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.

Essential Twenty-First Century Mom Conflict

Things are in the saddle and ride mankind.--Ralph Waldo Emerson

Is it just me, or is everyone having the same fantasy? I find myself saying to myself several times a day, “Oh, that’s okay; when Barack Obama is president, that’ll be solved.” "That" being everything from the ever-sinking Dow to our high health insurance premiums to the mice who have taken up residence in our cupboards to my daughter’s continuing refusal to become potty trained. Now and then I remember that Obama is just a guy, albeit a smart and attractive and charismatic one, and that he probably can’t wave his hand and produce miracles, but I think it’s probably good for my nervous system to pretend he can right now.

A friend of mine sent me two articles today that stirred up my Time, Money, Calories matrix and left me panting for breath. One article was from the magazine Brain, Child and the other was her response to it. The Brain Child article is called "Eco-Housewives" and tells of a woman named Shannon Hayes who is writing a book tentatively titled Radical Homemakers: Reclaiming Domesticity form a Consumer Culture. It sounded right up my alley—a sort of Annie Leonard "Story of Stuff" homesteady fantasy, and with trepidation, I started to read my friend’s response to it. My friend, the mother of three and a brilliant professional writer and card carrying feminist, took offense at the suggestion that “eco-moms” were somehow more enlightened and evolved than those who, as she does, shop at ShopRite and occasionally accept plastic bags when they forget their canvas ones. My friend raised the question “what is enough?” which to me is at the root of what I keep thinking of as the essential Twenty-First Century Mom Conflict.

What is enough? My friend was clearly disturbed and, by her own admission, thrown on the defensive by Hayes’s embrace of a completely consumer-free lifestyle: no TV, all local organic cuisine, no presents at Christmas, etc. Hayes’s stance didn’t bother me in the least: I admire her; occasionally want to follow that path; don’t (I have many an eco-sin); and figure it’s good enough that I use cloth diapers and make my own wipes and drive a biodiesel (which may or may not be an eco-sin, but that's a topic for a different post). It’s about batting averages, I figure, and I am grateful to the Hayeses of the world for allowing me to have lower ones.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t have my own areas of defensiveness. I get defensive around moms who spend most of their day actually doing something that can be perceived as “playing” with their kids. I am pretty good at making up stories, but oddly terrible at engaging with my daughter around her stuffed animals or dolls. This is especially odd as that was exactly the kind of play I did as a child. The other day when I was lamenting my lack of talent and interest in imaginative play, my husband said, “You don’t like to play with her that way because you brought that part of you along with you. Now you play by writing novels and songs, and you can’t go back.”

Maybe so, but I still feel like a rotten parent when I see someone else–– a babysitter, another parent, my husband–– animating one of her dolls and getting her to giggle and shriek with joy. I have friends who get defensive––in fact, go on the offense––when it comes to a career they may have left behind. These moms speak with passion about selfishness and priorities and deathbed regrets.

Whatever. Motherhood, career, good stewardship of the planet, It's impossible to do it all. I give up. Also, I give up on trying to be enlightened. The High Priests of the Present Moment may now come and officially excommunicate me. I’ve been trying so hard to live in the Now so as not miss a single thing my darling children do or say that I think I’m seriously in danger of losing my sense of humor forever. I wish today, with all my heart, that my friend and I (and all the Shannon Hayeses of the world) could just relax and enjoy our few moments here, even if that means we are zoning out and watching Stephen Colbert on Comedy Central; EVEN if that means we are sitting around the kitchen table judging our other mom friends for watching Comedy Central. Either way, at least we will have a few precious moments for ourselves, even if they are self-righteous ones.

Today I let my daughter cry in her crib for five minutes after I put her down for her nap, and yes, I felt terrible, and yes, it was the absolute best choice I could make given how exhausted I was and how my son needed his diaper changed. Then I noticed that she stopped crying, sung herself the ABC song and fell asleep. When she woke, she was in a great mood.

“I say 'hostibal,' mama, and you say ‘hospital.’ Isn’t that funny, mama?”

I picked her up and snuggled her. “I’m sorry you were sad before your nap,” I said.

“I not sad now,” she replied. “Talk about the bear and the scary boy, okay Mama? That’s a good idea, right Mama?” and she hugged and kissed me, and perhaps I was forgiven, but at any rate, her innate, instinctive kindness allowed me to forgive myself. In this, as in all things parental, the kids are the best teachers of all.

The Bear, Part One

In late October, Tom and I had a $26 date. I packed up my dinner and met him at the Haymarket, our local coffeehouse/ vegetarian eatery where Wi-Fi is free and the local writers hold office hours. The $20 was for the babysitter; $6 was for Tom’s egg sandwich. On the way home, driving past Smith college, I saw what looked like a giant Newfoundland dog bounding in front of the art museum.

“A bear!” I shouted, pointing. The bear ran across Main Street right in front of our car, Tom jumped out with his cell phone and called the cops, following it a pace. I called out to the Smith students, “There’s a Bear on Bedford Terrace,” and they responded with appropriate enthusiasm.

When we got home, of course we told Lila right away. That might have been a mistake.

“But,” she said, wrinkling up her eyes and nose and feigning amusement but actually looking terrified, “Will the bear come in our house? I don’t want the bear come in our house.”

“No, sweetie,” I said. “Bears don’t come inside houses.” Then I remembered too late that our most recent favorite book—the one we read three times per night—was Goldilocks. “Real bears don’t come in houses,” I amended. “They can’t. They don’t have hands, so they can’t open doorknobs.”

This didn’t seem to relieve her much, so Tom quickly added, “And they like woods. We don’t have enough woods here for the bears.”

Three days later, our family of four traveled to Brattleboro VT where Katryna and I participated in a No Nukes Jubilee. It was a dismal day, not quite raining, but definitely threatening to, and the crowd was not huge. The first thing we saw, (having hoped for face paint and a bouncy house and maybe some farm animals to pat), was a clown dumping a barrel of autumn leaves on a group of children. Lila promptly screamed and jumped into Tom’s arms. “Who’s dat guy wif lipstick?” she shrieked.
And now it’s, “Clown’s can’t come into our house, wight Mama, because dey don’t have hands.”

It’s a time of fear and loathing—after all, it’s almost Halloween, not to mention election day. We Democrats are so scared we can hardly look each other in the eye these days. The polls look fabulous, with our guy above 50% and campaigning vigorously in states that haven’t voted for a Democrat since before the platypus became extinct. People are talking landslide. People are talking mandate. People are talking about a filibuster-proof Senate. People are talking about major parties on November 5. And I continue to be glued to my laptop where I can read the latest article about Why McCain Fell Short and The Palin Effect and Who’s Going to Be in Obama’s Cabinet instead of doing a million other things that would be, as my friend says, more nurturing.
Like: meditate, exercise, write in my journal, play with my kids, write a song, or best of all, do nothing. As a life coach, I often prescribe just this for clients. Take five minutes of nothing and call me in the morning. Today, I raced upstairs to get dressed for my weekly morning self-care date (therapy plus Pilates=saner and fitter mama) and as I passed my unmade bed, I lept onto it, rolled on my back and lay there for the count of thirty. Then I jumped back up, put in my contacts, washed my face and brushed my teeth. Tonight, after dinner and before my writing group, I found a CD from my college days—the fifteen century Franco-Flemish composer Josquin des Prez––and let the complex melody with the simple one voice arrangement act as a tonic to my nervous system. I recently learned that the young child (or baby) uses his parent’s nervous system to regulate his own. He literally relies on the parent to calm him down, and as anyone who ever played those outdoor adventure/inner quest activities knows, one must be well grounded in order to ground others. Thus, the Gregorian chant.
That extra hour we got when we “Falled back” was lost on us—it just fell into the big sleep deficit.

So this last week went a little differently from the previous weeks. I tried to put the oxygen mask on my own face before putting it on my kids, to use my all time favorite metaphor. I made sure I got to the gym, scribbled some musings in my journal every day, and went out for dinner with my husband and another wonderful couple while our kids got to eat Halloween candy and misbehave with a babysitter. And it worked, and I did feel better: not quite as convinced that if I didn’t take in every single last moment with my two growing children that I would lie on my deathbed regretting all my choices.

People didn’t used to parent the way we parent today. My parents left us in our bassinets by the side of the tennis court, and we turned out just fine, mostly. Some nights when I wake up in a pool of vomit (or worse) and my neck is bent at a radically unnatural angle as my body curves around my sleeping boy, I wonder why I let fear of SIDS keep me from using that lovely crib in what used to be my office down the hall. But then, just a frequently, I take in the unparalleled sweetness of my sleeping son, cuddled in the crook of my arm like the ultimate teddy bear and know these days are numbered: he’ll be in his own bed soon enough. I got an email from a friend whose boy is now 13. “I sat through the entire season of American Idol last year,” she confessed. “Just so I could cuddle with him on the couch under a blanket.” I totally get this.

I was reminded recently of one of the benefits of our way of parenting in a recent New Yorker: apparently the teen pregnancy rates (and even abstinence rates) are lower in so-called Blue states, and many sociologists attribute this to attachment parenting. Of course, all those sociologists probably are or were attachment parenting devotees, so the report may be suspect. Are we going overboard in our slavish devotion to our children? Where is that elusive balance? Given that my resources are so taxed, can I settle for a life where it seems the pendulum keeps swinging from one extreme (focus on kids) to the other (focus on self)? Or, to put it another way, can I let go of all my judgments, not to mention the judgments of others and just live my imperfect life imperfectly but with great joy?

I Might Have to Hang a Flag (Rightside Up) Off My Porch

I might have to purchase an American flag and hang it on my porch.

I come from a family of patriots. Every July 4 my mother dressed my sisters and me in red, white and blue, complete with red, white and blue ribbons for our braids. We climbed Snake Hill Road in Long Island with other tri-colored patriots in the annual Fourth of July parade. We sang “America the Beautiful” and other America songs and waved small cloth flags, and in the summer of 1976 we collected Bicentennial quarters. We grew up outside Washington DC and every time a friend or relative came to visit we took them on tours of the Smithsonian, the Jefferson Memorial, the Lincoln Memorial, the White House, the Washington Monument and the American History Museum. I knew the stories of Paul Revere and Betsy Roth better than I knew the episodes of the Brady Bunch. My grandmother, a Democrat, could barely speak of her brother-in-law who had been an America Firster in the forties—not because he had been a Republican, but because he, in her view, had distorted the notion of patriotism into something resembling selfishness. My other grandparents were Republicans, and until 1980, my parents were independents, choosing their leaders based on trustworthiness, intelligence and experience.

Then Reagan showed up, and I don’t think anyone in my family has pulled the lever for a Republican since.

But I don’t want to write about the past twenty eight (!!) years of partisan politics. As much as I am an eager participant in the blood sport; as much as I enjoyed this morning’s Huffington Post expose of the rifts between the McCain and Palin camps (she thought South Africa was just the southern tip of the continent as opposed to a country unto itself! She couldn’t name the countries in NAFTA!), I mourn the America of my childhood, broken and disillusioned though it surely was to the adults who were living through Vietnam, Watergate, stagflation, oil embargoes and the first wave of culture wars. Back then, there may have been rancor between Democrats and Republicans, but it wasn’t codified the way it seems now to be.

In July of 2004 I was sitting next to my fiancé, now husband at our friends Dar and Michael’s house in front of the Democratic National Convention. We watched a fresh young candidate from Illinois running for the senate stand up and address the people, urging us to put partisan politics aside because:

“We worship an "awesome God" in the Blue States, and we don’t like federal agents poking around in our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and yes, we’ve got some gay friends in the Red States. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and there are patriots who supported the war in Iraq. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.”

I turned to Tom and said, “Why can’t we have him as our nominee?”
“Why can’t we have him as our president?” said Tom.

It seemed like such a ridiculous long shot. First of all, there was the name. I found myself wishing he would change it. There was no way, in my mind, that someone whose last name rhymed with—was one letter different from—our public enemy number one, and whose middle name was the same last name as our public enemy number two, could be elected chief dog catcher, let alone commander in chief. He wasn’t even yet a senator, and if he did get elected, he’d just be in the job a mere four years. Maybe he could run in 2012, or 2016. Hillary was a safer bet for sure.

I read his first book and discovered this was a man with a remarkable sense of himself, a balanced visionary (didn’t know such existed) who by the way could write like an angel. Then Iowa happened, and I was a goner. If a lily-white state like Iowa could believe in this guy, surely I could too. So I did what little I could given my pregnancy and motherhood of a toddler: made phone calls, sent money compulsively, saving the thank you post cards for my daughter, put bumper stickers on my car, argued with my in-laws and anyone else who couldn’t escape, and prayed to my awesome God. High-fived when he––we––won another primary. Became mentally ill from checking the polls every five minutes. Almost walked out of my church on Easter Sunday when our minister noted that Barack Obama was not going to be our real savior any more than Jesus Christ was—the real savior is and always has been ourselves (yes, I go to an unusual church, if you can call it that.)

Of course, the joke about that is that this is what Obama has been saying all along. The change is us, people, the change is each of us. And that is why I am in love with our country again, so in love that I might have to hang a flag, rightside up, off my porch. Because ever since I first voted in 1988 (for Jesse Jackson in the primary and Michael Dukakis in the general) I have thought that elections were big shams. Back in the 80s and 90s, only about 50% of the population at the most even voted—so no politician was really chosen by very much of the populace. And even though I could tick off issues where I agreed with my Democratic politicians, I never loved them. I never really thought of them as leaders. A leader is one who has a vision and through the power of example and inspiration compels others to follow him or her. That was never the case for me, even with Bill Clinton, whom I voted for strategically: to protect the supreme courts; because I knew he was intelligent and would make better decisions than Bush. But I never felt he had a vision I could be a part of, except the vision of a Democrat majority, which never materialized, even with a booming economy.

Then in 2000 and again in 2004, voter turnout increased significantly, and many more red states turned blue—but, well we all know how that turned out. Our guy won the popular vote but the whole thing hung on those hanging Florida chads. Our guy was up in all the polls, even the exit polls, but the whole thing hung on broken machines in Ohio. We had the most cynical administration in history systematically destroy our reputation in the world, our economy, our justice system, even our media (remember how the press couldn’t interview the Bushies unless they proclaimed fealty?) Karl Rove and the Dicks: Cheney and Armey, Donald Rumsfeld–– their very names like dull clubs on my skull. I seriously fantasized about a new nation composed of the northeast, the left coast and some choice blue cities like St. Louis, Boulder and Chapel Hill.

But what happened on Tuesday night changed all that. I, like all of you, saw America on the front yard of Chicago, weeping and cheering and taking their marching orders from our new leader; someone whom we chose, as Frank Rich said in the Sunday Times on Nov. 2, because “we are a people as practical as we are dreamy. We’ll soon remember that the country is in a deep ditch, and that we turned to the black guy not only because we hoped he would lift us up but because he looked like the strongest leader to dig us out.” The real leader is ourselves. Democracy works. We cashed in that promissory note that all of us are created equal; that we each have a voice and a vote; that if we don’t like the government, we can change it, because the government is us: by the people, for the people. This is my country. Not since those July days in the 70s have I felt that that has been true. Since Reagan, I’ve always felt like a leftie oddball, a small nag shaking my tiny fist at the powers-that-be. But today, I feel powerful, and my guess is that you do too. Having felt the power of the people, the power of a good vision, my bet is that we are never going back to our disenfranchisement.

And, for the moment, I am done with partisan politics. May the goodwill that seems to be burbling up from every corner of the world seep into every corner of this great land of ours. May we lay down our swords and shields and be, as Obama calls us (as Jesus and every leader of every major religion calls us, as our own consciences call us) our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers. May we rejoice together that our hopes and dreams and love overcame our fears on November 4, 2008. May God bless the United States of America, and may our country be a good, caring and righteous patch of green on this big blue planet.

Time, Money, Calories

As I write this, the Dow has just plunged to its latest lowest low, which means the small amount of money I have managed to squirrel away for our retirement has evaporated. Unemployment is up; the price of oil is threatening to force many families to choose between food and heating this winter, and there is general discussion that our country is on the verge of another Great Depression. Somehow, this made me want to shop for a pair of Uggs.

I have a pair of very nice fake ugglike boots—Merrills, which are more practical but not as cute. But recently, I’ve been seized with the idea that I absolutely need a pair of real Uggs. Six weeks ago, I gave birth to my second child, and even though much of my pregnancy weight is gone, I am still carrying around a good (okay, exactly) 13.5 pounds more than I had on me the day I married my husband. So I rationalize, now is certainly not the time to buy new items for any body parts north of my ankles, both because I hope soon not to fit into that new pair of jeans I would buy today; and because, like most people I know, my family lives from paycheck to paycheck with not enough to make the expenses we have, let alone the $800 bill we just received for repairs to our car. (This because we let our two year old daughter “drive” the car while we unloaded groceries; when we returned, she had taken all the quarters we keep next to the stick shift (for easy access to our town’s meters) and dropped them one by one into the CD player.) Clothes are so out of the question in terms of importance in our budget that we are still wearing the ones we bought in the early 90’s. But somehow today, the thought crossed my mind that Uggs would be just what I needed to give me a quick pick-me-up. They will fit in spite of the vicissitudes of my waistline. So I went on EBay to see if there were any candidates in my size. (Seven and a half, in case anyone out there has an old pair they want to sell me.)

I was breast-feeding at the time, sitting on our couch in the middle of the day. I’ve arranged my life so that the morning belongs to my daughter, the afternoon is when I work as a life coach, the evening is when I run writing groups and go out to perform with my sister as one half of The Nields, and occasionally make contact with my wonderful and long-suffering husband. But the middle of the day—from about 11am to 2pm—is mine. Or it used to be. It used to be when Lila took her nap, but now it’s the time when Lila gets dumped into her crib along with all of her dolls and her stuffed animal menagerie plus five or ten children’s books to keep her occupied while I race downstairs, make myself something healthy and quick, and eat it while I hang out with my seven-week-old son, Johnny. He snoozes for part of it, but mostly I feed him, dandle him, stare into his big blue eyes, kiss his soft chubby cheeks and read him articles from the New York Times online.

Or occasionally shop online. Of course, there were hundreds of pairs of Uggs in my size, but not my price range of $10-$15. Instead, they came in at around $100. I found a pair that were up for their bidding time in 7 minutes. I started to type my name and numbers into the screen when I suddenly remembered the car payment bill. Also, I remembered my principles, my new hungry family, our limited income, my general desire to de-clutter our house and not bring anything new into it and the fact that when Uggs first hit the streets a few years ago I vowed I would never ever be seen in anything so useless and trendy. I navigated away from the page and went back to obsessively poking around the RealClearPolitics sight to see if Obama’s numbers had changed at all. The baby on my breast started squirming and fussing. Absentmindedly, I rocked him, but he just fussed more. I picked him up and looked him in the face. As soon as I gave him my full attention, he stopped grunting like a little groundhog and instead gave me one of his drunken lopsided grins. I suddenly thought, “When I go to heaven, St. Peter will say, ‘Why should we let you in? You had heaven on earth with those two charming kids, and instead of enjoying them, you spent all your time reading minutae on the Internet. Get lost.’”

Having a child was a huge change for Tom and me. We used to be two single self-employed artists whose biggest concern (besides bone-chilling loneliness) was whether to spend Thursday morning writing in our journals at the Haymarket or going to an Anusara yoga class. After Lila was born, we had to negotiate who would be with her, and who was going to be working to bring home the (local, organic) bacon. Now, with two, it’s who will be on bath duty, who on kitchen clean up and how are we going to juggle the baby while attempting to follow the story lines Lila has concocted for the family of dolls in her dollhouse. Most evenings, I collapse in bed with my infant son, who won’t go to sleep unless I am lying next to him in our (dark, silent) room. I have about forty-five minutes a day—on a good day—to advance my agenda: to “get things done.” By “getting things done” I mean taking a shower, putting in and taking out my contacts, doing the never ending loads of laundry, cooking our meals, shopping for our food (and ecologically friendly laundry detergent), and last but definitely not least, getting some exercise so I can lose those 13.5 pounds.

I find myself bartering with myself constantly: if I walk to the store with Lila in the stroller and Johnny in the front pack, that means Johnny naps now, which means I won’t be able to count on it later, which means I won’t be able to pay our bills online today. But it will mean that I’ll burn about 80 calories, which means I can have a mango for dessert tonight. Mangoes are $1.50 each, which is more than an apple right now—apples are more like $1, unless they’re Honeycrisps, in which case they’re more like $2. And if I walk with Lila in the stroller, I can’t hear her talking very easily and therefore can’t interact with her well, so it’s not really “quality time”—maybe instead I should just take her to the park, but that will mean I’ll have to skip my own naptime tomorrow if I want to get to the grocery store. And we’re out of diaper wipes.

In other words, I’m in a constant matrix of time, money and calories. Each day, I have a certain number to spend, a certain number budgeted out. We all do. And it’s been occurring to me recently that many of us have the same kind of amnesiac disconnect that I experienced today over the Uggs when it comes to these three daily “goods” we’re all given. Everyone now knows we’ve botched our finance markets, both nationally and personally--the average American is in debt and lives in a kind of delusion of credit. We’ve got an obesity epidemic as well as a seriously distorted BMI ideal that fuels our insidious $100 billion a year dieting industry. And we are a notoriously busy nation, taking an average of 13 vacation days a year (France takes 37; Italy a whopping 42!) So I am not alone in my journey through this matrix. And, like many of us, I have always thought of myself as a particularly good navigator: I am in good health, physically and financially, usually fit and trim, solvent and something of a time management specialist. As a life coach, it’s my job to help other people with these three issues, among other things. But recently I’ve added three balls to my juggling act: Lila, Johnny, and for lack of a better term, the desire to be a good steward of my corner of the earth. There are lots of ways to save time and money and calories if one is willing to trash the planet: in no particular order: disposable diapers, driving to the supermarket instead of biking or walking, drying clothes in a clothes dryer, using a non-stick spray like Pam, buying groceries at Costco or Wal-Mart, working out on a treadmill instead of bundling up and going for a jog…the list seems to grow daily in my head as I try to be “good.” And mostly, I fall short. I hung one load of laundry out to dry in the wooden drying rack I freecycled last summer, but mostly I’ve been too lazy, or the weather hasn’t co-operated and I end up using the dryer. But I have decided to write a book in the hopes that through my struggles and attempts at being not the supermom of the 80s who was all things to all people including a sexy (skinny) wife at the end of the day, nor the Blackberry-wielding organizational powerhouse mom of this decade but just Lila and Johnny’s completely imperfect mother, Tom’s daydreamingly frustrating wife and the musician/writer I’ve grown into over the last 41 years, I can help some other new mom or anyone who has extremely limited time and money and wants to lose a little weight in the bargain. Even if the reader gets helped by putting the book down and saying, “Well, clearly THAT doesn’t work.”

If any readers out there have anecdotes on the topic, I welcome them! This book is for new parents and anyone else facing a period (or lifetime) of extremely thin resources. I hope to create a clearinghouse of stories and ideas to inspire us on the journey.

Blood, Yellow Slime, Tears and Reflections on Sarah Palin and Motherhood

Ah, it’s all coming back to me. The cracked nipples, that slightly sour smell of witch hazel and healing flesh, the endless bleeding, the Ibuprofen tablets the size of horse tranquilizers—and the indescribably sweet smell of the top of my new baby’s head.

I love all baby smells, even the mustardy poops which my husband refers to as “baked goods” because they smell strangely sweet. Even the milky puke. Even that fold in his neck where strange odors, probably associated with trapped breast milk, linger and lurk, which no baby washcloth seems to eradicate for long. My two-year-old, whom I usually find delicious in all ways, climbs into my lap and I am painfully aware that she smells like a human being, whereas Johnny smells like he comes from a much better world. Even the moment I pulled him out of me, covered with blood and yellow slime, he seemed to smell like herbs, or fresh-cut grass.

I love breastfeeding, even though the first week was so painful my toes curled every time he latched on. I am even coming to love the forced bed rest while my dainty parts heal, and have made an untidy nest on both the downstairs couch and our bed. I’m surrounded by large glasses of water, eye-pillows, sections of the New York Times and my laptop. I listen to Elizabeth Mitchell’s wonderful children’s CD You Are My Flower and put the two Woody Guthrie covers on repeat: “1 Day, 2 Days, 3 Days Old” and “Little Sack of Sugar.”

Here’s the part I don’t love: the six o’clock weepies. Even though I know they are just hormonal dips (plunges feels more the correct word), while I am in one, I seem to forget everything I know, like that 80% of women suffer from baby blues. That in a few hours they’ll be gone. They remind me of labor contractions—the waves are intolerable while you’re in the middle of riding one, but once you’re out, you forget the pain.

Thoughts make the pains worse, and the thoughts that inevitably accompany the tears go like this: soon my parents will die, soon I will die, soon my babies won’t be babies but surly teens who will surely choose to listen to some kind of music I will find intolerable (and “not music”). It’s all downhill from here, in short. What’s the point? Moreover, when the weepies strike, I forget that I’m not the only woman who’s ever had them; instead I feel ashamed and defective and I don’t want to tell anyone how sad I am, so I don't call my friends or family. I just read the New York Times and check the polls on realclearpolitics.com obsessively.

Also, I miss my work. I miss playing guitar, singing, performing, writing, coaching. I miss the small families of writers who come to my house twice a week and bring me outside of myself and into their creative worlds. When I’m in Six O’Clock Weepyland, I think, “How can I do my job as an artist, coach and facilitator and also do my job as a mother?”

So imagine my amazement when all of a sudden the national news started reporting that women all over the country were asking the same question right at this very moment: as a mother, how much do you have to give of yourself to your family, and as a (for lack a better word) Big Succeeder, how much do you have to give to your work and the people who depend on you?

I’m writing of course of Sarah Palin, John McCain’s new VP choice. Anyone familiar with my politics can guess how I feel about her—I wouldn’t vote for her under any circumstance because her politics and vision for this country are about 180 degrees from mine. I disagree with her about the environment, the war, the economy, and every social issue on the book. But I kind of identify with her desire to be all things to all people and to fill her cup to the brim, preferring it to spill over rather than leave a centimeter of a margin. I heard that when her water broke last April, she stayed to finish her speech and then took a plane home to Alaska to have her baby. That’s not THAT far removed from my showing up at Falcon Ridge knowing I could drop the baby any minute, or asking my OB two days before the festival if I could perform on the main stage the day after giving birth (just hypothetically). Don’t get me wrong—I’m horrified that McCain picked Ms. Palin and I don’t think she has the experience to be president, but I don’t dislike the gal. It’s nice that she’s supporting her daughter to have a baby at age 17, even though I question her judgment in running for VP knowing that would mean her daughter would be under intense scrutiny (and criticism) from the rest of the country as a result.

But how, I ask, trying to refill my water glass, juggle baby Johnny in his sling and get Lila a peach all at the same time, can she take care of a family of five, including a four-month-old with Down Syndrome (who, by the way, lives over 4000 miles away from Washington DC) AND be a (72-year-old’s) heartbeat away from the presidency? How good a job can she really do? What gives?

Yet I totally relate. As I sat bent over my breastfeeding baby, bawling my eyes out, my husband reminded me that last spring I had a full roster of clients, full writing groups, gigs every weekend, a book coming out and a CD I was recording, plus a toddler. “You were so busy I felt like I never saw you, and even when you were there, you weren’t there,” he said. What gives for me? Or, rather, what will I give up?

I don’t want to be only partly there for my husband and kids, and I also don’t want to give up any of the things I get to do now. I want to write a new book and make another CD this year. I want to write in my journal and keep up my meditation and exercise practices, and I want to coach all my clients and run my writing groups and take the kids to the park and the Y and the library and read to them and bathe them and tuck them in every night. Also, I want a social life and I want to have a weekly date night with my husband. But something has to give. At least, I suspect it does.

This makes me cry at 6 o’clock.

But in the mornings, I feel euphoric again--after all, I just gave birth to the cutest baby since Lila, and in general I live in the knowledge that I am the most fortunate person ever-- and Monday I took advantage of the relative dryness to make a bunch of calls to friends and family letting them know what was going on with me. “Right now I’m fine,” I said. “But by tonight I’ll be a sobfest again.” I got so much support from everyone, and one dear friend sent me this poem by Rainer Maria Rilke:

God Speaks
God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.

Embody me.

Flare up like flame
and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don't let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.
-Rainer Maria Rilke

Maybe nothing has to give for me; maybe nothing has to give for Sarah Palin, either. Maybe a day at a time, it’ll all work out—not perfectly, but in the messy, bloody, slimy way it always does. (Of course, if I mess up, it usually just means a song doesn’t get written or a book doesn’t get published. If Sarah Palin messes up, we might find ourselves at war with North Korea.)

Someone said to me a few days ago, “Whatever your kids are doing now they won’t be doing for long. Bad or good, it’ll change.” And last night at six o’clock I looked around and noticed the world did indeed seem a bit dimmer, but not as dim as it had the night before. I waited for the tears, and they didn’t come. “No feeling is final.” And the answer is the same as it always is: pay attention. Thoughts are not reality, so don't buy into them. Instead, whatever your hands find to do, do it with all your heart and mind. Get out of the fretful thoughts and celebrate this moment, even if it seems dim or mundane. Smell the top of your baby’s head, notice the curve in your lover’s calf, sculpt your sentences, savor that peach. “Don’t let yourself lose me.”

I Will Meet You There

It’s beginning to occur to me that most of this is out of my control. By “most of this” I mean: getting pregnant, staying pregnant, how incapacitated the pregnancy makes me, how each week seems to bring new challenges even as it takes away previous ones, and––most significantly at this moment––when the baby actually shows up. If you comb the internet (not that I do—all that much), you will find a gazillion and one questions from woman to woman, basically asking a variation of the same question: How can I use information to figure out where my little ship is at this moment in time? More specifically and recently, I have Googled:
“lost mucus plug—labor soon?”
“2cm dilated—labor soon?”
“cramps—labor soon?”
“thunderstorms—labor soon?”
And thousands of pages come up, most of which say, “The baby comes when the baby comes. You can’t rush it and you wouldn’t really want to if you knew the consequences.” Some say, “Yes, that was the beginning of my labor,” or “I had that, and delivery was still four weeks away.” You’d think I’d learn by now that there is no relief to be had by punching my questions into that little bar on the upper right side of the screen, but just today, I typed: “crying jag—labor soon?” And got the same three answers: yes, no, and the baby comes out when the baby comes out.

It’s been a kooky pregnancy. I had my daughter a bit early (36 weeks) and so I’ve been anxious about a premature birth for this one. I’ve had a lot of Braxton-Hicks contractions since Memorial Day, and so the docs have been monitoring me carefully. The big question for me was whether or not I’d make it through (or to) the Falcon Ridge Folk Festival, my favorite gig of the year. I was determined to be there no matter what, and fortunately I have an OB who is a folk fan. She said I could show up at the festival the day after giving birth if I needed to. (There was an OB at the festival site, and also an ambulance—I was prepared to jump in if the contractions got strong.)

I made it to and through Falcon Ridge, and here I am, over 2 weeks later, wondering if this or that contraction is going to morph into the real thing. Have I mentioned that patience isn’t one of my virtues? Nor is sitting still and doing nothing. I have taken this opportunity to move my office and decorate both children’s rooms. I had some hopes that the heavy lifting would trigger labor. I eat spicy food every day. I do all the things one does to satisfy the folklore. But the piece of folklore that’s sticking is “the baby comes when the baby comes.”

So about my crying jag. It started yesterday morning when I noticed the candlesticks on top of the refrigerator. As per my book, How to Be an Adult, I was following directions on how to get the wax off. You put them in the freezer and a few hours later, scrub them under hot water. The wax falls off easily. But before I can get a few hours in, my husband keeps taking them out, annoyed at the way they fall into his face when he wants to get some ice. (Can’t imagine why that irritates him.) So he puts them on the roof of the fridge, and I, later, put them back. This had been going on for weeks, and I suddenly had the thought that the baby wouldn’t come out until I’d succeeded in de-waxing these last two candlesticks. So when he came down for breakfast, I said, in my best gentle and reasonable voice, “we need to have a talk about these candlesticks.”
Now my husband has been fairly saintly throughout these last 9 months. When my doctors began to worry about me, he took over all the housekeeping and almost all the care of our 2-year-old daughter. But something about the candlesticks beaming him every time he wanted some ice must have been the last straw.

“We do NOT need to talk about these candlesticks! YOU need to get them out of the freezer and keep them out! And stop talking to me like I’m in third grade!”

“I’m talking to you like you’re in third grade,” I said through gritted teeth. “Because I’m afraid if I don’t, I’ll hit you in the face!”

This shocked him, since I don’t usually talk like that. Ever. He said, “What do you want me to do?”

“Take them to the downstairs freezer!” I shouted, as if the idea that I could possibly carry that huge load––two candlesticks––all the way to the basement and then have to ascent again with my big pregnant belly was practically wife abuse. He took the candlesticks down, and I promptly burst into tears and didn’t stop crying for four hours. We drove up to church, and I said, “I’m not mad at you. I’m sorry I said I wanted to hit you in the face. I’m just pregnant and emotional.” I sobbed through church and all the women with babies came up to me and said, “Oh. You’re really close.” One said, “Don’t worry. It’ll all be okay.” Another said, “You should worry! It’s all scary and real! And now is the perfect time to cry!” They were both right, and it was perfect advice. I felt grateful.

The scripture for the day was that Rumi poem with the lines: “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing is a field. I will meet you there.” That pretty much sums all of this up. As the wonderful writer Catherine Newman says in her book, Waiting for Birdy, pregnant women put so much emphasis on the details of labor and delivery. In addition to my burning question (“when is the baby coming?”), so many women worry about how it’s all going to go on Labor Day. Medicated or “natural”? Home birth or hospital? Midwife or OB? Vaginal or C-section? And on and on. It’s like focusing on the wedding instead of the marriage, writes Newman (or something to that effect.) The real point of the whole enterprise is what we do with the baby after that first experience. Similarly, (and obviously, I am sure to every reader of this piece) the day the baby is born doesn’t matter one whit, even though I’ve convinced myself that astrologically, seasonally, financially, childcare-wise and school-wise (if the baby is born in September rather than August, he’ll stay back a year) it does.

At one point during my crying jag, I prayed. “What should I be doing? What am I doing wrong?” and the answer came back lightening fast: “Nothing. You’re supposed to be crying.” Life is full of weather like this. Why do I try so hard to control the things I cannot change? Even that question has to be left on the near side of the field. Hopefully, I will look back at this ninth month of pregnancy and laugh. Hopefully, my son will too, whether his moon is in Capricorn or Cancer.

On Wall-E, the 2000 Watt Society and Fun

When I announced I was going to be giving birth in August, all my friends were horrified. “It’s the worst time of year to be pregnant!” they all chorused. “You’ll be so hot.”

Since I am usually cold and rarely hot—as in I wear socks to bed even in June, and long underwear from October to May–– I wasn’t too worried. Besides, I thought, if it gets really bad, I’ll go to the movies. What’s a better escape from the summer heat and the frustrations of everyday life than a communal air-conditioned experience?
Then the summer arrived, and I promptly wilted into a useless puddle of PermaContractions (very rare and apparently harmless scenario when a pregnant woman get Braxton-Hicks “practice” contractions if she so much as lifts a glass of water to her parched mouth). Also exhaustion, bad aches and low- (okay, mid-) level grumpiness. I began to look for a suitable flick to take my cranky self to, but somehow I forgot that going to the movies doesn’t really fit into my schedule anymore, what with my two-year-old daughter, three careers, etc.. Sex and the City came and went (in that I would have seen it the first weekend out, but the reviews made me lose interest). Then one of my clients told me about Wall-E the day after Frank Rich wrote about the movie in his Sunday Times column, and I was determined. When my OB told me I couldn’t do my scheduled show at the Boston Children’s Museum last Friday because she didn’t want me out in the heat of the day with my jumpy old uterus, I made a date with my friend Lisa, and we were off.

I’ll try not to spoil anything, but I will say this: Wall-E does not really strike me as a children’s movie. Made by Pixar, with gorgeous computer animation, there's even a cameo by one of my favorite “real” actors, Fred Willard. It was so dark for the first 40 minutes that Lisa and I sat hunkered down in our seats trying not to let the kids in back of us know we were sobbing. It takes place circa 2800 and the only signs of life left on planet Earth are a cockroach and one little green sprout. Humankind—what’s left of it––is circling around the Earth in a spaceship equivalent of the Love Boat. They’ve evolved (or devolved) into infantilized versions of themselves: obese and unable to walk, they travel about in motorized BARCO loungers, subsisting on a diet of shakes. Even the captain is completely clueless about their history and what brought them to their current situation: an apparent take-over of the earth by a conglomerate called Buy N Large, which has literally trashed the planet. Earth is no longer habitable, and a fleet of Wall-Es (Waste Allocation Load Lifter-Earth Class) was left behind to clean up the mess, but only one seems to be still functioning at the beginning of the film.

Wall-E, unlike the viewer, does not judge humans harshly for leaving behind all this trash. In fact, Wall-E seems kind of fascinated by us, and part of his daily routine involves filling a small cooler with artifacts he finds along the way: a Rubik’s cube, incandescent lightbulbs, an engagement ring box and an old videotape of Hello Dolly!. He’s taken by our creativity and our passion, and reminds the viewer that despite the near complete destruction of the Earth, human beings were not all bad. The question the movie asks over and over is: where does creativity turn into proliferation?

I left the movie in tears, and not just because I’m pregnant and had to view apocalyptic scenes of my children’s future environment. When I got home, I curled up into bed with last week’s New Yorker and read an article about the island of Samso, Denmark, which recently won a renewable energy contest, turning a small farming community (hardly a bunch of progressives) into net exporters of energy in less than a decade. The article, by Elizabeth Kolbert, went on to discuss an equally intriguing Swiss initiative called the 2000 Watt Society. 2000 Watts is the world average of energy usage per capita per day. But the figures are skewed by the huge disparity between developing and developed nations: Bangladesh, for example, uses 2600 watts per capita per year, while we in the US use 12,000 watts per person per day.

Since reading the article, I have been combing the internet trying to find out more about the 2000 Watt Society, but I can’t find a whole lot. I want to lower my wattage to 2000 so they let me in their club and I can feel good about myself. More than that, I love the idea of making conservation a personal goal, sort of like trying to climb all 46 mountains over 4000 feet in the Adirondacks was for me and my sisters when we were growing up. One of the villagers of Samso said that once residents started thinking about creating and conserving energy in this new way, “it became a sport.”

It could actually be fun to try to save energy. Rather than see it as deprivation, I want to see it as play. And, as the founders of the 2000 Watt Society point out, reducing energy consumption needn’t lead to a lower standard of living. On the contrary. What sounds more fun: staying inside with air conditioning, or sitting with my two year old in a Freecycled kiddie pool? Driving yet again to the local fluorescent-lit grocery store or riding a bike with a trailer to the downtown farmer’s market where I am sure to meet many dear friends? Throwing out another “disposable” diaper, or hanging out a load of wet but clean cloth diapers in the warm July sun?

Of course, I am lucky that I have these choices to make. Being pregnant and on strict orders not to exercise, I actually can’t ride my bike to the farmer’s market, which makes me notice how lucky I am to live in a bike-friendly, pedestrian-friendly area instead of a megatropolis built around the automobile. At the same time, because I have to drive everywhere these days, I am acutely aware of how much I rely on technology, and how grateful I am to have my own transportation. I try not to buy plastic, AND I’m grateful that plastics have literally saved lives in their applications in various surgeries and other health related matters. (Condoms, for example. Intubation tubes and catheters for another.) I am grateful that we have electricity to power wheelchairs, elevators so that my friends who are unable to walk can bypass stairs. Moreover, the residents of Bangladesh are not living on 2600 watts of energy a year out of some desire to be eco-martyrs. The question that I kept asking after seeing Wall-E (and after seeing An Inconvenient Truth two years ago) is: where did we go wrong? Where is the line? Where does human ingenuity turn into self-destruction? Where do basic human needs get mixed up with desires for iPhones and bigger cars, not to mention hegemony over countries that are oil-rich so that we can maintain our current lifestyles?

That old bumper sticker comes to mind: "Live simply so that others may simply live." When I first saw that, it just made me cranky. I felt preached to, scolded. I was an anti-environmentalist when I was a teen-ager, rebelling probably against my zealous mother and Birkenstock-wearing aunt. (Back then, I could not understand how anyone could allow themselves to be seen in footwear so hideous. Right this moment, I am wearing my beloved 19-year-old pair of Arizona-style Birks.) I remember freshman year in college saying out loud to a friend, “They say there’s deforestation, but look.” I pointed to the trees lining that portion of I-95, probably in Maryland. “Tons of trees.” (My brilliant point was not met with a sympathetic response.) It’s taken me a very long time to get over my feelings of entitlement and try to do my tiny part to lower my footprint, and I know that laying on the guilt doesn’t help. Like any addict, I wasn’t ready to let go of my substance (in this case, consumerism and the easy fix—“just toss it in the trash”) until I was ready.

But I do know this. It works when it becomes play. It works when you make it a game. It works when you see the gift of “less,” the gift of creativity inherent in placing limits on oneself. And it works when I see the truth that no gadget, no processed food, no article of clothing ever made me as happy as the view from the top of an Adirondack Mountain, or the sugar snap peas we grew this spring in our garden, or anything having to do with my little daughter, including her cloth diapers hanging out to dry in our backyard.