MotherPie

Someday You'll Know...

Mother drove the car and checked her face in the rearview mirror.  She smiled.  "You have to be careful to have your face lines be happy lines," she said.  "Someday you'll know."

Mother put her car into reverse in the driveway at her parents' home and watched her parents walk across their porch.  "They look suddenly old to me," she said to me in the seat beside her.  "Someday you'll suddenly think that of me, and you'll know what I mean," she said.  I watch her vitality, energy and strength from her exercise routine and wonder what defines old?  Will I know?

Mother was exasperated with me, the stubborn teenager that I was.  "You'll never know the patience it takes," she said.  "Someday you'll know." 

Don't you miss me, I asked my mom, when I went away to college.  "It is good to see you launched," she said.  "Someday you'll know."

As I drove out from my mother's house, she said how much she appreciated this extended one-on-one time with me now that my own children are out of the house, and said she savors every moment with me.  "Someday you'll know," she said.

Once, I don't remember when, she said that I wouldn't understand until I became a mother myself.  "Someday you'll know."

Someday is today.  Happy Mother's Day!!!

Life Behind the (Perfect) Picket Fence...

Family life is never as neat and perfect as it is packaged up to be.  What you see from the other side of the fence, as an outsider looking in, is not the messiness and chaos, for the most part.  In fact, a good family struggles to overcome circumstances and situations and hopefully, can struggle together and make it through tough times better for it all.  Presenting wholeness is presenting hope and faith and positive outlooks.

Airing dirty laundry?  Shoot, with closed windows and the demise of the clothesline, it isn't even metaphorical anymore.  I used to be that no one aired anything publicly or privately. Then it was "let everything hang out."  Reality shows?  Even those are edited.

The picket fence for bloggers and teenagers is an interesting question, as far as boundaries go.  For me, I choose to keep my family and their matters mostly all private.  New York magazine has an article about students at Horace Mann in NYC, how they posted derogatory things about teachers on Facebook, how teachers discovered them and confronted the issue and how the whole affair sorted out.  The student who was responsible for the comments is now Student President and teachers have been forced to resign for invading the Facebook territory.  The letters this week to the magazine about the article are evident of the hot buttons being pushed with schools under pressure to get students into top colleges, the ability of teachers and administrators to discipline students and the issues of boundaries and privacy with public postings on Facebook.

As mothers we have a job to protect our children and our family and that instinct runs deep.  Children are growing up in a different world.  How this sorts out, I wonder.

   

Fois Gras Moi...

With the professor sitting at the head of the table, the waiter asked all of us, students-in-Paris, what we thought of the meal.  After course-upon-course, I said that I was so full.  Quelle Horreur!  The literal translation meant I had told the waiter I was illegitimately pregnant.

Well, that was 1977 and this is 2008 and I don't remember the French for what I said but after fabulous meals and most memorable wines in Napa Valley, California, I'm now, me, moi, fois gras.

We went to visit my in-laws in Sacramento and they asked what we'd been doing in Napa Valley.  Eating and drinking.  No, really, what all had we been doing?  Eating and drinking.  Really. That's all we've been doing. We've been eating and drinking, eating and drinking.

I'm pregnant-to-bursting with food and wine.

Windows and Views...

Think of the view that gives pause, takes us outside of ourselves and sheds perspective and light upon our world.  What window defines your world? Now?

Friends and loved ones can give us these perspectives.  Our window tends to be one looking out from ourselves, stuck in our place inside.  Windows are outward things, a construct from in to out. 

Often it takes a long time for an idea of self and place to come from an objective viewpoint, from the outside of that window. After a period of time we can have an idea of perspective from the imagining of looking in, but that isn't our day-to-day way of living. We live on the inside of the window in our private places, with our idea of the view.

Shifting windows, shifting views, shifting places.  Very rarely, if ever, do we just sit on the sill, sensing our view from outside-in or inside-out simultaneously.  My youngest child turns 20 this year.  My window changes from a mother of teens to a mother of three twenty-somethings.  Man oh man does my female view change this year.  Motherhood feels as thought the curtains have shut.  Glass panes to changing scenes.

Windows to the soul.  I've lost count of the windows I've looked out while living, thinking about these things.  All I know is that windows are important, whether in NYC, Atlanta, Houston, Dallas, Oklahoma, or now in Santa Fe, at least for me.  We all need, as women, a room with a view. We all need our never-changing windows of self-definition. This is our newest window, large, full of a living plant on the inside and frozen snow on the outside and a wall.  All windows can be existential.  The window of motherhood is most defining.

Part II: Privacy and The (Watching) Eyes...

Part II: Privacy & Eyes Looking In:

Starting with the eye as the definition of self, artistically and symbolically in Part I, Eyes Looking Out, I am now in Part II looking at the issue of technology and privacy and wondering how this will alter our very sense of self, our soul and our way of seeing our identities and our world. 

For our children, things will be and are dramatically, radically different, far more different than they already are, tech wise.  Profound changes are altering us in ways that are complex and scary and unfathomable. Like the kohl used for protection around eyes long ago and today (this kohl-lined eye at right is from an Egyptian sarcophagus in the Met), what firewalls or metaphorical kohl and protections will we have?   What will we give up for convenience, for safety, for security and what are the long-term implications? 

Adobe Walls & Digital Dust...

As I slowly rebuild my computer after it crashed, I am thinking of the Adobe Photoshop program I need to reload and which I've missed and all of the  many photos I don't think I had backed up that are gone forever, digital dust to digital dust.  I had to pull this one, of the adobe walls of the Rancho de Taos church, left, from my Shutterfly online digital file.  Regular adobe walls need maintenance, just like my computer does.  But my tasks are ethereal, digitally, and not something I can put my hands on, like real adobe that is everywhere, here, in Northern New Mexico.  Digital dust.

What forms and shapes the adobe walls and structures in our minds? The NYTimes magazine article this week on Taking Play Seriously was a good read about how we are hard-wired to play and how childhood play helps shape the growing brain.   The article doesn't touch on the online play I've seen with how teenagers work to create an online digital identity, play at presenting various aspects of their personality through their profiles and how they project and portray their personas through Facebook or MySpace.  Networking is a form of play.  But oh,oh, oh, this is a dividing wall of concrete it seems, between the play of yesterday and the play of today.  How will this sort of play shape the thinking and beings that are growing up digitally?  Media Theorist Marshall McLuhan said, "Men on frontiers, whether of time or space, abandon their previous identities. Neighborhood gives identity. Frontiers snatch it away."  Ourselves in this new media world? Digital dust?

Wasbands and Hives...

My son is taking Marriage and Family, a college course.  I took a course by the same name, too, one year into my dating relationship with my husband.  After 28 years of marriage this year, I'm wondering how things have changed and what the content of his courses might be like.

Will he look at the topic of Starter Marriages?  What is the latest advice and what about the stats for prenups?  Dynastic marriages, marriages of convenience, marriages of hope... 

Love in the linear world...Love sense and love scents.  Now we know the science of things, the genetics of attraction perhaps and it is now time to rethink theories of marriage,  the marriage gap,  ideas of the resintitutionalizing trends of marriage.

Pink is the new color of love.  At least in my idea of love as a consumptive thing.  Really, it was only an idea I had for a school project and this art piece, left, was part of the visual. 

Love isn't a consumptive thing or is it? Marriage should be a dynamic thing and courses about it probably change over time.  I hope to get my hands on his textbook.

Chicks & Chickies...

When we, as women, grow up, we have our hen friends. In fact, in England they call the bachelorette parties hen parties and girl-night-outs are called hen nights. 

As mothers we learn to sit upon ideas, accept what is hatched, cluck around our young and hopefully not peck to death those we love the most as we try to spread our wings in protection over them.  We know of the snakes in the henhouse and the hawks in the sky and how good eggs can crack.  We know the roosters who crow, the roosters who strut. We learn how to be mother hens.

Maybe this is why I have taken to heart the idea of the chickies.  That is what I call my little ones. When I want to peck at my husband, I call him Gallito.  It is my underhanded slap.  He doesn't get called that very much.

This chickie artwork is by  the folk artist P.J. O'Roarke. In the 1990s, she was living in Round Top, Texas and selling her work out of her home/studio and also through the spring and fall Round Top Fair.  When I moved to Atlanta in 2001, she was exhibiting at the annual Atlanta Folk Art Festival and she was among the very best.  I don't know where she is now. I can't find her online.   

One of my favorite pieces, bought way before any ideas of menopause were on my porchsteps, was a fan to add to my personal fan collection, most of which are cardboard.  P.J. titled it "The Menopause Fan" with the tagline at the bottom: Not just for Hot Flashes. The shape is similar to what my friend Francie calls the Funeral Fans. 

Hen friends. Chickies. Very important.

Teaching Children to Think...

How do you teach your children to think and dig deep, to grow and to know? Theory of Knowledge, School of Hard Knocks?

Harvard's new female president Drew Gilpin Faust:“It is urgent,” she said, “that we pose the questions of ethics and meaning that will enable us to confront the human, the social and the moral significance of our changing relationship with the natural world.”

Does thinking happen after age 25 when neurological connections come together?  We're learning more about the brain and how it works.  For example, I found it quite interesting that neuroscientists discovered that teens are not able to think about consequences of actions until very late in their teenage years. Drugs, Sex and Sartre. Maybe I should have used that title for this post.

Parents used to have more of a hands-off approach to learning... sort of the life-long montessori approach that lets children discover learning on their own, to learn through experience.

One parent told me how important it is to project likely outcomes through "stories about other people" so that when a child is confronted with choices in situations, they will recall these admonitions.  Parental teaching is not so easy...thinking one step ahead of children and trying to guide them through today's modern minefields.

Teaching to think goes hand-in-hand with teaching to live. Some children learn best through experience.  Skin on the pavement is a term that comes to mind.  How much skin?  Life and learning.  It should never end.  The quest for knowledge and the desire to learn from experiences...   Jean-Paul Sartre's philosophy's never conteded with the pitfalls of our times.  Maybe, now that my children are (or nearly) grown, I should go back and reread Sartre in terms of today.  Thinking with twists.  Living is more than band-aid patches.  Kisses can't heal all hurts, prevent all wounds, make the way easy. The Brits call band-aids "plasters".  Parenting to plaster the wall of life? 

Parenting is the hardest job.  Maybe because the stakes are so high, the love so deep, the work so difficult, the rewards so wonderful.

Mother of the Country: Traditional Queen Elizabeth...

The Kingdom has always been her baby. She will have reigned longer than any other British monarch, including that long-serving Queen Victoria, next month. Yet her era has not been called Victorian and the Elizabethan era was for Henry VIII's daughter. On November 20 she is celebrating her 60th wedding anniverary.

Queen Elizabeth, 81, is such a firm keeper of tradition, holding the ruling the reins tight. Yet she isn't a matriarch in the familial sense. Victoria was more of a domestic mothering influence.  This Queen doesn't embrace change --she still comes out in carriages.  Her image is closely crafted; her portraits are reminders of position and  influence. Where once the Bishops wore hats and the saints wore crowns in England, she wears the icon of radiating glory, the indicator of  worship and all the pomp and ceremony that goes with those symbols of power.

Like the first Queen Elizabeth, whose only marriage was to her country, she has never been seen as a "loving figure" but as a person who puts position over personal.  This makes me think about mothers, power and place in general.

What does this say about women in high postitions and our Anglicized culture?  Thatcher was a tough cookie, too.  Can women hold power positions and also be seen as good mothers?  Does England have the mommy wars? Is it more about security in our society than the role of the female in the family?  She inherited power but did her position grant her power or has she worked to keep it?