All That Conflict Resolution Bullshit.....

First, let me aver that my boss is a great Dad.  He's a fully engaged father, attentive spouse, and more than inclined to spend sizable amounts of his sizable disposable income on the education and entertainment of his kids.  In fact, he's so perfect -- and his children likewise -- that it's a little hard to swallow the inevitable boasting about early-met goals, amazing exploits, and other standard parental remarks.  Dang it, you think, grinning through gritted teeth, can't he complain once in a while??

My boss's daugher, a precocious 2.5-year-old, has well-assimilated the conflict-resolution lessons taught in her preschool.  When finding herself in a difficult and potentially threatening situation, she raises both hands, palms out, and says: "Stop!" in a loud, firm, controlled voice.  This, of course, is supposed to bring the attendent adults to the scene to intervene when the other little Johnny's and Mary's have temporarily forgotten their own skills.

So I was steeling myself for another set of obligatory smiles and congratulatory remarks when my boss began the other day:  "You know, she's really internalized her lessons...." He went on to describe an early-morning situation during which he'd patiently negotiated three different choices-of-outfit issues, before finally settling on something.  Wiggling the dress over her head, he was just checking the clock to see how late he'd be to work, when:  "Stop!" cries the adorable tot.  Both hands are up.  Obviously, it's an untenable situation.  "This dress won't do either!"

"You know," says my boss, "There are definitely days when I just want to say:  'Honey, forget all that conflict resolution bullshit.  I'm your father.'"

Oh, I did laugh.  And think, too.

Once, my management professor told us, there was a time when X-style management was the only option.  When bosses were bosses and Authority was not only Right, it was Revered.  And unquestioned.  I guess, broadly speaking, there's a historical sweep to this progression:  once there was the King, then the Boss, and now .... anarchy?  Or just a vast sea of equally-responsible, equally-qualified individuals, elbowing each other as turf is battled over, red tape unfurled, meeting after meeting after meeting to 'give ownership' to every decision, Dilbert on every office wall, and spam-mails by the millions screaming:  "Fire Your Boss!"

I really am struggling over this whole collaborative approach to decision-making, both on the family level (when does negotiation become absurd?  Obviously when I tell them not to step in the street, they have to obey unquestioningly.  When I demand they wear shorts under their skirts?  When I want them to eat roast beef and they'd prefer pb&j?  When I tell them to not to bother me, I don't have time to play right now?) and on the professional level (I do what my boss says in the end, but I will definitely argue if I think he's wrong.  Sometimes he pursists in wrong behavior, and I admit to a few Machiavellian maneuvers to encourage others to promulgate my ideas to him.  How childish is that?  Is it childish?  Or is it just the way the world works?).

What do you think?

Misconceptions.  And (?) Beer.

I live in a college town.  This means "we" (us townies) have our quaint little cobblestoned streets, and vacant movie-theatres and restaurants, all to ourselves over the summer months.  Around this time of year, though, the early influx begins, and we savor all the more the emptiness before the true onslaught.

So today I pulled out of my office lot and drove through the adjacant, temporarily vacant, student parking lot with my usual abandon, thinking that in the irritatingly near-term I'd be skirting the hundreds of students' cars neatly slotted, each into its numbered cell, as opposed to driving, catty-corner and willy-nilly, across all the cells from end-to-end.

Except there was some weirdo in my way.  He was wearing jeans and a baseball cap on backwards, and as I drove slowly toward him, he was leaning over the pavement as if examining it minutely.  "Great," thought I.  "Some early-bird frat-boy, drunk at midday, clowning around in a parking lot."

He stood up and faced me.  In one hand, he held a silvery cylindrical object.  Given my train of thought, I imagined it to be an oversized can of beer.  In the other, he had a bright flat orange plastic thing, rather like one of my kids' toys.

Very weird.  Every weirder, he held both his items up above his head and made a horrified "oh no!" face at me as I slowly and decorously drove by him, catty-corner through the parking spaces.

It was only as I pulled away that the following realizations came to me:

• there were lots more of those bright flat orange plastic thingys on the ground
  
• they were lying on the ground in an orderly fashion, one to each parking space
  
• they were stencils
  
• I was driving over them
  
• the guy had had a spray can and a stencil, and had been mouthing at me not to disturb his painstaking job refreshing the numerals on the parking spaces.

Oh.  OH.  Well, shit. 

I swerved and started driving along the proper lanes, but not soon enough to save four or five of the guy's stenciling jobs from complete smear-out.

You know, though.  I've had such a dreadful week (and it only Tuesday!) that the poor fellow's misfortune just made me shake my head and laugh, weakly and guiltily, all the way to my destination.

I did return from the other direction, and so didn't notice whether he'd stomped off (hot, bothered, and steaming mad, no doubt) to find the appropriate barrier.

Book Review:  Rules of the Wild

    "One cannot always be more clever than pain, you know," I say to her after a while.  "At some point you just have to give in ... "

    She nods and  smiles in a strange way, looking out the window.

    She seems to know exactly what I am talking about, and after all why shouldn't she -- beautiful Nena with the Beautiful Chilrden, in the Charming House with the Wonderful Husband -- Nena who we all assume is not allowed to feel unhappy ever again.

    It didn't use to be like this.  This place seemed the closest thing to Paradise.  I should make an effort, try to remember that time, I keep telling myself while I drive home in the drizzle on the Magadi road.

    Suddenly it seems so pointless to remember anything.  Isn't happiness such an uninteresting feeling, so dull to describe, once you are in pain?

Rules of the Wild p. 74

When Francesca Marciano's "Rules of the Wild" was recommended to me, I admit I gritted my teeth.  I mean.  My "to read" stack is beyond embarrassingly long, I have to read a book a month for my book club, and I have no time.  But the recommendation came counched in such -- well.  Such richness, let me just say, that reflected not only the recommender's own inimitable style, but also our shared experiences, vices and virtues, that I had the item in hand not a week thereafter, and started reading it in bits-and-starts almost at once.  In the end, of course, I finished it by nightlight while the children breathed soft nothings into the early morning air, and the wind sent wishful tendrils through the hot bedroom.

Marciano's brilliant examination of the intricacies of human interaction begins as the tale of a young and beautiful Italian, Esme, whose father's death sends her into a psychological downward spiral that finds her, at loose ends and weary of life, in an up-scale safari camp in East Africa.  There she finds a man.  Then she begins to discover a land that enters into her soul to its very depths.  And at last she finds a soul-mate (or thinks she does) whose essence, like all those with whom she interacts in Africa, is so intertwined with the land as to be inextricable.

Having spent three years in Africa, without leaving the continent, on my own first journey there, I am torn as to whether I believe Marciano has adequately captured my own impressions of the land and the people.  Certainly she knows exquisitely well the effect of the African landscape on the newcomer.  And assuredly she unfailingly exposes that tormented relationship the wealthy white elite of the East African capitals have with the people whose land they still -- essentially and contrary to anyone's perceived reality -- enslave.  But as to the vibrant life of the village, or the intricacies of the black Africa natives -- I am less certain she understands this (not that I claim to, myself). 

Marciano's true artistic brilliance, however, comes in her explorations of what occurs between men and women at that stage of life when, externally, they are at the height of their beauty, power and potential; but internally so wracked and torn that they often self-destruct.  This is a tale not just about unusual people in an exotic place full of deep beauty and aching tragedy; but about human beings living out those all-too-human tragedies we all know all-too-well.  This is not a tale about "good" and "bad" people, but about the good-and-bad inside all people, all mixed up and confusing and indecipherable.  It's about endlessly starting anew, and stumbling, and re-starting with less assurance and perhaps less hope.  It's about discovering yourself: in a place, in other people, in the interstices of your own soul -- and then about re-discovering yourself again and again and again.

So my fellow readers:  sit yourself down with a cup of Kenyan coffee, and open Chapter One....

SINK-i--n---g

When I began, it all seemed very porcelain-and-pretty-flowers.

The kids were quietly and amusingly playing some sort of imaginative game in the next room, the gleaming new faucet and associated apparatus did, indeed, appear on first blush to live up to its touted "easy-install" moniker, and quite honestly my little farmyard kitchen just felt nice and pleasant, this early Sunday morning.

An hour later, the children had come to an impasse about their matchbox cars ("SHE has two more 'cuties' than I do!" sobbed the youngest, clinging to my ankle.  "But I OWN one of them," shrieked the eldest, her slender legs hopping up and down just out of my crick-necked position under the sink.  "It's NOT SHARED!").  The irritating drop of water from the lose hose dribbled down my elbow.  My rear end slipped on the rotting floorboard.  The impossible-to-uninstall old sink apparatus finally gave way under my grappling fingers, showering unnamable gunk on my chin.  "MOMMY!" screamed the youngest at full bore:  "ARE YOU LISTENING TO ME??"

I closed my eyes.  Yes,  I thought.  I am listening.  I am listening to your current temporary anguish, soon to be completely obliterated by delight at some new diversion.  I am listening to the dripping of water, soon to be stopped by my sweat and cursing.  I am listening, and I'm not worried.

It's what I'm hearing, malgre all attempts to close my ears, that's worrying me.  I'm hearing my heart beating rapidly and furiously.  I'm hearing my teeth grind.  I'm hearing my slimy fingernails grating on rusty bolts as I clench my fists.

Why am I always so angry? 

I know perfectly well that there are flowers-and-white-porcelain moments, and dripping-rusted-bolt moments.  I know they're all temporary.  I know that when I get to the hereafter no-one's going to care about installation or uninstallation of new faucets, but they are going to care if I couldn't keep my temper and laugh at it all.

I need not to be angry.

How?

Rain on the Tent

(written last Thursday)

My socks, which I'm wearing for the second day in a row (without washing) are wet.  My head is woozy with that feeling you get having slept fitfully and uncomfortably and just dying for the moment when you can sink (aaaahhhh, bliss!), washed and dry, into your own bed.

Today I spent my lunch hour shlepping a massive amount of wet tenting gear out of a sodden forest behind my kids' school.  Fortunately the mosquitoes were dampened by the intermittent downpour.  I'd also  foreseen (by rolling the pant-legs) the fact that the creek was overruning the wooden walkway ankle-deep, and a huge heron broke from the waterside just as I sweated past, giving me a gasping moment of delight watching its prehistoric form clear the treetops through the mist.

And last night my daughter was over-the-moon delighted.  I realized what a sad lack of a mother she had when I explained that we would probably have s'mores on her parent-kid camp-out, and she said:  "What're those?"  What?  She's almost seven, and I've never fed her a s'more??  Dreadful.  But she had one last night, and lemme tell you.  She liked them.

Despite all the effort I pour into Ms. 6's school as a voluteer administrator, I don't spend much time in the classroom.  So it was somewhat revelatory watching her last night, darting around the darkness, the smallest of the baker's-dozen-worth-of kids, and one of only two females.  With the rest of them, she gathered wood, played tag, vied for the best marshmallow-roasting spot, and generally held her own amid a raucous gaggle of children widely varying ages, sizes and interests.  Even though her habitual shuteye's at 9 pm, at 11:15 she was vociferously objecting to my bedding her down:  "But MOM.  Ryan's still out there!  Ryan's only a year older!  I don't want to sleep until Ryan does!  Mom, I'm still really...........zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz."  Log-tired, she was out.

Myself, I tossed and turned on the stony ground and counted the number of uproarious beedy-eyed bugs creaking and shrieking through the night, along with owls and some weird haunting cry I couldn't identify and might have been scared of, had this not been southern Ohio where the scariest thing on a dark summer night is the rare snake in the grass.  Ms. 6 breathed softly while I sighed and muttered.

Then at 3 am it started to rain.  The bugs, silenced, scuttled away, and the drip-drip steadied into a gentle downpour. 

Finally, curled against my bony offspring's sturdy backbone, I slept.  Not enough -- but peacefully, dry, under the sound of rain.

Please Do So Today

With reluctance, long ago I bought in to the standard business phrases: 

"as soon as possible"

"for your information"

"per yours of the 25th" 

I hate them.  They're overused.  They can be perceived as rude shorthand for even ruder sentiment (asap = get your rear in gear already; fyi = hey, I did that thing you were supposed to do so I got the points, and so on).  And they just aren't, durnit, literary.  But I bought in.  I use them frequently, even though they always make me cringe.

So yesterday I got a piece of spam using "please do so today," a phrase generally employed for routine office admin patter:  "If you haven't put your $5 in the coffee fund, please do so today."  "If you didn't turn in your time card, please do so today."  "Please do so today" is a somewhat exasperated bit of pseudo-politesse about something that's unimportant to you (and to the world in general), but vital for the continued smooth turning of the institutional gears.

But this was the context in my spam:  "If you or someone close to you has not accepted GOd [sic] please do so today."

Now I am not a religious person.  I have neither accepted God, nor do I ever anticipate doing so.  But in a weird twist of irony (or hypocrisy, perhaps), I found myself being offended, on behalf of the God-in-whom-I-do-not-believe, by this bit of junk mail.

First of all, are we reduced to mis-capitalizing "God" so we can slip past the spam protectors?  Is "God" as verboten, according to your-favorite-spam-assassin, as "Viagra," "Cialis," and "HorsePorn"?  Or was the writer just so illiterate that this important message didn't need to be reread before sending?

And let's think for a moment about acceptance of God.  This is not the coffee fund, folks.  This is not your timecard (although according to the sender, who entitled the message "It's for Eternity," the timecard analogy is closer to the mark).  This is not a casual sort of quotidian duty one should just accomplish and move on from.  This is purportedly a life-changing event.  This is something even the most devout, surely, consider deeply.  This is the eternal-marriage sort of deal. 

I'm not sure where I'm going with this grumpiness.  Do I just want all the devout to be purer-than-I?  Am I expecting, somehow, that those who do "believe" have a bit of the angelic already in their veins?

Or am I just pissed because no-one, God, GOd, or Not, cares about the proper use-and-care of English any more?

I'm beginning to think that my Xanga reappearance could be aptly entitled "The Great Middle-Aged Pout About Everything."

The Hippogriff Syndrome

The ancient archives of legendary creatures has been deeply mined by many, most recently and most successfully by Rowling -- to the degree that every 9-year-old knows and loves the prickly hippogriff.  According to the legend, the hippogriff was a symbol of love, being, as it was, the offspring of mortal enemies Gryffon and Horse.  I don't know about you, but I wouldn't mind Buckbeak replacing those gaggingly stupid-cute Cupids as emblems of the difficulties, as well as the sweetness, of love.

But that's not my current point.  I was thinking more about the difficulties of being an amalgamated being.  Apparently the creators of Buckbeak (screen version) spent a lot of time at the zoo looking at horses and birds and arguing about movements and habits.  Apparently it was a tough assignment, giving the vast differences between the two (although -- I mean.  Can you imagine a better or more fun/creative way to have spent a year's employment making -- ha ha -- a buck?  Wow).

When I walk down the sleepy summer street in my little Midwestern college town, I know I look more-or-less like everyone else:  a little hot, a little squint-eyed, a little sweaty under the collar. I don't stand out.  My husband once informed me I was the sort of person at whom people don't look twice on the subway.  I gave that comment right back to him, too.  It's very true.  We're both of us pretty average-looking human beings: Your Standard White Anglo-Saxon American.  No bird legs.  No tails.  No wings.  Nothing weird.

But inside I feel like Buckbeak in disguise.  I struggle between so many roles and responsibilities that I can't seem to get my own self-definition straight.  Am I first-and-foremost a Horse, with two lovely foals, meandering the pasture and nickering gently to my young?  I'd like to think so, but how often does the Gryffon-Executive shoulder its way in and take over my persona, with all her quick talk and shined shoes and client-knows-best?  Then there are the days when I do both, and more:  talking Gryffon-talk on the phone while shushing the foal at my knee -- oh, and giving an apologetic glance at the spouse, who I'd promised to help with some household duty or other, hours ago.

I suppose we're all amalgams at heart, all us similar folks swaying to the rhythm of the same train while hiding our hooves and our beaks and our wings under our samenesses. 

A happy day to you, fellow Buckys.

Everything Gets In My Way

"Everything gets in my way," grumbled Ms. Six, sotto voce, pushing past me on some expedition of her own during our standard school/work-night melée of dinner/bath/housework/conturbations of the soul.

That comment stopped me dead for a few milliseconds, while the dishwater dripped unheeded off my hands on the floor and Ms. Three vied patiently but without success for attention regarding her bathroom needs.

That's it.  That's precisely it.  Everything gets in my way.  Just to choose a random moment in a standard day: my responsibilities for sustained and forward-looking project management get in the way of my boss's desire for instant ad hoc meetings about some unrelated topic, which get in the way of my moonlighting as a senior volunteer administrator at my eldest's school, which gets in the way of my remembering to do things like leave the carseat at preschool for my husband's later use in retrieving the youngest, and his resulting irritated phone call gets in the way of adequate project management.  All of which gets in the way of sneaking off for a moment's private writing time.

Well.

My two months' absence from the Xangaverse were initially a relief, in that I didn't feel obligated to "do the rounds" in order to feel properly deserving of your remarks chez moi.  But as the days melded into weeks, I was appalled to find that despite the heavy demand that I would have claimed Xanga made on my time, I seemed to have no "extra" time as a result of abandoning it.  Everything got in the way, you see.  And I was always itching to write a blog about this, that or the other, even though I dutifully worked, and mothered, and did dishes instead.

Enough, say I.

I'm not back, really.  But I'm not gone either.  I'm just closing my eyes and pretending things aren't in the way of this happy habit.

Hi, everyone.

(I'm NOT back -- but I had to post about........ )

The Giving Tree

"Omigod," said my nanny, peering out our kitchen window, and then the bathroom window around the corner, at the dense foliage.  "It wrapped itself around your house!"

Our stately oak gave up a third of its girth last night to the raging storm.  This hasn't happened in our own yard for decades, although every storm brings another host of fallen giants in our woods.  But the unusual thing is the way our guardian fell:  to the north, crookedly.  Falling to the east, it would have smashed the window above my eldest's bed.  To the west, it would have felled the clothesline and the garden fence.  To the south, the maple and the tire swing.  And had it fallen straight, it would have decimated the new compost bin.  But instead it wrapped itself around the house, carefully, in the midst of the tumult.  Its outermost branches merely brushed the gutter and the birdfeeder, harming neither. 

Uneasy in our beds at the crashing lightshow, we nevertheless didn't even hear it fall.  We found it in the clear blue-grey dawn, all its gallant new green growth giving us a last flourish at the windows.

You've read Shel Silverstein's "The Giving Tree"?  It's perhaps the most depressing children's book we own.  I always sort of wondered why we did own it, but I think I know now.  It was to prepare us for understanding how much a tree can give:  green light in spring, and deep shade in summer.  A burnished orange beacon in fall, and those steady deep lines against the snow in winter.  And the miraculous gentle death of a caring friend.

Nurture, Naturally

I've never really bought into the concept of instinct.  Oh, I know it exists.  I've watched little chicks squirm out of their egg and set to scratching and pecking like miniature adults, without a role model in sight.  I've seen baby goats stagger to their feet and wend their way on wobbly knees around to the food source before the new mother can do more than provide a lick and a promise.  I've seen the migratory patterns overhead in the Spring and the Fall.  I've watched all the nature shows.  I know instinct is alive and well on Earth.

But I don't think there's much instinct left in the average run-of-the-mill modern cell-phone-toting uncomfortable-shoe-wearing homo sapiens.  I think we have to pretty much learn it all by rote.  I think about 95% of the composition of any adult's brain is nurture, not nature.

Which is why, around about this particular day of the year, when I'm tallying up all the reasons I should have been more grateful to my mother on a daily basis (rather than scurrying around trying to cram all that gratitude into one 24-hour period) I find myself unable to reach a bottom line.  There is no bottom line to all the line items my mother put into her nurturing.  It was a bottomless well, the wellspring of her care and knowledge.  From the organized fashion of her nutritious menus (cereal one morning, eggs the next, and "specials" on Sundays only; lunch and dinner equally carefully apportioned), to her dedicated and tearful attendance (front row always) at every single theatrical presentation in which I ever obtained a bit part, to her dubious and raking assessment of potential mate-material -- Mom had the basics down pat.  But it's the intangibles and the extras that really make something out-of-the-ordinary, isn't it?  The fresh bread perfuming the house after school, the sweet notes from my dollies on my pillow at night, the intricacy of the treasure hunts on Easter and my birthday, the care with which the family car was packed with little surprises and treats, in addition to the essentials, for those annual family vacations. 

There are not enough superlatives in any language I know to easily summarize my mother's mothering.  It's only really in my inadequate attempt to mother my own children in any way approximating what I myself received that I've recognized the true superiority of my mother's expertise.  My children are inestimably fortunate to benefit as much as I did from my mother's continued presence in our lives.  To the degree that I can claim "good motherhood" myself, it's only a pale immitation of the endless loving skill that my mother applied to the task.  And despite my initial premise -- I can really only say:  she came by it naturally.

For your boundless love, Mom --

boundless gratitude and admiration