Lila Discovers Steeleye Span

"Mama," Lila said this morning at breakfast, waving around the flimsy plastic cover of her YoBaby, which was the only part of the product she was interested in. "This is carrot cake."
"Because you like it so much?"
"Mmm hmmm. Also I like chocolate cake."
"Maybe we will have chocolate cake or carrot cake for your birthday," I said. "Hey, Lila, how old are you?"
"Two in May," she replied immediately, her response hard-wired into her last year at this time.
"No-ooo-ooo..." I said. "Try again."
"Sixteen?"

In fact, she will be three in May. Three. For completely arbitrary reasons, I believe this means she should go to school this September. Those reasons are: I went to school at age three in September. So did my two sisters and so did their kids. I could keep her home. After all, I love having her around, even when I'm mostly ignoring her and letting her watch "Elmo's World." I like our parallel play. I like the way she races around the downstairs bare-bottomed and shrieks with glee whenever she pees on the potty. Best of all, I love when she and Johnny make each other giggle. She takes his face in her hands and squeaks, "Johnny, oh, Johnny Moaney!" Whatever that means.


Lila has just begun her Everything Poop phase. I blame her cousins. She inserts the word “poop” into sentences, followed by squeals of laughter on every occasion, and mostly I ignore it. Today, she made some poopy/raspberry sounds with her mouth, then turned her back and stuck her butt in my face and shouted, “I poop you!” and shrieked and ran around in circles. At first I rolled my eyes and said, “That’s not nice, Lila,” all prissy-like. But six-month-old Johnny, who was nursing, pulled off my breast and cackled. This encouraged Lila, who repeated, “I pooped you!” complete with wiggling butt several times, each time being rewarded with that most divine of all sounds, a baby’s laughter. So I joined in, of course, making poopy sounds and laughing too. I regard this as recovery and a great personal evolution.

She's so delicious. Today as we were snuggling, she whispered, "I love you." Tonight as I was cooking up my red cabbage and Brussels sprouts and singing "All Around My Hat," she said, "I like that song, Mama. Mama, let's sing that song in HooteNanny."

Sick Day

Tom has the stomach flu, Johnny has a cold that might be pneumonia and Lila has pink-eye. Meanwhile, Katryna and I have a radio show at 9am. WKZE 98.1 out of Red Hook NY is calling us to do a quick interview for drive time to promote our show at Infinity Hall this weekend. Katryna had laryngitis and the plan was for her to come over to entertain my kids while I was on the phone doing the interview, but as it turned out, the interviewer was so late that I took a chance on trying to put Johnny down for his morning nap about 30 seconds before he called. So Katryna picked up the phone and ran up to the attic to get me the extension. Juggling both kids and the two phones, we did the interview together.

Katryna brought over an art project for Lila which she will tell you about now:

I learned this wonderful technique from William's preschool teacher, Julie. When I dropped William off on Friday I noticed these beautiful marbled looking splattery paintings on the wall. They looked like they had been shellacked or something. I asked how to make them. Here it is. So simple. So fun. Such gorgeous results.




You take thick paper. I used Acrylic paint paper. They used a kind of white cardboard stuff. Then you pour some corn syrup on it. (This might be the one and only use for corn syrup-aside from marshmallows) So I poured some corn syrup on the page and then spread it around with a paint brush. Then you take watered down water colors. Ideally you have droppers- like for medicine- and you drop water colors that way onto the corn syrupy page. The paint is so cool to watch as it hits the corn syrup and sort of spreads out onto the page. You wait for the paint to stop moving and then you can add more colors. The greatest thing about this project is that the process is so incredibly fun and satisfying. Then the final project is inevitably beautiful. So fun. It takes a LONG time to dry. We did some last night and 14 hours later they are still a little bit tacky. Have a blast!

While they made gorgeous art, I worked on my February songs. Truth be told, some are not what you'd call completed, completely. This is how I write songs:

Play guitar with abandon and let your mind go.
Notice the kernel emerge and follow it.
Let it get bigger and more developed and follow it some more.
Squish it around in your hands.
At some point, sooner or later, it develops its own organic structure.
Then, hang ornaments on it as if it were a Christmas tree.

So I was sort of at the Christmas tree stage with some of the songs. I played a bunch of them for Katryna while she burned me a CD of photos she took of pelicans and also of our kids while we were in Florida. I started making a video for our song "Pelican Fish" whose lyrics go like this:

How much fish can a pelican fish
A pelican fishes all day
One fish, two fish, three fish, four fish
A pelican fishes all day
Five fish, six fish, seven fish, eight fish
A pelican fishes all day
Nine fish, ten fish, eleven fish, twelve fish
A pelican fishes all day.

The video will be posted as soon as it's done!

We had lunch, and versions of naps were attempted. Then I took both kids to the doctor, leaving poor Tom at home in bed with the Science section of the Times (did you know that Daylight Savings Time might be bad for our health? Check this out.) The doctor said Lila did indeed have pink-eye. "No," she said. "Blue eye. But I don't need a stick, right, Mama?"

"No," I said, kissing her cute head. "No shots."

Johnny on the other hand, does not have pneumonia, but we did figure out that I'd completely forgotten to schedule a six-month visit, so our wonderful doctor gave him a check up then and there. It turns out he's not gaining enough weight. There's a scary term for this that I have conveniently repressed, something along the lines of "failure to thrive," but not quite that drastic. He was 50% in weight at birth; 35% at 3 months and now he's 4%. And 65% in height. A string bean. But with the cutest chubby thighs you've ever seen, so I just haven't worried. My doc sure seemed worried though, and wants me to give him an extra feeding every night at 10pm.

I had a remarkably good day considering all the sickness and schlepping and concern about Johnny's weight. At the end of it, I realized I would not be able to leave two sick kids with an even sicker husband to go to my regularly scheduled Tuesday meeting with my friends, and I was pretty disappointed, but still willing to play Cheerful Mommy. Cheerful Mommy made dinner and tidied up. But during dinner, Tom and I had a fight whose grand perimeters were the same as all our fights: who is going to get some down time and who is going to take on child-care. In this case, it had to do with a festival I'm scheduled to play at the end of the summer during the same weekend as Tom's long standing kayaking trip with his buddies. I hate fighting in general, and I especially hate fighting in front of my kids. But tonight, in the height of the feeling of rage––that feeling I get where I am convinced that I am right and he is wrong and that to back down one inch will mean certain death and massive injustice akin to the worst injustices humankind has ever known–– I said a little prayer, and immediately a voice said, "You're really angry. Wait till you're not so mad and then work on this. You're in a state."

Remarkably, I cooled off instantly. I felt as though the anger were suddenly removed, like a hot pan lifted into the sink and doused with cold water. I shook my head and looked around and even smiled a little bit and said, "Ha!" out loud. Then I went into the music room where Tom was sitting with Lila and Johnny and said, "I'm sorry."

"Really?" said Tom skeptically.

"Yes, really. I really am sorry. Let's talk about this more later."

I went around for the next hour giving baths, cuddles and changing diapers and choosing PJs. Also feeling bruised and sore and sad. Lila's at an age now where I feel like she's always observing, always taking in more than I might assume. I am beyond grateful that I made the decision to work less, but even though I can feel the difference in my ability to mother these days, even though I certainly have more equilibrium, even though I feel so much more balanced and able to respond with agility and grace to the off-beat challenges thrown at me by my clever pre-schooler, I still am so far from perfect. Letting myself show my anger toward my husband in front of my daughter was just not the way I wanted it to go tonight. It so clashed with my vision of myself as Florence Nightingale merged with Carol Brady. Why don't I have more self-control? And yet, I was able to apologize. I hope that's worth something.

After the kids were snugly in bed and I had called my mother to cry and get reminded that parenting is hard, marriage is hard, decisions about pre-school are hard and that being a traveling musician is hard, but all are worth it, I felt better. I found Tom and we talked reasonably and calmly about the festival and his kayaking trip and came to a happy solution and laughed and cried and hugged and made up. This is what we do. Anger is inevitable, and since death is certain but the time of death is uncertain, what are you going to do? And as Tom reminded me, these painful places where we rub up against each other can be our best teachers. They can lead to growth and wisdom if we open ourselves up to that possibility.

Also, Harvey the Squirrel is alive and well and living in the DAR forest. And there is peace and quiet in the walls of my house once again.

Fingerpainting

Someone told me today that EGO stands for Easing God Out. I love that. The way it works for me is this: I have a huge existential crisis (like losing my mind on account of having five careers and two small children on top of my own fairly needy high-maintenance self) and so I lean in on God.

“God,” I say. “Help! I will do whatever you want me to do. I give up! We’ll try it your way.”

Then God says something gentle like, “Just close your eyes and take some deep breaths. Relax. Let me rub your feet.” And like a deep-sea diver surfacing, a thought comes up that I know I can trust. The thought usually presents itself as simultaneously from deep within my own experience and also much more brilliant than anything I could have come up with on my own. It’s also usually simple and obvious, but it will require some sort of ungripping of my tight little fists. This ungripping causes momentary pain, followed by huge relief.

Then, after a few weeks of said relief, I begin to slide back into my old ways, whatever they are. Let’s just say, for the sake of example, maybe perhaps I am just a little bit of a workaholic and what I’ve just ungripped is some aspect of one of my careers. Again, merely for the sake of argument, let’s say I’ve noticed that the biggest casualty of my tight grip is my relationship with my two and a half year old daughter Lila. Perhaps she is furious with me because I went away to New York for two nights and didn’t come home with stories of meeting Dan Zanes. In fact, when she emerges from her bad mood long enough to ask me to tell her a story about Dan Zanes, I responded by saying, “Actually, Mommy needs to post to her blog because she made a commitment to do so every day for the month of March.”

Of course, none of this is exactly my fault, and for the record, I didn't really tell her I had to post to my blog. What I really said was that I needed a nap, which was true. Moreover, I firmly believe that it’s a gift to my daughter to have a mother who loves her work and who feels whole and together because of it. But the piece I need to pay attention to has to do with something that subtle voice says to me when I ask for help. It says, “You don’t have to be a supermom. You don’t have to be the kind of mom who makes macaroni collages with rubber cement, or the kind of mom who makes her own play-dough and dyes it with natural pigments made from wild berries that you scavenged with your child on a field trip and crushed under your bare feet once home. You don’t have to be the kind of mom who sits on the floor for hours with your child making up stories about flying to Seattle and animating her stuffed animals with different foreign accents. You just have to find something you like to do and include her. See where your interests meet. Treat her like you’d treat anyone you love. Pay attention to her.”

It’s worked really well for me in the past to heed this voice. Even when the only thing I can think of to do is sit in front of the TV and watch "Elmo’s World," there’s a big difference between sitting with her and paying attention to the show, letting myself enjoy it and laughing at the jokes, or making comments about Mr. Noodle, or singing along to the songs Elmo teaches her versus sitting her in front of the TV while I take off to the kitchen to tidy it, make a phone call, check my email, cook a meal. Not that I shouldn’t be able to do some of that—I must be allowed to do some of that or I will once again lose what’s left of my mind. But just as toddlers learn independence by venturing further and further away from the parent only to return to touch the parent’s knee every once in awhile, so that both know there’s still a bond, so must I come back to Lila and reconnect every half hour or so (at the least) to let her know I am still here with her. My lesson as a parent, over and over again, seems to be this: forgo achievement in favor of presence. No matter what the arena, the achievement is never as worthy as the sheer wordless experience of togetherness, bare attention.

Along these lines, I spent far too long today on the phone talking to various admissions people about various preschools. I had promised Lila some drawing time, and I blew right over it conversing with a financial aide administrator about whether or not we qualified. (I have such mixed feelings about this subject, by the way. We are right on the line, and I was raised to believe that one paid full price for education if at all possible. My parents didn’t go out for dinner for ten years in order to send their three daughters to private school. My first instinct is to go to the school with the lowest tuition, which also happens to be a co-op. I like the idea of paying in part with my time, elbow grease, and in my case, voice and guitar and my ability to impart a song to a group of children. But I also, like all parents, want the very best for my child, and maybe I am being unnecessarily proud about the financial aid.)

At any rate, I don’t have any clear answers about the school decision right now, nor did I this afternoon as the clock was ticking and my designated drawing time slipped away. As my friend Karen says, “you are in the information-gathering stage and that means you still need to gather information.”

But when I get into this mode, this information-gathering mode, when I have a goal, I am like a dog with a bone, worrying it, tossing it around, chasing my tail, growling at anyone who comes near me with even the wisp of a threat that they might take it away. I am easing God out, forgetting that God doesn’t like it when my full attention is on my own little knots and problems. God seems to like it better when I hand the bone over and trust God that the marrow will be given me in a much less painless way than my solution, which is to absolutely gnaw the bone to shreds.

Lila is too young to notice that I promised her we'd draw together and then reneged. She doesn’t hold grudges. Even yesterday when she wouldn’t talk to me for a good forty-five minutes, eventually she softened and asked me again about Dan Zanes. This time, I was able to tell her all about the Del Fuegos, how he had his daughter Anna and came to want to make a different kind of music that whole families could enjoy together. Then we sat down and made fingerpaintings. By evening, she wanted me to be the one to put her in her crib.

Tonight I was getting ready for my writing group. The house was in its usual state of cataclysmic disrepair, with the added bonus of fingerpainting materials underfoot, and I was fortunate to have the help of both Tom and our wonderful babysitter. My job was merely to get Johnny down. I lay with him, breastfeeding, my mind on my day: the school decision, the bills I was paying, the email I sent out about the next writing session here at my house, the fact that I forgot to buy enough protein at the co-op today and will therefore have to schedule another trip to a grocery store this week, the discussion questions for my Agape meal for members of our church this Saturday, the video to "Pelican Fish" that I am trying to make, the surly knot that is the current version of my novel, The Big Idea, the concern I have over Lila’s potty training or lack thereof. The usual swirl, or as Jack Kornfield would say, my typical top ten hit parade. Johnny started making his tired noises, which sound like a car trying to start when the battery is dying: ‘UH ah, UH ah, UH ah, UH.” He also rubbed his eyes. I carefully picked him up, still attached to my breast and lay him in his crib. He looked up at me, his eyes half closed and grinned. He wiggled all over, holding eye contact and beaming. I was about to leave him there and take off to check my email to see if any pearls of wisdom or mind-blowing answers to the questions that had been swirling through my head would be waiting for me in my in-box, when I thought, “Which are you going to remember in ten years: any of these mundane concerns or the look on your son’s face as he gazes up at you adoringly?”

So I stopped and I stayed and I grinned right back and I waited until he moved his attention from my face to the chord of his stuffed Clementine Bunny. Clementine Bunny is actually two bunnies: a big mommy bunny attached by a pull-chord to a little baby bunny. When you pull the baby bunny away from the big bunny, a music box plays “Oh my darling Clementine, and the baby bunny pulls in, inch by inch, back to his mom until he’s snug up against her and the song stops.

A Perfect Day in the City

As I type this, Katryna and I are hurtling up the Hutchinson Parkway on Sunday morning at 9:19am, EDT. Johnny woke up at 5am by the old time after sleeping about 6 hours. I nursed him for awhile, and then let him rest on my chest while I tried to sneak a few more zzz’s. Then he threw up all over my hair, and I decided it was time to get up and go back to Massachusetts.

An hour and a half later, I was carrying our coffees back to the car on Bank Street. Katryna was boogying to “Muffin Man” in the driver’s seat. The sky was a patchy pale blue and the streets had that warm wet feel of early spring and I was not wearing a hat. I’d choose this mild, subtle weather over almost any other kind.

"So move to Seattle," Katryna suggested helpfully when I shared this feeling. But part of what I like is the way it surprises me every single year. Really? Spring?

Yesterday was a perfect day. I say this despite the fact that we did not go up to see my 101–year-old grandmother. Johnny’s cold had moved to his chest and he was oozing bodily fluids from every orifice. I know how my grandmother’s caregivers feel about visits from sick people, so we decided to stay in the Village. We ventured out at lunch time and took pictures with my cell phone camera



We had lunch at the Whole Foods at Union Station. Katryna insisted on carrying Johnny in the front pack and pretending he was her baby. People thought we were lesbian moms and were therefore incredibly nice to us, wanting to go out of their way to prove their open-mindedness, perhaps. “Welcome to the neighborhood!” sang other people with strollers as they passed us. “See you in the park!” Everyone was out, enjoying the first spring-like weather of the year. Lots of babies and puppies. I love babies and puppies.

Whole Foods was like a stadium show. There were perhaps three hundred people waiting in line to check out. Five Whole Foods staff were required to police the lines. People who were incredibly rude to other strangers came up to us and cooed, “Oh, what a cute baby!” Johnny waved at them. He is perfecting his Italian backward wave. Right now it’s at the stage where he extends his palm out and flat, facing up and waves his whole arm, Frankenstein-like. I would say he was cute too, if he weren’t my baby. Oh, yeah—I’m always saying he’s cute.

Last week, Katryna sent me this article from the Times by Natalie Angier. It’s all about how infant human babies are really fragile for a really long time compared to other animals. They have to be cared for much longer than, say, squirrels. So one of the ways we handle this is that we raise our children communally. Aunties, grandmothers, dads––all are what Angier calls "allomothers." We let everyone hold our babies. But chimp babies who are almost equally fragile, are held exclusively by their moms, for good reasons: dads occasionally kill them just for sport. This is a handy evolutionary device: while chimps andother apes generally space their kids 6 years apart, we space ours, as every good Episcopalian knows, every 2.5 years. That's why we rule the earth and chimps are closing in on the endangered species list.

The other evolutionary adaptation that comes from this is that our babies are incredibly social: they flirt, the beam, they even bellow charmingly most of the time.
My coaching mentor Martha Beck says we are the only animal that looks for a safe person. All other animals look for a safe place. We are the most social of creatures.

By the way, here's an ad for Tylenol we passed:



I was moving so fast, I just assumed it was some greenie goodie two shoes display of how terrible New Yorkers are about wasting coffee cups. Instead it's a rousing endorsement of our amped-up drug-addicted culture. Have some legal downers with your legal uppers!

Katryna and I performed last night at the Watchung Arts Center in Watchung NJ. We both could have sworm that we’d only just done a show there, a year ago December, when I was just pregnant with Johnny (4 weeks—I’d found out the day before). Both Patty our manager and Lori our booking agent swore up and down that we hadn’t. We were relieved since that December show had taken place during an ice storm, and as a result (perhaps) the turn-out was tiny. So small that at the end of the night the promoter had said, “Do I really need to pay you your full guarantee?” (The answer, for all you potential promoters, is always “yes.”) So when we drove up last night and saw the familiar traffic circle and familiar little clapboard house, we both went, “AHHHHH!!! They hate us here!!!!!”

But then the evening turned into an episode of The Twilight Zone. The promoter was a completely different person who had no memory either of us ever playing there. Moreover, the set up inside was totally different. The show was fabulous, and packed, which was another difference.



The crowd was mixed: some young women who resonated with "This Town Is Wrong" and such, but there were also more than a couple of –how do I put this respectfully?--cranky older men who might have voted for McCain and pursed their lips when we said certain things. (I see myself in these cranky old men. They liked things the old way, and now kids are coming along and wanting to change it all. I can relate, but I don’t really want to be that way. I want to be soft and pliable like my kids.) Turns out I was wrong about the men. Several of them came up to Katryna after the show and said, "Aren't you the charmer!"




Katryna just had a great idea for The Big Idea. “You know how there was a first novel and people argue about what it was? Well, what if The Big Idea were the first in a genre? And what if the genre were this: the book is a (real) web site of a (pretend) band and each band member has a blog on the web site. And that’s how you tell the story.”

I think this is so brilliant I hardly know what to do. I have thousands and thousands of pages written, none of which I want to leave on the cutting room floor. The most recent version of this book was edited down to about 400 pp. But there are so many more stories to tell. This way, they all get out there. And we will raise money to publish some version of the story (I still have to chose which POVs to use) and a soundtrack. This way, librophiles can have an artifact in their hands and in their car CD players. We do need to raise money to pay Dave for his studio time, not to mention duplicating CDs.

I am home now. More about that tomorrow. Tom and Lila and Johnny and I walked into town and I bought Lila some fingerpaints and me some Pental markers and both of us some water colors. I feel so liberated and reconnected to my artist self. The irony of my taking a leave from coaching is that now I can see that I was cheating my life coaching clients by not walking the talk. How can I encourage people to take big chances when I myself am not doing my daily work and living through trust? But in the past week since I started blogging daily, I feel more inspired not only to make my own art, but also to share what I've learned with my clients. Art really does heal. I am reborn.

Pounding the Pavements

We are in the West Village, in exactly the kind of neighborhood I fantasized about living in when I was 14 years old. Of course, at that age I wasn't clear about rental prices and the discrepancy between what an artist makes versus what a stock broker makes, but I was clear that I was an artist. More on that later. But here I am staying with wonderful friends who are a sculptors, painters and writers, actors and film-makers. And the report on NPR that we heard driving into the city last night was all about how the stockbrokers were applying for jobs as sales people at Target. So maybe the artists get to keep Greenwich Village after all.

Our show at the Living Room was so wonderful, albeit stressful, what with arriving at 6:50 for a 7pm show. Our dear friend Cadence Carroll opened for us, and even though she was sick with laryngitis, she raised the roof with her sweet music. Katryna had laryngitis too, and we had to lower all the songs a whole step. Our cousin Craig who lives in the financial district arrived just in time to whisk Johnny away for a tour of the lower East Side so that his non-laryngital yelps would not drown out our efforts, and we were escorted home by the fabulous Lucy Roche, whose two CDs are my personal musical discovery of 2008.

Last night Johnny wouldn't fall asleep, which is unusual for him, and this morning he woke at 6:30 rarin' to go. After attempting to wrestle him down with both breasts, to no avail, I gave up and we sat in the sunny living room with our host, the sculptor who was reading the New York Times. I told him I was going to join him with my computer and read along on-line, which begat an argument over the merits and demerits of print versus digital information gathering (him:"You're the reason papers are going out of business!" Me: "You're the reason Brazil's being deforested!" Then we laughed and put down our "papers" and chatted about Johnny, Buddhism, how artists need order and tidiness (him) and and mess and chaos (me).

Now I am back in my little guest room with the oriental rugs which my hosts promise are baby-proof, meaning they don't wince when Johnny pukes all over them ("Babies were born on these rugs! Camels were born on these rugs!"). Johnny has miraculously fallen asleep for what could be an hour and a half, and I cannot believe my good fortune. Here I am, sitting on a bed with my laptop, leaning back with a mug of English Breakfast. Behind my head is a window overlooking West 4th Street, where Bob Dylan and Suze Rotolo once cuddled famously on the cover of his second album. It's a sunny, warm day, and beautiful people are walking by in elegantly tailored clothes. To my hungry eyes which usually see nothing but people bundled up in down and polarfleece from nose to toes, this qualifies as a parade. A woman just crossed the street in a tight wool fawn-colored belted blazer with a camel turtleneck and pointy boots. Her smooth light-gold hair clearly has been blown dry! I can't remember the last time I blew my hair dry, and I am happy to live vicariously through this lady. There will be no two-year-olds asking for Elmo or stories about Mother Goose (Dan Zanes's friend, not the centerpiece for Fairy Tales).There will be no phone ringing, no squirrel men coming by to check on the trap, no dishes to wash or diapers to process. Just possibilities.

Yesterday, I was on the cell phone with Lila as we crossed over into Manhattan. "We just drove into New York!" I shouted into the phone.

"Do you see Dan Zanes?" Lila asked.

Being in New York reminds me of our very early days. As I said above, I figured out I wanted to be an artist (no, make that was an artist) when I was between schools at the age of 14. I had never liked school. Part of my angst about Lila's going to pre-school is that I found those two years among the most traumatic of my life. Kindergarten was better, but school from age 7-13 with the exception of grade 5, seemed at times like one long socially uncomfortable situation after another. I always felt like I had my nose pressed up against a bakery where the other kids were indulging in different flavors of cupcakes, whereas I was 1. forbidden from eating sugar and 2. too poor to buy one and 3. too proud to ask for a bite. Also there was the whole problem of liking the Beatles in the late seventies when everyone else liked the Bee Gees and Shawn Cassidy. And the problem of preferring books to almost anything else.

But then, the summer I turned fourteen and was about to enter high school, I would lie in bed first thing in the morning after I woke up, and I'd stare at the ceiling and let my imagination go. The realization came to me, or perhaps I concocted it, that I was an artist, and that this was the very reason I had suffered so in school. I was different! I marched to the beat of a different drum! I no longer had to pretend to be anyone but myself! I could give up the preppy handbag with the reversible monogrammed purse cover; and I could also give up the New Wave tee shirt that was also not really me. I was free to be who I really was. I would be a folk singer, living in Greenwich Village like my idol Bob Dylan. I would marry an artist and have kids that we'd take to Magnolia Bakery and have whatever flavor cupcakes we wanted, and we would live happily ever after, writing songs about saving the world.

Ten years later, Katryna and I came to the City to "pound the pavements." Somehow, we'd gotten it into our heads that if we did this activity (which manifested in walking a lot with a bag full of tapes and press kits and visiting dark bars in the middle of the afternoon where there was no one present to receive our pitch), we would be rewarded with a Chance.

Before we left yesterday, I was on the phone with various people involved in various pre-schools, including admissions directors, the state arbiter of scholarship funds, other parents, etc. Next week will be devoted to exploring our options. I realized at some point yesterday that I'd been approaching the issue more from my own interests than from Lila's, as in: how will this affect me? "How can I let my little girl go for so many hours a week?" "Where is the damn school, anyway? Will I have to figure in a commute on top of everything else I have to do? Oh, no! The carpooling enslavement begins!" "A co-op? You mean on top of tuition I'm going to have to volunteer my precious time?" And most importantly: "Won't it be great to get a mid-day nap again?" Sometime in the course of the day, I began to ask more important questions: "Where will she feel most safe and happy? Which school will best foster friendliness and trust? Will she look back on the experience with fondness, or will she, like I do, shudder?" (And I have to remind myself that some kids might look back and shudder no matter where they went--the reason I hated nursery school, as far as I can recall, was because my best friend Eloise Jones who lived downstairs from us refused to talk with me or play with me at school. She would only play with me at home. So I felt dissed on a daily basis. Who wouldn't hate that experience? And what parent could have predicted or prevented that? Wouldn't I choose to send my child to school with her best friend if I could?

Did I mention that the pre-school I went to was here in Manhattan? I just looked it up, and it appears to no longer exist. The pre-school that is. The rest of the school is here.

Johnny's been asleep for a good hour. It's almost time for lunch. I am going to find Katryna and together we will pound the pavements, this time with a baby in an Ergo pack and our destination uptown to visit our 101 year old grandmother. I am going to breathe in the warm spring air and savor the company of my family. Maybe we'll even walk by my old pre-school.

Don't forget to turn your clocks ahead tonight! Daylight savings begins tomorrow.

Harvey the Squirrel

I am sitting next to Lila watching Sesame Street, or as Lila calls it "Real Sesame Street." We have the most basic cable, so we only get Sesame Street on weekdays at 10am. Other times when I am desperate for a TV break (for her, not me), I put in an Elmo's World DVD. We've been given these by various siblings and friends. We've watched them so many times, we know the sequence by heart, and since Elmo's World has a very rigid formula, we look forward to the mornings we are home and can watch a fresh episode. But this is not a fresh episode. We saw this very one last week. It's brought to us by the letter Q and the number 6 and it has all the same skits and super 8 films. Oh, well. Lila doesn't mind.

Elmo's World is about school today. Speaking of which, that is our big excitement of the week: Lila just got into a school here in town, and that is a big big deal. Kids in our town are put on wait lists for the various pre-school programs while they are still in utero. I did not do this; I put her on two wait lists sometime last year. I have such mixed feelings about letting my girl leave my house (all by herself!!!) three times a week; and yet, as you know, I could use the time for myself, and I could use the time to pay a little more attention to Johnny, who often gets relegated to his Tigger jumpy swing or to the floor where he shouts at us as he struggles to move forward in his now-all-fours, now-tummy porpoise-like gait.

Just so you all know, the squirrel is going to be fine. Merely evicted. Mark the Nice Squirrel Man came over yesterday and set a trap for him right above the large hole in the porch roof.

"I saw his nose," Mark confessed. "He's big."

Darn right. That squirrel must weigh 20 pounds. I have seen him on our porch happily munching our garbage, and he is the size of a large cat. We have named him Harvey. Mark says he will take him about twenty miles away to squirrel paradise.

Almost-Flat Lila was almost decapitated. Lila has discovered scissors. So we made a new Almost Flat Lila and an Almost Flat Johnny.

I lost about $125 which was our merchandise money from our show last week at Kripalu. I know it was stuffed randomly in my overstuffed disorganized purse on Sunday, but now it's not there. Katryna says not to worry; it will turn up. I feel sick about it nonetheless. It's not really my money, or even our money. Patty needs to "process" all merch money to give our old band-mates their royalties, not to mention pay herself and our business manager Kathleen. Along with the lost money is my count in sheet. I have no memory of where it might have gone, and I've looked in all the obvious places.

Yesterday we got called by the director of Revels Inc and asked to perform in the Summer Solstice Revels in Watertown MA. This is such a dream come true, I can't even begin to describe my joy. The only problem is that the show is on June 20 and we are already booked at Passim. So we're going to do the early performance for Revels at 4pm and skip the 7pm show.

I am really sad to be leaving Tom and Lila to go to New York for the weekend. This morning, Lila came to cuddle in bed with me.

"Are you bringing Johnny to New York?" she said, burrowing her nose into my side.

"Yes, sweetie," I said, knowing what was coming next.

"I want to come too," she said.

"When Johnny's a big boy and doesn't need to breastfeed, then I'll bring you instead," I said. "And we'll go to a museum. A museum is a big big building where they have big big BIG toys of dinosaurs and whales."

"I don't want you to take Johnny," she whimpered.

Wow: a whole other wrinkle to the fabric of the crazy quilt of our lives. Of course, I assumed she wouldn't want me to go. But I'm taking away her baby brother too! Oy, the guilt. Fortunately, her father is taking her to a sugar shack tomorrow where she will have pancakes and local, fresh maple syrup to her heart's content.

I found the Kripalu money behind the foot locker.

Harvey has been trapped! I just took a picture, but I'm not sure it really reflects his grandness and heft. I have ten minutes before Katryna drives up to pick me up, and I still need to breastfeed Johnny, yet somehow I feel compelled to call Mark and tell him to come rescue poor Harvey ASAP. Somehow, I am now the caretaker of all creatures in my domain, including my former enemy the squirrel.

Though I will write tomorrow, I may not be able to post. I will try to find an internet connection, but I will be in the wilds of NYC and one never knows. Katryna and Johnny and I are going to visit our 101 year old grandmother.

Schlepping

I love being a mother more than I’ve loved any experience in my life. But there is one thing I do not love. One thing that sends me over the edge almost every single time it comes up. One thing that knocks my carefully calibrated equanimity from here to Hawaii, and that thing is schlepping. Especially schlepping kids in the cold weather.
Because of this, I try to never leave the house. I can go for days hanging out in the house, making almost-flat Lilas, listening to Dan Zanes CDs and watching Elmo’s World videos, playing with Lila’s dollhouse, doing pretend HooteNanny. If we do venture forth, I make sure there are acres of hours of time on each side of the outing so that I don’t have to rush any child into or out of the car. For this reason, I try to make sure I, myself, have covered all my own physiological bases, in terms of hunger, fatigue and elimination. (Nothing makes me crankier than having to pee like a racehorse while Lila inches ahead of me on the six-inch path between snow banks that runs from the driveway to our back door.)

But on Thursday mornings, when we have real HooteNanny, we have no choice; we have to hurry.

-6am wake
-6:10-6:20 yoga
-6:30-6:50 breakfast (self) (put on tea to steep—must make it extra strong!)
-7pm at latest,wake Lila if not up yet
-breakfast Lila (with lots of help from Tom; in fact, sometimes he does the whole thing.)
-7:20 at latest, wake Johnny if not yet awake in order to breastfeed
-7:35 get ready for run; must be back at the house by 8:10! On way down stairs, throw clean clothes and diapers at Tom in hopes he will diaper and dress kids while I am running.
-7:45-8:08-“run” (really, I jog)
8:08-take the kids from Tom up in our bedroom where one of us gets a shower and the other one just gets dressed (don’t tell).
8:10-8:45-Run around madly collecting snacks, water bottles; argue about what toys/blankets/books/half-crayon-missing-its-wrapper may come to HooteNanny and what may not, put hats and coats on kids, put Johnny in his portable car seat, put Lila’s hat and coat back on her, since she will have removed it, find Lila’s boot which Tom put on but which she since taken off, and then, (if no one suddenly has pooped and therefore has to have his/her diaper changed, which of course means removing coats and pants), holding the car seat with one hand and Lila’s hand with the other, make way down treacherously icy back steps and icy walk to car, which will be locked. Find key in handbag. Unlock car. Retrieve Lila who has wandered to the other side of the parking area. Put her in her car seat, sometimes against her will. Put Johnny’s car seat in its base. Run back to the house to get the diaper bag (only sometimes do I remember to do this) and mug of hot tea. Drive the 4 minutes to Center Street and find a parking place easily. Dig through hopelessly disorganized purse looking for quarters for the meter. Get out, pop the truck, retrieve the stroller base, put all but one quarter in the meter. Bring stroller base to Johnny’s side and pop him in. Lila will be crying, so quickly go over to her side to unlock her. “I wanted to put the quarters in the meter!” she will wail. Say, “I saved one just for you.” With one hand, lift her out; with the other hand, hold on to the stroller. (Suck in abs so lower back doesn’t hurt all day.)
8:59-Let Lila press all buttons on the elevator. Arrive at HooteNanny; remove all boots, coats, hats, non-essential paraphernalia, and if the diaper bag was remembered, ask the babysitter to change the inevitably wet diaper. Sit down and drink tea and say a prayer that you will get through the morning. And thank God for this rich, crazy, stressful, marvelous life.

Art and Almost-Flat Lila

As I write this, the sound of a squirrel gnawing away at the inside of my walls is filling my ears on the right, while on the left, my six-month-old is saying, “Bur ur ur, a ba ba, ur ur ba,” and using the mallet of Lila’s tongue drum to poke at some small yellow triangle shaped blocks. He is so close to actual crawling it's paining him, physically and emotionally. He has red marks on his cute chubby knees, and he howls in frustration that he can't sustain his pose as he makes his army-crawling way across the music room carpet.

It’s been a big day here at Big Yellow. Kind-hearted readers, inquire no further as to my plans for that squirrel; you won’t like what you hear. For the more pragmatic among you, let me impress upon you the feeling this sound gives me every time it starts up again, after a 3 minute pause (during which I imagine the squirrel to be carrying its newly-shorn bits of my house into its new nest for the babies that were likely born two weeks ago: squirrels give birth to (multiple) litters between January and February, and these neighbors have been camped out here for at least that long.) It sounds like this: "Heh heh heh. HA HA HA!!!Heh heh heh. Saw saw saw.”

We did not exactly sleep last night. At 1am Lila screamed us out of our achy-backed nocturnes.

“There are spiders in my crib,” she wailed when I came to investigate, bleary-eyed and with my detested mouth-guard still protecting my teeth from their incessant grinding (perhaps I can use this as a bridge of understanding to the squirrels). I brought her into bed with me on the condition that she not wake her father who had insomnia the night before. She lay there next to me, arranging and re-arranging my arm around her neck depending on her fancy and occasionally sitting up to peer into my face and whisper, “Mama! Is it time to wake up Daddy yet?” until I said, “That’s it.” And took her back to her crib. This she didn’t like, and she yelled so loudly that Johnny woke up. This was at 2am. Suffice it to say, I spent the night in Johnny’s room, Tom in Lila’s and no one slept much.

This morning, I Skyped my new song “I Am Half My Mother’s Age” on Ed McKeon’s radio show on WWUH. The whole event seemed like a miracle, not the least getting to perform in my PJs. Lila and I spent the rest of the day sorting through approximately half a ton of baby clothes to give away. I am told that it’s not cool to give away clothes that are actually stained, but at this point I have ripped up so many for rags, I can’t imagine we can use (not to mention store) any more. So what’s a good environmentalist to do?

My mom friend Katie Rubenstein sent me this today, and it inspired me to do something creative with my child.


You will not regret the visit.
After lunch, we constructed Almost-Flat Lila (modeled in part after Flat Stanley, and in part after some similar dolls our cousins Emmett and Reese made for my parents last Christmas.) My idea, based on Emmett and Reese, was to staple two sides of a paper bag doll together and stuff it with more pieces of scrunched up paper bag, but the stapler was in my office which is past Johnny’s room and we didn’t want to wake him. So we used scotch tape instead, which prompted Lila to decide that we were wrapping birthday gifts. “This is a present for Abigail,” she announced.

By the way, Katryna was right: the “song about Vermont” was really “Country Roads.”

Running Shoes and Other Thoughts

It's 4:10 on Tuesday March 3 and I'm up in my office on the third floor of our house. It overlooks the parking lot of the hospital across the street, but less prosaically, it also has a view of just a little bit of one of the Seven Sisters, the range that rims our valley to the south. I love this room. It's removed from the rest of the house. I gave up my grand and commodious office on the second floor a few months before Johnny was born, and Tom painted this room a simple white. We hired our friend Eddie Duggan to strip the wood floors of their ugly rust red color and re-finish them; they are a golden pine now.

Already I am second-guessing my decision to halt my coaching practice. Today I coached two clients whom I adore, and I am sad I won't speak to them again for a month. I love coaching and, noticing my thoughts, I see that I "coach" in my head all day in the same way I "write" in my head all day.

Writing in my head all day was the tip-off to me that I needed to be writing on the page a little, too. I have another mom friend who used to be a writer, and she told me, "Once I had kids, all my creative juices went into mothering. They went into playing games with my kids, cooking, crafts, stuff like that." I had thought that would happen to me, too, but no. Perhaps it's because I'm too selfish; perhaps it's because I always hated crafts, even when I was a kid. (Though I had a thoroughly enjoyable and meditative 20 minutes this morning lying on the floor with Lila and coloring in a picture of some butterflies with her broken bits of crayons. She pretends they are ice cream, and when I'm not looking, she eats them.) But the truth is, I am still always writing. I go around with songs brewing in my head, and only sometimes do I sing them for my kids or Garage Band. I am constantly composing missives and plots and noticing characters popping up, or re-working my novel The Big Idea.

Speaking of The Big Idea, that's the other thing I need to think about for this period of time. Do I use these two hours a day to rework that poor novel? Right now, it's the story of a family who is also a folk-rock band who travels around the country and rides the roller coaster of a performing career. They are young: in their twenties. I am so not twenty anymore, and sometimes I find their trials and tribulations SOOOOO over the top and 15 years ago. I have also been composing a soundtrack to go with the book, but that soundtrack has been pillaged over time, and much of it has appeared on our CDs: Love and China, This Town Is Wrong and even Sister Holler. Last October, my brother-in-law and guitar player/producer Dave Chalfant read it and gave me some good suggestions. I said to him that I thought what I needed to do was take this February to write some songs and then re-write the novel around the narrator who appeared in those songs. We'll see about that. One of the songs I wrote is a sequel to "Ash Wednesday" and "Merry Christmas, Mr. Jones," and I am supposed to Skype it tomorrow morning to Ed McKeon's radio show on WWUH. I have no idea how to do that. I have about fifteen minutes to spare in the morning before Tom leaves and I have to watch the kids. I hope I can figure it out, and I also hope I can go for a run tomorrow. Also I need new running shoes because my present ones are 3 years old and flat as tortillas.

Lila had a play date today. Another mother and daughter came over and we sat at the little kids table and had applesauce and tea. The little girls had raspberry herbal tea and the big girls had Lung Ching Dragonwell green tea. The mother is a yoga teacher who owns and runs her own studio, and she is one of the most luminous people I have ever met, and also one of the best yoga teachers I've ever worked with. I asked her how she came to be so awesome. (We are just getting to know each other, and one thing I am learning is that trying to talk to an adult during a play date is like trying to get the Democrats and Republicans in Congress to pass a bill; you make such incremental progress that any step forward is hailed as an historic event. So it was with my friend and me.) She said she had decided at some point to let her spirituality lead her forward; to be unapologetic about it and to be clear with her students that yoga is a spiritual path.

I realized right away that this quality was what drew me to her as a teacher, and also that I myself am so shy about sharing my own love of God with the world that I often go to extremes to hide it. Most of the time, I assume that 90% of my audience are atheists who are completely turned off by any talk of God, in the same way that the woman in the running store where I was looking for new shoes was horrified when Lila stated, "Mama, I have a big big poop," and started walking around with her legs extended like the Tin Man.

But the truth for me is that this conversation I have going on all day long in my head–– the songs, the coaching, the writing––it's all a conversation with God (or Higher Power, or Spirit, or Inner Wisdom, or whatever you want to call it.) I want to be braver about letting that light shine in the world and not hiding it under that bushel of Generation X cynicism.

A couple more things to note before I sign off for today: Johnny is now officially Rockin' Johnny! He is up on all fours, doing the pre-crawl rock and howling in frustration when he propels himself forward like a porpoise only to fall on his tummy. Lila's favorite songs this week are "Sidewalks of New York" and something she calls "Mother Goose" which is the telephone conversation recorded on Dan Zanes's Rocket Ship Beach CD. The rest of the song is Father Goose rapping, which she used to love, but now eschews. She has discovered the "clicker" AKA the remote control, and there is no longer peace in the valley at the Nields-Duffys.

Thank you all for your supportive comments! I am so glad to have a readership. What a wonderful format a blog is!

Till tomorrow.

Why I Am Blogging Daily During the Month of March

Because I'm scared that if I don't commit to it, in public, to you, I will spend my two hours of precious daily babysitter time fast asleep in my bed.

The first thing I promise is that this will be the longest post you will read. I just felt that you needed to know why I came to the decision to quit coaching and re-commit to my own creative work. From now on, these posts will be very short––scout’s honor.

Readers of this blog know a little about my current situation: I am recently the mother of two children (Lila, 2.9; Johnny 6 months as of last week). I am a musician who plays most weekends; a life coach who coaches weekdays between 3-5pm; a writing workshop leader who runs three workshops weekly; a co-leader of HooteNanny, a music class for parents and children aged 0-5 (this is all day Thursdays); and finally, a writer of novels and non-fiction. I have been writing a series of pieces under the working title “Time, Money, Calories, Stewardship” about my struggles trying to “Do It All,” a not unfamiliar topic for mothers in this century and the last. And, like many of my peers and the women who have gone before me, I go around with the nagging feeling that I am not only not doing it all, or certainly having it all, but instead, doing most things decidedly badly, or at least a lot worse than I used to. Most days, I spend the bulk of the pre-3pm hour at home with my kids, but I feel like I am constantly neglecting them. After all, there is laundry to do (I have until very recently cloth-diapered both children), dishes to wash, emails to answer, and then (wondering whether there’s an electronic hijack of sorts going on) digital photos and videos of the kids to upload, grandparents to Skype, FaceBook updates to maintain, bills to pay, clients to invoice, the monthly newsletter to write to our fans, music to learn for church (where I am the occasional music leader when our wonderful Penny is out of town), other church business to attend to, as well as my commitments to my spiritual fellowship, HooteNanny potentials to communicate with, the New York Times to read (although I almost never get to that anymore), clients’ work to read, clients to email, meals to cook, babies to breastfeed, puke to clean up, small blocks to retrieve from the body of my guitar, baby clothes to sort and all sorts of items to Freecycle. And it’s the winter, so we’re not even talking about the garden full of tomatoes and squash. Thank God I don’t have a pet or a houseplant.

Many days, I feel as though someone emptied out my head and then filled it again with a combination of gelatin and driveway gravel. The constant feeling I have is one of mental clutter. Thoughts shoot through my head so rapidly I went to a psychiatrist recently to be tested for ADD (he says I don’t have it––just Mommy brain). Like my attic, which is currently full of boxes of hand-me-downs for my kids and all my old performing clothes that still don’t fit me yet, my mind is so full I can’t even wade around in it. I forget words on a daily basis: words like “workshop” and “update” and “exploit.” I am like Pandareos, tormented by Harpies (I had to Google that because I completely forgot Pandareos’s name, of course).

And yes, I know I am hugely blessed, very very very fortunate. Mine is certainly the problem of an embarrassment of riches.

A few months ago, I figured out a way to get a very short daily run in: 23 minutes before Tom leaves for work. I take my iPod with me, and recently I’ve been listening to audiobooks by my mentor, Martha Beck. (It’s been my way to get some cheap coaching for myself, and often it's the only time I manage to leave the house.) I’ve been signed up since last October for her Master Coach Training, which started this February and culminates in Huntington Beach, CA the last weekend in July.

I love coaching. Martha trained me in 2005, and I was fortunate to build up a robust practice very quickly. This practice has sustained my family financially through both maternity leaves and Tom’s three years in graduate school (he has, from 2005-2008 gone from being a writer and reporter for People Magazine to being a psychotherapist and currently works at a residential program for kids with mental health issues.) I have learned so much from coaching, and I love my clients. I see a very bright future for myself as a coach that includes writing books and running workshops and retreats and teleclasses. I have lots of big ideas for my practice.

But one day in late January I heard a friend of mine preach at our church in West Cummington. (Her name is Erin White, and she writes a wonderful blog called Hatched By Two Chicks, which you can find here.) I was seized with the kind of electric-lightening insight I’ve gotten several times in my life, most memorably when I stepped out onto the streets of New Haven in August before my senior year in high school and KNEW I was meant to go to Yale. Erin is a writer and a mother, and hearing her preach, a voice inside me said, “You are supposed to be writing. Not coaching. Stop.”

I cried throughout the church service and ignored the voice, except to mention it lightly to Tom on the drive home. “You love coaching,” Tom said. “You tell me every day when I get home from work how much you love coaching.”

“Yes, and besides, I sure can’t afford to quit now,” I said.

This is true. I run our numbers constantly, and there is very little we could cut from our monthly expenses without severely compromising our values around food (wholes foods, local, organic, etc.) We do have some savings, but who in their right mind right now in this economy would give up a lucrative, thriving practice to live off savings?

Several weeks later, I woke up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat. I had dozed off while feeding Johnny. I suddenly knew that I simply could not, in good conscience, take an eleven-month old to California for five days and leave him in a hotel with a strange childcare giver. I emailed Martha Beck right away and asked to pull out of the training and save my spot for 2010.

Katryna and I started performing again quite regularly in January, which meant I no longer had even one day off per week. And as every parent knows, there is no such thing as a day off unless one is physically out of the house without the kids. After a particularly poorly attended show at which I could barely stand up, I told Katryna on our way home that I thought I needed to take a break from our adult shows. “I feel like I am physically breaking,” I told her. “I knew it would be hard. I didn’t imagine it could be this hard.” She understood, God bless her, and said kind things to me. Fortunately, I was so tired and overwhelmed that I didn’t take any action steps after this conversation, so nothing happened.

Fast forward to last week. Katryna and I were slated to fly to Florida for three shows and decided to bring the kids with us. The night before our 8am flight, Tom and I got the kids in bed by 6:30pm and spent the rest of the evening packing for all four of us: four bathing suits, complete with swim diapers (for the kids), snacks for the plane, toys and bedding for each kid, guitar strings, performing shoes, etc. Everything was packed in the Jetta, and we were poised to leap out of bed at 5am to get to the airport. We were asleep by 10pm. At 11pm, we heard a wail in the hallway. Lila was standing with her pajama bottoms hanging low, covered (COVERED!) in diarrhea. We cleaned her off and brought her into bed with us, but once up and the center of attention, naturally she wanted to play. Tom got up and hung out with her for a couple of hours, and then came back to bed around 1am while she played happily by herself. At 2am she cried again, and I went to her this time, and sang her to sleep. At 3am, Johnny woke up crying and I brought him into our bed. We all dozed for the next two hours, and then we ran to the airport.

Aside from the incident where I left my computer at security and had to exit the plane, race back, convince security that the bag with the computer (and green lion, tupperware of salad and happy sack of bunny crackers) was mine, the rest of the trip proceeded the way one would expect it would when one has two squirmy kids who have not slept well the night before.

I did not have high hopes for the Florida shows. We haven’t played in the area for five years. The last time we played Sarasota, there were about ten people in the audience. But this year, the rooms were packed and we sold out of every CD we’d brought. The St. Petersburg show was at the Craftsman House; a space that usually serves as a store for high-end crafts people and artisans. The room we used as a green room had a beautiful hardcover book called The Mud Pie Dilemma about a master ceramacist and potter, Tom Coleman. I picked up the book and read it voraciously (a full review here). Every word sang to me: it was about an artist who was trying to support his family solely through his art, and how hard that was. How long and rocky the road was.

People came up to us at the shows and told us how much our music had meant to them over the years; how our songs were the soundtrack to courtships, break-ups, new families coming together. But more importantly, I had fun on stage. I remembered why I love to perform. I was present.

I thought back to my daily coaching sessions in my running shoes listening to Martha Beck. If I were coaching myself, I would ask myself this: what is it that you want to do with your one precious life? (To paraphrase Mary Oliver). Without a doubt it’s to mother my children, be partners with Tom, sing with my sister and write my songs and stories and other communiqués like this one. I am fortunate in that I know so clearly what I want to do; many of my clients have trouble knowing. The next question I would ask a client is this: if you weren’t afraid of anything, especially financial repercussions, how would you spend your time? Again, easy: mothering; with Tom; singing; and writing.

So, says my inner life coach. You must take those 7 hours a week and write. That will leave space for your brain to be present for your family for the hours that you are with them. But show up every day for your writing, no matter what.

And so here I am. It’s now 8pm on Monday March 2, and I am finishing this gargantuan post. Thanks for sticking with me. I look forward to your own stories on the topic of parenthood, following one’s chosen path, and that horribly elusive thing called Balance. May we all find it, and barring that, figure out how to live without it.

February Album Writing Month

Once again, Katryna and I have managed to write 14 songs. Some are more realized than others. This year, we will be recording them more carefully and deliberately and posting one a month on this blog. But here are the titles just so you know we did our job:

1. Full Catastrophe
2. Falling, Given Wings
3. Grabba Labba Do
4. Together We Will Keep Each Other Company
5. If I Could Be Forever Young
6. Give Me a Goodbar, Madam Mama
7. Mama Told Me
8. Caterpillar/Butterfly
9. This Is Not A Song About Vermont
10.Appreciate the View (Appreciate the Boo)
11. Appreciate the View #2
12. I Am Half My Mother's Age (Ash Wednesday #3)
14. Pelican Fish

"This Is Not A Song About Vermont" was written in the car in Naples, Florida. Tom saw a license plate from Vermont.

"Mama," said Lila. "Sing dat song about Vermont."

"OK," I said, and sang:

I want to live in Vermont.
Everything is green in Vermont
Except when it is winter in Vermont
Then everything is white in Vermont.

"NO!!!" said Lila. "That's not the song about Vermont!"

So I sang,

This is not the song about Vermont.
There's a better song about Vermont
This is not the song that I want
I want the song about Vermont.

"NO!!!!" said Lila, her lower lip trembling and her eyes filling with tears. "Not that song! The other song about Vermont."

When I find out what song she is talking about, I will let you know. Meanwhile, I will continue to torment you with the above. If you know the song about Vermont, please advise!

Hot Chocolate Run

This piece is about the annual Hot Chocolate Run, sponsored by Mayor Claire Higgins to benefit Safe Passage, a wonderful local organization that shelters survivors of domestic violence and their children. The race is a gentle three-miler, with participants as various as runners and joggers with dogs, as well as families pushing strollers. I’d flirted with the idea of running, but opted instead to walk it with Tom, carrying Johnny in the front pack and pushing Lila in the stroller. We’d paid our forty dollars and had been looking forward to this event for months. What could be better than our two favorite activities—walking and talking—with our children in tow, and surrounded by our like-minded friends on a sunny cold Saturday in December before the snow starts falling? But in the night before the race, we were woken not once but twice by the coughs of both of our children. Johnny has his first cold, and Lila is so congested that when she said, “I’b dot weely sick, Baba,” I just looked at her and sighed and proffered orange juice.

Tom and I felt like little kids, too, and not in a good way. We kept trying to rationalize bundling them up and dragging them out with us. We tried to think of laissez-faire parents we could call who would endorse that decision. Finally, we agreed that I would go for a run, buy some cocoa and bring it back for a homemade version of the event. “But be sure to get the kind you make with milk, not water,” Tom said. It was generous of Tom to let me run; the deal we made was for me to go in the morning and for him to go after lunch, during the kids’ naps. But instead of feeling grateful, I got into a fight with him.

“Wow. You sure have a lot of gigs coming up, “ he said, taking a sip of tea and looking up from his computer screen. I’d just forwarded him the latest schedule from our booking agent. And this became the starting point for 1. A big discussion about how busy I was going to be in 2009 and how dear our weekends would become and 2. A huge session about our family budget, complete with bank records, checkbook, calculator and spreadsheet.

An hour or so later, I was finally out of the house pounding the pavement in my cold weather get-up. It was seasonally perfect: crisp, cold, sunny, and it smelled like Christmas. I put my iPod on “Songs” somewhere around the M’s—I’d just downloaded Cake’s version of “Mahna Mahna” which we’d used in HooteNanny for a play-along, meaning the toddlers got to pick through a bucket of shakey instruments like tambourines and maracas while the song played in the background. I jogged into town at my usual “speed”—about a 13.5 minute mile, which may not even qualify as jogging. I stopped into Serio’s, the local grocery store. They had a box of instant Swiss Miss for $2.69. The number one ingredient was corn syrup. I picked up a red box of Droste instead. The only ingredient was cocoa, and so I headed to the check out line. Then I noticed the price tag: $8.69. “Never mind,” I told the check out girl, and started back. But then I paused; we’d already paid $40 for a race we weren’t running, for a good cause. Surely I could pay an extra $6 in the name of whole foods, even if that whole food was imported cocoa. Besides, the box was smaller and would fit in my pocket. And in these days of rampant penny-pinching, perhaps I could be a maverick of sorts.

As I emerged from the store, I caught sight of the racers streaming up Elm Street towards my house. I jogged over and fell in with them, noticing with only a little disappointment how many runners outpaced me immediately. I stayed to the right. I have never run in a race before—I’m not that kind of runner, as you probably gathered from my stated “speed.” I’m the kind of runner who does it mostly for mental health reasons, although in the past one might not have called my running mentally healthy. Once, in 1997, after falling off a stage and breaking my foot, I was so worried about how my lack of exercise would affect my “mental health” that I insisted on going out in the February ice and “crutching” for forty minutes. Anyway, I am not a racer, having no speed and a lot of competitiveness, which is a bad combination. But as I jogged along listening Bob Dylan and Joan Baez singing “Mama, You’ve Been On My Mind,” a cheer went up among the people I was running with, and I saw that the frontrunners were coming back on the other side of the road. The first batch were men, paced several car lengths apart, dressed only in shorts and tee shirts, their legs churning, their chests puffed out. I had to admit, they looked pretty cool chugging along like that. I kept my eye out for the first woman to join these returning racers, while I noticed that Joan Baez was singing “Daddy” every time Bob sang “Mama.” This recording was from one of their early shows together, one of the shows where Joan, the established star, was introducing Bobby to the folk community. There was lots of banter going on in between verses; you could hear the infatuation in the nuances of the harmonies. The song ended, and my iPod immediately played a second version; this one was just Bob, solo, not hamming it up, but singing the song like a resigned dirge:

Perhaps it’s the color of the sun cut flat and covering
The cross roads I’m standing at
Or maybe it’s the weather or something like that
But Mama, you’ve been on my mind.

I thought about my argument with Tom. He is about to go full time, which means 9-5. I work from 3-5 most afternoons, plus HooteNanny all day Thursdays. In addition, I run writing groups two nights a week and starting next weekend, I’m back to performing at least one night per weekend. This will be nice for our children; they’ll almost always have a parent with them. But, as so many other couples lament, we will be like two ships crossing in the night. Could I work less? Well, that’s why our next step was to go over the numbers in our budget, and what we discovered is that we’re spending on average about $200 a month more than we make. Granted, that’s always because something comes up that we hadn’t planned for, like a $200 dental bill, or, as was the case last month, our two-year-old sticks quarters in the car CD player and thereby breaks it, necessitating our purchasing of a new one, but that’s why one budgets. Eventualities always come up eventually—I know that. I work with clients on this all the time. And my solution has always been to work harder, make more money and therefore not have to worry about negative bank balances. But that’s not what I tell my clients, and that’s maybe not what I should tell me this time around. I really can’t work any harder now. I can’t give up any more time than I’m currently giving up without feeling like I’m shortchanging my husband and kids.

Joan Baez is back; this recording is from the Rolling Thunder Review from 1976. She dedicates this version of “Mama, You’ve Been On My Mind” to her own mama, who is sitting in the front row. This time through, she sings “Mama,” not “Daddy.” This version is uptempo and professional, not full of false starts and giggles like the first version. I see the first woman racer among the men heading back to the finish line. She’s young—maybe even still in her teens—with red hair and a determined look. I can’t help but smile. “Go!” I think toward her.

The mass of racers curves off to the left, and I continue to the right, cutting through the park toward home. I make Lila her first cup of hot chocolate, which she sips and professes to adore, but then leaves to get cold on her little table. Tom drinks his up, though and thanks me for getting “the good kind.”

The Bear, Part Two

The Saturday after election day, Tom made a cake: an electoral college sheet cake. Tom is even less of a graphic artist than I am, yet he managed to draw the United States with only a few weirdnesses around the Appalachian region. The cake had white butter-cream frosting with the state abbreviations written in the color in which citizens voted; blue Minnesota, Red Kentucky, etc. Guests helped themselves to their favorite state, so by the end of the evening, the cake was a riddled mess. (Lila ate Alaska, but don’t be too alarmed—it was not drawn to scale.) Cleaning up, I cut a wedge out for Tom to eat later and threw the rest of the cake in the trash on our back porch.

The next day, our friends Melany and Sam came over for a playdate. We saw them drive into our driveway, and were then puzzled when the phone rang and the caller ID identified Melany.

“Um, you’d better look in your backyard,” Mel said. I peered out the kitchen window to see a big black bear lumbering around our picnic table. Lila, who’d recently been told that bears can’t come into houses because they have no hands and therefore can’t open doorknobs, came scampering up behind me.

“Oh, look!” I said, trying my best to sound jolly. “A bear! How fun! Let’s take pictures.” And I hung up on Mel and called 911. “Hi,” I said, again feigning casualness, my daughter on my hip and my son asleep in the neglecto-matic. “There’s a bear on my porch. Please come very soon.”

The bear, meanwhile had shuffled up the stairs to the porch, which is on the other side of the window we were looking out, and proceeded straight to the garbage can. He must have had an appetite for all those red states no one ate. A few minutes later, after we’d taken as many pictures as we could and I was beginning to worry that he’d make a liar out of me in front of my daughter (about the part where bears don’t come in houses), he turned from the garbage can, looked our way, waved his head around and made off down the stairs back into the backyard. I called Melany and told her to back her car up onto the street.

A policeman came and jingled his keys. The bear ambled farther back into our yard and proceeded to climb one of our trees, and we all decided it was a good time to go to the playground, via the front door.

That was the last we saw of the bear. But every night we tell stories about him, and when I get out of my car, I look around carefully before pulling my two kids out.

Johnny got his first cold right after Thanksgiving: that makes one dysfunctional family bingo prediction come true. He also rolled over for the first time, is grabbing at things, including our hair, and has developed the manliest hearty laugh. He still sleeps in our bed, and when I discovered by reading my old journal that Lila was out of our bed by now, I called my friendly neighborhood child psychiatrist to see if I was in the process of ruining my son’s life, or at the least encouraging his future Oedipal complex.

“No,” said the psychiatrist. “Boys’ nervous systems are more fragile than girls’––they only have the one X chromosome, you know, and the Y doesn’t have much of anything on it. Besides, as a second child he probably gets held much less frequently than Lila did. Keep him in bed till kindergarten.”

“Really?” I said, shocked.

“No, not really. But don’t rush it. He’s fine. You’re fine.”

“But I’m terrible at playing with my daughter,” I said, switching gears. How often does one get to talk to a child psychiatrist?

“What do you mean?” he said.

“I mean she asks me to play dolls with her, and as soon as I sit down on the floor in front of her doll house, I think of a million other things I should do instead. Like clean the bathtub or wash dirty diapers. And what’s really weird is I was the kind of kid who loved to play with dolls. I could play for hours and hours, making up stories, getting totally lost in the fantasy. In fact, I had to force myself to stop playing with dolls when I was 12 or 13, and even then, I’d sneak into my little sisters’ rooms and play with them, like a junkie getting one last hit. But now, it’s the last thing I want to do. I’d rather organize her books than play with her dolls.”

The psychiatrist was silent, and I began to lose hope that he would say what Tom had said: that I was an artist and I’d brought my make-believe into my writing life. Instead he said, “That sounds like a block. Work on it. Make it your meditation. Set a timer for 15 minutes and play with her for that long."

So I have been. And the funny thing is, as soon as I think of it as meditation, I don’t mind doing it at all, probably because the alternative is sitting still and doing nothing, which is harder than aviation engineering if you ask me. And wouldn’t you know it? I do remember how to play again. I find myself thinking of new shenanigans for Lila’s dolls to get into while I’m taking a shower or going for a jog. (Her dolls’ names are Nimi, Chimi, Tofu and William. William is a girl with long brown hair.) But even better, I remember that it’s not all up to me—I get to just wait and respond to what Lila makes the dolls do. Ah, yes—that’s probably what I liked most about imaginative play to being with –the way it connected me to the other kids I was playing with.

But I started by talking about Johnny. Yesterday my sister Katryna called to tell me she and her whole family had been exposed to Whooping Cough. In case you don’t know, WC is a horrible disease that kills babies under the age of 6 months. Johnny’s had one immunization, but he won’t have the other for another few weeks. Katryna, who takes illness very seriously and her own responsibility for the happiness and well-being of others even more seriously, called in tears to tell me, and said, “I won’t be able to live with myself if I’ve given this to Johnny.”

“Don’t worry, “ I said, once again affecting jollility. “He’s fine.”

Of course, he wasn’t fine; he had a cold. I took him to bed and asked Tom to look up Whooping Cough symptoms online.

“You won’t like it,” Tom said after a minute of staring at the screen. “’Often starts as a cold with only occasional coughing.’”

As if on cue, Johnny started to cough. Then he vomited.

“And it says they vomit,” Tom went on.

I curled my body around my baby and put my hand on his head. He was trying to nurse, but his congestion was so bad he had to keep pausing just to catch his breath. All night long, I kept waking to his labored breathing, which alternated between baby gasps and sighs, and old-man-like snoring. Late in the night, he settled down and we both slept. But not before I’d prayed with everything I had for his good health.

I don’t believe in the kind of praying that results in infants being saved from grave illnesses, but I do believe that for some of us, that kind of praying is all we may be capable of when we are deep in a state of fear as I was last night. I also believe that the kind of prayer that does work—almost perfectly in my experience—is the prayer that we love more, love better, feel more gratitude, forgive and change our stuck ways of thinking. So I prayed for all that too.

In the morning, I called the doctor who told me to watch his temperature (which was not elevated) and breastfeed him a lot. Later in the day, Katryna called to say the person she thought she was exposed to turned out not to have pertussis. And Johnny seemed to have just a bad cold. Once again, the bear passed us by. I am beyond grateful. All this happened around the fifth anniversary of the day Tom and I met for the first time at the Starbucks in Northampton. I asked him that day if he wanted to have kids. He said he wasn’t sure. Did I?

“I don’t know,” I said. “I really like my life. It would be a big change.”

Now that I’m here, looking back, this response strikes me as slightly off. People who are trying to decide whether or not to have kids don’t get it. They think it’s a lifestyle choice between, say, living in the city versus living in the country, whereas it’s really a choice between living in an imperfect, volatile and uncontrollable world versus having a bear take up residence in your backyard. This is what they mean about the highs getting higher and the lows getting lower. I want to scream from the rafters about the importance of immunization and throwing one’s trash away indoors and out the reach of deadly wildlife. But instead, I’m going to get on the floor and play with Lila’s dolls. Nimi and Chimi and Tofu are planning a trip to California, and I want to lead them via Yellowstone Park.

Hostibal

Saturday morning, I woke up with Johnny asleep in the crook of my arm, as usual. I lay for a long time watching him breathe, watching the perfection of his little face; the curlicues of his nose shapes, his little bow of a mouth, the whorls of his ears. The morning was so new it was still dark outside, but light enough to make out these features. I let myself bathe in my maternal love for this perfect little boy, so lovely, so cheery, so good-tempered. He woke up and stretched backwards, his little fists next to his ears, and then he opened his eyes and smiled at me, hiccupping with giggles. I was thinking about something I’d recently learned from a child psychiatrist: that babies have such undeveloped nervous systems that they literally depend on their parents to provide that calming effect for them. And the nervous systems of boys are actually much more delicate than the nervous systems of girls. For this reason, this doctor recommends that boys co-sleep for longer than girls. I was thinking about all the times as a child I went to my parents for reassurance over my many fears: fears of tigers, monsters, robbers, avalanches, rattlesnakes, Bad Guys, hornets and the abominable snowman in Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer.

At six forty-five I got hungry and carried him, still dozy, downstairs with me. Usually at this point, I put him in the neglecto-matic while I make my eggs, but this morning, I wanted him close for some reason. Like a new lover, I wasn’t ready to let our sweet night of connection end. So I got out one of our baby carriers. I may have already mentioned this earlier, but I am a disaster at baby wearing. I have been shown countless times how to work our many varieties of baby wraps, and I seem to fail at all of them, but none worse than on Saturday morning, when I “froggied” Johnny’s legs and placed him, back against my stomach, into the easiest sling of them all, except somehow I missed the pouch. Thinking Johnny was secure, I let go and he fell from the height of my chest prone onto the floor with a thud. And then he produced the longest, most horrible scream I have ever heard. My baby turned red, and wailed, huge wet tears spewing from his eyes. I immediately picked him up and sat on the floor, trying to comfort him, first with my breast, which he didn’t want, and then just holding him and rocking him and cooing to him. But he was inconsolable. I called the emergency pediatric nurse who told me to get him to the ER right away. By this time, Tom had come downstairs and found me, blind with my own tears, trying to change Johnny’s diaper.

“I dropped him!” I sobbed. “We’re going to the hospital.”

And Tom responded the way the world’s number one best husband would respond:
“Oh, honey,” he said, wrapping his arms around me. “He’s going to be all right. Babies are made of rubber. But I’m so glad it was you and not me who dropped him.”

But even though Tom did not yell at me, I was yelling at me. How could I have done this? What if he were really hurt? What if his neck had snapped? What if he suffered brain damage? As I sat on the floor holding my screaming baby, I knew this much: no matter what, I would love him. Crazy promises to God went through my head, to save him in exchange for…for what? Even as I was bargaining, I knew God doesn’t work that way. So I just vowed to love bigger. And try to pay attention more. And no matter what, to grow.

Fortunately, we live across the street from the hospital, so I bundled Johnny up against the 21 degree cold and raced over. They took his vitals as he continued to scream. The doctor, a young guy with a goatee, repeated what my husband stated about babies being made of rubber and looked in Johnny’s ears. “Kids fall out of swings all the time,” he said, putting away his stethoscope.

“Sling,” I said. “Not swing. He was on my body—I was standing–– and he fell off.”
“Oh,” said the doctor. “Well, that’s quite a fall. I’m going to order a CT scan.”
I started to cry again.

“Just to make sure.”

The doctor called Johnny “Boo boo,” which calmed me down a little, and Tom and Lila arrived which calmed me down even more. Then the nurse brought us some black tea and I felt almost able to handle the situation. Then Johnny stopped crying and did a double take as if to say, “Well, hello! It’s you! How marvelous to see you!” and started talking to me in his current language that sounds like, “Euh, Euh! Euh Euh!” and I knew he was fine.

The nurse wheeled us through the hallways of the hospital to the CT scan room. We donned lead aprons and I was instructed to keep Johnny still for the photos. He cried at first, not liking to have his little neck encumbered by the strange pillow situation, but I sang “Hush Little Baby” to him and he went back to staring up and me and smiling.

He was pronounced the cutest baby of the day, which didn’t mean much since he was the only baby there and it was 9am, but still. He was. We waited and waited to be told the CT scan was normal, and by that time I didn’t need the results. The young doctor came back in and said, “Okay, now just to be safe, we’re going to do an X-Ray.”

“No,” I said. “We’re not. But thanks.”

He sputtered a little, and then admitted that we didn’t really need an X-Ray and bid us farewell. I wrapped us up again and we crossed the street and found Lila and Tom playing “Hostibal” with Lila’s Groovy Girls. There are five Groovy Girls and most of them are named Joanie and they are all doctors. They all had special beds that could roll. I told them the good news about Johnny’s return to himself and general OKness and then I sat on the couch and called my parents to tell them about the adventures of the morning.

“Oh, sweetheart!” they both exclaimed, each one on an extension. “That’s the worst thing in the world."

“The thing is,” I told them. “I spent that first hour so mad at myself, so miserable, so worried, and I kept thinking, ‘if only I’d stayed in bed a few minutes longer, if only I had put him in the swing, if only I hadn’t turned on NPR which might have distracted me.’ I mean, now that everything is fine, I’m actually glad I got to just spend two uninterrupted hours cuddling my boy and making faces at him. But if he’d been seriously hurt…”

And they shared with me the stories I already knew, about my sister’s various trips to the hospital, how there’s no fear like the fear of your child being injured. We talked about Thanksgiving, about how great the election was (again), about how great Lila and Johnny are, about the cold spell we’re having. I told them for the millionth time since I became a parent how grateful I am for all they did (and do) for us girls.
I hung up the phone and realized this forty-something mom of two had just used her sixty-something parents to calm her nervous system, and I smiled. And then Tom and Lila and Johnny and I bundled up once again and braved the cold, determined to seize the day, walk into our little town and say hi to our Saturday buddies and face our next fear (Lila’s first haircut) with as much grace and gratitude as we could muster.