Low Ebb

Not feeling wonderful this evening.  The knee hurts again, almost as badly as it did in late May when I started all of this exercise madness.  It has been hurting since I ran the 5K on Sunday, and today it was probably a bit worse, not better.  I've been taking it easy since the race, walking, biking or swimming (no running).  But the knee hurts every time I take a step, almost.

I still have 30 stories to edit, and still feel as if my writing is horrible.  

I've been spending a lot of time at my son's school...tomorrow I have two more 45-minute volunteer duties to fulfill.  Really cuts into the writing time.  

Very tired...didn't sleep well last night, which contributes to my overall decrepit and demoralized state.  

Tomorrow morning I will be in my son's class reading a book to the kids, then we'll discuss it by acting out little skits and asking the kids how they should be interpreted.  Doing it with three other parent volunteers, all of whom have been great to work with.  It should be fun; but I am so dispirited that I can't work up much enthusiasm about it...better just go to bed.  

Editing Part 2

Sick of editing now.  Have about thirty more stories to plow through.  Which means I've read about eighty of these short-short stories; my writing seems completely banal and worthless to me right now...I wonder why I can't come up with more colorful expressions and metaphors, though part of my plan was to write in such a way that the writing does not call attention to itself.  Maybe I went too far in the plain-speak direction...

But this is the problem of spending a lot of time with my own writing; the inner critic starts screaming at me...to the point where I can't even think clearly.

Days Like This

Action-packed day, for my son and for his school.  Did two volunteer assignments related to the school garden; also, my son's teacher visited the house--she does one home visit for all of her students whose parents are okay with that--and it took about three hours to clean and organize the house.  This week will be like that, full of school duties, although Tuesday (tomorrow), Wednesday and Friday, I should be able to devote at least part of the day to writing.

I should repeat that:  my son's teacher is scheduling home visits with all of her students whose parents agree to it.  This is so unusual that every time I mention it to parents whose children are in other teachers' classes,  their jaws drop.  The only time I've heard of this practice is in Farmer Boy, the book by Laura Ingalls Wilder, which is set in the mid-19th century.

My son's teacher just wants to get to know her kids better.  "I had no idea he was so into dinosaurs!" she exclaimed while she was here.  The visit was short, around thirty minutes; but what a wonderful idea, and what a lucky kid my son is this year...except for one thing:  she's also pregnant and is expecting in late February.  She will only be his teacher for another four months at the most.

And this also happened to my son last year; his teacher left in March to have a baby.

I don't know what effect this will have on him this year; maybe he's come to expect it, so he won't even be bothered by it.  It all depends on the substitute teacher...I was upset when I heard it was happening again, but what can I do?  We'll just have to make the best of it...

Seven years ago, when she found out I was pregnant, my mother--already quite sick with lung cancer at the time--shook her head and looked sad.  I'd recently finished grad school, finally, and she was hoping to see me launch my "brilliant" academic career (one that I didn't want), with few or no impediments--"You'll see," she said ominously.  "You'll see how much work it is to raise a child."

She knew there would be days like today...days when career pursuits are completely subsumed by  parenting duties.

Again, what can I do?  It was, actually, a wonderful day.  My son's teacher took the time to come to our house, just to get to know him better.  It's hard to believe it actually happened.

We Don't Need to Figure It All Out (Damn It)

Re:  my post yesterday, there is so much advice about parenting nowadays, about what we must do, what we must not do, how we're ruining our kids, how we are making their lives too easy/too hard/too fast/too slow/too traumatic/too boring etc. etc. etc...

But the truth is that we can only listen to so much advice before we start to go mad.  The mood of yesterday's post was a little bit crazy--the underlying tone of it was "I've got to figure everything out"--but why?

Should I listen to Jerry Seinfeld, and let go a little where my six-year-old is concerned?  Yes--but I'm already doing that, by pursuing a writing/videography career and training for a triathlon.  I don't need to stress so much about this.

For one thing, there are side benefits for our children, when we passionately pursue our own interests.  I'm thinking now of what happened today--I ran a 5K race which also included a 5K walk.  My son did the walk with his dad, and I did the race, and when I won a prize (no big deal--the competition in my gender/age group was very slow) my son looked at it and said, "I want to win a prize."  A seed was planted.  We told him he might win a prize if he started running several days a week.  Maybe he will, maybe he won't, but at least he has some kind of visceral sense now of what's required.

We should pursue our own interests--without letting that substitute for an hour spent right beside our kids, of course, reading a book with them and playing a game.  All common sense stuff.  We shouldn't praise them to the skies for being able to run 25 meters, but we also shouldn't push them to do a 5K at age six if they don't have a strong desire to do it (and some degree of natural talent).

I don't need to figure it all out and I don't need to worry quite so much.

Trying Too Hard?

Jerry Seinfeld is, in his own way, leading a one-man campaign against over-parenting...just watch his new Internet show, "Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee."  He repeatedly brings up the idea that our parents never had much time for us, and that was okay--we turned out okay--and we don't need to coddle our kids and follow their every move and praise everything they do, and in fact by doing that, we're hurting them by not preparing them for the real world.

He has a point.  I rarely watched "Seinfeld," by the way...I must be one of the only people I know who never found it funny, except in very brief snatches ("The Soup Nazi" for instance, or Elaine's crazy dancing).  The self-absorption of the characters, the trivial issues that were being discussed--and more than anything, the feeling that the characters were two-dimensional, that they mostly served as props for the Main Joke, for whatever ridiculous situation was being played out--I just wasn't into it.

But I am absolutely nuts about "Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee."  And Seinfeld's views on parenting make sense to some degree...I think we're due for a paradigm shift where contemporary parenting is concerned, and of course, I'm not the only one. (Read the books All Joy and No Fun or Nurture Shock for some more thinking along the lines of "maybe helicopter parenting isn't the way to go").

On the other hand...I worry a lot about my son spending too much time on the iPad, and steer him towards other activities; I worry when he doesn't get enough exercise; I want him to have at least two or three play dates a week, because he's an only child and will be too much the boss of his own universe without those.  I volunteer frequently at his school.  I scheduled many different activities for him this summer, and took him to those.  My husband and I have very few date-evenings per year--three or four?--partly because my son still hates it when one of us isn't there to put him to bed.

So--in a sense, I do hover.  I have a lot of time for my son.

Am I trying too hard?

Going Too Far?

One of my short-short stories describes a moment of cruelty towards a child, and how a bystander deals with it.  I feel troubled by the story...almost feel like I should get rid of it.

I wanted to describe an event where the level of cruelty is ambiguous...did the abuse really happen or not?  We've all had those experiences, in a park, at a rest stop, in some other public place, where a parent, grandparent, adult figure, is borderline-abusing a child, and we're not sure what to do.  We want to respect privacy, and we want to protect children.

When we were living in San Francisco, we lived next door to a woman who started running a "daycare center" in her one-room apartment.  Up to twelve children were being kept in a room where the useable space was about ten by fourteen feet; there was also a patio where the "play area" was just miniscule--about the same size as the room.  And we lived on a steep San Francisco hill--there were no parks within a safe walking distance.

We called child protective services for San Francisco, and they cited this woman, basically shutting her down.  It's amazing that parents--most of them pretty wealthy, as this woman was also a part-time teacher at an elite private school--would willingly allow their children to be kept at such a place for up to eight hours.  Working parents are backed into corners sometimes, I realize; but this daycare just defied common sense and common decency.

In my short-short story, the woman witnessing the event acts immediately; but the result of her actions is unclear, and the image of the child being abused haunts her for the rest of her life.  I also wanted to indicate, in this story, how quickly we can be scarred by random events.

There is no happy outcome in the story, or any resolution, period; and that's true for many of the stories.  I don't think there's anything wrong with a lack of resolution...but it's more unsettling than usual in this case because of the subject matter.

But what can I do?  If I didn't write the occasional story that made me uncomfortable, I'm probably not doing it right.

Editing

...is not the sexiest of topics.

I enjoy editing, which at its best is a process not so much of re-writing, but of cutting away the fat...but that means, recognizing the difference between good and bad fat.  And sometimes what looks like bad fat is actually vital connective tissue.

At any rate, spent most of the day editing the short-shorts.

One surprising aspect of the writing process:  sometimes you toss something off in fifteen minutes, and ten years later, it still resonates.  Sometimes you labor intensively for a couple months, and all you have in the end is an overwritten, useless, smelly piece of @#$#@#$.

But it's also true that without a lot of "useless" laboring, it's almost impossible to get to the point where you can toss something off, something pretty good.  It's like the famous story of the zen priest who stared at a wall for seven years, then picked up a brush and in three seconds, drew a perfect crab.

Of course the punch line of that joke would be: "Then another priest comes along and says, 'After seven years, you couldn't come up with something more useful than that?  You better go back to meditating!'"

Fiction in the Teens

I don't like most of the novels I have read in recent years.  My husband thinks I'm overly severe on contemporary fiction, but I just find very little to cheer about.  

I sometimes think that we're going to see an enormous upheaval in art soon, similar to what was experienced in the 1910s and 20s in Europe.  

When I read something like Infinite Jest I feel like things are just going from bad to worse.  But this effort to craft the cleverest sentence is bound to implode; and once it does, maybe then people will shake themselves free of the workshops and MFA programs.  People will move out into the fresh air again--to live, breathe, and write.  

Cat's Meow

Our cat woke me up at 5 a.m.  She has a habit now, stretching back several months, of waking me up at various early-morning hours with a cute little meow--she only uses it at this time of day, and it's very tender and loving, a little "Mraw?  Mraw?" from just outside the room...then she either comes in, purrs and jumps up on the bed next to me, or goes on to the guest bedroom to sleep.  It would melt my heart, if I weren't so damn exhausted and sleep-deprived...and getting more so, these days, because of her.  (Yes, occasionally I manage to go back to sleep despite this interruption, but much less often than I'd like.  My fortunate husband sleeps right through most of these incidents.)

When you're sleep-deprived, everything just starts to look bleak.  All your aspirations look ridiculous, you feel lonely no matter how many loving people are around you, and you feel like your body and mind are disintegrating.

On that happy note, time to start the day.

On the Ropes in Monterey

Just back from Monterey, which was beautiful today, 82 degrees or thereabouts and sunny; my son and I made a quick getaway yesterday because today (Monday) was a teacher learning day (no school).  We went whale-watching this morning.

We did the same thing last year, and on that trip we saw a massive amount of humpbacks, 30 at least, and many of them lunge-feeding, which means they stick their snouts high up out of the water to scoop up huge mouthfuls of fish, and they usually do it in a big circle and in unison, perhaps as a way of trapping the fish...often you see the sea lions jumping around in that same circle, feeding at will, just before the whales lunge up all around them.  We also had 15 or 20 dolphins swimming right alongside the boat for miles.  It was spectacular, and I'd heard reports of similar sightings this year. But today's trip involved about 10 humpbacks partially emerging then slowly diving about 200 feet from the boat, plus about seven dolphins.  I think my son got more out of it this year than last...and I found it moving, even if last year's sighting packed more of a wallop; the main problem this time was that I was just physically not there for at least half the journey.

I'm one of the least sea-worthy people I know.  I get seasick snorkeling; I get seasick almost every time I'm on a small or even medium-sized boat with any kind of wave action.  I did not get sick last year; this year, I bought us passes to the upper deck, which rocked violently back and forth every eight seconds or so.  I was physically ill for about an hour during the three-hour trip.

It's embarrassing to throw up on a boat full of people where there are few places to hide...luckily there were moments when everyone's gaze was directed towards the whales and I think I managed to do it discreetly enough (tucked away in far corners of the boat, or stumbling into the restroom) that almost no one was aware of me...and thank goodness they provided barf bags.

On top of all that, I was sick at eleven p.m. the night before, most likely because of my dinner (strange-tasting hamburger, odd-smelling quinoa side dish) at a Cannery Row restaurant.

At least my son had a blast.

Toxic Society

This article says so much about the state of our lives in the U.S.  Anyone with children can relate.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/20/opinion/sunday/a-toxic-work-world.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=opinion-c-col-left-region&region=opinion-c-col-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region&_r=0

I'm a stay-at-home mom--so, no problem with work-life balance, right?  Wrong.  Stay-at-home moms who have no help (or very little, a couple hours a week) with childcare and who feel obligated to volunteer at least a few hours a week at school, as I do, and who still hope to build a career, as I do, have a work-life balance problem.  They just do.

But I realize that in many ways, my situation is not that bad.  I can choose whether to volunteer at school, for one thing.  Many working mothers cannot make that choice.  I have enough of a financial cushion (for now) and my husband's job is secure enough (for now) that I can actually remain unemployed for the next year or so, and thus, hopefully, do the things necessary to build a meaningful career.  (But it feels like I will have to start rowing very quickly to get there.)

I feel for those mothers and fathers stuck in a miserable job that demands twelve or more hours a day, who come home exhausted, who feel guilty about not spending more time with their kids, who aren't making enough to do more than put food on the table and a few items of clothing on their children's backs...who are just barely hanging on...and that is, I realize, a large percentage of the American population.

We can look at the Syrian refugees, or poor families in underdeveloped countries, or people coping with severe disabilities who are also raising children, and think, "Well I have nothing to complain about."  On the other hand, stress is stress, and even a small level of daily stress, when experienced over several weeks or months or years, cannot be alleviated by saying, "Look at those people with nearly-lethal amounts of stress in their lives, and stop feeling so bad."

American life is toxic in many, many ways; the only thing to do is to work together to change it. Parents should band together, across all socioeconomic levels, to demand truly high-quality childcare and after-school care for all children; not places where thirty or forty kids are packed into a small room, and where it is noisy beyond belief; but places where ten or twelve kids are working on projects that are meaningful, and there are soft, clean cushions and sofas on which to relax and do nothing from time to time, and outside they have access to gardens and trees to sit under, and large playgrounds, and there are always at least two adults for every ten kids.  That's my idea of a good childcare or after-school environment, but I've literally never seen it.  We just don't value our kids enough, and, given our increasingly toxic work environments, we don't value ourselves enough either.

Mock Tri

I did a "Mock Tri" this morning, which involved swimming 32 laps in the pool, in a wetsuit, followed immediately by an 8-mile bike ride and a 5K jog.  The most annoying part of it was pulling off the wetsuit, goggles, swim caps and ear plugs, then drying off sufficiently enough to put on socks and shoes and a shirt and bike gloves and a bike helmet and sunglasses...the first transition.  (Why do they even include the transitions in the overall triathlon time?  Just give everyone four minutes to complete the first transition then two minutes to complete the second, and that's it, done, we're being tested solely on our athletic ability not on our organizational and dressing skills).

The best part was the feeling afterwards--it was the second time I've done this, and unlike the first time, I wasn't completely wasted, wasn't breathing like a horse after the Kentucky Derby, wasn't so tired I could hardly move for several minutes.

I am in danger of becoming one of those pumped-up, high-on-life people who are addicted to an intensely physical sporting event...how to make that side of my character compatible with the late-night-movie-watching, eat-ice-cream-and-drink-Jack-Daniels-just-for-the-hell-of-it, I-must-have-the-perfect-cappuccino-right-now side?

I don't know; they'll have to find a way to get along somehow.

Human Pinball Day

This was one of those days--weeks, really--when there are so many errands and mini-tasks to carry out, I start to feel like a human pinball.  It sets in the fifth time I have to leave the house on a quick shopping trip or to pick up the kid, or take him somewhere; or the eleventh time I have to run up the stairs to get something.  This rabbit-like activity is not at all conducive to writing; it defeats it, more often than not.

Writing requires:  a room (with a decent desk and chair and your favorite writing tool--or in desperate circumstances, at least the writing tool); an underlying boundless desire to write that never goes away, plus, at any given moment, a constant itch to write that one specific thing...and finally, time.  Wonderful, magnificent time.

I did manage to squeeze in about forty-five minutes of writing just before picking up my son from school.  Attacked a short-short story I'd begun months earlier--mashed it up, re-shaped it, started to feel the form of it, but also, doubted more and more that any of it was any good--and the time quickly vanished, leaving me with a half-chewed story on my hands and a sick feeling of my own ineptitude.

The fourth thing that writing requires, then, is a sort of zen-like sense of timelessness.  None of us has time, and yet, there is all the time in the world...hold those two thoughts in your head, and the explosive energy created will blast through the human-pinball mind (or "monkey mind" as others have phrased it), making way for the true writer's mind that cuts like a diamond, right to the heart of the matter.  That's the hope, anyway; I rarely achieve anything as wonderful as that.

Leedsichthys

I am not unhappy, of course, to have lived to the age of 50 without knowing what a Leedsichthys is. I don't think my ignorance about this "biggest fish that ever lived" has impacted my life all that much, after all...but I was surprised to stumble upon this animal in my son's dinosaur book; which then caused me to reflect on the depth of my ignorance on all sorts of subjects.

I hope to impart to my son how desperately important it is to soak up knowledge, at this point in his life...to be curious each and every day, to pack in as much learning as possible on a wide variety of subjects...

Right now his fascination is with dinosaurs and dragons and other scary creatures.  Not unlike many boys his age.  I try to nurture this interest; but now is the time to discover a huge range of animals, not just mythical and extinct ones...and to learn to draw dragons and dinosaurs, to the best of his ability...and to learn who first created images of dragons, and why, etc. etc.

I'll get off my high horse however, and just enjoy the idea of a fish that was about 45 feet long.

No Homework

"I am not a big fan of homework."

At Back to School Night tonight, my son's first grade teacher uttered these magic words...opening the door to a year of adventure and exploration for my son, who hated the homework assignments last year, after the first month had passed and the novelty had worn off.  Much of his kindergarten homework was mind-numbingly repetitive.  I had to coax, cajole and cry (almost) last year to get him to finish it every week.  It was the low point of the week for both of us.  But this year, maybe, he won't dread any part of school--well, maybe that's a little too much to ask...

As for my own homework, I wrote another story today...not sure if it's any good; found myself wandering into unfamiliar subject matter.  All of these stories commit the sin of having plots and central characters (they are predictable in that sense--Breton would not have approved), but I wanted them all to pivot around one crucial moment...in that sense they are more like splashes of feeling, rather than traditional stories.  The story I wrote today does pivot, but how gracefully?  Not sure.

Nadja and God

My son woke up saying he wanted to create an "owl simulator game" and because of a wonderful online resource for kids that teaches basic programming skills (or programming-type skills?), he was able to do so in about five minutes, before going to school...he's not a genius; it's just a very good tool that even a six-year-old can master in a short amount of time.

The not-so-wonderful part of the day was the fact that I spent almost all of my free time cleaning and shopping...did not write at all, except for this...and since I've signed up for about five different volunteering activities at school, my free time will diminish even more in the coming weeks...but to hell with it; this subject is dull and I won't continue it.

Am currently reading Nadja (because one of the characters in one of my stories is interested in surrealism--and because I needed something good to read), also the Bible (because I'd never read it straight through).

I have less patience for Breton's fascination with coincidences than I did when I read Nadja at twenty or thirty...but I love his sentences, twisting this way and that like an old alleyway in Paris (the kind that is hard to find in that city now thanks in part to Haussmann in the 19th century, but they definitely still exist in Montpellier and other cities in France).  I love the spirit of adventure and the sense of play, and almost everything about the book apart from the "like wow, this happened and then this happened" moments.

As for the Bible, I never knew just how violent it really is.  More on that some other time.

Short-short

I'm calling my stories "short-short stories," for lack of a better term...I need to find a better term.

"Flash fiction" has become a popular label for any story under three pages long, but I don't much like it.  It might be okay for a two-line poem, or Hemingway's shortest story ever (how does it go:  "For Sale:  baby shoes, never used."  Something like that).  But it's not great for a two-page story, which can't be read "in a flash."

Coffee stories?  (They can definitely be read in the time it takes the average person to drink a cup of coffee.)  But that would be too confusing, it sounds like "coffee table stories" which makes one think of coffee table books...actually I like coffee table books and think all books belong on coffee tables not bookshelves...but that's another subject.

I'd like to come up with a better term.  But for now..it's perhaps more urgent to come up with a title for the whole collection.  After finishing three more stories I will weed out the bad ones, edit them all one more time, then start sending them out.  So I need to have a better working title.

Escape

We've been absolutely blasted by heat this past week; today, Sunday, wasn't nearly so bad, and the coming week should be fantastic--mid to upper seventies.  The thermostat goes up again next Sunday, however...my son has Monday the 21st off for a "teacher learning day," and I'm taking advantage of that to head out of town with him next Sunday, just the two of us, for a quick trip to Monterey.  We'll keep cool and visit the beach, and also see various sea mammals on a tour of the bay.

Any mom knows how important it is to program little moments of escape into every day, every week, every month, every year.  Both for the mom's sanity, and for the sake of the children, who (usually) thrive on adventure.  My son, however, escapes into his iPad on an all-too-regular basis.  His reaction to the Monterey trip was lukewarm at best; I suspect he was wondering "Will I still have access to the iPad?"  

His iPad is becoming the thing from which we must escape.

Missiles and iPads

I would like my son to experience being in the wild for days on end...I would also like him to learn to exert himself, in whatever activity he strives to do well; exert himself to the point where he loses track of himself and of time.  I've gotten there sometimes when playing the piano, sometimes when writing.  That's what "wild" means to me, in any pursuit.  You lose track of yourself, yet you're in perfect control; you are the activity, at least for a short span of time.

I was going to write about missiles and iPads...

Today we visited the old Nike missile launch site, SF-88, out in the Marin Headlands.  It's the only restored Nike missile site in the country...and we stumbled upon the guided tour, purely by accident, and so were able to descend into the concrete bunker where the missiles are still stored.  It was a remarkable experience for my son, for each of us, in fact, to walk down that steep metal staircase and see those four white missiles, about twenty-five feet long and five feet wide.  Because he was one of only three children on the tour, our son was selected by the volunteer, a former missile site worker and Air Force veteran, to come forward and push one of the missiles a few feet down a track; then the crowd of about 40 tourists went back upstairs to see one of them hoisted up out of the ground and positioned so it was pointing about 85 degrees, almost straight up into the sky.

It was a strange site for me, as a participant in many anti-first-strike demonstrations in the 80s and early 90s, to see this old missile base.  They were planning to launch these Nike Hercules missiles, carrying a payload of about 1.2 kilotons of nuclear material, to blow up incoming Soviet bombers.  A remarkably crude Cold War defense tactic that, according to the Air Force veteran, worked, in the sense that World War III never occurred...it's chilling, however, when you read about how many false warnings and near-launches did occur during the Cold War.  Operating under the MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction) strategy can only succeed if each player is completely sane and never makes a single mistake.

The Air Force veteran and tour guide argued that MAD would not work today, because of ISIS and other terrorist groups...I would argue that we should not assume it would have continued to work indefinitely under the old system of the two superpowers...nor that it will continue to work today (we still have a simplified MAD system in place after all).  Also, the conflict between those superpowers helped give rise to some of the most corrupt, authoritarian political systems in the Middle East in the sixties and seventies.  I'm not saying that the MAD regime led directly to ISIS; it's obviously not as simple as that. My central point here is that we should never assume, in any situation, that all players will act rationally.  People go off the rails all the time.

What to do then?  First, be aware of what's happening...which brings me to iPads.

My son didn't want to go to the Nike Missile site.  We had just toured the Marine Mammal Center, about a mile away, and he thought it was time to go home.  "I hate Nike Missile sites," he announced. I told him we were going to the missile site anyway.  Once we were in the car (I'd wanted to hike over to the missile site from the Marine Mammal Center, but he would not) he asked for the iPad; I told him I didn't bring it.  "Could I have the iPhone?"

I understand the lure of the i-devices.  They create perfect worlds, where missiles and tanks blow up people but no one is injured.  I detest the amount of violence and fantasy available at the App Store, much of it free of charge.  Then--we go to a real missile site...where the fantasy, in some ways, is even more intense.  Sending nuclear bombs to blow up incoming Soviet bombers; and if even one of those bombers gets through, that's probably enough firepower to destroy one-third of the United States...it all makes sense?

I don't know if my son will remember this visit to the missile site; and, was the sight of that one 30-foot missile pointing almost straight upward, with the cloudy Marin sky as a backdrop, enough of a dose of reality to counteract the painless, flowery explosions of all the missiles on his iPad?  I doubt it very much.

Wild Part 2

I need to nurture the "wild" in me, if any still exists, because let's face it, my life is pretty tame at the moment.  I'm a stay-at-home mom.  I raise a child and keep house.  And I do it in the San Francisco Bay Area, in Silicon Valley, where the majority of the population eats three squares and goes on fancy vacations on a regular basis.

Participating in a triathlon is one small way to experience--for an hour and a half?--some sort of inner wildness. But Nathalie Goldberg and Hemingway both got it right--nothing captures the wild in us like the activity of writing, when it's done right.  More on this tomorrow--oh, it's "tomorrow," I see; but I'll pretend that it's still Friday.

Wild

I completed another short-short story today, which brings the total to 104.

I've more or less accomplished what I set out to accomplish with these stories, though as usual I'm wondering, "How many of them are really any good?"

My plan is to complete six more, then weed out the worst 10 of them, the ones which will make me cringe in ten years, the ones that stray furthest from the core idea of this collection (which I won't talk about here.

For my next one hundred stories...

Yes, I do plan to continue with the short-short story or "flash fiction" form.  I suits me; I think I can do something interesting (possibly even unique?) with it.

For the next one hundred stories I'd like to shake up the prose a bit...how, exactly, I don't know...but something a little more wild, maybe.

Balance

Mostly what I've been talking about and joking about with the "Cheetah Mom" idea, is balance--helping your child achieve a balanced, healthy and rewarding life.  We all want our children to try hard, but not to the point of depression or mental illness.  We all want them to maintain their self-esteem, but not become self-absorbed.  We all want them to excel at a certain number of activities--hopefully some of them school-related--but not cut off all social ties in order to do so.

One way to achieve this elusive thing called balance is to resist piling on the after-school activities--at the tender age of five or six, especially.

Today when I dropped off my boy at the start of school, I was chatting with the dad of a classmate, an adorable boy with one of the sweetest natures I've ever seen.  He is almost always smiling to himself; and he seems to have a social awareness well beyond the norm for his age.  He came up to my shy son the other day at a birthday party--my son was sitting on the sidelines while the other kids were eagerly playing pin the tail--and held out a donkey tail to him, encouraging him to join in the fun.   Some other moms had mentioned that this boy was already on a swim team, so I asked the dad about it.  "Yeah; for now," he said.  I wondered what that meant.  "Well, practices are three or four days a week.  My daughter was on a soccer team, but it got to be too much. You know how it is, Silicon Valley--everything's competitive."

Six year old kids, already practicing a sport at least four times a week?  But this is getting to be the norm.

What's wrong with that? I hear some parents say.  But there must be a reason why so many teens in this area are stressed to the point of considering or committing suicide...could it be, perhaps, that their lives are simply way out of balance?  And have been, not just for a few years, but since they were five or six?

Now I sound like I'm preaching, or ranting...I suppose I am.  It's late and the weather's been brutal (close to 100 degrees the last three days), so I'm turning in on this grumpy note.

Cheetah Mom Part 2

Most of the moms at my school make sure that their 6-year-olds are involved in at least two or three after-school activities--and often four or five:  swimming, soccer, tennis, music, martial arts, math, art, chess club, golf, 4H, ice skating, Cub Scouts, Brownies, coding, fencing, archery, knight training, rugby, street-cleaning...just kidding at the end there...

I understand the impulse to provide, provide, provide...all the opportunities possible...give your kid a leg up, feed his/her natural interests, make sure they are up to snuff, make sure they are socially well-adjusted; make sure that they're not cussing you out at the age of fifteen:  "Why didn't you let me take ballet when I was three and a half; now it's too late!  I hate you!"

I understand the impulse, but...I also see the dangers of overscheduling at this age.  My son loves to let his mind wander.  He tells me long, elaborate stories about subjects that interest him (penguins, dragons, and dinosaurs, good guys and bad guys).  He loves to goof around at home on the computer--we've bought him a couple online computer programming courses for kids and he's tearing through them.  I've encouraged him to start private music or art lessons but haven't pushed too hard; maybe in another six months.  He's involved in a baseball league two-month training program that's meeting once a week this fall, through October, though he's a reluctant participant at this point so I don't know how long that will last.  He reads pretty well, maybe on a 2nd or 3rd grade level, though the amount of time he spends reading at home is far below the time he spends playing internet video games (my husband and I are striving to limit his iPad time to no more than an hour a day).  I'm interested in signing him up for either Cub Scouts or 4H, mostly to get him out in nature with kids his age and let him experience certain activities--woodworking, for instance, or rowing--that he's not likely to pick up by hanging out with his mom and dad.  I want to take him camping.

But all in good time.  For one thing, he's just three weeks into first grade.  Time enough for after-school activities in another month or so, after he's really settled into the school routine and the homework routine (so far, no homework, but I believe the teacher said he'll start getting weekly homework assignments at the end of this week).

On the other hand...maybe I should encourage him to pursue a select handful of activities just a little more vigorously, even now...make him work straight through the difficult phases of those activities, the plateaus where progress seems impossible, until he gets to the other side and shines at them. Cheetah moms find ways to get their kids to "work," don't they?  To move fast, without making it feel like work--they turn it into play.  At least that's my image of the average cheetah mom.

On the other hand--he's six.  I'm overthinking this.  I've been joking with the "Cheetah Mom" idea--but in that last paragraph I almost took it seriously.

I need to let him dream, to vegetate.  One scheduled activity a week is okay.

So much unspoken yet constant pressure in this area (San Francisco Bay Area) to get our kids to "perform" in various ways...to make the grade.  And why?  What are the brass rings we're offering them?  Doctors overwhelmed with bureaucratic paperwork; university professors completely obsessed about getting tenure or keeping up with impossible course loads; software developers working sixteen hours a day to release a product so full of bugs it never sells...I'm sorry but the futility of much of our busywork is only too apparent.

Can we let our children dream and have fun, and not freak out about winning all the time?

I hearby renounce the "Cheetah Mom" title, even as a joke.

Cheetah Mom

Last May marked the approximate one-year anniversary of a knee problem--Patellofemoral Pain Syndrome (PFPS), my doctor labelled it, when I saw her in November of 2014.  I think it might have been caused by a combination of my very big five-year-old slamming his body down on my knee on a regular basis (sitting down forcefully on it, in other words), and my constant ascent/descent of the stairway in our house, at least twenty times a day.  

My doctor demonstrated one very feeble exercise I could try to treat this condition, swinging her leg slowly back and forth about 24 inches.  This did absolutely nothing for me.  I researched the condition online, and found some very useful exercises at the Kaiser web site, a series of four moves which, when I tried them, did seem to help ease the pain to some degree.

For several months after that, I would do the exercises for a few days, then drop them, then pick them up again for another few days, then forget about them for a week.  I wasn't taking them very seriously, and (surprise surprise) my knee wasn't improving.  The pain would subside, then for no apparent reason, flare up--moderate pain, not excruciating, but bad enough that I couldn't run without feeling pain with every step of my left leg; stairs were also difficult for me.

Finally, last May, something in me snapped.  Would I live like this for the rest of my life?  How could I hope to remain healthy if I couldn't exercise?  My body felt horrible and I was always tired.

I decided to exercise at least 25 minutes a day, every single day, without fail, for at least a year.  I decided one day--in tears, feeling nearly hopeless.  "Well if it's going to hurt with every other step I take, I just don't care; I'm still going jogging today."  And it did hurt, those first few runs.  Every other step.  But the encouraging part was--after I'd jogged about five times, the pain would subside during the run, about halfway into it.

I didn't jog every day.  That would have been crazy...the stress on my knee would have caused further injury; of that I have little doubt.  I ran about twice a week, and on the other days, I swam, biked or walked.  All at a slow-to-moderate pace.  I also did yoga, the knee exercises, and free weights; about five minutes' worth of each, every day.

About a month into it, I announced to my husband that I was going to do a triathlon sometime in the near future.  I've always loved all three components of the triathlon:  swimming, biking, jogging; I want to see how it feels to do all three in a race.  I have no illusions of greatness--I'm much too slow for that.  My swimming is pretty good, but not stellar; ditto for my biking; and my running times are god-awful.

But none of that matters; I want to do a triathlon, with a smile on my face at least half the time; I want to have fun with it.

I've selected what seems like a good sprint triathlon for beginners, the Marin County Triathlon, held November 7-8 in San Rafael.

Having made up my mind to do it, I've started training for it--training hard sometimes--and after three months, I'm happy to say that my knee is doing much, much better.  And (nice side benefit) I feel healthy in a way that I haven't felt since my son was born.

Patellofemoral Pain Syndrome is one of the most poorly-understood joint conditions I've ever heard about or read about.  They know what it is, more or less--the back of the kneecap rubbing against the thighbone, an absence of sufficient cartilage in that area--but there is no clear understanding in the medical community about how to treat it (as evidenced by my own doctor).

My own unscientific experiment has convinced me, however, that exercise, even vigorous at times, has a wonderful effect on this condition.  I've read somewhere that exercising the knee can actually build cartilage, and therefore aids in healing PFPS.  I certainly hope it's true; and judging from the much-reduced, nearly-nonexistent pain in my knee, even when climbing stairs or jogging 3 miles, I am growing more and more convinced that this has happened for me.

My regular exercise routine has had a beneficial effect on my child as well; he is suddenly interested in running a road race.  Starting two weeks ago, we've gone jog-walking at least three times a week.  I wish it were a little less walking, a little more jogging--but it's a start.

Instead of a tiger mom, I aspire to become a cheetah mom.  I want to move fast and well, and teach my son to move fast and well--in every domain that interests him.  Not because I want him to win; I just want him to see how fun life can be when you can move that way.

Infinite Waste?

I have trouble coping with many aspects of contemporary American society. Therefore I approached David Foster Wallace's mammoth book, Infinite Jest, with a lot of interest, as I'd heard that it examines, and satirizes, American culture's obsession with entertainment.  Also, I had read and admired his essay in Consider the Lobster regarding the soullessness of recent American literature, and thought that Infinite Jest would provide a literary answer--that every page would be so packed with heart and soul and important truths, Tolstoy and Steinbeck are standing up and applauding Wallace from their seats in heaven.

When I start reading a book, I slog through the first fifty pages no matter what.  I'm on page 43 of Infinite Jest, and it will take a lot of will power to get to page 50.  I do not like this novel.  I understand that many people and situations are being satirized in it, including the protagonists; but underneath there should be a layer of dead-seriousness (as in Gulliver's Travels), that makes your heart go, clunk, as you tell yourself, yes, he's ripping up everything around him, but only to get at the truth of things.

I felt ripples of seriousness in his description of a man desperate to receive some pot from his supplier so that he can get lost in a three-day solitary dopefest in his apartment.  This was the only section of those first 43 pages that rang true with me, on any level...but then it ended and we were back in endless scenes with boring, eviscerated people.  Now perhaps boring, eviscerated people can serve as the fulcrum on which a novel rests (see certain novels of Sinclair Lewis), but it's pretty hard to pull that off and maintain the reader's interest.

I will perhaps read more than 50 pages because this novel is so beloved by so many people, and my hopes were so high.  Wallace was brilliant and insightful in his essay about the soullessness of contemporary American literature, but this novel seems to prove his point much more than disprove it.

A Lead Belly Day

I forgot to post yesterday--but then, it was a Lead Belly Day.  At least until about 9 p.m. when the crisis was resolved.

The expression "Lead Belly Day" comes from a former work colleague.  Maybe she heard it in her childhood in Texas, where the blues musician Lead Belly lived most of his life.  I worked for an arts festival in San Francisco in the early 90s.  The festival ran into the red, to such a degree that it had to shut down in the midst of its one-month run.  On the day when we really knew the worst of it, when they told us we would be out of a job by the end of the week, my colleague, a funny black woman in her thirties, sighed, sat down hard and said, "This is a Lead Belly kind of Day."

When the blues are sinking deep into your bones, and your heart hangs down around your ankles...that's a Lead Belly Day.  But as I said, the situation drastically reversed itself yesterday at around 9 o'clock in the evening...and I was so overjoyed about this change of circumstances that thoughts of this post never crossed my mind.  (I won't say exactly what happened--too personal.)

Yes, I'm going to make a daily entry here, as I did six years ago...that's the plan; to do it again for about a year, which is how long I lasted the first time.  If I miss a day here and there, I won't cry about it.  

A Blog No One Reads

I have to admit that I enjoy writing a blog no one reads.  It runs counter to the main tendency of our times:  you're no one unless you have followers.  We're all like miniature L. Ron Hubbards.

Writing a blog no one reads is like standing in one corner of a very crowded room, whispering to yourself.

Five Years

I just spent several minutes re-reading some of the old posts from 2009 and 2010.  They're not as bad as I remembered.  Most of them are readable...of course I'm kicking myself for not having continued this.  But as indicated in the previous post, daily life took over.  And why dwell on the past?

Just the same:  I hate the fact that I've already lost so many moments from his life as a toddler, preschooler, kindergartener...will make a point of trying to remember some of them in a separate journal (again, the point here is not to catalog my son's triumphs and accomplishments, nor his cute statements which are only really precious to a parent, it's to explore what it means to combine motherhood with artistic pursuits, particularly as an older mother who is frequently overwhelmed with fatigue).

I will have to find a way to accept what's happened...for everyone's sake but especially for my own.

Time and the Six-year-old

I am the stay-at-home mother of one six-year-old son.  It might seem like I ought to have a lot of free time.  After all, he's in first grade now...and doesn't he spend a lot of after-school time playing on his own or with neighborhood friends?

Well, the after-school play is mostly by himself, with me in close proximity, and involves a lot of Mommy participation even now.  And yes, he's in school about twenty-eight hours a week; but during a good part of that "free time," I volunteer at school, run errands, clean, organize, send emails and exercise. That leaves--about sixteen hours...which is much more time than I had last year.

When my son was born, I told myself that by the time he had reached the age of two and a half, he would be in preschool five days a week...and so at least I'd have every weekday morning to write or do whatever I wanted.  This did not occur--at least not most weeks.  I will not use this post to tell the entire story of his preschool experience; let's just say, it did not go smoothly until he reached the age of four and a half.  I had maybe ten hours a week to myself, on average.

I've come to realize:  the amount of free time almost any dedicated mother has, if their child is in preschool or kindergarten, is almost always very limited; at best, fifteen hours a week..a bit more only if the child is extraordinarily independent at a young age or if nannies or grandparents are involved, or the child is in an all-day daycare.

We are not wealthy enough to hire nannies, nor was it what I wanted for him; also, we have no grandparents available (his mother and stepfather live far away; my parents are dead).  I have one relative living close by who watches my son about five times a year.

Even now, when he's in first grade, I do not have more than sixteen hours a week that I can spend doing anything that does not involve cooking, cleaning and running errands, or helping my child with homework, helping him get some exercise, or taking him to school or to an after-school activity.

I belabor the point because I was completely stupid about the amount of time and energy it would take to raise a kid from age two and a half to my son's current age of six and a half.

I should perhaps explain:  I am married.  My husband is a good father.  But he also works intensively, five days a week; is physically and mentally drained many evenings and just needs to escape in a good book; and he has a stepdaughter who is in college now--meaning, he has slogged through the trenches of parenting for eighteen years already.  We had a discussion about this before our son was born.  My husband needed a break when it comes to the heavy lifting, where our child is concerned--the feeding, baths, dishwashing, lunch-making, rides to activities, etc. etc.  He spends quality time with our son on the weekends and is always there when we need him.

But the simple fact is--this mothering/housekeeping business has taken up twelve to fourteen hours of my time, day in, day out, for the last six and a half years.

I'm not complaining...but I wish someone had spelled it out for me when I was getting started with the whole thing--I wish they had really made me understand the degree to which, as a mom of a young child, my time would not be my own.

I'm happy though, for the sixteen hours a week that I do have to myself, finally, now.