A Memory--No, Some.

Too late now to tackle any of the subjects I'd planned on tackling (new title: sevenhundredfiftywordspastmidnight?) so I think I'll try a lamo writing school exercise that has occasionally yielded some useful line or idea or image in the past and write about a childhood memory. Okay. I just sat in front of the keyboard for ten minutes going over my entire childhood and adolescence in my head and yielded not very much. Well, that's not exactly true. For some reason, and I hope it's not early Alzheimer's, my memories are coming to me in snippets--I cannot recall a scene longer than a few seconds--which is usually not the case for me. So, because I must write something I will write the snippets. Not trying to be arty, I promise. As it comes:

Alison and I had a book called How to Make Mudpies or something similar that actually contained recipes for a variety of mud concoctions, with ingredients such as "crushed leaves" and "pebbles." One summer we both became possessive of the book and kept claiming ownership of it, and because we actually used it, took it quite seriously, in fact, it was ultimately a wreck: pages hard and crinkled from being soaked and dried, splotches of mud with bits of twig and sand encrusting it and so on. I can just make out the image of a little table set out in front of our play house with a tea party arranged on it and my dad walking across the lawn with some black still in his hair, having been invited to the gathering.

One of the quintessential scenes of my childhood--and there were so many variations on this that I may be combining more than one--is me and Alison, Andy, Jacy and Brandon, seated around the round glass table on my grandparents' porch eating supper, which is what we called it, while the grownups ate in the kitchen with the door closed between the two rooms. I never actually thought about that before, how the door was always closed, but it makes perfect sense to me now. We had bubbled glass glasses filled with my grandmother's childrens' "cocktail": an even mix of orange juice and gingerale. I have had orange juice and seltzer since but not that mix in 30 some odd years. I can almost, kind of, taste it.

The Goodnow Library, in Sudbury, was one of my favorite places as a child. We would go every week, at least, and our librarian was named Betsy. We were maybe her favorite visitors, or at least I felt that we were at the time. I loved her, felt that she understood and appreciated me, and I would have spent all day in the library if I could have. We were allowed to take out as many books as we wanted, and we often left with twenty each. I remember my sister carrying an enormous stack--she loved being stronger than I was--out to the car in the parking lot behind the library. It must have been late fall; the leaves were brown and mostly on the ground, but it wasn't cold. My mother's car was green; I can't remember which one, as they were almost always green.

I also remember the somewhat awkward and never entirely successful transition to the upstairs part of the library where the books for teenagers were kept in a nook off the main section, which was for adults. The books seemed alien and alienating to me, but tantalizing too, of course, maybe later on: full of things I didn't want to know about, like teenagers. I wasn't sure what teenagers did, beyond babysit, although occasionally I would skim one of these books with a scary-looking cover; there was one, in fact, with a babysitter who was--is this possible?--raped while she was babysitting? A Stranger in the House? Maybe I am mixing this up with something from a later time, but I do remember quite distinctly that some of the books seemed illicit, the paperbacks, especially. Anyway, my mother had gone to the same library as a child, and there was a part of the building that had been there since before she was born, and I can see myself standing on the edge of the balcony there trying, squinting with the effort of it, to imagine my mother at my age, which must have been about twelve.

Alison and I, at six and seven, were sitting in our basement playroom watching "Happy Days," which I can't imagine we really understood, eating hot dogs, which was also unusual, and there was somebody upstairs with our parents. For some reason, I think this is the night they told us we were moving. I have an intense memory of a feeling from when I first found out--a powerful wave of nausea and pain in my midsection as though I'd been punched in the gut. I wrote a song about the move, which I fought every step of the way and does, in hindsight, seem to have divided my childhood into early- and mid-, but I can't remember the lyrics.

I remember a day in kindergarten when we had to have some kind of vaccine administered at the school--I can't imagine they do that now--and having to go from the classroom, where we'd been doing something involving the letter A and the word "achoo" as in a sneeze, to the hallway, where a table was set up and we all had to wait in line. I was given a tiny plastic trinket afterward, perhaps some kind of animal?

The earliest memory I have, I think, is of sitting at a little table at my preschool having snack. The snack was graham crackers, and I suddenly became aware of my chewing, of the sound it made in particular, which seemed impossibly loud, and felt mortified that the children on either side of me were hearing it too. It's funny; I have gone over this memory so many times in my head that I'm not totally sure I can even recall the moment itself anymore or if I'm recalling my memories of remembering it--analagous somewhat to the way I sometimes think I am remembering something but am actually only remembering a photograph I've seen of it.

Abashed Aside and Some Thoughts on Proxemics

From now on, I am only allowed to use the words "gender role" if I have had a solid seven hours of sleep. Seriously, the last thing I want here is to traffic in ludicrous generalities and glib summations of complicated issues. I had a few conversations today stemming from last night's post that will be very helpful when I revisit this subject, but to the thousands of men out there who make the dentists' appointments (and the perhaps two that have access to this blog), I apologize. My bad. I'm not retracting everything or even most of what I said, I just didn't say it well or at sufficient length--not to mention the generalization problem that is the heart of all bad personal essays. I know better; again, and play your tiny violins for me, I was exhausted.

Now, some thoughts on one of the big subjects I am mulling over, and by big, I mean I am hoping possibly book-worthy (sigh, the hedging of "hoping" and "possibly"). Have you ever heard the word "proxemics?" I hadn't either until fairly recently. It means "the study of the spatial requirements of humans and animals and the effects of population density on behavior, communication, and social interaction." A lovely lunch I had some months ago with a brilliant editor and writer started me thinking about this in earnest, and I think--after quite a bit of thinking and some reading and research--I am ready to start writing about it. (It's even harder on a blog than in a plain old essay to get to your point, I am learning as I go along; there's so much explication that I would skip if I didn't know anyone was reading this with a venue in which to write back.)

Jumping in: If you went to college, you most likely have lived in a dorm at some point. If you went to boarding school, you lived in a dorm for a solid eight years. I want you to close your eyes and think back--far, far for some of us, now--and remember who your best friends were. Are any of them still your friends now? Now, picture your dorm room, and their dorm room. I am willing to bet, stake money on the fact, that your best friends then, and even more likely any you stayed in touch with over the intervening years, lived not much more than a couple doors down.

Does that ever strike you as odd? If your college was anything like mine, there was a dorm next door, say twenty yards away, and your first friends, your closest friends, did not live there; they lived on your hall. Was this because we were too lazy or incapacitated in some way to walk five minutes to that dorm next door and make friends with some of those people, who were busy befriending each other? Of course not, and eventually you did, I did--I even married one of them. But was it just an enormous coincidence that the handful of close friends I made right away, four of whom are still among my very closest friends, just happened to be assigned adjoining dorm rooms?

If I'd asked you before writing any of this--which maybe would have been a better experiment--on what basis you form friendships, formed them in college, I'd be willing to bet again that you would not have said "proximity." You may have said personality or shared interests or values or experience, but you would not have said "lives next door." But time and again, this situation asserts itself: You are more likely to form relationships with people who are in closest proximity to you, even if more likely candidates for relationships based on more relevant-seeming criteria--are only ever so slightly less proximal.

Anyway, this is just a toe in the water. There will be much more on this subject, which gets more interesting, I promise. And maybe I will change the name of this blog to "sevenhundredfiftywords before 11 p.m." We could all avoid some discomfort, I think.

Contextual Ephemera

I am having fun with my titles; this one may actually make no sense. Which is fitting because for the first night now I have hit a bit of a wall. I started two other entries centered around possible story ideas and both went nowhere. I am really too tired to write. This is the first night this has been true. I have been tired on the other nights too but propelled by the excitement and momentum of the project and by the writing itself. Tonight, nothing. Or very little.

It will likely be excruciatingly boring to read a recounting of the ways in which my two previous attempts were stymied. I was going to write "stymied themselves," but that places the blame firmly on them, when it is my fault entirely. I am not sure about the use of the passive voice, in general or with "stymied," but you can see now why I am having trouble tonight--this kind of thing keeps happening to me and the idea has no way to make an inroad. (Is the process of writing, and the process of failing to write, or succeeding in writing, of any interest whatsoever to either those of you who are writers or those of you who are not? Discuss amongst yourselves.)

The first piece I tried to write also had a bad if not a nonsensical title: Saving Scout. I have wanted to write about adopting Scout, our big white rescue collie, for a long time now, but I am up against the saccharine nature of the dog genre and the whole Marley and Me phenomenon that makes writing about pets seem like an exercise in selling out. Do I think writing about pets has to be syrupy and full of messages about unconditional love and rascally escapades? You might think I do, based on the Lifetime movie title I keep wanting to give this theoretical piece. But I think what I really want to write about is the way rescuing something is so tied up in ego and that the self-congratulatory nature of rescuing can mask or cloud or at least affect the very real reciprocal benefits, but it keeps coming back to oh, you can see this coming a mile away, how Scout really saved us as much as we saved him and I can't make it go where I want it to. Yuck. Yet.

Wouldn't it be great if I could attach or link to a picture of Scout here? I will ask Nicole tomorrow to tell me how to do it, but it will involve taking one, and downloading it, and then doing whatever is required to post it, so it may take me a while. But I like my ambition; I like that it still exists.

The other piece has more depth, and may be more saleable (although as someone who worked in editorial at Little, Brown when Warhol's Cats was published, I certainly know about the salability of animal crap) , but it is even harder, in a way, because the subject is too big, unless I make it personal, which I have to do anyway to make it any good. In thinking about gender roles, which I do too much these days (I know; makes me seem like the life of the party, right?) I realize how much mine changed not in the context of marriage but in becoming a mother. It seems to me that having children throws many couple's notions of their gender roles into a tailspin, and I am very, very interested in why even the gay fathers I know, and I know more than a handful, don't do certain things regarding their children; their sisters do. And oh, the lesbians--forget homophobic arguments about unfit parents: from where I'm standing their children must be twice as well outfitted in underpants and playdates and healthy snackfood--the province of womenhood based on some unwritten universal law.

I find it strange that before we had children, I would have fallen on the floor laughing if someone had suggested that I was going to be the only person in my household who cared if my daughter ate cupcakes for breakfast. Some men do care, or claim to, or act as though they do, but most of these whom I know well are pretending to care much, much more than they do for reasons relating to their wives.

That sounds way too glib, and as I live in New York City, where half the kids in my daughter's nursery school class are ridden on bikes or walked over by their dads, not their moms, and dads do shop and cook dinner and maybe even legitimately care about healthy snacks and make dentist appointments--no. I want to be fair, but I challenge you. Find me a dad who makes the dentist appointments, a straight one, and I will, well, think of something to do to reward you for shattering my preconceived ideas about gender roles.

This idea, too. Not happening. Not now, not yet, maybe not at all. But I am interested in gender roles. And I am especially interested in the ways they affect parents, so maybe I will write something about it sometime. But now it is 12:26, and I need to pack a lunchbox. Ha. See? I just did.

On Falling in Love (and Little Red)

Well, I am 38--just, but still. It's been a long time now since I fell in love in terms of what we usually mean when we talk about falling in love. But earlier today, and I will explain what triggered this later, I was thinking about how actually I fall in love with people and things all the time. Tonight, for example, I fell hopelessly in love with Annika all over again moments after I wasn't sure how I was going to get through the rest of the evening. I had managed to get Lily to bed, and to sleep--after only one change of nightwear ("I'm just in more of a mood for a nightgown, Mama,"--I guess I fell in love with her all over again, too, in that instant)--and I was sitting in the reclining chair, holding Annika, feeding her, forgetting to be mindful of the preciousness of the moment. In fact, I was so far from minding the preciousness of the moment that I was actually half-watching an Iron Chef episode while willing her to fall asleep, silently begging, my mind filled with all of the things I both had to and wanted to do on this particular night. I mean this backstory as a transition from last night's entry, but see, I am still new to this: Blog entries don't need transitions, do they? I will move it along.

Anyway, I looked down at Annika, really looked at her, just as she took a deep, satisfied sigh, and she grinned at me. It was a cockeyed grin that reached her eyes, so completely trusting and satiated and, well, happy, and then, when I grinned back, involuntarily, she chortled, and I thought, in that instant, that I had never loved anyone or anything so much. But as I explained to Lily the other day, the great thing about love is that it works like this. There is just so much of it--and it never has to be, never should be, quantified, I forget this sometimes.

I am worried I am heading off in the wrong direction, and I will write about Lily's concerns about the possibly finite nature of love another time. And the kind of love one has for one's children is not exactly what I want to arrive at here, anyway, as that is not a "falling in love," really, it is perhaps the only kind of love that doesn't require the falling. What I want to write about now is how we have the capacity to fall in love with something and how doing so--and I know I run the risk of sounding over the top here--sort of validates the space you take up as a human being on the planet and gives you the kind of interconnectedness that makes the span of time you have worthwhile.

Okay. I'm not explaining this well, and I still haven't gotten to the point or explained in any way how this relates to my writing. Let me keep trying. Have you ever done something or seen something or heard something and just thought in a really pure and unfiltered kind of way: I love that? And then, have you ever thought about how your loving whatever it is--for me, the Rolling Stones' "Ruby Tuesday," Epoisses cheese, an hour almost twenty years ago at a little tiny nothing cafe in the Marais with a friend who always make me feel profoundly understood--is actually an enormous, enveloping part of who you are? And then, bear with me, I am feeling the strain of this too, have you ever stopped to think about what your life would be like if you didn't ever fall in love this way?

I am not sure if this is inappropriate, as I didn't ask the artist's permission, but I am working on a children's story, which now will be about, I hope, a girl called Little Red, and birds, and birch trees, and a world in which colors seem riper and shapes seem cleaner, and the reason I am finally doing this--and it is hard, much harder than I expected--is because I fell in love with the work of an artist. Maybe you will too. Because I know how to do this now, and because it is almost as satisfying to share something you love like this as it is to actually love it, here is the link to see for yourself: The Art. More on the story to come.

Night, and Further Thoughts on Technology

A few hours ago, when I was putting Lily to bed, she commented en route to the bedroom after brushing her teeth, "I hate night."

"Why?" I asked, not paying close attention. I know full well why she hates night; she is onto me. Before Annika was born, I used to breathe a sigh of relief so immense that the neighbors probably heard it when I closed her bedroom door. Now, a little more time elapses before the sigh, but Annika is asleep by 9 these days, at the latest, so the sigh comes then. Lily knows, because at 4 she already knows me oh so well: Night is mine.

I love my waking hours with the girls. The evenings are ours in particular; lately, when Ben is away, Lily and I make dinner, something a little bit festive, like "breakfast for dinner," which we both enjoy. Then, we read together, in the reclining chair or in Lily's bed, unless Annika squawks too much, in which case she is relegated to the indignity of her bouncy seat with a pacifier. We talk, too, in a different way than we talk on the way to school, in the dark, which is always a different kind of talking, and when Lily falls asleep with Scout curled around her and the Mary Poppins soundtrack blasting, as she wants it to be, Annika and I sit for a while, back in the chair, and sink into the night, and although she does not know yet, is way too small, perhaps on some cellular level she can sense it too. Night.

The nights are mine, and I long for them all day, at least on some subconscious level, a place where a tiny part of me still remembers what it felt like to lie in bed in the morning and decide if I felt like getting up. There are no decisions, now, in the mornings. There is just getting up, before or just as it is getting light, and then there is no spare second in the day in which to breathe deeply enough to really feel it, no moments in which to ask myself, "Hmm. What should I do next?"

This is, I know, intrinsic to parenting young children. From the very first day, or at least the very first day home from the hospital, after which you spend every subsequent day wondering why nurses are so underpaid and undervalued, time shifts irrevocably, constantly but inconsistently, never again your own to own in the way you did before. Deciding when to get up is one example of a lost luxury, but there are so many more. The loss of daytime is the biggest one, I think, because no matter how much help you have, or who is helping, or even if you are not actually with a child of yours at any given time, if they are awake it is their time, not yours, and it is impossible to fully let that notion go.

I am not complaining. Really, I am not. In fact, I didn't mean to take this long to get to where I wanted, what I wanted to say, which is that my own relationship to night these days is growing complicated. As I said, I long for it, covet it, hoard it, try my best to stretch it out until it barely fits the definition, but it taunts me, slipping by with a haughty turned shoulder, knows it has the power and wields it like a knife.

At night, of course, I run as though on an escalator that is going down, chasing my old self. But there isn't really time in these snatched, furtive, even desperate hours to have the kind of conversation on the phone in which you end up trying to remember the lyrics to as many Christmas carols as you can, or to make caramel popcorn by hand, or to watch a real movie, even, or to really, really read: a book, a novel, not a magazine, and without any outward purpose but to lose yourself.

Those words are a cliche, I suppose, "to lose yourself," and funny, too, as what I am talking about is actually trying to find myself, and the fact is that although some would probably say the self itself has changed--that we change so over time (and becoming a mother would be only one of the myriad ways a person changes)--but I don't believe this, never have.

So it is night again, and because I have not been checking word counts (to my own surprise, I realize), just writing--tonight and every night for, I think, nine days--I have managed to lose myself for a little while again. And yes, I am tired, but in a way that feels manageable, surmountable, even a little bit exhilirating. It will be yours someday, too, Lily, and Annika, although that's harder to imagine still, but I know it's true. But for now, the nights are mine.

Not going to tackle the further thoughts on technology tonight in-depth, but I am interested in the question of how our modern technolgies both facilitate and break down closeness, the space between us. And I do think they do both. And I want to really think about this, and write about it, hard.

A Minor Point of Interest and My Brave New World

First, the Minor Point of Interest
The tub faucet in our bathroom has two positions; one indicates the water will come from below, and fill the tub, the other indicates the water will come from above, as spray. It is a rudimentary, old-school faucet; you turn it so the arrow faces down or faces up; there are no other options. We have been in this apartment now for over a month; every time I want to take a bath I squint at the faucet, note the position of the arrow on the faucet, turn on the water, and get drenched fully clothed. Every. Single. Time.

A Brave New World
As the mother of two very young children with a spouse who is out of town a lot, I suspect I am not alone in the fact that these days I spend a lot of time, particularly very late at night, online. Actually, I know this to be true; I have noted over the past few months the somewhat disturbing number of emails I receive from mothers or workaholics or those unfortunate souls who are both between the hours of, say 10 p.m. and 2 in the morning, when all law-abiding citizens over 30 should really be asleep. Or at least doing something more beneficial to society than googling their second grade crushes or shopping for vintage suede coats on ebay. Or even, as much as I love these fellow night owls, and they are some of my favorite people in the world, sending missives to me.

It occurs to me that in some ways, these days, I am living in two different worlds: the first is the real world of my daytime life, in which I interact with family members, friends, colleagues, neighbors, students, lots of hilarious 4 year olds and some local nutty alcoholic homeless people who really like my dogs. The second, alternate-universe world is the virtual one, in which I keep in touch with 500 times more people than I ever would in real life, play copious amounts of online Scrabble, buy groceries, shoes and the occasional vintage suede coat, scope out abandoned dogs who need loving homes and then sites designed for people who are addicted to Petfinder.com and can't, reasonably, add so much as a goldfish to their existing menagerie. I made that last one up: there is no such site to my knowledge, but there should be.

I was a latecomer to the Internet, partly due to ineptitude and fear, partly on principle, for reasons related to my initial reluctance to buy into cell phones and cable TV. There is a real part of me that believes, deep down and insistently, that we have become way too reliant on our various technologies, and longs for the days when people wrote real letters and met each other in person for meals and talked on telephones whose attachment to the wall meant that you actually needed to be seated in a chair to use them. I find it irritating when I am talking to somebody now and I can hear them click-clicking on their keyboard; I suspect we all have been guilty both of chatting on a cell phone in a way or place that annoys somebody as well as being really ticked off by somebody else's doing the same.

And yet. And yet, online, in the last few years, so much has happened to me, so many things that would never have happened any other way. I am not talking about some double life in video, a side gig in identity theft, an illicit correspondence with a prisoner, or even a 15-year-old posing as one. I am talking about how much I love Amazon.com and the ability to choose exactly the edition of a book I want and have it delivered to my doorstep, at a discount and with free shipping, in a matter of days. I am talking about the hours I avoid at the grocery store, and the fact that Fresh Direct is never out of celeriac, or buttermilk or whatever ingredient I need to try a recipe in an out-of-print Jane Grigson cookbook I never could have found at either my neighborhood chain bookstore or my lovely independent one. I am talking about the fact that on Facebook, which a friend signed me up for initially for the Scrabble, I received a lovely message from a third grade friend I have had no contact with for almost 30 years and learned that she is a clearly brilliant economist living in Dubai.

There's so much more--I know I will think of a zillion other examples before tomorrow. I can debate politics, send articles of interest instantaneously, share pictures and get invited to things. I have access to every take-out menu in New York, seating charts for theater tickets, the ability to order movies without waiting in line at a Blockbuster. Because of my online life, I read my hometown paper, listen to music, maintain a gratifying witty banter with a college friend I rarely see, have a window into the lives of people I know well and admire or love. In fact, I have had no bad experiences with this particular technology, other than being daunted by the process of installing, using or setting up related components of it, and I have enough friends who are good at this and willing to be bribed with a homemade blue cheese burger (you know who you are) that it isn't even really an issue.

I know I am not alone in this either--my alterna life online--because one of the things some people hate and fear about the internet is the loss of anonymity, the whole Big Brother aspect of it all, and Facebook, for example, lets me see who's online 24 hours a day. It's a lot of you. Emails indicate when they've been sent; I always wonder if anybody notices when I've sent one in the middle of the night, but the truth is I never check the messages I receive: who cares? Like Las Vegas, or Atlantic City, where the casinos have no windows and the idea is existence out of time, the Internet exists in its own timeless, hourless sphere. Not to mention this whole blogging thing, which is both incredibly intimate and incredibly impersonal, if you stop to think about the fact that anyone writing a blog is really sending it out into infinite space, not just into yours.

That's enough for now (is it jarring just to announce that mid-idea?). But I am pleased--not necessarily by what I've written, which I'm too tired to reread--but by the fact that I dove into this at all, as it is very much related to one of two book ideas I'm working through. More later...ASW

I inadvertently signed off the way I signed my emails--what's that all about? I definitely do NOT think blogs should end with some Edward R. Murrow flourish. Sorry. One-off. Will not happen again.

Fatigue Sets In

It's 11:57. Before anyone who knows me thinks to himself: So typical, posting by the skin of her teeth, let me just say for the record that I pledged to write 750 words a day, seven days a week, with a day by definition being a 24-hour cycle. I never said I'd be done before midnight. (It's nice to know that one's weaseling out of deadline skills don't dry up after a lengthy drought.)

No, in the words of, I think, Stephen Sondheim in one of his less good songs, "I'm still here." I actually can't believe it myself. That might be a bad song lyric too--yes! I actually remembered lyrics under duress--it's from the Greatest American Hero. I think the song goes, "I still can't believe it myself." So pretend I wrote that. Okay. Too tired for much tonight, it's clear, and still a little fired up from watching the republican debate. Although they're still a whole lot of crazy, the candidates seemed a little more sober somehow, as though they sensed that their usual tactics (barely suppressed rage, starched condescension, and so on) would not play well on this stage. Some of the questions and responses were even a little boring, unusual for this creationism-crazy crew of Mormons and Holocaust deniers. I almost longed for the now burnished, shopworn schticks of the Black! Woman! Populist! candidates across the aisle.

This is the problem with a blog, and maybe I will allow myself this slip-up because I am so tired: It's way too tempting to just talk about whatever you want to talk about, imaging an audience that has any interest in your thoughts on the most random or tedious of subjects. There are so many things I want SO BADLY to write about now: Huckabee's planted Easter eggs, my deep and abiding love for Hugh Laurie, the 140 word I scored in a recent Scrabulous game against a fellow blogger who shall remain anonymous, the unexpected and fascinating reemergence in my life online of a number of people from my third and fifth grade classes and the unexpected and fascinating things some of them are doing, more thoughts on princesses, including the highly relevant comment by a reader that really threw me for a loop about boys liking princess stuff, why American don't eat treacle toffee, the omnipotence of Boston sports, and more.

Actually, I don't really want to write about any of those things. It's a highly contrived list, and with the exception of Scrabulous, which I do really want to write about as part of a larger project, and the new princess angle, I had to strain to come up with the rest of the items. Don't get me wrong, I do love Hugh Laurie, but that's all I have to say on the subject. What I will make myself do is write an anecdote for the beginning of the Four Generations piece, which I increasingly feel will have to be about five generations by the time I ever write the thing. Here goes:

We are sitting on a bench in Union Square by the fountain: my grandmother, mother, daughters and me. Actually only three of us are sitting; Lily is standing as close as she can to the fountain without falling in, and Annika is asleep in her stroller. My father has gone ahead to our favorite restaurant to wait by the door and stake our claim at the bar when it opens. My grandmother is sitting next to the stroller, which she pushes like a wheelchair when we go out in the city, where I live and where they come to visit from Massachusetts as often as they can throughout the year. We have been to the greenmarket, and the stroller contains not just the baby but winter produce: root vegetables, apples, and kale.

A man walks by, middle-aged, polished in camel hair coat and cashmere scarf. He smiles at my grandmother, who wears coronet braids and is watching Lily with a furrowed brow, nervous about her proximity to the fountain. I see him smile at her and smile back on her behalf, as she hasn't noticed, and he takes in the rest of us: my mother, reorganizing the food we have bought, me, slunk down on the bench like a 30-something teenager, the intimations of a baby under some pussywillows.

"Is that four generations?" he asks, stopping for a moment, addressing the question at me. I stare at him for an instant, uncomprehending. Generations? What is he talking about? I look at my 92-year-old grandmother watching my four-year-old daughter. My mother is looking at the man now too.

"Yes," she says, as the realization hits me. That is what we are: four generations of women, women and girls, spanning nearly a century, related by blood, divided by experience, bound by both habit and love.

"Yes," I add, unnecessarily, echoing, as always, my mom.

"That's just terrific," the man says. "Just wonderful." He would have tipped his hat, had he been wearing one, but instead he slightly bowed, in the direction of Mormor, and my mother and I, the only two members of this motley crew who'd heard the exchange, stood to gather our brood.

The Princess Problem, Part Deux

Okay, I lied. The book is not really in the basement, although I did hide it behind my computer, and Lily forgot about it overnight, as she is wont to do with such things. I find that most of the time "out of sight, out of mind" works well with her for all but the most beloved posessions. Maybe this is true for all four-year-olds? Regardless, she has not asked about the book, which was not around long enough to make much of an impression and which I read in such an edited and lackluster fashion that even the tiny paper makeup brushes probably seemed less alluring by the time I was "done."

One of the reasons the book is not in the basement is because I had a crazy busy day, and I am also a little lazy about going to the basement unless I absolutely have to. But another reason is that when I reread yesterday's post, I was really annoyed by myself and kept it around and near me as I worked to force myself to think about why. I guess I couldn't help but imagine reading the piece as somebody else, which sounds weird and possibly insane but bear with me. I mean, I imagined that it had been written by somebody else, not by me, and that a me who hadn't written it--and even agreed with everything I wrote--would have found this hypothetical writer to be a bit of an ass.

Well that's certainly bad writing, even factoring in for the colloquial blog format, but it is the word that comes to mind and for a variety of reasons. For one, the whole anti-princess thing has been done before, and by much bigger names than mine. For another, it's so facile--either you embrace the movement and buy your little girl tons of princess crap because you like it and think it's cute or because she does, both of which are totally legitimate, or you don't, and your kid is or isn't annoyed by your resistance. It's not actually that interesting, either way. Yes, there are cultural and regional and ethnic reasons people do or don't embrace princess paraphernalia, but one of the most intellectual, political feminists I know could care less if her daughter wears a ballgown and tiara all day, and some people I find moronic have taken a strident anti-stance like mine, and there are gun-lovers in the blue states, and atheists in the red states and blah, blah, blah. What I am interested in is why I care so much and what it means for me and for my own child, who spent all yesterday afternoon in a Cinderella dress from her costume box while constructing an elaborate parking garage with one of her favorite friends, who happens to be a boy.

I am not saying that I did anything wrong by censoring the book or even hiding it away. I am who I am, and personally--as an adult--I find princess stuff, especially the commercialized version that is ubiquitous these days, distasteful in a visceral way. But when I was thinking about it this morning, my face got hot as I remembered a favorite pastime for months when I was about ten. My sister and I were in the Nutcracker, and my mother had bought a large makeup kit--about the size of three laptop computers placed side-by-side--to help do makeup backstage. When the performances were over, she gave the kit to us, or we appropriated it, and I loved it--was passionately in love with it, can remember the smell and taste of the glossy little lipstick circles, the sheen of the mauve eye-shadow (which was big in the eighties for a brief spell), the sleek brushes and wands with their fake tortoiseshell handles and grubby flattened ends.

Did that makeup kit turn me into a "girly girl," a species I was wary of as early as junior high? Did it make my mother a Ramsey parent, prepping us for a lifetime of applying sparkles to our cheekbones in lieu of higher education and a sense of dignity? Or was it simply, well, fun.

The answer, my friends, seems fairly obvious to me now. I picked an easy battle with this topic, at first, anyway, and although I agree with my yesterday's self in principle, I think in practice I am going to try to be a little less controlling. One of the many things that Lily has taught me already, in her barely four years, is that she is bound and determined to be her very own person regardless of whether or not I give away the books and toys I don't like, bombard her with ones that I do. She's much less interested in what I think when I present it in a dogmatic, lecturing way, and the last thing I want is for her to become contrary because I'm annoying. Bottom line: I can bear raising two girls who like to don a princess dress every now and then because "it's pretty" as long as they also know their own minds.

*

It must be really uncool and alienating and possibly counterproductive if I am seeking increased commentary to give individual blog "shout-outs," but hey, I'm old and new to this, and I can get away with claiming not to know the rules. Thank you Betsy for making me think this through again--it feels good to think about something with a little exertion for a change. And Alex, you gave Lily Where the Wild Things Are, for which I will always be grateful, although the real place they are is: E-10, 1992.

The Princess Problem

The (very raw) start to a piece for one of several possible publications...

Today somebody gave me a present for the baby and, thoughtfully, gave me a present for Lily as well. I could tell it was a book; when she opened it, after opening Annika's gift first, I was dismayed. The book was called How to Be a Princess: A Girl's Guide to Being the Ultimate Princess. It was a Disney book, so various characters of the Cinderella variety were featured on its cover. It was pink and sparkly, and Lily oohed and ahhhed as she examined it--a bit ostentatiously, for my benefit I felt, as though she knew--or had an inkling of--what I was thinking.

Which was, of course, how to make the book disappear as soon as possible, preferably without having to read it first. I did have to read it, though, for the bedtime story, and it was pretty much what I would have predicted, maybe slightly more annoying in its blatant attempts to assuage the fears of uptight, anti-princess moms like me. For example, on the page where it says, "Before an undersea concert, I always like to use a little extra makeup," it also says, "A princess's real beauty comes from within." A paper wardrobe on the opposite page from the text can be opened to reveal little paper makeup brushes that can be removed and put back in because practicing applying makeup is, for Disney, clearly a key component of American little girlhood. The quote at the bottom of the page reads, "Being pretty is part of your world." --Ariel.

I couldn't do it. I mean, I kept reading, largely to avoid a bedtime battle, but I edited out every single dumb, offensive, demeaning, simpering word and read only the platitudes, which gave me about one line per page. Fortunately Lily was tired and not paying careful attention. When I was done, I closed the book and smiled a steely smile. I refrained from saying what was foremost on my mind, which was that a book designed to teach little girls how to be princesses was based on a pretty flawed concept: Did Disney not know that applying makeup well and looking pretty couldn't actually turn you into a princess? Perhaps the book should have provided tips for seducing William or Harry, the only princes I could think of. I didn't say that either.

Lily and I have had a few princess conversations over the past six months or so. The first went badly. She announced to me, after a few days of exposure to some new, princess-obsessed friends, "Mama, I want to be a princess when I grow up." Me, horrified: A princess? Princesses don't do anything. How boring. What about a ballerina instead? Lily, crestfallen: I guess so. Later, I told a friend that I had had a low parenting moment, that my joyless, knee-jerk response had been wholly unnecessary, as I wasn't really worried that Lily would catch princess-fever in a serious way, and even a little bit mean. But as awful as it had been to see her smile crumple, I couldn't just suck it up and give in.

The next time the subject came up, I tried a different, and I hoped more sensitive and informative approach. "Do you know what a princess is?" I asked.

"No," she admitted. "Will you tell me?" My opportunity: I had to choose my words carefully.

More to come. Spoiler: I do not actually come around and embrace the princess business. The book is in the basement. Reserve judgment...

Links to the Blogs I Read

I read four blogs semi-regularly, as mentioned in previous post. Full disclosure: they are written by people I know, in some cases quite well. Fuller (?) disclosure: Nicole had to walk me through the process of linking to them as though I were a lobotomized hamster. But now I know how to do it. So check them out if you feel like it.

Nicole's blog

Emilie's blog

Kiley's blog

Gretchen's blog

For those keeping score (only me, I know, as always), this is TWO entries in one day. I can't remember the last time I kept any sort of resolution DOUBLY. Forgive the all-caps--I know it's annoying. But I'm kind of amazed this is working.

A Plunge

Okay. I actually have an assignment for real, and I have been putting and putting and putting it off. I'm not sure why, and it's so late now that it may even be too late, but inspired by the fact that I've found it possible to snatch enough time for my 750 words on the subject of procrastination, I am going to shoot for a start to this piece right here and now. I think part of the problem is legitimate: I'm not certain what the point should be, what I'm writing toward, I guess. But my awareness of that problem has not proven helpful in any way, shape or form, so I will just try to start, which is--I am finding--always better than doing nothing at all.

The assignment is to write about the four generations of my family spending time together: my grandmother, my mother, my daughters and me. See, it's a vague idea, right? It has no inherent point. And I pitched it in the first place; I have no one to blame but myself. Blah, blah--I'm doing it again. Here goes. Any insight very much appreciated...

Four Generations
By Amy Wilensky

"Mama?" Lily is standing at my desk holding a pad of paper and a pen. "How do you spell 'tease?'"

"Why?" I ask, absent-mindedly, squinting at my monitor.

"I am writing a letter to Mormor," she explains. "I am going to tell her that I don't like it when she teases me." I turn to her. Lily, just 4, has been writing letters lately, along with signs, nametags, and "homework;" the ideas of self-expression and communication by means of the written word are clearly taking hold. But this is not what strikes me then.

"You do like it when Mormor teases you, I think," I say, realizing this is true, a little surprised by it.

"Sometimes," she agrees. "But I think she'll think it's funny if I tell her I don't."
She's right. Mormor, who is almost 92, will think this is funny. I don't, particularly, and my mother finds the teasing stressful, but this letter, this dynamic, has nothing to do with us. From as early on as Lily could talk, she and Mormor have had their own, unique, sometimes perplexing relationship. In fact, Mormor almost never teases my mother or me, and Lily does not play this flirtatious game with us. It is theirs, and theirs alone.

Sometimes, when we are walking down the street together--a cluster comprising baby Annika's stroller pushed by my grandmother, Lily and her various stuffed companions, my mother and I coaxing everyone along--people call out to us. "Hey, is that four generations?" It happens enough now that we just smile and nod.

The first time it happened, when Lily was an infant, we were sitting at the bar having lunch at our favorite restaurant. "What's the age span here?" a man waiting for a table asked. My mother and I looked at each other.

"Almost 90 years," I said.

"Wow. Four generations, right? That's incredibly lucky," he said, as the people seated on either side of our group checked us out, mildly curious. I hadn't yet stopped to think about it that way. Now, of course, I can't stop. Four generations. Very lucky indeed.

*

I am being summoned for an indoor picnic. I am not happy with this beginning. It is much like the other five beginnings I have for this piece, and yet again feels like it is going nowhere fast. What I want to establish, I think, is that there is something amazing about the fact that we four females, related by blood and experience, but different from each other in so many ways, have established intense and wildly different relationships with each other that give me insight, across the span of nearly a century, into who I am and who I want to be.

How can I ever get this across without resorting to platitudes? And in enough time to submit the piece before the editor who commissioned it leaves or retires (She is 36, I think.)? Tomorrow is another day.

A Decision, and a Half-Assed Attempt

750 words is A LOT. I haven't actually done a word count on the previous two posts because (and I recognize this is getting old already) I couldn't figure out how. But I know I've written at least that much each time, and I know I don't feel like doing it now. Again, it's late. It's 11:46, to be precise, which means it is actually Sunday still, an improvement over last night's post-midnight post, as it were. That's something, I guess, although I can never quite get to the bottom of my last-minute ways. Why am I doing this now instead of earlier in the day? Yes, I was busy, always feel busy, but I made a pecan bread pudding with some stale slices of bread from the refrigerator at about 2 in the afternoon. I could have written then.

I guess what I am getting at is that writing has not seemed urgent to me these days, the way it used to, and I'm not sure why. I used to be inspired to write, fairly regularly, from almost as early as I can remember. In fact, writing this now I just had a vivid memory of myself in second grade at a restaurant with my parents, grandparents and sister and begging a waitress for some extra cocktail napkins because a poem had just occurred to me and I need to write it down RIGHT THEN. I love that about my old self; where did she go?

Although I have had inspirations in the last few years, and do jot down words and phrases in my daily planner for later reference, I rarely am sufficiently inspired to sit at the computer and just write--out of fear that I will lose the idea, the mood, the thread, the moment. Mostly, I just let the moment go, and then the mood, the thread, the idea eventually follows. Mostly, I repress the urgency when it rears its head and decide to do something else instead.

This makes me sad. To be fair to myself, it is partly a function of the way my life is now. I am no longer a child, or living alone, or beholden to nobody. My time is not entirely my own. But it really never was, never is, regardless of the particulars of one's circumstance; there is always something. Sure, there are writers like, oh, I don't know, Styron, of whom his children have said that his writing always came first. But what about Grace Paley? Or Saul Bellow? Or I could come up with a zillion examples of writers successfully raising children or having torrid love affairs or doing all kind of things that must have taken away from their ability to sit down and write.

I guess I am coming to realize the power of decision-making, in this, and in other areas of my life as well. In other words, you can write, or you can make bread pudding. You don't always have to chose writing, of course, but you do have to choose it sometimes. And I don't care how busy I think I am, may even be, there is almost always an element of choice. I'd like to write more about this later, when it's not 12:05 in the morning, this idea of how much choice a person has. But not now. Not in the mood I'm in.

Oh yes: the decision. Although I am, offense-be-not-taken, a non-believer, I actually tried to use the "even God rested on the seventh day" argument with myself about an hour ago, on the way home from dinner with friends. You can skip Sunday, the little shoulder devil cooed. But the shoulder angel prevailed. The subtitle of my blog, were it to have one, would be: seven days a week.

Day Two

Almost immediately after posting my first entry yesterday, I had blogger's remorse. The whole enterprise seemed silly, embarassing even. I was nervous to look back and see the list of people to whom I'd sent an alert, although all were very close friends and family who would, at best, offer encouragement, at worst, make gentle fun of me. I have a tendency to speak first, think later, and I was worried that in this case I had written first, thought later. Why was I doing this; what was the point? And shouldn't I have determined the point, if there was one, in advance, certainly before inviting other people to read what I had written?

Cringing, I logged back into the site (with some effort) to reread my efforts and was not surprised to find a few suppportive messages from the usual customers. I was surprised to find a comment from a stranger. First, I wondered how this person had found the blog. Then, I couldn't stop thinking about his brief and probably offhand comment. He wrote: Your approach of meeting your writing goal in your blog seems unusual. I'm more used to seeing writers blogging more to put off doing actual writing work.

This made me feel better and worse at the same time, better because it seemed to answer my own question to myself. This was a blog about meeting my writing goal. I could use it, after I got the hang of it, to write actual work, and the few people who know about it could give me input or encouragement if they ever logged in. It made me feel worse because I realized the inherent danger--or one inherent danger--of the blog. The writing could be like this entry, ruminative and ultimately pointless in terms of the overarching goal. It could be yet another way for me to put off doing "actual writing work."

Now I couldn't even remember--had I thought I would write 750 words of an article I'd been assigned, for example, or a book proposal, and just post it midstream? That seemed like a bad idea. Had I decided to post the 750 words just so I could tell myself I'd done it? Why didn't I just pledge to write 750 words every day without the blog mechanism? Was I hoping my friends would serve as combination consciences/editors/nags? Yikes.

I read four blogs semi-regularly myself, and I needed to ask myself why. The general answer is simple: it is because I know their creators. I have never so much as perused a blog by a stranger, let alone left a comment on it. (I know a good blog writer would link to the four blogs I read, but I am not quite there yet, proficency-wise; bear with me.) I read the blogs I read for specific reasons, too. I want to see Nicole's pictures and movie clips so I can watch Eva growing up--the blog makes me feel less far away from someone I wish could be physically part of my everyday life. Kiley is a new friend; I find her smart, funny, quirky and observant, and her blog is helping me get to know her better, at least in this brave, new world online. Emilie is one of the most elegant people I know, and she writes so beautifully--I remember phrases sometimes from pieces she wrote more than a decade ago when we were in graduate school together. The fact that she is living in Africa makes her blog all the more compelling. Gretchen is a person I admire and am fascinated by; her blog is an active part of her current book project, and I can sense her intrigue in the form in everything she writes. She is using the blog to her advantage even as she figures it out.

Reading these blogs has been contagious. I can sense how much their creators are enjoying the freedom of the form, and I can see the ways in which their words and images are controlled and in some cases constrained. I find the immediacy of the blog form exciting and its interactive quality a little bit scary, but in a good way. I am not much of a risk-taker, but writing a blog is a kind of a risk. Maybe I'm needing a risk, these days. It seems entirely possible.

But back to the comment from the stranger. He makes a good point. Although I wrote in my first entry that I want to be read, I hadn't really imagined this blog as a way to attract readers, which does seem, now that I think about it, a little bit odd. Most of the people I told about my blog are people I send work to for feedback anyway. I hadn't imagined the blog as a place where I would post finished pieces on subjects of general interest, or about a particular subject matter, which is generally the way blogs seem to work; rather, I imagined using it to facilitate my actual writing: the articles and books I am working on outside of the blog, as well as simply to make myself write, with the idea that writing begets writing.

Is this a blog about writing and its sidecar of anxieties and baggage? Or will it be the writing itself? I am still working that out. Why should you care? Is this the ultimate self-indulgence? Yes. But I don't see it that way when I read my friends' four blogs. I'm just interested in what they have to say. Maybe this blog is, at heart, really just for me.

Oy. It's 1:30 in the morning. It's not yesterday any more, but I will cut myself some slack on that. This is way more than 750 words. And two days of writing is better than one.

And so it begins....

I cannot believe I have started a blog. I cannot believe this for many reasons, but first and foremost I cannot believe it because I am essentially computer illiterate. Just last night, in fact, a computer savvy friend, watching me struggle with my mouse (yes, it is possible, if you are truly inept, to struggle with a mouse), asked me if I knew that the "tab" key caused the cursor to jump to the next section on the screen. Needless to say, I did not. However, it has become clear to me over the past five minutes that in this day and age the smarter of my two collies could possibly start her own blog, if it weren't for the awkwardly large paws, although I am so impressed by apple these days that I wouldn't be shocked if they actually had a solution for this. Dog Blogs? Go for it, Jobs. 

That leads me nicely into the second reason I am shocked I have started a blog: although I am not self-conscious by nature, and I almost always want to be read, writing in the form of a blog, and forcing myself to write a minimum of 750 words each day (more on that to come), is going to require some surrendering of control over what I write and how I write it.  Although I know I will still revise and edit what I write here, it will not be obsessively or time-consumingly, as that would require me to give up things I need for survival, such as income and online Scrabble.  I will have to release text into the blog universe (or at least to those who know about the blog and actually read it: I'm talking to you, Joel, and you too, soon-to-be browbeaten Nicole) that is essentially raw, occasionally embarrassing (I could erase that line about the collies and the aside to Steve Jobs, for example, but I won't, as it illustrates this point so well) and in a stream-of-conscious style that I usually disdain. My hope is that this will feel okay, after a while, and that possibly it will even be good for me, in that if nothing else, I will actually be writing. 

This leads me to the final reason I cannot believe I have started a blog, and it is, as final reasons often are, the most important one. As someone for whom writing has always been a tremendous source of pleasure, and more--the way I best sort out what and why I feel and think about practically everything--as well as my chosen profession, most potentially useful skill and an essential component of my identity, I have been doing very little of it for the past few years, since becoming a mother, actually, and I finally decided this state of affairs needed to stop. I have always scoffed at blogs a little, to be totally honest, as navel-gazing, writing for want-to-be writers instead of "real" ones, whatever that means, but the truth of the situation is that the people I know who have blogs are real writers, in that they are writing, and most of them are incredibly accomplished and talented and productive at writing and everything else they do, which is possibly not a coincidence. I want to be these things too, more than I am often willing to admit, and so much so in fact that a lack of effort has been my solution for way too long in terms of alleviating my anxiety about not living up to my own expectations. 

So let me stop now and do a word count.  (That took a little while because I could not figure out how to do with the computer's assistance so was forced to determine a line average of 20 words and count lines.) I think I should have almost 700 words by now, so I will end by explaining the title of the blog and the goal I have set for myself. We have all heard of or read about writers who set word goals for themselves and write EVERY DAY no matter what. I have been hearing and reading about these writers for, oh, about 30 years and have thus far never constructed a writing shed in my backyard, risen at 5 before the rest of my family for concentrated alone time, or established a symbiotic relationship with a "writing buddy" with whom I exchange the day's work for helpful feedback. I have tried all manner of writing workshops, including some very expensive ones during my two years at Columbia, and although they helped me get work done to a varying degree in the moment, their effects were not lasting, their impact on my own inertia minimal where it counts: at home and over time. 

So as a person who has rarely made let alone kept a New Year's resolution,  spent her childhood inscribing two, maybe three pages of every little pink keyed diary I was ever given, this is my pledge to myself in writing, online, where I am told the real word now exists. I am going to write at least 750 words every day, on this blog (the word still makes me cringe--let's hope that fades), for as long as I can, maybe for the rest of my life if it works. Because I want to be writing, I need to be writing. And the funny thing about writing, is once you do it, you're doing it. 750 words. I have to say, I feel better already.