Providers

We meet the Universe halfway, and then we wait. I love the notion that whatever we’re moving towards is also moving towards us. We don’t have to be perfect or push things along, we just have to show up.  - Jena Strong, Bullseye, Baby!

I am about to be unemployed. I am about to be part of the Great American Collapse. Or so it feels. As a lifetime freelancer who has never worked in one place for more than two years and who is accustomed to buying her own insurance, I feel psychologically better suited for this situation than many. But as a newly single mom, I’m also keenly aware of my obligation to provide.

I am pickier these days about work. Not in terms of income, but in terms of Right Livliehood – of wanting to be doing work that is contributing rather than harming; of working with people who are awake. As I talk to people about their organizations and businesses – trying to find the job that no one has yet thought of, the job that is secretly hiding in plain sight just for me – I am also realizing just what I will and won’t do in terms of time away from my children. I’m realizing just how sacred my work as Mama is to me. Writing can be put on hold. Writing can happen between the cracks. But not my kids.

During these “informational interviews” people ask questions. It’s sort of their turn to be nosy. I’m trying to use their questions as tools for narrowing my path, for better understanding what I want. One woman in a high position in my community who was kind enough to sit down with me and talk about work possibilities, asked: “What do you most love doing? What would your parents look at you now – remembering you as a little girl – and think, ‘Of course, this is what she does!’”

The answer was easy: I talked about telling stories. My stories, sure, but other people’s, too, stories that shouldn’t even interest me. I told her of writing academic white papers about gifted kids in rural schools – the whiz kid from a reservation in South Dakota who went to Yale and who I occasionally Google, now, years later, to see what’s become of him. About being the lead editor for Microsoft Complete Baseball without ever having been to a major league baseball game – and how interesting the player bios were for the guys who just made it to the Big Show for a season or even a single game. I enjoy every annual report I write, every newsletter. Really.

I knew the “right” answer:  A LOT! I should have blurted out, “Forty-plus!” I should have been thinking: money, money, money. But I hesitated.

Then she asked a harder question. “How much do you want to work?” I knew the “right” answer: A LOT! I should have blurted out, “Forty-plus!” I should have been thinking: money, money, money. But I hesitated. I sat and watched my mind whir. I had never had to answer this aloud to someone who was in a position to truly help me get work. Suddenly, I could not lie to this woman of two grown boys; “I cannot be away from my kids for the kind of time that a full-time job with traditional hours entails.” I went on to explain – and to my amazement, she agreed – that this should not rule out full time positions. There’s plenty that I can do from home as a writer, and my kids are both school-aged; computers have far reach; I’m well-disciplined. This is possible. But putting my kids in before- and after-school care, five days a week? Can’t do it. Won’t do it.

I remember my old neighbor – a single mom of two who told me of working a hodgepodge of odd jobs when her girls were in school in order to be there when they got home every afternoon. She worked in a lab and as an office clerk on different weekdays, then sang with a band a night or two a week after they were asleep. Her example has been a beacon to me, especially now when as a single mom it seems that finding a full-time, 8-to-5 job is de rigueur. And especially since she’s raised two amazing young women and been awarded every feminist award our university has to offer.

Connecting with another friend, a highly creative entrepreneur, got me thinking outside the box: Sell a booklet via pdf online, she suggested. Take in kids for after-school care. Get a renter. (Check – did that one last fall. Oops – renter just moved out unexpectedly. Know anyone?)

Then today, as I cleaned up my office at my current job, a woman who has worked there for two decades came in to get something. “What are you going to do next?” she asked. I shrugged and told her my conundrum.

“Be with your kids,” she said. “Even if you’re poor. You’ll never regret it. Never.” And then, much to my surprise, she welled up with tears.

“I do this work because it allows me to be the kind of mother I want to be.”

They were similar to the tears that a friend shed yesterday while sitting at my table sharing a cup of coffee. She’s a massage therapist and a recent injury has made it difficult to work. Another single mom, she lives very close to the bone. “I do this work because it allows me to be the kind of mother I want to be,” she said, and suddenly, she started crying.

“Wow, I didn’t know that was so close to the surface,” she said after she’d composed herself, referring to the tears. That is very near the surface for many of us, I think – that constant sense of obligation to provide and provide. To be breadwinner and mom. To love in the best and most important way. That is at the heart of our madness and could drive us politically (if we had more time!). That is what keeps us poor but makes us rich at the same time.

abundance

I am so grateful. And rather amazed to hear myself saying so. In a few weeks, I’ll no longer have a job or any known source of income – which is more than enough to make me wake up with a start many nights. My dear madre has conspired to see to it that I have a soft landing pad on my duff. Hopefully whatever fall there is won’t be too hard – or too long lasting. In the meantime, I keep tossing proverbial sticks in the fire and believe (though I can’t promise you I’ll say the same thing if you ask me in two days – especially at 2 a.m.) that one of them will light on fire – brilliantly – at just the right moment. Any minute now…

Namely to do work that is worthwhile in the company of good people; to be there for my kids; and to maintain this home, which is a gift unto itself.

In addition to applying willy nilly for jobs at places that range from banks and libraries to the Department of Epidemiology (just got the letter from the latter today, informing me they’d found someone more “suitable” and wishing me “luck” in my search – which feels akin to being handed a face mask at the beginning of an H1N1 outbreak), I am meditating on what I want:  namely to do work that is worthwhile in the company of good people; to be there for my kids; and to maintain this home, which is a gift unto itself. I am more sure that I want to teach again – but something new, something with a spin. Writing through grief? Yoga for teens? How to have a good divorce ? … There’s something out there that I’m supposed to be sharing more actively, and I’m excited – albeit a bit terrified – to pull it out of my velvet top hat.

Tobey and Bella on the Gulf of Mexico - the sweet life.

As I wait for this year 2010 to arrive, an inexorable wave that is just out of reach, I sit here, tea cup in hand, and smile with pleasure for the many beautiful moments that shine brighter in my memory than any of the dark places of 2009. I can be dark – yes, I have my moments – but Lexapro free as I am of late, I amaze myself at my ability to see plenty of light. For this, I credit the moments that have provided me with grounding –  like the two times I visited  the ocean this year. I’m thankful that at 43 I am no less enthralled by the power of water. The Atlantic — well, really the Gulf of Mexico — provided the most LOVELY day of all 365. Just one day. Perhaps seven hours, when you come right down to it. At a friend’s beach house with my mom and my kids. They dug for sand crabs and carved out  moats, while I read Peter Mayle’s fluffy but totally pleasurable Hotel Pastis cover to cover. Wow. Talk about gratification.

A page from Dan Eldon's journals.

There was also Los Angeles and my dear friend Kathy’s house. I was there working on another book about her son, Dan Eldon. I spent a day with his journals – such amazing reminders of what a life well lived looks like. It looks like Pleasure. It looks like Passion. It looks Curious and Open Ended. The journals always leave me feeling wide OPEN to possibility, so I was in a good space when I left them, first to visit  my friend Kyle’s store – a craft shop that is an act of love by one single mama/artiste  - and then to listen to my friend Hope read from her book – a book that gets to the heart of motherhood and the soft spine of creativity. Later that night, meeting Barb at Lucques, I had one of my favorite meals of the year.  I don’t remember what I ate, but I vividly recall talking and talking in a cozy room while people brought wine and refilled water and Barb laughed. The next day – capping off all of this creative energy – I stood with my toes in the the Pacific, remembering its ineffable return and our briny beginnings.

The wishing rocks, Topanga Beach, Malibu, USA

One of the greatest ongoing blessings of my year was my yoga practice. I took classes with several outstanding teachers in Los Angeles, including Bryan Kest. A trip to San Francisco brought me to two studios in the Mission, the most memorable of which was a lovely class with a buoyant teacher named Peter Guinosso. My own little corner of the earth is now teeming with yoga. The opening of Heartland Yoga, which recently celebrated its first anniversary, makes me feel ever more at home here; my belief that I belong and have a like-minded community, ever more intact. I remain amazed, after more than 15 years of practice, as to how powerful yoga is for me as a creative force – or, rather, as a tool to renewing my creativity and shedding any hunched-shoulder weariness that comes with mamahood or from gray jobs.

Shoes awaiting their yogis, Santa Monica.

Oh, for the time in my life when I used to keep a journal in which I wrote the title of every book I read and by year’s end, pages had been filled with appraising comments and explanation points.

Outside of that woozie, delightful entire-book day on the beach, my reading was woefully limited this year. Oh, for the time in my life when I used to keep a journal in which I wrote the title of every book I read and by year’s end, pages had been filled with appraising comments and explanation points. Hopefully, I’ll experience that again, but for now, I get through 1/3 of the Sunday New York Times - always starting with the Style section (shame, shame). With the oh-so-sad demise of Gourmet, I have become a fan of Chow, which I read online as steadfastly as the Buddhist magazine, Tricycle.  I love the little dashes of honesty and wit that I find online among friends like Aimee at Artsyville and Karen at Cheerio Road.  And I enjoy bumping into new friends and new ideas, such as How Art Saved My Life and Bulls Eye Baby.

The life of a single mama doesn’t even lead much time for films. Most of what I’ve seen, I’ve seen with my kids. Often, this is satisfying, but sometimes, as on my birthday when we sat in a movie theater during a rainy beach vacation, watching Up (a good movie, but not what I had in mind that day), I want to cry. As with reading, I remember being in my 20s in Seattle and going to movies all of the time. Matinees alone. Weekends with friends. Rainy days. Summer nights. The Neptune. The Egyptian. The Harvard Exit. The Guild.  Now, the kids and I forego the big screen of the mall cineplex and snuggle up with my computer to watch in bed. We went on a documentary spree last winter, my favorite of which was Girls, Rock! More recently, I saw a documentary about a Tibetan monk in search of the reincarnation of his lama. Unmistaken Child is a beautiful film that raises unique questions about spirituality – who leads, how they’re chosen, what is valued. Food, Inc. made me once again struggle with just what to buy at the grocery store, an overwhelming ethical dilemma worthy of Martin Luther. Undoubtedly, though, the film that  hit closest to home was Everlasting Moments, which I saw in NYC last March. Set in Sweden in the early 1900s, a woman gets a camera and discovers both a gift and a passion – which spells joy and trouble, not necessarily in that order.

So that trip to New York in March also brought about one of several Food Moments of the year. Most memorably:  oodles of  noodles and other goodies round a lazy susan in a crammed Chinatown restaurant with five friends who didn’t previously know each other — three writers, an editor, a photographer, and a painter. Loud but blissfully so! Another meal so loud that I nearly lost my voice was at avec with April on a weirdly mild winter night in Chicago. We couldn’t get in until 9:00 pm and by the time we left, it was well after midnight, but we were more that sated. So happy, that place. Then there were the croissants — oh, too many croissants for one woman to have eaten alone whilst working on a book in a borrowed apartment — from Tartine in San Francisco.

And the steamed oatmeal from Doma — so good that I’ve slowly been adapting it at home on my stove, which has seen plenty of action with boules of no-knead bread, chocolate gelato, and Mark Bittman’s divine – I mean really, on-your-knees divine roasted corn salad.

Hands down, though, the best meal of the year was a mid-July feast in honor of Bastille Day. The place: Kristin and Kat’s screened-in porch. My attire:  a Chinese red dress. The menu: 7 or so courses, climaxing with a variation on a Patricia Well’s Mediterranean rabbit.  The company: Impeccable. Especially the man at the far end who piqued my interest. A week later, I introduced myself on Facebook. I have a lot of women in my life, I basically said, and they are wonderful. But I am trying to cultivate some male friendships. Are you game? The answer pinged back, indeed, and we haven’t stopped talking yet.

And that, folks — along with generous mothers and block parties celebrating the neighbors’ legalized marriage, along with stellar children’s holiday concerts and a nest of baby hawks in the alley — is reason enough for hope at the end of a year that could be overwhelmingly gloomy. When the glass could seem half empty, Life threw a party, replete with glasses of rose and marinated olives. It brought a lovely human being into my midst and suddenly so much that felt impossible is within bounds. Jobs. Money. Even a new roof. All is within the bounds of the possible. All is within the potential waves of the coming year. Salut!

Further Into the Fray – hobby: passion: $

My beau called this morning from his family’s Christmas gathering. “I was talking to my brother-n-law about freelance writing. Is that something you’ve considered doing?”

The Snarl Heard Across the State ensued:  “I am a freelance writer!” He lurched a little, and I don’t blame him, but people seem to have a lot of opinions on how we writers might try to make a living. Isn’t it obvious, they all seem to infer, that you could be doing A and B, and C and getting along  just swimmingly? At least, that’s what I – Miss Sour Pants – hears.

As I grapple with trying to figure out just what I am — a writer? a freelance writer? someone who loves to write but is first and foremost a mother? or maybe something entirely different, like, the scintillatingly titled Program Coordinator? — I am a bit touchy on this subject. The touchiness, I think, boils down to a few key points: making a living wage, mixing art and income, doing all of this as a mother whose time is stretched very thin.

I know my logic here is a little muddy. Please, hear me out, if only for the sake my own attempt at making sense of my life. Putting aside the upper upper echelons of artists, I continue to wonder, “Can you make a living wage from your art? or, at least, the skills you possess as an artist.”  I’ve found at several points in my life that, yes, I could make a living as a writer;  most impressively as a perma-temp at Microsoft in the early to mid-90s. I didn’t really enjoy what I was writing about – professional sports – and the work was rote, the hours sometimes grueling, but I undoubtably well paid and, hence, relatively well respected. Does this make me shallow? I think not. Many of us are able to stomach work that is less than highly appealing if we feel we our skills are valued. Even, then, however, if you are spending your day using the same skills that give you artist joy, it can drain you of your desire to go home and do “good work.”  As a novelist I once interviewed told me, he wrote lots and lots of rubbish for astonishingly good money during the dot.com boom, but eventually, knew that, “I had to write creatively or I would die.” Hyperbole? Perhaps a bit, but really – I get it. I believe him.

So, you want to make a living wage, you want to be respected, you’d really like to make work that comes from your heart – even if you do so in the wee hours, AND you want to raise your kids?  Hmmmm…. By adding this last piece, you’ve just raised the bar exponentially, perhaps impossibly high. Place on top of that ridiculous stupa the fact that you are a single mother, or the sole breadwinner, and perhaps it’s in the stratospheres of possibility.

So do you stick with it at all – do you continue to paint the same painting, give or take the hue and the shape of the flower, over and over because you know it sells? Do you schlep your violin to one more bat mitvah or wedding dance? Or, do you draw a line and do something entirely different to bring in the money and hope and pray that Life will help you eventually make time for your art?

There’s an article in today’s New York Times about crafters who have hit it big on Etsy, turning their hobbies into $100K-plus annual incomes. Of course, there are only a few of these, just as there are only a few Heather Armstrongs – the Queen of the Mommy Blogs who used to have a simple, pretty, personal little blog but now has advertising and staff and, according to lore, a husband who was able to quit his day job because her blog made enough and more for both of them.

Heather Armstrong of Dooce blog

The article doesn’t ask whether these women come to detest knitting after they churn out 500 mufflers. But it does quote the very wise (in my opinion), Sarah Mosle who has written of Etsy sellers/artists:  ”I think for many women the site holds out the hope of successfully combining meaningful work with motherhood in a way that more high-powered careers in the law, business, or sciences seldom allow. In other words, what Etsy is really peddling isn’t only handicrafts, but also the feminist promise that you can have a family and create hip arts and crafts from home during flexible, reasonable hours while still having a respectable, fulfilling, and remunerative career. The problem is that on Etsy, as in much of life, the promise is a fantasy.”

Ok, can we just have a communal amen? We long to make our art. We long to be able to spend time with our children and be the mothers that it feels so right in our  hearts that we should be. And yet in trying to do these two things side by side are we too often belittling our skills as artists while also setting ourselves up for unbearable by not making the money that our skills suggest we are capable of making if we did something else, something more practical?

The desire to be a good mother who spends ample time with her kids AND to have “a respectable, fulfilling [my emphasis], and remunerative career” should not be fantasy. It should be within the realm of reality. I fear – I don’t want to believe but I do fear – that for many women this combination is impossible. My goal for 2010 is to spend more time figuring out why this is so and what – even baby steps – can be done about it. I know, it’s like saying, “I’m going to study Global Warming for the next year and see what I can do,” but my ongoing fury over this conundrum, this Rubic’s cube, has reached a level where I just need to jump further into the fray. Further in … we’ll see where that leads!

Lost & Found

When I was growing up, I swam. I guess it would be more accurate to say that when I was growing up, I was a swimmer. It was my main identity for quite a few years. When there was a creative writing assignment in school, I’d write poems about laps or odes to chlorine. If asked questions about myself by well-intentioned but nosy grownups at parties (kids, of course, never ask such prying questions; they just take each other at face value), I discussed swimming. The fact that I had electric-blonde, stiff hair kind of gave me away.

But then, I quit swimming – suddenly. One winter, between age group swim club and the beginning of high school season, I got a nasty case of strep throat and had to take a few weeks off. By the end time that I was feeling better, I realized that I didn’t want to go back; the thought exhausted me, even though my energy had returned. One night eating out at a restaurant with my mom, she proposed that I take a break. The thought never would have occurred to me. It was like suggesting that I stop having hair or quit being from Iowa. It just wasn’t an option.

At first, it was a trial. Not even that – it was a break. A single season rest. By spring, I would be back to the six a.m. workouts, the after-school workouts, the weight training, and the weekend meets. My locker at school would again emanate with the fumes of chlorine from the gear that I lugged to and fro. Of course I’d return.

But I didn’t. I never swam another race. And somewhere along the way, I stopped telling people that I was a swimmer.

And yet, I’ve never stopped. Oh, for a few years there I certainly did. I needed to dry out a bit. But by the time I got to college, I started doing laps again. When I moved to Seattle at 22, I sought out public pools. There was the nice, clean one on Queen Anne, where dot.com types made deals in the hot tub, and the pool at the UW where students and faculty crammed in, eight to ten to a lane. But my favorite was the Medgar Evers Pool in the old African American neighborhood – a pool named after a Civil Rights leader, whose ragtag swim team’s mascot was an octopus with African features and whose lanes were mercifully empty. Across the bulkhead, the old black grannies in their petal-covered swim camps and flounced suits would bounce up and down to The Village People along with the young gay guys in tiny Speedos – the newest comers to the ‘hood – during water aerobics. There was a soul food restaurant across the street and drug deals in the parking lot beyond.

When I go to the pool now – something I only manage once a week – there’s always a feeling of complete comfort and ease. It’s a feeling that I don’t have at any gym or when I run outside. (Though after fifteen years of downward dog, I do have it when I ever a yoga studio.) It’s that sense of being home, of being with a part of myself that is central to who I am. I am a swimmer. It’s not to be lost, only found again and again.

I bring this up because as I try to figure out the role of writing in my life – as I play hooky from work for an hour this morning just to be able to write this, this thing that will do nothing to increase my chance for work or my billable hours, this thing that pleases no one but me — I remember, again and again, that I am a writer. I return and return to this fact, to this part of me with awe and fear and, finally, relief.

do no harm – to YOU

“The theme of class today is ahimsa,” said Betsy at the beginning of Thursday’s yoga class. I knew the word and was startled that Betsy had somehow gotten into my head and heard the vitriol there. She had chosen this theme just for me. I shrunk down on my mat for a moment, ashamed. But then I straightened my spine. Clearly, this was just where I needed to be.

Ahimsa is part of a code of conduct in a number of traditions, including yoga, Buddhism, and Jainism. These codes – much like the Ten Commandments – provide rules by which to lead a good life. In several of these traditions, ahimsa comes first and is a code against doing violence toward others. Many people have used ahimsa as reason for practicing vegetarianism, and it’s certainly used as a reminder of kindness toward others. But what my yoga teacher was getting at, and the reason I’d heard the term before, was because we should also practice nonviolence toward ourselves. And most of us suck at it.

May I proffer that artists suck a lot at this. We have an army of voices, well-honed from the stingiest writing workshop to the meanest crit group:  Is it good enough? Is it bright enough? Red enough? Bold enough? Smart enough? Straight enough? Round enough? Will anyone care?

Each of us – and I am so sure of this, even if you are nodding your head NO – has her one tiny but significant domain of mamahood perfection.

And if anyone is worse than artists, it’s probably mothers. The load of shame and guilt and not-enoughness that mothers heap upon themselves could keep a bull whip factory in business for lifetimes. We are never the Queen of the PTA. The one who brings all of the right snacks in the perfect containers. The one with the handmade birthday invitations and the kid-perfect party. Well – that’s not true. Often we are. Each of us in her own particular way, at her own particular thing is PERFECT. Each of us – and I am so sure of this, even if you are nodding your head NO – has her one tiny but significant domain of mamahood perfection. The issue is that we are not perfect – or even close – in many, many others and those are the areas that we focus on.

As an artist who isn’t getting her work done – certainly not at the speed or level that she would be doing if she were not a mother (I’m reminded of Hope Edelman’s comment that every child a woman has means one less book she could have written) – I beat myself up. You do too, don’t you? I feel sorry for myself and make myself a victim – almost as damaging as the bullwhip – and I compare myself endlessly and without clarity to women who seem to be doing it all (when if I stopped and examined, I could see the ways in which this isn’t true).

This behavior, this utter lack of ahimsa, is reaching a frightening, Mengele-like zenith because I am currently looking for a job. My temp gig is ending in another month or two, and there are no clear options in sight. Looking for work fills me with dread. It reminds me of how much I am not an artist in the day-to-day way in which I long to be. It also reminds me of the way in which I do not and will not ever fit into corporate culture. (Years ago, I was downtown Seattle with my parents on a bright spring day that turned unexpectedly hot. We were having lunch at a restaurant, surrounded by working girls in brightly matching suits and blouses, and I was berating myself for my lack of working girl moxie. The heat drove me to take off my sweater.  Then later in the bathroom I realized that I had on a black bra and looked ridiculous. I couldn’t even get this right, much less purchase and wear a cobalt blazer and skirt. I cried to myself, locked in a stall, and the moment has remained with me ever since – a beacon of my failure as A Worker.)

Looking for work also brings me face to face with the ever difficult issues of being a single mother with school-aged kids who get sick and have conference days and snow days and those three entire damned months of frolic known as summer vacation. Could I really take a job in a city a half hour away, for instance, where I’d be working eight to five? What would happen when the school nurse calls?

Looking for work brings me face-to-face with my worst demons: Money. My desire to Create. And my desire to be the best mother possible. Something’s got to give. And what gives first is any slim ability I have to be kind to myself, to cut myself some slack.

Even though it was two days ago, and I’ve struggled many times since to be kind to myself, I’m going to take Betsy’s advice and find ways to be kind to my artist-earner-mama self. I’m dreaming up a funky video project about my work – something I can send people that declares who I am and what I can offer, something that will actually be fun to make and perhaps useful in the longrun. I’m going to breathe deeply for the next few days before my kids go on a week-long trip with their dad, at which time I can steep myself in yoga and baths and reading the comically diverse books I got at the library.

I’m going to watch myself and give myself secret, silent fist bumps when I do something really well — nothing is too small. I know how to use semi-colons – no small feat!  I give good answers to some of my kids’ weirder questions. I am good at spooning. My pets do not go hungry. I am making my ex-husband a birthday cake, and just this morning I had the kids call his mom to wish her happy birthday. I do a great camel pose. I can order off a menu in French. I got my sidewalk fixed just when the city asked me to so. I recycle.

Nothing is too small. It’s all worthy of a quiet moment of celebration.

There’s a Buddhist saying:  ”Practice like your hair is on fire.” Can I bring that same passion – a passion akin to what I focus on my missteps and my shortcomings – to ahimsa? Marrying passion with gentleness, seems like a very good practice to try my hand at for awhile – black bra and all.

 

ambition – a post script

An article in today’s New York Times about the Czech band, The Plastic People of the Universe, who have been credited with playing an important rule in the downfall of that country’s communist government, talks about the lack of the recognition they have today. Speaking of the band’s keyboard player, Josef Janicek:

“While other rock stars tour the world and drive flashy cars, Mr. Janicek makes a living by delivering hot meals to a nursery school where the children know him as ‘Mr. Lunch.’”

This made me think of the work of so many working artists who are mothers. Even on the best of days, at the height of our success, we are always best known in our own universes as Mr. — well, okay, maybe “Ms. Lunch.”

Ambition – blind or otherwise

Ambition is like love, impatient both of delays and rivals. – the Buddha

“I don’t want to be a writer any more,” I said to my friend a few weeks ago.

“What do you mean? You are a writer,” he says, inferring that I’d just suggested I stop becoming a woman or a Caucasion of German-descent.

“I’ll always write. But I’m tired of the aspirations.”

The aspirations are a lot to carry around. Or maybe I should say ambition, which is more about drive and less about hopes and dreams. Both – ambition, aspiration and even hopes and dreams – are all baggage, to some extent. Indeed, they get us places and push us on to the Next Thing. But at different junctures, they can become heavy and, ironically, hold on to our ankles when what we really need is some steam heat to help us float.

Ambition is something I’ve struggled with since becoming a writer and a mother – two events that happened nearly simultaneously. Before I published my first book, I was someone who enjoyed writing. I did it when I could. I published occasionally as opportunity presented itself. But I didn’t have grand dreams. I didn’t call myself a writer. I didn’t worry terribly when there was a dry spell.

This was thrilling territory. What I didn’t understand was that it also came with a slew of expectations from my self and from the world.

But then the book came out and I was A WRITER. This was thrilling territory. What I didn’t understand was that it also came with a slew of expectations from my self and from the world. There was a book out so surely there would be another. And there would be articles. And agents.

Last week, I was visiting New York and was invited by a friend who is an editor to attend a hoity-toity publishing luncheon at the old school restaurant 21 Club. It was like entering the belly of the beast. All around me were editors and agents. Women who do nothing all day but Make Books, and by extension, make people into writers. It was an entire room of women in glasses with natty book-filled handbags, tucking into bland chicken, sipping coffee, exchanging business cards, and listening to a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist talk about “why fiction matters.” I might have passed out with anxiety, but instead I looked around and thought, “I am not these people.” They didn’t feel like my peeps. I wasn’t at home.

New York - last week.

The most at home I felt was when the visiting author, Elizabeth Strout, who was lovely and a tad gawky, tried to answer the rather overblown question implicit in her talk. “We all desire every day to have an authentic conversation,” she said. “Whether with a partner or a friend or a parent – it’s what we most long for.”

Authentic. Amen. Yes! That’s why I write. To record my most authentic self. To share her with others. To have that dialogue that in some ways I can have with no one else but myself. That is why I write — not to sell copies or get an advance or see my name in a review.

The conversation in the room, however, was all about that stuff: “What are you working on?” “What have you sold?” I was increasingly uncomfortable with my nametag, which announced me as a Freelance Writer. Is that what I am? But if I’m not a writer, then what am I? A mother, indeed. A member of my community who works to improve it. A yogi. A swimmer. A daughter. A friend to many. But do I have a professional moniker at this point? And if not, can I live with that?

When we allow our art to just be — not to be something that defines us or that we’re constantly working on (and here I mean working in a sweat-inducing, teeth-gnashing sort of way) — what happens? What happens to the art and to us and our self-definition? Over dinner in NYC, a friend who went through an MFA program and has published short stories, all the while working on a novel, admitted that she no longer calls herself a writer. “I’m a copywriter,” she says of her job in advertising, “which means I’m a sell out to a lot of people. Writing is my hobby.” Another friend said that she too is increasingly uncomfortable calling herself a novelist, as she’s yet to sell one and grows further and further from the ambitions that got her through two years in the notoriously brutal Iowa Writer’s Workshop. “But if I’m not ‘a writer’, then I’m a ‘legal writing teacher,’ which is fine if I’m also ‘a writer’, but less fine if I’m not.”

I used to not want to be called A MOTHER because I had such issues with all that that inferred. I saw Betty Crocker. I saw crockpots and dustbins. I saw apron tails and clinging toddlers. I saw anything BUT ambition. And if one wasn’t striving toward something, then who the hell was she? JUST a mother, I thought, disparagingly.

And if one wasn’t striving toward something, then who the hell was she? JUST a mother, I thought, disparagingly.

Another friend who has had luck as a writer, gaining hefty advances and time on the New York Times Best Seller list, told me emotionally–even a bit desperately, “I am a career writer. That’s what I do.” She was reacting to the changing publishing climate, in which the kinds of advances – large enough to allow someone like her to live for two years in an upscale urban area – are drying up. I wanted to feel for her – her “work”, as she’d known it, was changing probably irrevocably, and that is indeed scary. But I couldn’t much empathy.

I don’t mean to say that I view her as privileged. I’ve always ruffled at the argument that practicing art is a privilege. Having words always in your head, or images always in front of you, music in your ears – that is a way of Being. It can be viewed as a gift and even as an annoyance, but to be someone who tends to those words and pictures and sounds is not be a privilege any more than answering to an innate desire to teach or to medically cure others. One should be valued by society for sharing those imaginings with the world, for expressing them in such a way that helps the rest of us better understand ourselves and our world. “Looking at good art is like falling in love,” I read recently on a museum wall. Both are valuable experiences.

So I didn’t disagree with my friend that she should be able to keep doing what she’s done and be compensate it. Yet, there’s so much more luck-of-the-draw system in place in the arts than in other professions that I sometimes wonder if the arts can really be headed as a profession. We succeed and fail based on very fragile whims. There are many, many more talented people vying for a very small number of paying slots — that pay being decided in a pretty subjective manner by a small number king makers — as compared to, say, how talented accountants or dentists are rewarded. If you do good crowns or excellent bridges, chances are you’ll succeed sufficiently. Not so with oil painters and saxophonists.

As artists, part of our lot is to accept that the system is willy nilly. And in accepting that, perhaps our best choice is to settle down with it and let the art be. Allow it to ebb and flow and stop being wrapped up in success. Maybe by shedding our ambitions is the only way of doing our truest work.

Marilynne Robinson

I saw the novelist Marilynne Robinson speak a few winters ago. She lives in my town, so I see her at the farmer’s market in the summer and sometimes at her musician son’s performances in the winter. But this was a magical talk. She’d won the Pulitzer for her novel Gilead the year before. The book had come out 23 years after her first novel, Housekeeping. (Here’s a great NPR interview with her post-Pulitzer win.) She’d been busy in the intervening years, writing heady non-fiction about religion and teaching young writers their craft. But I got the strong impression that December late afternoon, as large snow flakes fell outside, that those two decades in between novels had not been a time she’d spent bashing her head against a wall, hoping desperately for something to write or fearing what would happen if she didn’t write another novel. Nor was it a time of ceasing to think of herself as a writer, for she is at her very core a writer. Rather, it seemed a time when she was sifting through ideas, letting some fall through the sieve and holding onto others – sometimes expressing them in alternatives forums, such as her nonfiction books or the classroom or even in her church where she sometimes gives sermons – and holding on to others, carrying them in her pockets and rubbing them, smoothing them out.

What would have happened to Marilynne Robinson’s writing if she’d felt compelled to get the Next Work Out? If she’d have an agent asking her when? If, in other words, she’d been led by the nose by ambition?

That day, I asked her how she’d managed to write Housekeeping when she had two young sons and was, I’d heard, a single mother. At the time, she was an academic, not a novelist, and it’s likely that no one in her life thought of her as such then. The moniker wasn’t yet attached to her person. She was teaching in France for a year, and her sons were in school nearly all day. The university went on strike, and suddenly she had time to go through the scraps of paper she’d been keeping in a drawer, on which she’d written ideas about characters and dialogue and questions. It was a collection of “What if’s” and suddenly she had the time to puzzle them together. She had time to begin writing a very slim but eventually very celebrated novel that would change – to the world, at least – who Marilynne Robinson was.My sense, though, is that it never for a moment changed who she was to herself. Her self-definition didn’t budge. She kept ambition calmly at bay – or so I’m guessing from how she’s portrayed herself and how she writes.

At 43, I think I’m ready to let go of the impatience of ambition. Of the foot race that comes with it. I want to be. Here and now. How long I can live without a moniker in our profession-obsessed culture, we shall see. (Ah, yes, another reason to move to France where, so I hear, no one asks ‘And what do you do?’ at parties) But I’m going to try to cultivate contentment with and appreciation for the multitude of things I accomplish each day, the infinite duties I hold, the people and beings to whom I tend in ways small and large. I am going to live on authentic conversation.

snapshots

I wish I could remember forever the sight of my kids running into school this morning (and so many other mornings) — of Bella in front, her hair tied back with a scrunchy with tiny bells that ring in the night every time she rolls over, making me think there’s an elf in our bed, and Tobey bounding behind her in the that run-skip-hop he does now — he does it in soccer games and on the playground; it’s the sweetest movement , filled with joy and uncomplicated verve. The sight of the two of them going into the old brick building with utter faith in an education that I know to be imperfect, complicated by too-large classes and standardized testing and the like, swells me with love and breaks my heart a little.

I wish I could always remember them sitting at the table this morning, Bella working on her “Geographical Terms” booklet that she is making. She has “ocean” up on Wikipedia and is copying the definition down on the blank paper in front of her: “An ocean is a large body of saline water, and a principal component of the hydrosphere.” She’s upset because her drawing of an ocean looks a lot like her drawing of a rapids. Her pencil grows heavier and faster on the paper, and I can feel her frustration from where I stand in the kitchen. Then Tobey, who is perched on the edge of his chair, eating a bagel, says, “Bella, I think it’s a really good drawing,” and I can feel her calm down a little. A few minutes later, still watching her draw, he says, “Did you like my book?” – referring to the story he wrote and illustrated and read to us last night, “The Birthday Party.” “Yes,” she says, earnestly. “Did you think it was good?” he asks meekly. “Yeah, it’s really good Tobey! Definitely.” I stand at the counter, knife poised in the peanutbutter jar, two blank slices of bread in front of me, and am filled with thankfulness.

I don’t want to forget the sweet eyes of Hannah, my 13 1/2 year old lab, who stumbles now daily, sometimes unable to get up for a few minutes, and who is losing her bladder and her memory. She’s been with me since I turned 30, a constant and patience presence who radiates unconditional love, even when I’m too impatient or crabby to reciprocate as I wish I could.

I don’t want to forget the sight of my kitchen this morning, cleaned and scrubbed by my friend C. last night and so many other nights. He does this for me because he doesn’t know what else to do and yet is filled with love and patience and a desire to be of use. There is something artful in the dishrags that I find in the morning, which he neatly folded and left on my sink’s rim . Knowing that he’s been down here, scrubbing my sink of its stains, wetting and drying the counters, stacking the dishes, while I snuggle in bed with the kids and read stories is a reminder of grace. And that love appears even when we’re convinced it won’t.

In the face of all that we cannot know — where a paycheck will come from next, how to get by as a creative soul in an ever efficient world, who we are becoming — these snapshots fill me with grace. They are providers of faith.

I Believe in The Possibility of Everything

Even now, eight years later, I cannot tell you if I traveled down that road as a whole person, held intact by my own convictions, or if I went there as a broken woman, mechanically following my husband’s lead. I can tell you only what it is like to be riding in that van, on that mango road, rolling past dense fields of brown and green. It is to be a thirty-six-year-old woman, a mother and a wife, who is willing to do anything—anything—to help her child.

Mi vida. I will tell you. This is how it feels. As if my life is lying across my lap and I am bringing it into the jungle, to the man who speaks with spirits, so it can be healed.  - excerpt from The Possibility of Everything

Something new on Mothers of Invention this time around — a Q & A with author Hope Edelman, who just came out with a new memoir, The Possibility of Everything. Many of you may be familiar with Hope’s book Motherless Daughters and the several books she wrote after receiving an outpouring of interest in the topic. The Possibility of Everything is a departure, as it’s straight memoir, focusing primarily on a weeklong trip she took with her family to Belize about nine years ago.

Her then-only child Maya had an imaginary friend named Bobo, who was not a particularly nice guy. He hit Hope and their Nanny; he scared Maya; and he refused to go away. Creepier still, Maya could see Bobo and the hundreds of other Bobo-like creatures with whom he lived. As Hope struggled with what to do about this, she also tried to hold on to her sense of herself as a writer and to her marriage which was faltering. Her husband was working insane hours while starting a new company, and was also entering a spiritual path – one with which Hope, a self-proclaimed pragmatist and cynic (how often those two go hand and hand) wasn’t entirely comfortable.

All of this led to the need for a family vacation. Once they chose Belize, Uzi’s (her husband’s) interest in the country’s shamanistic traditions and their nanny’s belief that Bobo needed to be dealt with through native healing techniques led them to enquire about seeing a shaman during their trip. Everything up to that point of the book is wonderful writing – pure Hope, who has a clear, witty and self-deprecating voice that reads on the page just as it sounds in person. But once there in the overgrown, uber green, musty-musky world of Belize, the pages start flying.

As someone interested in how mothers get the work done with their kids around, I was very intrigued by the fact that Hope had written so openly about her daughter, who is now an adolescent. My first question to her was, “How does Maya feel about this?” to which Hope responded: “Can we start with a different question? When you’re a 12-year-old girl, any kind of attention is anathema, but especially for something that happened when you were three.” Fair enough.

Another third of the book was written on stolen weekends away, when my husband would take care of the kids for a night or two and I’d check into an inexpensive hotel and binge write for as many as 12 or 15 hours straight.

Me: Can you talk, then, more about the HOW of writing with two kids?

Hope: My daughters were 10 and 6 when I started writing the book, and 11 and 7 when I finished. They were both in school full-time, so ostensibly I had those hours free for writing, but I’ve never been the kind of writer who can compartmentalize my work hours that neatly. I managed to write maybe 1/3 of the book during their school hours, working from a small office I rented in Topanga Canyon (the town where we live). It’s on the grounds of an outdoor Shakespeare theater, so I’d be writing about touring through Belize to the background sound of swordfight rehearsals in Elizabethan English.

About another third of the book was written late at night, after the girls went to sleep. I spent much of that year and a half extremely sleep deprived, since no matter how late I stayed up writing I still had to wake up at 6:15 to get the kids ready for school. And another third was written on stolen weekends away, when my husband would take care of the kids for a night or two and I’d check into an inexpensive hotel about an hour north of our house–strategically chosen to be close enough that I could make it home quickly in case of emergency, but far enough that they couldn’t drop in for dinner–and binge write for as many as 12 or 15 hours straight.

I took three trips to Belize to research and fact check the book, one in 2008 and one in 2009. That was probably the hardest part of the writing for both me and the kids. The first trip was for twelve days, and it was by far the longest time I’d ever been away from them. I think five days had been the record at that point. Before 2008, I felt the girls were just too young for me to leave for that long. The second and third trips to Belize were a little shorter, nine days and ten days, but still meant I missed some of their important events, like my younger daughter hula hooping to “Crazy Frog” in the elementary school talent show. Internet connectivity and phone service was a little spotty where I was staying, but we did manage to IM a few times and I sent them emails whenever I could get on line.

Hope signing copies of The Possibility of Everything.

Me: You were a journalist and then got your MFA and sold a book coming out of the Nonfiction program at the University of Iowa. Is writing with two kids – one on the cusp of her teenage years – what you would have imagined it being then? I guess the cop-out version of this question — and coming from the mother of younger kids: Does it get any easier?

Hope: “Easy” was being 28 with unencumbered daytime writing hours, and the ability to stay up long past midnight in pursuit of the perfect paragraph. Each day was an endless vista of potential writing hours. I remember when I was first dating my husband, a slightly older friend of mine who was an editor and author with one child said, “Now is the time to concentrate on your writing, because once you have a child you’ll never have the same focus on work again.” I thought, Wow, that’s interesting. I wonder what that’ll be like? It was still pretty academic at that point, since I didn’t know if I’d ever have children, but I trusted her and paid attention to what she said.

“Once you have a child, your art never occupies the center of your life again. The child takes over that spot. So my advice to you is to go ahead and have a second one.”

After my older daughter was born, I was pushing her in a stroller in Soho on a visit back to New York and walking with a friend’s mother, a fine artist who’d raised three children into adulthood. She told me, “Once you have a child, your art never occupies the center of your life again. The child takes over that spot. So my advice to you is to go ahead and have a second one.”
Between those two shared insights, both of which I took to heart, I think I had a fairly good idea of what to expect moving forward. Intellectually, I understood I’d have less time and perhaps less inclination to write once children came along, and that I’d have to learn how to write within carefully circumscribed childcare or school hours. Still, that didn’t wholly prepare me for the times when I nonetheless felt like pulling my hair out, because it seemed the only time for me to write was is in the scraps left over after everyone else’s needs had been met.

It’s absolutely gotten easier as the kids have gotten older. They’re now in seventh and second grades, and both are in school for full days. (Half-day kindergarten was a killer.) Today, for example, was my older daughter’s first day of school for the year, so I brought her there and stayed for the parent-student assembly. Then I grabbed a quick coffee with a friend and was home by 11. I don’t have to leave the house again until 2:45. And nobody needs me in between. After a whole summer off, this feels like a bounty of riches in terms of uninterrupted writing time.

Being a mother cracked open a new place of tolerance and intolerance inside of me, of patience and impatience, of hardness and compassion at the same time.

Me: What does it mean to not have your art occupy the center of your life? You work with a lot of writers – as a teacher, a reader, and a writer – how do you see it affecting people’s work when they are or aren’t parents? I remember a mutual friend — an accomplished writer — once describing a pretty well known poet’s work to me; “It would be better if she’d been a mother,” was the gist of what he said; meaning, I think, that it would have been softer, less self-involved.

Hope: Interesting comment, from a father of two daughters who’s experienced the transformative nature of parenthood. Also interesting because so many successful writers that I know do not have children, either by circumstance or by choice. And their body of work is more prolific for it, I believe. There’s an Israeli writer, a woman, whose name escapes me right now–maybe Savyon Liebrecht?–who once said that every book a woman writes is a child she doesn’t have. The American twist on that statement would be that every child a woman has is a book she doesn’t write, which has certainly been true for me, though without a single regret. But your questions was about quality, not quantity, right? I can’t make a blanket statement about all women writers since the work of each one is affected by so many influences, motherhood among them. But I do know that being a mother cracked open a new place of tolerance and intolerance inside of me, of patience and impatience, of hardness and compassion at the same time. Before I had children, I was capable of feeling great compassion for others in circumstances similar to mine, which I think shone through in the Motherless Daughters books. After becoming a mother, I felt capable of feeling compassion for others in many different circumstances, whether I’d personally experienced them or not. The world was suddenly full of people who’d once been someone’s child. And I hope that will shine through in all my writing from this point forward.

Unconventional Teachers

“We aren’t supposed to look the same. We aren’t a bunch of fucking drones.”

“My teachers had been encouraging me to paint with my kids, to work in my surroundings, but I’d just sort of rolled my eyes at them, like, ‘Yeah, right,’” Jill tells me over lunch. She has three kids under the age of seven and helps run a sugar importing business with her husband in L.A. A photographer and painter before having kids, she’s returned to painting again in the past year after relegating herself to pen and ink (very funny ones to say the least) during the kids’ infancies.

I get her “Yeah, right” attitude. If I had a dollar for every piece of advice people have given me about how to write while taking care of two kids… My therapists haven’t been able to avoid this kind of advice giving (something I find really annoying in a therapist, actually), nor my doctor, and certainly not my mother-in-law or many male friends. Only other women friends with creative bents have totally avoided it, and that’s because they’re all in the same boat – the same yeah, right boat.

Jill goes on to tell me that she’d started thinking about a painting – imagining it and planning it out in her head. She’d bought a four-foot by four-foot board for the work, storing it at home as she kept planning. One day, her kids wanted to paint with her and she decided to take the board out; “I figured I could always just get another one.” The kids went to town. Her seven year-old daughter, Scarlet, was dripping paint and making abstract designs. “I hadn’t been envisioning an abstract work,” says Jill, “but suddenly it really worked.”

Then 18-month old Zuma picked up a crooked stick and started trundling over to the table that held big slabs of blue acrylics. He carefully dipped the stick into the paint, went over to the board and scratched away with his robin’s egg-hued stick. “He was so focused,” remembers Jill.

She watched him, then got out her camera and filmed him. “I just knew he was teaching me something. ‘Thank you for showing me I don’t need a brush to paint!’ I wanted to tell him.”

“I want to make authentic work at this point in my life; I want to lose the critic,” she says with great passion.  If learning new tricks was the point of the 20s, and honing them was the point of the 30s, becoming authentic seems to be the point of the 40s for many women I know.

Jill’s kids helped her to let go of some of her rules. It’s that wonderful way in which our teachers can come from unexpected places. Certainly, our kids can be major teachers – artistically and spiritually, especially (see Karen Maezen Miller’s Momma Zen on this). Love, patience, gentleness, and play are all lessons children have to offer. Others who can maintain a sense of play or non-attachment to the usual way of doing things can provide such lessons. A friend who works with “retards” (his loving word) says they have been his gurus because their hearts are so open, without pretense. Another friend, a bookbinder and Buddhist, finds constant inspiration in her cats.

A yoga teacher who I visit when I’m in L.A. (in fact, Jill and I were still sweating after taking his class during our painting/teacher conversation) always connects me to my most authentic self.  The lessons I learn in his sweaty, unadorned studio translate not only into my yoga practice but my life and art.

While we were all balancing in a variation of parsvottonasan, he walked around the room and said almost fiercely: “This is called standing-on-one-leg-with-your-other-leg-in-the-air position. If you could look around – and don’t – what you’d see is the beauty of a room full of eighty-some people doing the same thing all differently. We aren’t supposed to look the same. We aren’t a bunch of fucking drones.”

Bryan Kest's yoga studio after class - imagine 100 people in here... It's powerful.

Ok, I’m a sucker for anyone who swears during yoga and makes it just a little less holier than holy. But I also love this guy’s constant reminders throughout class that we are here for ourselves. Our practice – be it on the mat or on the canvas or in rearing kids – is to be our truest self, whoever that is at the moment.

In yoga, it doesn’t mean I should look like the woman next to me who weighs forty pounds less and is twenty years younger, or the guy on the other side who runs ten miles a day and has the hamstrings to show for it.

As a writer, that doesn’t mean I should sound like Dave Eggers, much as I love his work, or succeed in the same way as this month’s hot new thing, much as I wouldn’t shirk success. It doesn’t even mean identifying the most saleable work.

As a mother, it means showing up for my kids to the best of my ability, but not pounding on myself if I forget water bottles and snacks.

It does mean practicing as though my standing leg is strong – shaking though it may be – and my other leg is extending a bit farther than I thought possible. It means being open to the possibilities of standing longer than I initially thought possible. Or of putting my leg gently down when I need to.

Which reminds me of another teacher. In helping me try to navigate some particularly strong emotions—passion and the possibility of connecting with another person, emotions that surprised and somewhat scared me—my friend/yoga teacher/Reiki teacher Jenny, said:   “Of course, it was that strong – you’re more Jennifer than you’ve ever been before.”

At first, this seemed so simplistic as to border on the childish.  But that was the point. I drank the idea—the feeling—in. Indeed, I have been learning from all of my teachers in recent years – the ones who live far outside the classroom walls, away from criticism and convention – and their lessons have been powerful. I can paint without a brush these days. The effect is a strength that comes through effort, coupled with the suppleness that comes when we abandon assumptions. Stick on board. Knee to head. Fying.

Related: See Honoring Your Inner Tutu