Entrance…

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fall winter 2012 013I recently reread Anne Tyler’s Ladder of Years. I hope I’m not revealing too much (about myself) by telling you that in this novel mother and wife Delia Grinstead acts on an impulse to walk away from her family. Eventually, she returns, and Tyler does an excellent job imagining both the humor and the tragedy of the situation. In a late chapter, Delia reflects that she hadn’t known her children would so entrance her. She doesn’t mean a doorway-type entrance, but the trance, the spell that our children cast on us. Delia has come to understand that the wonder she felt at her children’s birth was also a full-body — full-life?–invasion. She’s been under their spell ever since, and it’s a spell that (like all complex relationships) is sometimes wonderful, and sometimes…oppressive, scary, overwhelming.

This morning my husband generously cooked pancakes (his special cornmeal pancakes) for our girls and four of their friends. It was quite a scene, and all before Annie had to be whisked off to Bellingham to work at the church nursery there at 10:30, and then get resettled in her campus apartment. (I get to stay home and write.)

Anyway, this morning I’m thinking about things that entrance me, including my kids and their friends (and I loved having them here this morning, by the way).

What entrances you?

 

The Good Enough Writer

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When I first became a mom, my friend Karen gave me Bruno Bettelheim’s book The Good Enough Parent. The concept originated, I believe, with D. W. Winnicott. The heart of the theory is that trying too hard as a parent just mucks things up for the child. Better to be “good enough” and let the child take credit for some of her development.

I embraced the concept of the good-enough parent. Where I have difficulty letting go, is with my writing. But is my desire to make a text perfect, really just a a tactic to keep from ever having to let it go?

Sixty-seven drafts of a poem will eventually see me through to completion. The same sort of obsessive revising with the novel…this is not going so well.

One of my on-going goals (articulated for myself in the last few months) is to be the parent my daughters need at 20, 20, and 14 as they move toward independence. To stop babying them. Along the same lines, I need to very clearly set a goal to let go of my novel.

Reading: January 16, 2014

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I have been thinking (and telling people) that this reading is on the 14th, but it’s not. Thursday, the 16th, two weeks from today!

So here’s a reminder for me (and you, too, if you live nearby):

https://sites.google.com/site/soulfoodpoetrynight/

The reading begins at 7:00 and includes an open mike. The other featured reader is Jennifer Bullis; I’ll be reading from Sparrow. 

Imagine the lowest threshold possible…

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The real trick to getting work done is that my 15 minutes is very seldom only 15 minutes. It’s just the threshold. 

If 15 minutes doesn’t work for you, imagine a lower threshold. Imagine 5 minutes. Imagine a broom handle lying across the floor. Fall over it. 

Conversely, you may need an even number. So try 20 minutes. Many years ago when I was trying to get up early in the morning (before my infant twins were awake) to work on my doctoral dissertation, a friend suggested that I try getting up on the half-hour, when the clock’s hand was rising rather than falling. I don’t know why 4:30 was “better” than 5:00, but it worked. 

Lowering the threshold will work for your other unresolutions, too. When I’m having trouble getting myself to the gym, I coax myself into merely putting on my workout clothes. Just put them on, you don’t have to go. Then once I’m at the gym (I’m dressed for it, so why not?), I tell myself, just get on the treadmill, just walk for a half mile, then you can quit. Once I get started, I almost never do less than my 2 1/4 miles. 

Lower the threshold. Stumble over it.