Chappy

I have an aunt who is just the best at aunting (that's her over there, in the stunning hat, at my wedding reception.)  Everyone should have an aunt like this. 

Example: the time she bought her sisters and nieces crazy hats, including a turban (my sister) and a 20s-style cloche (me.)  She then took us all, wearing our hats, to high tea at the Four Seasons, for a Mad Hatter tea party.  We were quite the sensation. 

Example: she has, for decades, kept a bust of Elvis and a fake Christmas tree covered with purple feathers on display in her home, year-round. 

Example: she insists on "candlelit breakfast."  There is no one so elegant.

She has a teeny tiny cottage on Chappaquiddick, a bit of Martha's Vineyard that is sometimes an island or sometimes a peninsula, depending on the tides and how actively the sea has been reclaiming the beaches.  She took six or more of her nieces and nephews to the cottage for "cousins' weekend" every summer that I can remember.  And now she's invited our children to do the same.  So this year, Jon and I took the three little ones on one big boat, then one small boat, to the cottage, crammed them all in, and had a wonderful, perfect weekend.  With little to no sleep and little to no privacy, but, just look at this:

tired selfie attempt on ferry no. 1

 This is childhood to me.

Not pictured: the Flying Horses (epic), candlelit breakfast (of course), me driving around the island for hours with a baby who insisted on trying to wake the whole house at 5 a.m., then seeing a deer running full-speed across the sand dunes (sleep-deprivation-induced hallucination?  possible), fireworks at 10:00 pm (three hours later than the boys should have been awake), a farm stand with cucumber-basil popsicles, lots of snuggles with an incredible aunt. 

when I decided to be a mom

My friends from college like to tease me about my wholehearted embrace of my life as a mom.  Apron-wearing, cookie-baking, itsy-bitsy-spidering, mom.  They are right to laugh at me, since they knew me as a college freshman.  At that age, I announced that driving a minivan would be my worst nightmare, that the thought of going to a playgroup made me nauseous, that I would always live abroad and travel and go to cocktail parties and wear fabulous clothes.  And for some reason they remained friends with me, the saints. 

But then . . . I decided to spend a semester of my junior year studying abroad in Cameroon, which is a country about the size of California on the west coast of Central Africa.  I went to Cameroon for all the wrong reasons.  I knew that they spoke French, and I wanted to work on my French.  So far, so good.  But I also wanted so badly to be different - to live a life that was other than everything I had known - that it hurt.  Everyone went to Paris or Aix or Switzerland (the privilege!  I know, I know) - so I was going to go to AFRICA.  Also, my parents hated the idea, which made it even more attractive.

I knew nothing about Cameroon.  I didn't know about its complicated history of colonialism and civil war, about the hundreds of language spoken there, about the diversity of landscape or religion.  I knew nothing of its staggering beauty, its incredible food, its exuberant, hospitable people.  So I got on a plane after a tearful and dramatic goodbye with my boyfriend, and landed many hours later in a place that seemed like a foreign planet to that sheltered little girl.

After a couple of days of orientation - mostly lectures on all of the diseases we would certainly contract - we were sent off to our first month-long homestay.  I nervously arrived at a good-sized house with a corrugated tin roof, accompanied by Elvis, my homestay brother, a charming and handsome 16 year old boy with a life-size cut-out of Beyonce tacked up above his bed.  (The names in that family!  They had an Elvis, a Prince, a Jeanne D'Arc (which I quite like, actually)).  The house seemed quiet. The first room I saw was an empty formal parlor, with a dozen matching chairs upholstered in green velvet, and potraits of the Cameroon president and my homestay father on the walls.  Next we passed through a narrow hall, which opened up into a kitchen filled with more people than I had thought could fit in the small room.  It seemed like dozens of faces, all smiling and welcoming me in rapid French that I could barely follow.  Soon it was made clear that these were all siblings.  20 of them.

20 children.  My parents are each the youngest of six, so I thought that I knew about large families.  But this?  I had Elvis write down everyone's names on a sheet of notebook paper, and it soon became clear that there were three wives in the family.  (Oh, Cameroon has polygamy?  I had no idea.  None.  Seriously, I should have read at least ONE book about the country before moving there.)  

The culture shock was intense, certainly.  But even more so was my crushing homesickness.  I felt ill, constantly on the verge of tears.  Everything was awful, I had made a huge mistake.  Making it worse, the kinds of things that I was good at at home- schoolwork, field hockey- were useless to me in Cameroon.  I had thought my French was passable; I still couldn't follow half of what was said to me.  I didn't know how to wash my own clothes using rocks to beat out the stains; I didn't know how to cook over a fire or tie a headscarf.  I had always thought of myself as competent, if nothing else.  In Cameroon I was useless, a child.  I was flat-out scared, and I wanted to go home.

I wanted to quit, but do you know what saved me?  Those children.  One child in our family, a little girl, about two years old, had severely bowed legs.  I imagine that in the West she would have been fitted with leg braces and been fine, but in Cameroon she walked with a limp.  She was my favorite.  When I got home from university I would pull her on my lap, play little games and sing songs with her.  She never teased me about my French (she mostly spoke their native patois anyway) and she seemed to like me.  She braided my hair and taught me how to say hello and goodbye in her language.  

Other times I held infants (so many infants!  Almost every woman had one strapped to her back all day) so their moms could tend to something else.  One day I walked home with a young mom whose husband was away with the army.  I carried her tiny newborn, wrapped in a blanket, as we walked through wild fields and over a bridge no wider than a single board.  I was so terrified that I would drop that bitty, perfect thing.  Here was something I could do, and do well.  I could help take care of the babies.  I clung to those children and their unquestioning acceptance of me, useless and lost as I was.  I found my footing and made it through.

Those children- their happy faces, their loud songs, their little chubby arms around my neck, those little content infats bouncing on their mothers' backs as they went about their work - I wanted it, all of it.  International travel, money, a fancy career - I still wasted a few more yearsstupidly chasing all of that when I came home, but underneath it all was a longing for babies.  I started counting the days until I could start my own family.  Ten years later, there I was, driving a minivan full of babies to a playgroup.  I am so glad that I was so wrong.

endure for a night

I first thought of this blog as a kind of scrap book, a way to document the life I'm living with my children.  But I think it's ok to start moving past cute baby pictures, though there are some of those too, don't worry!  Oh look, here are a few, from a recent playdate with cousins:

But right now I want to talk a little bit about how things are going.  And how right now, I am scared.  Deep-down, nails-bitten-off, awake-in-the-middle-of-the-night, scared.  Because, for a bunch of reasons that aren't all that important, I have to find a new job.  I am my family's financial support, and I have three babies to feed.  If I can't pull this off, we're in serious trouble.  So I worry, and chew my nails, and try really, really hard to think about anything else.  Sometimes that works, but sometimes I feel like the walls are closing in and I can't catch my breath.  And I'm flailing around, trying to think of something, anything, I can do that will bring in the income we need (yes, need) and will still allow me to be truly there for my kids.  Not "there for my kids" in the sense that every mother is there for her kids, because of course we all are.  But physically there - on the first day of school, at the soccer game, over afternoon snack.  I have a few crazy plans, but any one of them would be a huge leap of faith and risk failure on a massive scale.  I'm terrified.

But you know what?  We've actually been here before.  We thought we were in a crisis a few times - a job search that went nowhere, a house purchase that fell through, a new baby on the way when we hadn't quite gotten all of our ducks in a row.  And it all worked out, every time.  And every time, the result was better than I could have even imagined.  So why am I so afraid?  Why haven't I learned?  Listen, I know, I know, that life doesn't always work out.  People really do lose their homes, have to start from scratch.  I'm not unrealistic about that, and that's what keeps me up at night.  But I also have to remember that we always come through it somehow.  And maybe a leap of faith every now and then is for the best. 

summer days

I'm a big believer in boring summers.  They should be so boring, they should be endless. Each day should last for weeks, with not much to do but examine cool new bugs and make up games in the woods behind the house.  So we've been doing a lot of this:

And it's been good.  So, so good.  Now, I'm not a purist.  The kids went to the pond every day for a half-hour swim lesson (the town offers them at something like $3/day.  How can we say no?) followed by lazy lunches at the beach with friends, lots of free swim and sandy bathing suits.  Afternoon naps, loads of books.  I read the boys The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and they can now identify fauns on sight.  Conor is learning to read.  We're planning a weekend on Chappaquiddick with my aunt and uncle.  But still, we've been able to slow down and just have a boring summer. 

This summer has made me so happy, and the thought of going back to work full-time (I'm at 3 days a week now), which is a looming possibility, is getting harder and harder to stomach.  I know I'm going to need to just put on my big girl pants and do what's best for our family.  I know that.  But oh, it's going to be hard to let these days go. 

Name change?

I don't know, I'm just playing around with the blog name a bit.  Hoping for a bit more anonymity, maybe?  Anyway, this is a poem I love, I thought it seemed appropriate:

Birches

When I see birches bend to left and right

Across the lines of straighter darker trees,

I like to think some boy's been swinging them.

But swinging doesn't bend them down to stay

As ice-storms do. Often you must have seen them

Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning

After a rain. They click upon themselves

As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored

As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.

Soon the sun's warmth makes them shed crystal shells

Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust—

Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away

You'd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.

They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,

And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed

So low for long, they never right themselves:

You may see their trunks arching in the woods

Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground

Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair

Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.

But I was going to say when Truth broke in

With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm

I should prefer to have some boy bend them

As he went out and in to fetch the cows—

Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,

Whose only play was what he found himself,

Summer or winter, and could play alone.

One by one he subdued his father's trees

By riding them down over and over again

Until he took the stiffness out of them,

And not one but hung limp, not one was left

For him to conquer. He learned all there was

To learn about not launching out too soon

And so not carrying the tree away

Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise

To the top branches, climbing carefully

With the same pains you use to fill a cup

Up to the brim, and even above the brim.

Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,

Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.

So was I once myself a swinger of birches.

And so I dream of going back to be.

It's when I'm weary of considerations,

And life is too much like a pathless wood

Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs

Broken across it, and one eye is weeping

From a twig's having lashed across it open.

I'd like to get away from earth awhile

And then come back to it and begin over.

May no fate willfully misunderstand me

And half grant what I wish and snatch me away

Not to return. Earth's the right place for love:

I don't know where it's likely to go better.

I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree,

And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk

Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,

But dipped its top and set me down again.

That would be good both going and coming back.

One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

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Source: The Poetry of Robert Frost (1969)

everyone's a critic

Being a mother is humbling, isn't it?  Recognizing the tremendous responsibility, the impossibility of the task, all that?  Also, because your children will tell you to your face when you look a mess.  Ahem:

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Conor: "I don't like your hair like that [ponytail].  I like it when it's all . . . wide."

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Finn: "WHO COLOR ON YOU BACK?"  [tattoos] [Finn only ever yells, hence the all caps.  Also I think he was really alarmed that someone had attacked me with markers.]

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Me: "Conor, do you like this scarf?"

Conor:   [Half-smile, nod] "Mmm-hmm."  [Walks away, shaking head, silently mouthing "noooooo."]

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Conor:  [With wrinkled nose] "Mom, can you just -- change your face?"

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Cass hasn't gotten mouthy yet, but we're dealing with a lot of this:

1.  "Nothing to see here, mama.  Scoot."
2.  "She'll never notice if I just swallow this real quick-like."
3.  "I HATE YOU I HATE YOU."
4.  Onward.

And this has nothing to do with anything, but Conor "graduated" from pre-school (since when is that a thing?  No matter, it was pretty cute) and summer is ON. 

Happy days.

One Hot Mess

It's a good thing she's cute, because this is gross:

Why wasn't I watching her, you ask?  Oh, that would be because one Mr. Finn had just had an accident of the particularly messy variety and I was in the bathroom with him and an entire package of wipes.  And I am pretty sure there was poop on the doorframe of my bathroom (I cleaned it.  You can still come over, it's safe now, I promise.)

Nothing but glamour over here.