's and Evans's research suggests is that regular good parenting - being helpful and attentive during a game of Jenga - can make a profound difference for a child's future prospects."

"The most critical missing piece, Randolph explained, is character. 'Whether it's the pioneer in the Conestoga wagon or someone coming here in the 1920s from southern Italy, there was always the idea in America that if you worked hard and you showed real grit, that you could be successful,' he said. 'Strangely, we've now forgotten that. People who have an easy time of things, who get eight hundreds on their SATs, I worry that those people get feedback that everything they're doing is great. And I think as a result, we are actually setting them up for long-term failure. When that person suddenly has to face up to a difficult moment, then I think they're screwed, to be honest. I don't think they've grown the capacities to be able to handle that.'"

"It is a central paradox of contemporary parenting, in fact: we have an acute, almost biological impulse to provide for our children, to give them everything they want and need, to protect them from dangers and discomforts both large and small. And yet we know - one some level, at least - that what kids need more than anything is a little hardship: some challenge, some deprivation that they can overcome, even if just to prove to themselves that they can. As a parent, you struggle with these thorny questions every day, and if you make the right call even half the time, you're lucky."

Read Elsewhere: Reading, Morality, Stories, Happiness and Bravery

From an interview with George Saunders, who I heard today on NPR:

Let me close by saying, from the perspective of someone with two grown and wonderful kids, that your instincts as parents are correct: a minute spent reading to your kids now will repay itself a million-fold later, not only because they love you for reading to them, but also because, years later, when they’re miles away, those quiet evenings, when you were tucked in with them, everything quiet but the sound of the page-turns, will seem to you, I promise, sacred. — George Saunders

*****

From "The Velveteen Rabbit," which I've been reading to Jemma: 

"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become real."
"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."
"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?"
"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very happy. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."

*****
The girls watch this almost every morning:

"Scared is scared of the things you like."

*****
From momastery.com:

When I started writing, my children were babies and Craig and I were new to marriage and all my stories were their stories and all their stories were mine. We all overlapped. But now my babies are growing up. They’re becoming their own little people with their own secrets and dreams and ideas that belong to them and them alone. They have their own decisions and mistakes and plans to make. And they need their mama to be a safe person to live in front of, knowing that she values their experiences as more than a series of anecdotes. I want to respect their stories as their stories. I want to teach my kids that each human being has a story as brutal and beautiful and sacred as the next, and so we don’t tell others’ stories unless we’re asked to.

*****

From The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt:

When I began writing The Happiness Hypothesis, I believed that happiness came from within, as Buddha and the Stoic philosophers said thousands of years ago. You'll never make the world conform to your wishes, so focus on changing yourself and your desires. But by the time I finished writing, I had changed my mind: Happiness comes from between. It comes from getting the right relationships between yourself and others, yourself and your world, and yourself and something larger than yourself.

Read Elsewhere: Parenting Perspectives

From Sundry:

I remember feeling this great crashing wave of never wanting to take a moment with my children for granted ever again, that if they were healthy and happy that’s all that mattered in the entire world. And then I remember being intensely irritated with Riley all of half an hour later, as he pickily hemmed and hawed over the little box of toys that the X-ray lady offered him as a prize for holding still during the scan. “Hurry up,” I hissed at him, mortified at his greediness.

I don’t really have a point here, other than I was thinking about perspective lately, and how slippery it is to hold onto. I bitched and moaned mightily about how long this winter break from school has been, then I blinked back tears as Riley climbed on the bus this morning. Last night I couldn’t wait for the kids to go to bed, then I sat on the couch and read someone’s blog post about their children approaching the teen years and how hard things are getting, and I ran back into my boys’ bedrooms to kiss their confused, sleepy faces. And on it goes — I have a thousand examples. Christ, a BILLION. I’m sure you do too.

It’s sort of ridiculous, isn’t it? How parenting so often makes you feel as though you’re not feeling the right thing at the right time.

From John Dickerson at Slate.com:

He is receding. He is still sweet, clever, and kind, but that impossibly large body I stand over while he sleeps is a different busier kid. This is natural of course, but in my reaction to it, I’m flirting with becoming that tiresome guy you meet at weddings. He’s the guy that goes on about how quickly children grow up. No couple with kids is safe from his instruction: Cherish every moment with your children.

This lament is natural, but not helpful because, unless you are a total brute, the sense of loss is inevitable, no matter what kind of parent you are. If you neglect your kids, you look up and they have grown and you've missed it. If you are fully present in their lives, then when they’ve grown you lament the hole they’ve left in your life. Either way, you've done your job and now they're off backpacking out of cellphone range or making girls with unruly hair laugh in coffee shops.

The answer has to be avoiding the lament and focusing on the product. Try to give your kids the benefit of your experience, love, and discipline—so that they can leave you strong. This also means giving them the example of what it looks like to enjoy your job so much that sometimes it takes you away from them. You hope they’ll have a job like that one day too. There’s got to be a way for the guy at the weddings to say something more like this to new parents. It would be more helpful. Still: I’m pretty much that guy.

From Swistle:

I've read a lot of stuff, mostly written in metallic script on greeting cards, about how much children TEACH us. Perhaps my own children are somewhat stupider than the standard-issue child, and that is why so far I don't feel they've taught me anything---and in fact, I have to spend a lot of time explaining things to them that seem really obvious, such as "This is why we don't throw a rubber band ball at the window" and "Are you serious, scraping a FORK into the TABLE??" But what I HAVE noticed is that I teach MYSELF things as a RESULT of having children---and perhaps that's what people mean to say but their children haven't yet finished teaching them how to articulate their thoughts clearly.

Read Elsewhere: Three Poems by Wendell Berry

"The seed is in the ground.
Now may we rest in hope
While darkness does its work."

*

"No, no, there is no going back.
Less and less you are
that possibility you were.
More and more you have become
those lives and deaths
that have belonged to you.
You have become a sort of grave
containing much that was
and is no more in time, beloved
then, now, and always.
And so you have become a sort of tree
standing over a grave.
Now more than ever you can be
generous toward each day
that comes, young, to disappear
forever, and yet remain
unaging in the mind.
Every day you have less reason
not to give yourself away."

*

"Finally will it not be enough,
after much living, after
much love, after much dying
of those you have loved,
to sit on the porch near sundown
with your eyes simply open,
watching the wind shape the clouds
into the shapes of clouds?

Even then you will remember
the history of love, shaped
in the shapes of flesh, ever-changing
as the clouds that pass, the blessed
yearning of body for body,
unending light.
You will remember, watching
the clouds, the future of love."

From A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997 by Wendell Berry

Read Elsewhere: Abundance

From the book Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler:

"When people say we have an information-based economy, what they really mean is that what we have figured out is how to exchange information. Information is our latest, our brightest, commodity. 'In a world of material good and material exchange, trade is a zero-sum game,' says inventor Dean Kamen. 'I've got a hunk of gold and you have a watch. If we trade, then I have a watch and you have a hunk of gold. But if you have an idea and I have an idea, and we exchange them, then we both have two ideas. It's nonzero.'"

****

"Our new cooperative capabilities have given individuals the ability to understand and affect global issues as never before, changing both their sphere of caring and their sphere of influence by orders of magnitude. NYU professor of communication Clay Shirky uses the term 'cognitive surplus' to describe this process. He defines it as 'the ability of the world's population to volunteer and to contribute and collaborate on large, sometimes global, projects.'

'Wikipedia took one hundred million hours of volunteer time to create,' says Shirky. 'How do we measure this relative to other uses of time? Well, TV watching, which is the largest use of time, takes two hundred billion hours every year - in the US alone. To put this in perspective, we spend a Wikipedia worth of time every weekend in the US watching advertisements alone. If we were to forgo our television addiction for just one year, the world would have over a trillion hours of cognitive surplus to commit to share projects.' Imagine what we could do for the world's grand challenges with a trillion hours of focused attention."

Read Elsewhere: Lovers Vs. Fighters; They Grow Up; Cell Phones

A smattering of interesting tidbits seen and heard lately:

:: From "I'm a Lover, Not a Fighter" by Shauna Niequist:

"I know that controversy is currency. But I think it’s worth asking about who you’re taking down, in the hopes that your snark and wit will go viral. I think it's worth asking about what happens over time to your insides when you decide to be a hater, when you decide to be the police of the internet, crusading for something or other.

There are enough haters. There always will be.

And right at the same time, there will always be enough beauty, enough hope, enough good, if we decide to be people who are always on the lookout for it. I want to use my voice to bring light and hope and beauty. I want to search for what’s good, and shout about that.

When I get all wound up--when someone trashes someone I love and I want to get into the fight, when I disagree so vehemently that I want to use all caps to illustrate my point, when someone's political views make me insane, I remember my rule, that I've committed to love, to being a voice for love and goodness.

It's especially hard work during election season, but if we're going to make it through the fall with relationships intact, maybe we should all think about being lovers instead of fighters."

:: From All & Sundry's "It All Vanishes:"

"I finished Rick Bragg’s The Prince of Frogtown last night. It’s a memoir inspired by Bragg’s relationship with his ten-year-old stepson, and towards the end, he writes,

The little boy started to fade, just like we left him in the sun too long. (…) He had been a ragamuffin, hurled into space by the seat of his pants. Suddenly, he shopped for shirts, and worried about his hair. He got too heavy to throw. (…) He turned twelve, then thirteen, and then the little boy just disappeared.

Just when you start to get used to it, to not minding it so much, it all vanishes, and the little boy you launched in the air stands at your shoulders like a man, and when you turn to say something you find yourself looking right into his eyes.He is not helpless, not needy.He is everything I rushed him to be.

Do you know how sometimes you read something, and it’s like the air in the room grows heavy? Like something you can touch, like you’re held fast by the words. I felt that way, last night. My god."

:: Moosh In Indy's "She Said: Kids and Cell Phones:"

"Oh, our generation is going to be a rich one when it comes to such arguments. Gone are the “I walked uphill to school both ways in six feet of snow with no shoes” arguments and here are the  “I made it to a job interview without google maps, turn by turn directions or a phone in my pocket, in my day, if we told someone we were going to be somewhere, WE SHOWED UP!”"

Read Elsewhere: 180 Things to Be Happy About

Spied over at Mighty Girl, this list is bound to make you happy. It strikes me how many of these happy "things" are actually very cheap or free and very tactile, sensory, everyday pleasures. I'm inspired to cram a bit more happiness into this last week of summer vacation.

http://mightygirl.com/2012/08/23/90-things-to-make-you-happy/

Read Elsewhere: Fiction

From Keith Ridgway in The New Yorker:

And I mean that—everything is fiction. When you tell yourself the story of your life, the story of your day, you edit and rewrite and weave a narrative out of a collection of random experiences and events. Your conversations are fiction. Your friends and loved ones—they are characters you have created. And your arguments with them are like meetings with an editor—please, they beseech you, you beseech them, rewrite me. You have a perception of the way things are, and you impose it on your memory, and in this way you think, in the same way that I think, that you are living something that is describable. When of course, what we actually live, what we actually experience—with our senses and our nerves—is a vast, absurd, beautiful, ridiculous chaos.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/08/everything-is-fiction.html#ixzz23ZbASKsr

Read Elsewhere: God

From Ann Napolitano's A Good Hard Look:

"If Flannery had been able to speak, she could have said, I disagree with you. I disagree with where we're going and why we're here. She could have said, I believe that God is present everywhere - in every tree, person, and pebble - whereas you and the other ladies on this tour believe that God tends to spend his time in churches, especially the nicer, older churches with Renaissance art. She could have said, I put no stock in solicited miracles. The idea that someone can line up to bathe in a particular bathtub and expect God's healing seems a bit like putting a quarter in a pinball machine and expecting the same. God is not here to be demanded of, begged from, or criticized. He hands out burdens to those who are strong enough to carry them, and I feel profoundly uncomfortable with the idea of lining up with the other invalids and asking for mine to be alleviated."

Read Elsewhere: What To Do

Anne Lamott, on Facebook, in response to the senseless violence in a movie theater in Colorado:

All I can think to do is what we've always done. We work towards peace and non-violence. We register voters. We create art and music in the face of madness. We light candles. The praying people pray: Lord have mercy. The meditating people meditate. We create Love and beauty as radical acts. We take care of the poor, and teach people to read and write. 

Read Elsewhere: More About Extra-Curricular Craziness

From Mitten Strings for God by Katrina Kenison (It's like she time-traveled, read my last blog post, and then returned to 2000 to write these words!):

Is this what we mean today by family life? Is it really the way any of us want to live? I think not. Why, then, do we try to do so much? Why, as one friend put it ruefully, are we "dervishing through life"? And why do we allow our children to fall victim to the same kind of over scheduling that keeps us from enjoying our own lives? I am convinced that one reason we try to do so much is because we are afraid.

What if my son falls behind his tennis-playing peers? How can I show the world I am a good bother if I don't volunteer at school? What will people think if I don't appear at that party? What will we be missing if we stay home? There is fear behind all this frenzy, fear that we, or our children, will somehow fail to measure up. But just whose expectations are we trying so hard to meet?

These days I find myself pondering another question: What do I lose when I try to do too much? The answer is simple: Balance. For me there is nothing worse than the feeling that a day has flown by without any moments of real connection between me and my husband, me and my children, me and my own inner self. Yet how easily that happens. We want so much to do for our children, to give them every opportunity to learn and grow and succeed. At the same time, we want to live our own lives fully, to be productive and creative and useful. Sometimes, though, we lose touch with our need to feed our inner lives and with our need for solitude, silence, and time together. 

Surely there is no one raising children today who has not paused at times to wonder: In our efforts to provide for our children, are we losing sight of what is really most important? Have our activities crowded out the kind of simple, spontaneous moments that truly make life worth living? Each and every child I know could use more of these. We adults need them, too . . .

 . . . Like all mothers, I harbor dreams for my children, and sometimes I fall under the spell of my own aspirations for them. We want our children to do well! But when I stop and think about what I truly want for them, I know that it is not material wealth or academic brilliance or athletic prowess. My deeper hope is that each of my sons will be able to see the sacred in the ordinary; that they, too, will grow up knowing how to "love the dailiness."

From Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety by Judith Warner:

The Mommy Mystique tells us that we are the luckiest women int he world - the freest, with the most choices, the broadest horizons, the best luck, and the most wealth. It says we have the knowledge and know-how to make 'informed decisions' that will guarantee the successful course of our children's lives. It tells us that if we choose badly our children will fall prey to countless dangers - from insecure attachment to drugs to kidnapping to a third-rate college. And if this happens, if our children stray from the path toward happiness and success, we'll have no one but ourselves to blame . . . We are convinced that every decision we make, every detail we control, is incredibly important.

Entire towns turn themselves inside out for a spot in the right ballet class. Parents prostitute their souls for spots in private schools. We read about how our children can't get into good colleges unless they are superhuman. We know that our public school systems ca't provide an education in superhumanness (much less basic well-roundedness, in many places). Without a good education our children won't be able to get jobs, won't be able to buy a house or have the middle-class existence our parents seemed to find easy but that we can barely sustain. Ergo: soccer and violin and public service and weekends of baseball practice become vitally important because if we don't do everything right for our children, they may be consigned, down the line, to failure.

Read Elsewhere: Faith, Parenting, Imperfection, Story

From The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides:

"Everyone he knew was convinced that religion was a sham and God a fiction. But his friends' replacements for religion didn't look too impressive. No one had an answer for the riddle of existence. It was like that Talking Heads song. "And you may ask yourself, 'How did I get here?' . . . And you may tell yourself, 'This is not my beautiful house. And you may tell yourself, 'This is not my beautiful wife.'" As he responded to the essay questions, Mitchell kept bending his answers toward their practical application. He wanted to know why he was here, and how to live."

 *****

"As he took in the marvelous sights, the dusty Polo Grounds, the holy cows with their painted horns, he had got in the habit of walking around Calcutta in the presence of God. Furthermore, it seemed to Mitchell that this didn't have to be a difficult thing. It was something every child knew how to do, maintain a direct and full connection with the world. Somehow you forgot about it as you grew up, and had to learn it again."

From Blue Nights by Joan Didion:

"On this question of fear.

When I began writing these pages I believed their subject to be children, the ones we have and the ones we wish we had, the ways in which we depend on our children to depend on us, the ways in which we encourage them to remain children, the ways in which they remain more unknown to us than they do to their most casual acquaintances; the ways in which we remain equally opaque to them. . . . As the pages progressed it occurred to me that their actual subject was not children after all, at least not children per se, at least not children qua children: their actual subject was this refusal even to engage in such contemplation, this failure to confront the certainties of aging, illness, death.

This fear. 

Once she was born I was never not afraid."

*****

"I do not know many people who think they have succeeded as parents. Those who do tend to cite the markers that indicate (their own) status in the world: the Stanford degree, the Harvard MBA, the summer with the white-shoe law firm. Those of us less inclined to compliment ourselves on our parenting skills, in other words most of us, recite rosaries of our failures, our neglects, our derelictions and delinquencies. The very definition of success as a parent has undergone a telling transformation: we used to define success as the ability to encourage the child to grow into independent (which is to say adult) life, to "raise" the child, to let the child go. If a child wanted to try out his or her new bicycle on the steepest hill in the neighborhood, there may have been a pro forma reminder that the steepest hill in the neighborhood descended into a four-way intersection, but such a reminder, because independence was still seen as the desired end of the day, stopped short of nagging. If a child elected to indulge in activity that could end badly, such negative possibilities may have gotten mentioned once, but not twice."

*****

"What I have memorized is my child's face at different points in her life."

From the blog Superhero Journal:

"The ways that you are imperfect allow people to connect to you and love you even more." 

From Seth Godin's blog:

 A true story

Of course, that's impossible.
There's no such thing as a true story. As soon as you start telling a story, making it relevant and interesting to me, hooking it into my worldviews and generating emotions and memories, it ceases to be true, at least if we define true as the whole truth, every possible fact, non-localized and regardless of culture.

Since you're going to tell a story, you might as well get good at it, focus on it and tell it in a way that you're proud of. 

 

 

 

 

Read Elsewhere: Books, Human Nature, Weight, Appearances

"I think, consciously or not, what we readers do each time we open a book is to set off on a search for authenticity. We want to get closer to the heart of things, and sometimes even a few good sentences contained in an otherwise unexceptional book can crystallize vague feelings, fleeting physical sensations, or, sometimes, profound epiphanies." - Maureen Corrigan, Leave me Alone, I'm Reading


"Most Asian cultures see human beings as innately good, born perfect but then pulled off course by false beliefs, unfounded fears, and other delusions. The Judeo-Christian tradition that undergirds Western philosophy sees humans as innately imperfect, born with all sorts of problems (original sin, carnal nature, ignorance of God's laws) that must be rectified and controlled if we are to become worthy. From a Western perspective, setting the original self free is shocking and dangerous: 'Why, if we just act from a place of freedom, we'll all be pillaging and looting by nightfall.' In Asian psychology, pillaging and looting (etc., etc.) come from a place of delusion, from imagining ourselves as separate from others, so that our welfare and theirs are disconnected." - Martha Beck, Steering by Starlight

"Nevertheless, she is six years old, and she is so far below the average weight for her height that the pediatrician mentions it at each visit, and she doesn't want to gain weight. She's mentioned this a few times recently, but I've ignored it because I didn't want to draw a lot of attention to it---or more truthfully, because I didn't know what to say. This time I asked soooooo casually if the other girls at school talk about gaining weight. She said no. I asked if anyone else had mentioned it. She said no. I asked why she said she didn't want to gain weight, and she laughed nervously and said, well, she meant she didn't want to gain TOO MUCH weight.

I didn't pursue it any further. There isn't any point. It's not as if it's possible to rear a daughter who doesn't understand that this society expects her to be thin. I'd been hoping, though, for a longer time before she understood it." - Swistle, writing "Weight and Daughters" at the blog Swistle

"None of us lead the lives our appearance suggests. We each lie in bed at night with our personal terrors as to what life could be, or about what life is like right now, and whether we have the strength to get through it. Clothes and money rarely can make that go away." - Deborah L. Jacobs, in Forbes Magazine

Read Elsewhere: If Motherhood Were School

"I barely make it most days. By the skin of my teeth, I pass. All my life I made straight A's but this mother thing. It's not something I want to just scrape by... and I feel like the gap is closing, what's shaping their behavior, and memories, and when they'll catch on." - from Adventures in Babywearing