MamaFox

The boy and the bushtits

2011-05-22T08:48:00.000-07:00

Kiwi got the bushtits.

No, that's not a porn title. It's the latest casualty in my front yard experiment.

This has been a banner year for wildlife. This spring, sucky though it has been, thanks to that rainy goddess La Nina, has seen a lot of traffic through our yard. Bird traffic, that is. (I feel like I am singing the Beverly Hillbillies theme song. "Oil, that is. Black gold. Texas tea...")

Before Kiwi

But ma and pa bushtit didn't make a mansion, they made a purse. I watched them and it was so cool. You know how I love accessories. They wove a dangling bag out of lichen and moss and it was so pretty. Here. Take a look.

They put it in the coastal silk tassel bush, one of my native plants that is finally getting burly enough for a nest. Or so they thought. But they built the thing pretty close to the ground, only 4 feet up and right by the sidewalk. I guess available property must be a little scarce around here. But I watched them doing their frantic race, sneaking up to the nest and then the whole thing shaking like Santa's belly when they got inside to the babies, jostling for their bit of jelly.

After Kiwi

Then Kiwi the cat found it. I threw water on him when I saw him stalking it. I even woke up in the middle of the night and thought maybe I should put a cookie sheet of water under the nest to keep him away... but the next day it was torn in two. Bye-bye baby bushtits.

I am a little more sanguine about this than I was a couple years ago when I annihilated the nest full of chickadees with my bbq plume. Helps that it wasn't my fault, plus the Fox just turned 3. He is burlier too.

You see, it's a numbers game. The older they get, the higher their survival chances are. At least with baby animals. And also, the more of them there are, the better the chance that enough will make it to keep things going. It's a numbers game. Like dating, like democracy, like craps. (Even though I've never played craps, I'm pretty sure I'm right about that.) Funny, its easy to be philosophical about other species as populations instead of individuals. I know that human procreation is a numbers game too, though so far we are holding at one. He just turned three.

In the days leading up to his birthday, he kept saying "And everybody will sing 'Happy Birthday' to me!" I loved that it was about music, not stuff. I shouldn't make everything into a moral crossroads, but sometimes I can't help myself. Though I think we might have blown that with the complete craziness. New room (bunk bed up high, his own nest), new play structure, couch full of presents from family and friends. He is sleeping in his new nest as I write this, saving up some rest for the party later today. We'll burn some sausages and garden burgers on the barbie, and all his 3 year old friends will sing "Happy Birthday" to him. Spring. Joy and loss. Hope and realization and disappointment. He is growing so fast, like the sunflower seeds I had time to start in pots for the first time since he was born. Some of them will get to be 12, 16 feet tall.
A Forest of flowers that will give seeds to the birds in the fall. And there will be enough seeds to save some, I hope. For next spring, when he'll be four. The silk tassel bush will be taller and so will he and the experiment with new life will begin again.

Mea Culpa

2011-04-10T13:50:00.000-07:00

Spring at last, a good time for apologies. I’ve got two. Please don’t be offended if I say the that first and less important one is to you, for leaving you on a bummer note for the dark months since December.

More importantly, for Forest, “Sweetheart, I am so sorry.”

Know what? He’s not “A Pusher.”

No. It’s true. And I am not Mrs. Dursely here. I know that because of the wonderfulness of last night’s visit from Katy, who pointed out that when Maggie dumped dirt on Forest in my front yeard, he did not take her down, as once might have been, but walked over to Katy and asked for help with his situation.

I know this, because he is now at a full-time day care with Miss Angie and is kicking it. Or, should I say, not kicking it. When I enrolled him, I did a full disclosure thing. (You know I can’t help myself. I am an over-sharer.) She said she’d meet him, but she had a really sweet group and she had to be picky…

He has now been there for four months. Within a week and a half of being there, the pushing was over and he was potty-trained. Seriously. I attribute it to three things. One, Miss Angie actually loves kids. And they can tell. Two: She is totally drama free. Three, she’s had most of the mixed age group since they were babies and --since she has mad skills -- her herd is awesome. She’s got some gentle three and four year old boys in there who are awesome heroes for the Fox. Don’t underestimate the power of a good herd.

So, to sum up: He just needed a loving teacher with skills. (And the herd that maketh.)

I know that sounds mean. But when I look back on the warning signs that I ignored – that the previous gals showed no affection for him, that they had no ideas how to help him, that they didn’t tell me he needed some help --

Well, I have to say it again. “I’m very sorry, Sweetheart.”

He’s blooming now, though. Rambunctious and kind. Generous and rowdy. Plus, a good dancer.. .Me and him and Maggie and Christina did the octopus dance together last night and he stayed right there with the girls without a white man’s overbite in sight. My kind of guy.

Special thanks going out to his babysitter, who said to me, in the midst of the badness, “Don’t you believe them. Forest doesn’t have a mean bone in his body. They just want easy kids who will sit still and color all the time.” She’s worked in day cares, now is a full-time nanny when she isn’t whisking the Fox off for some adventure. “I’ve seen it happen too many times,” she said. “The day care convinces you that your kid is the problem and the real problem is they aren’t doing their job.”

Amen, sister. And a shout out to any mom who is hearing this bullshit. It’s not that your kid is bad. Or that there isn’t something to do. Its just that you and his teachers need a plan, together. And some skills.

I Don't Want to Say It

2010-12-20T14:01:00.000-08:00

My kid is the pusher.

When I write it down, it doesn’t look like it has sharp edges and pokey places, but it does. I feel ashamed and scared and disloyal, just for saying it about the boy I love. It’s been roiling around in me for a week, since the owner of the preschool told me I couldn’t add Tuesdays and Thursdays because she has too many parent complaints about the Fox.

What????

I mean, I knew something was off when I asked about adding days for the third time and she said, “Let’s have coffee.” But the really sucky part is that I knew about this a couple months ago, we had the conference, we made a plan, and every day since then when I picked up the Fox and I asked, “How did it go?” I heard “Better. It’s getting much better.”

Clearly there is a communication problem. Is it my hearing? I don’t think so. But when does the person who isn’t listening ever think it’s them? Is it their lack of talking? I think “Yes!” But again…

But this is my beautiful, amazing, happy boy... I hear in myself every bully's mother. I could be Petunia Dursely, the mother of Harry Potter's muggle nemesis Dudley, and I wouldn't know it.

So, am trying to focus on fixing this. Because, above pseudo self-awareness aside, I know with the a ROAR of love that the Fox is confused, not cruel. And believe this is what they call a teachable moment, rather than a character flaw. And I am helped by the fact that the full moon is tomorrow night, and the longest night of the year is also tomorrow night, which both remind me that, as my friend Steve said to me a couple weeks ago at toddler time, “It will change.”

He said that to me because I was, at the time, in a really sweet swing of things with the Fox. We were have tons of cooperation and laughing and singing and “I love you’s.” I even got one “I love you very much, Mommy!” as he ran down the hall, arms full of stuffed animals, ready to make a pillow pile. Steve said “It will change,” after I told him about that, because he was in a hellish phase with his girl, he was on the dark side of the moon. This was a good thing, for him to remind me to cherish the goodness and for me to say to him on the phone, as I hear shrieking and screaming and crashing in the background, “Just remember, it will change.”

So after I spent a week roiling around in shame (“Bad mothers create kids who push,”) and anger (“They are supposed to teach him!”) and generally being a pain in the ass to M, I remembered:

This too will change.

Though, we have to help it. I don’t know exactly how, since we have done a lot already. At home, he has gone from a dog-pusher to a (mostly) dog-petter. Took a LOT of repetition and it’s always worse when he is hungry, angry, lonely or tired.

I had a good talk with Teacher Amy* this morning. I said “What time does this go down, usually?” “Hmm. On Friday, it was right before playtime,” she said. “11:30.”

That’s what time the Fox starts to lose it at home, too. Because it’s nap time.

Teacher Amy is going to write down when it happens and with who, etc. So we can make another plan. And also, I told her that I understand that if they are shadowing him and he won’t listen, he needs to be separated from the other kids. Yuck.

And now I'm saying to myself, Self, it's the day before Solstice, before the light starts to come back. Dark nights are here, but the bright moon lights them up. Love works and teaching does too. Things will change.

Because there are two things here: I really believe this is “developmentally appropriate.” (You know, that great phrase that experts use to describe behavior that is difficult and embarrassing and normal.) And I also believe in firm but calm boundaries, though sometimes they seem as elusive as Santa Claus. I told the teacher that the boundary should not be shaming, and she agreed. We looked each other in the eye and at that moment, I felt like she got it, like we were in it together.

And I told her what I have learned from every job, every relationship and every bad week with the Fox: Love has to come first. No one wants to hear what they are doing wrong from someone who doesn’t give the love first. Not me, not M, not the person I’m supervising, and not the Fox. I told the her the one thing that I wish I could remember every second with my son, my marraige, my work as a person. I said, “Give him as much love as you can before it happens. He listens better if he gets love first.”

*Exciting moment. First pseudonym, since I try extra hard to be open about my stuff and fair about the stuff of people who know what they are getting into by having a relationship with me. Or should. Anyway...

Why Sarah Palin is Popular

2010-12-02T19:43:00.000-08:00

I like certainty.

I actually like it a lot. I’m not alone, we’ve got a certainty-loving culture here. Ever been at a party when someone says “What do you do?” and the other person says “I’m between things…” Awkward silence. Or ever been the single person in a room full of couples, all settled in their certainty and couple-ness. Yeah, certainty is pretty seductive.

So, the other day, I was pretty certain I was on the trail of a bad mom. Okay, I know I’ve gone out on a limb and said (with only a slightly self-righteous tone) that I am against labeling other mothers, ‘cause who knows what is really going on? Right? Right.

But this little guy, whose missing-in-action mom was the suspect in question, well, he was the terror of toddler time. He was Jesse James and a touch of Charles Manson all rolled into one. Okay, the Manson thing is a little harsh, but he was taking toys and pushing and steamrolling little ones and generally looking for trouble. I tracked this kid for ten minutes, fancying myself a defender of the innocent, working up a righteous indignation as I waited for the mom to appear. I even gossiped to my friend Steve. “Where is that kid’s mother?” I hissed, before detailing his crimes. “Unbelievable,” he agreed.

Then I saw her. Sitting in the corner. Trying to get her newborn to latch back on and looking mighty hollow-eyed at that.

I should listen to myself more often.

But certainty is so much more seductive than knowing the facts. (For proof of that, look no further than the popularity of Sarah Palin.)

So then, after I got over feeling shame-i-fied on the inside, and after I told Edith to shut the f#*k up, and after I recovered from the once-more-with-feeling relief that I have one kid, because I don’t know how the multiple moms do it, after I was done with all that, I realized that there is a reason that we have toddler time. At the community center. So that we can help each other out. I mean, I know that can go too far and all, but then again, I tend to get all caught up in doing it alone perfectly. (Which makes me really pleasant to be around at about 5:30 at night, let me tell you. Or M could…)

So then I just found the kiddo with my eyes and kept an eye on him. I felt like a sort of giving auntie, a wise mama type who can help and give and be plentiful.

The next day, the kiddo and the Fox were both at the playground. They got into a pushing match over a toy and I will tell you two things: First, the mama was dealing with the newborn at the time, again. I caught her eye and said “I’ve got it” in an if it’s okay with you sort of tone. And second, the Fox was giving as well as getting.

Just in case I had any more temptations to cast that stone. Other than at Sarah Palin.

The Purff and the Wurff

2010-12-01T13:42:00.000-08:00

I used to carry small purses. Not little bitty sweater dog purses, but no bigger than a breadbox. You see, I had this theory that I’ll call the Law of Universal Purff (Purse + Stuff = Purff) Expansion: that the stuff that you put into a purse will expand to take up the whole purse, no matter how big the purse.

So why get a big purse? Just a backache waiting to happen, eh? (As they say in Canada.)

And now I’m starting to wonder if there isn’t a similar law in effect with worry. Have you noticed? It’s almost like I have an invisible worry purse. It hangs somewhere between my throat and my sternum… and when it gets full it starts to choke me. But even if I try to empty it, if I take care of one, another rises immediately. This seems to be true, even if Worry A is a whopper, and Worry B is sort of pathetic. Which makes me wonder: Am I just filling my worry purse? Is there a Law of Wurff Expansion?

Cause Motherhood already blew my small purse plan. Now I’ve got these hunks that I haul around with tupperwares and wipeomatics. And now the worries have gotten so much bigger too, now that there’s so much more to care about.

But maybe they’ll both go back to normal with time? Maybe, just about the time that I can stop carrying the wipeomatics because there isn’t a constant explosion coming out of one Fox hole or another, maybe then I’ll be able to go back to my cute little tangerine orange bag with the ivory leaf top-stitching and stop worrying so much?

But then I remember the moment with my mom. The one when she leaned over my bed and saw the Fox for the first time, and then looked into my eyes and saw that the bottom had fallen out of my world, and I could see that was there in her eyes too, there for me, and I had never seen it before. And I said, “Mom, does it always feel like this?” and she sobbed just a little bit and smiled and said “Yes.” And I thought about all those years, not even the toddler years, but the later ones, and all the worry I put her through, not knowing that there was this hole inside her. This worry purse with absolutely no Wurff limit. And I said, “Oh, Mom. I’m so sorry.”

(She loves telling that story.)

Anyway, if that’s any indication, my Wurff is going nowhere good.

Losing Track Of Time

2010-11-21T06:07:00.000-08:00

"What do you lose track of time doing?"

This is the question my friend Candace asked, one of those launching questions that we are given from time to time, the ones that are to the mind as the sawzall was to the pumpkins at that power-tool pumpkin-carving party I went to.

ZZZZZZt! Open up.

I was thinking about this yesterday as I watched M carry the Fox up the stairs from the basement, kicking and screaming bloody murder because he didn’t want to leave the shop for lunch and nap. I have two-year-old who loves tools. He gets lost in the moment of drilling, screwdrivering and sanding. This is M’s gift to the Fox, maybe the most precious gift a parent can give past the love: the experience of losing track of time.

I can see it when it happens to him; I recognize the look on his face like it was a mirror. His little jaw is loose, his lips are slightly pursed, like he was about to give the clamp and sandpaper a big wet kiss and then forgot halfway there. I know that feeling. That is how I feel when I draw, when I garden, and when the writing is good.

So today, when the Fox wakes up, we are going to go pick up some sassy new art supplies. His preschool teacher said he is one of the kids who wants to do art as long as possible. I felt a little bad when I heard this, partly because I felt like I should already know this and also because… Well, not to get too pointy about this, but I have been avoiding messes a little too much. It’s easy to do this, to get so overwhelmed by the exploding spaghetti nature of toddlerhood that I opt for the low-mess activities. C’mon. Let’s do one more puzzle. Let’s read one more book…

When what we really need to do is lose track of time together. Not him losing track of time and me checking my watch every two minutes (how long until nap time?) Not me losing track of time cleaning the cabinets, while he finds matches and knives in order to draw my attention back to him. Together. That, my friend, is today’s quest.

Power Tools, Pumpkins and the Dark

2010-10-31T13:39:00.000-07:00

Went to the annual power-tool-pumpkin-carving party this weekend. Host Steve is a tool wizard; Host Linda’s board groaned with burrito fixin’s. This year, there was a new twist: The Jack O’ Lantern totem pole. Picture a backyard littered with innocent pumpkins, waiting for their fate in the dark grass. Towers of floodlights show the carving table: a narrow, ten-foot stretch on chest-high saw horses. Imagine the gleaming blades of sawzalls, the glitter of drill bits and dremels, the humble tooth of the paring knife. Yellow and orange extension cords coil everywhere, like the serpents of the underworld writhing to life in fall’s colors. The bright lights make the shadows under the pines pitch-black and the grapevines contort weirdly out of the corner of your eye. Everywhere, beer and children flow.

Yes, children.

The Fox had a blast, scampering among adults’ legs as they wielded loud and sharp implements. I did good, too, finely walking the line between helicopter mom and not letting him learn a lesson by losing an eye.

The power-tool pumpkin carving party: your toddler (or your inner two-year-old) outta try it.

The pumpkins migrated from the sawzall slice of the lid to the manual scooping station. No power tool for that, alas, but the Fox loved getting his hands in there. Then, the power toos in hand as pumpkin guts flew, along with the gnarly smell of raw pumpkin. One hip Jack O’ Lantern sported a pair of headphones made out of pumpkin circles and a curving branch.

Snatches of overheard pumpkin-carving chatter ranged from “You’re drawing your design with a pen first? That’s like using a net!” To my favorite of the night: As Steve wielded the dremel on Linda’s careful and intricately drawn picture of an arching black cat (okay, it’s an orange cat on the pumpkin. But the blackness of all cats is clearly implied on Halloween…) As he worked her design, someone said, “Hey, you’re doing it for her!” And Steve replied, head bent to the task “Well, it’s like that old saying. If you give someone a fish, they eat for a day. And if you teach them to fish… they leave you.” Laughter all around. Linda’s laugh sounded like she blushed at the compliment, but it was impossible to see in that strange world of floodlight and shadow. Darkness and light. Danger and art and, did I mention? Darkness. It is the beginning of the dead time of year, which is how I think of this space between Halloween, and Winter Solstice’s new start.

Fires are good now, not just to stay warm, but to burn away what is dead and dying within us. The tribe is going into the cave for winter. If we didn’t have grocery stores and if the harvest was poor, we’d be looking at our supplies and wondering if the little ones would have enough to live until spring. This is our seasonal legacy and there is power in this impulse. Pare down. Go within. Decide what is important enough to live.

Outside the cave, the totem pole of Jack O’ Lanterns stands guard. We gather ‘round and tell stories of darkness, not just to scare ourselves but to release our fear, which can only happen if first you hold it in your hand. Halloween. Say welcome to the beloved dead, welcome to night’s reign, welcome to the time of rest before we begin again.

Happy Halloween.

Seven Year Itch-Free

2010-09-28T14:32:00.001-07:00

one dragonfly, two dragonfly, three dragonfly
Originally uploaded by annabel rose

We just celebrated our 7th anniversary.
What itch?
Last week, my wonderful friend called and said "I have a night at the Freestone Inn in Mazama that is paid for and I can't use. And I would love to give it to you." I misted up. Our plan for our anniversary was pizza and a half carafe of wine. Now, granted: pizza at the place where we used to go when we were dating and where the owner comes by our table and gets nostalgic with us, but still. Not the FreeStone Inn. Not the Methow. And what my wonderful friend didn't know is that we toured the place, longingly, several summers ago, after spending a week in a cabin with my folks down the road. What she didn't know is that in the spectrum of YES! yes, no, NO!, the Methow is a YES! for both M and I, and now is for Forest too.

We stopped on the way up and FF played on the restored train at Newhalem. We filled our eyes and our hearts with mountain vistas and tree scenes, while I read my book and Forest slept and occasionally, we talked of life. We arrived. FF went straight into the lake, then ran shrieking with happiness in circles on the grass. We found out what the squirrels were so excited about: that pine tree by the lake was a real pine nut pine, and I showed him how to find them in the cones, and peel them and FF fed them to M and I. Appetizers.

We had dinner. The first nice dinner out with FF for at least a year and he did GREAT! He ate a whole basket of bread by himself and then tried the basket on for a hat, but did not throw it on the floor. They had mac and cheese on the menu for him, amazing pasta for me, sausages for M. We felt rested and cosseted and comforted. We strategized for one more thing to keep FF from jumping out of his high chair. We clicked my glass of red wine against M’s glass of scotch against FF’s sippy. Surrounded by wood and families and butterscotch light, we smiled and said “Happy Anniversary.”

We woke and ate amazing granola and chased more red squirrels. We took a short hike. We walked and smelled the vanilla scent of ponderosa pines. And, can you believe it? I haven’t gotten to the best part yet. The best part is this: after the hike, we went down to the lake. Gave FF his shovel and two, I say two buckets. Oh sweet abundance. And he crouched in the warm sand, for it was a sunny blue day, and he played in blissful focus for forty-five minutes. M and I rested on our elbows in the grass and watched the Jurassic dragonflies zoom and smiled at how beautiful our son is and shared our dreams. Unhurried, unfrazzled, happy.

Some say that the seven-year itch is unavoidable. But I like what Caroline Casey says about it: every seven years, it’s a good time to evaluate the containers of your life. Make sure that you, as the plant growing inside the containers, aren’t getting root bound. As I look around this life we’ve made, I might say stretched, challenged. I might say extremely alive. I might say reaching. Yes, that feels right.

But root-bound? Nope. I smashed the pot that was too small for me when I was 35. Which, to give Casey her due, was right on point for the seven-year-cycle. I am now a convert, an unabashed pot smasher. I cannot recommend it highly enough. And through all the laughter and tears and smiles and shouting too, M has been with me. And now this beautiful boy we call Fox.

Happy Seventh Anniversary, Sweetheart.

What itch?

Treestory Seattle

2010-09-22T11:32:00.000-07:00

Now the love of trees has a name, a home, and an amazing event coming up.

Yesterday was the launch of Treestory Seattle, the Web site I've been working on with amazing filmmaker Ward Serrill. He is making a film called TreeStory about humanity's relationship with trees, and we are starting right here in my home town. TreeStory Seattle is collecting stories of Seattle's favorite trees, and the best ones will be told at An Evening of TreeStories on December 1. (Details on the site)

Already we are making a splash. KIRO FM caught on to it yesterday. The story reflects what the reporter told Ward: when they talked about covering this in their editorial meeting, one by one people started to say "I have a story about a tree..."

This is the start of something.

This is the best of the new and the best of the old. Ancient tree spirits meet the modern Web site. Twitter mania leads to old-fashioned, live storytelling. All of it weaving together a love of trees and place and connecting -- on line and in person. Check it out!!

Green Witch Column: I Worship Worms

2010-09-18T09:51:00.000-07:00

(This column appeared in Issue 78 of Sagewoman Magazine. Issue 79, with my new column on making peace with predators, is coming to your local Borders soon, or is also available at the Web site!)

I worship worms.

My love affair with them started years ago, when I lived in San Francisco. By night I was bartending at Hamburger Mary’s, the tattoo and fetish headquarters of the tattoo and fetish Folsom Street neighborhood. Lots of red lipstick, cleavage, double-knit lime green polyester. I was a species in my right habitat.

By day, I prowled the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood and I gardened. Our six-bedroom Victorian house was painted hot pink and had a tiny patch of earth in the back. I learned to garden there, in my own Eden with my appropriately named housemate, Eve. Neither of us believed in original sin, so when we began to come across worms in the places where the soil was richest, the ferns finest, we didn’t think of them as pests, or poets of temptation. And it came to us one day, in a dirt-under-our-nails-ecstasy, that the worms were the keepers of the earth, were powerful forces for good. We understood that the worms were, in fact, priestesses of the soil and since we were both reading The Mists of Avalon at the time, we named the worms, all worms, for Marion Zimmer Bradley’s head priestess. We named them “Viviane.”

Now, fifteen years later, I live in little cottage in West Seattle with my husband and new baby boy, who we call the Fox. My garden thrives. I keep worms. Mulching is a religion here and worm compost is the absolute finest mulch there is. But that’s not the best part. The best part is that the worms eat our vegetable trimmings. All of them. Coffee grounds, stale bread, beet tops, slimy forgotten lettuce in the bottom of the bin (I think that was lettuce…)

All of this works for me. I love keeping the veggies out of the garbage. I love having free, high-quality mulch for my garden. But, most of all, I love scooping the crumbly, dark, worm compost out of the bin on the equinoxes and solstices and feeling like a priestess of earth, like Viviane’s acolyte.

We made our first worm bin out of some old, wooden closet doors. When I say we, I mean my husband. He downloaded the plans from Seattle Tilth’s web site and spent a fall weekend building a giant box with hinges made out of bicycle tires, a stick to prop it open, sturdy legs to keep it off the ground. It was beautiful. It lasted three years; Seattle’s constant rain is hard on anything but cedar. Next time we went looking for something cheap and easy but durable. I liked the idea of finding something at our local salvage store, which I think of as a thrift store for houses; instead of great ‘40’s dresses or knock-off bags, it has everything from original glass doorknobs to perfect clawfoot bathtubs. I tooled around – so to speak – for a while, looking for the right new home for Viviane. Seattle’s climate is temperate, if wet. Not wood. Metal, I decided. Then I saw it, an old metal filing cabinet, six feet tall, four wide doors stacked one above the other. The kinds that open on a hinge at the top and then slide back. Turn that on it’s side and you’ve got four bins with hinged lids. We drilled holes in the back for drainage and in between the bays for worm transit.

I keep a stainless steel stockpot on the kitchen counter for scraps. When the stockpot is full, I take it down to Viviane’s box, open the lid, pull up the layer of cardboard or leaves on top. I make a hole in the bedding, put in the scraps, mix it up a little. When each bay is full, I stop adding scraps to that one and move to the one next to it. Viviane migrates.

When all is going well, the first bay will be a bin full of worm compost in eight to twelve weeks. When all goes well, my worm bin is like the one at Seattle Tilth’s beautiful demonstration garden. Their worm bin is the death in balance. It’s the old growth log, softly covered with moss and ferns, the wood decayed to a dry, reddish-brown velvet. That’s what worms are capable of. Tilth even put their worm bin inside a garden bench, and your nose never knows it’s there. The bench top has a hinge at the back and you lift it up to see the scatter of leaves, not a worm in sight. They are busy. They are at home.

That’s when it goes well. That’s how it would be if I always followed directions, which is not really my strong suit.

When it goes badly, it’s pretty gross. It’s slimy and smells bad. This is, after all, about death, people. The worm bin that is too wet, the worm bin with inadequate bedding is the death you don’t want to have, lingering and toxic and stinky, with worms crawling out, trying to escape in every direction. Earth gives life, yes, but She makes it from this. What we leave behind. What we are.

So that’s what happened this winter. Our worm bin got pretty wet and slimy. Not enough bedding, not enough drainage holes. It’s huge and it’s totally at capacity because cold, wet worms are not good workers. What can I say? I got busy. For me, it was a new baby. For you, it might be late nights at work. Regardless, neither of us was tending the worm bin, were we?

City Farmer, Canada’s awesome worm composting Web site, says, "Picture yourself after dinner. It has been a hard demanding day in the City. But now you can descend into the dark...touching the rich, dark vermicompost, releasing the memory-filled odor of damp earth – taking you into forests and the prehistoric past." City farmer also says “Taking worms out of their natural environment and placing them in containers creates a human responsibility. They are living creatures with their own unique needs, so it is important to create and maintain a healthy habitat for them to do their work.” I think about my soggy winter bin. My bad. But not like “I don’t want to worm bin” bad. Like “Honey, I’m sorry and I’ll try to do better” bad.

So I get to work. I get to work because when the worm bin is good, it’s good. I get to work because I want to have a good relationship with death and because this is a spell, a make-your-own-dirt project that gets me closer to the earth goddesses of winter than anything else but laying on the ground, and it’s too damn cold for that. I get to work because the worms take what we don’t need anymore and turn it into life.

On a sunny day toward the end of winter, I tear up paper grocery bags. I find all the pieces of cardboard lying around the house and tear them up too. I put on my gloves. I stand in the sun, the Fox strapped on my back. I use the big shovel, drive it in deep and pull out heaping shovelfuls of too-dense worm mud. The rocking back and forth of my body and the winter sun on the Fox’s body work like a charm. He is asleep by the time I get halfway through the first bay. Then I move the stuff back in. It’s like a mud layer cake that wants a cardboard and dry leaf filling. It’s like knitting with earth yarn. I tell Viviane about the regrets, the mistakes, the failures of the year: all that I want to release. I crumble with my gloves, breaking up clumps. I feel the earth energy traveling up my arms, up my legs, pulling my body down. I feel my feet on the ground. I wipe the hair off my face and feel a blessing. Not a worm on my forehead; a priestesses’ crescent moon.

With a lightened heart, I remember spring. At the end of winter, this is no small thing. The sun warms the back of my neck and I remember last year, when the compost was ready at spring equinox and I spread it under the fruit trees, mixed with lettuce seeds. I was seven months pregnant at the time and either I was exuding some sort of fertility force field or worm compost is the best seeding mix ever. My soil was rich. I grew new life, within and without.

That was the year my son was born, and that was the year my salads became legend. Ask anybody. Baby lettuce leaves, mint, pea-vine shoots, purple and yellow viola petals. I brought one to friend Michele, five days after her son was born and she was coming out of the tunnel of worry and fatigue and desperation that the early birth brought her. She said of that salad, grown in spring, grown in the leavings of all that sacred death, she said, “It was like eating life.”

I worship worms. Evelyn Underhill, that writer and mystic, said that worship is "The adoring acknowledgment of all that lies beyond us—the glory that fills heaven and earth. " If worms don’t fill heaven, they at least fill earth. I adore and acknowledge them. They take my vegetables and they take my regrets. They take my coffee grounds and my failures and when spring comes, if I have priestessed well, they give me new life.

Ritual Resources

You, too, can have your own Avalon. Build a worm bin. In early winter, give it what is dying. As you put in the coffee grounds, name your regrets. Release them. Say, “I give you my mistakes;” name them too. All of it feeds Viviane. If you follow directions (instead of my example,) your worm bin will be clean and sweet. In 2-3 months, you’ll have a bin full of planting material, just in time for a powerful spring spell. You can easily buy a worm bin for indoors or outdoors, there are plenty of them for sale online. I haven’t ordered one, but some of them look amazing.

If you want to make one for yourself that will be easy and cheap, here’s a plan. Credit for this set-up goes to the Washington State University Whatcom County Extension web site, check it out for some great visuals to accompany this how-to. http://whatcom.wsu.edu/ag/compost/Easywormbin.htm

You’ll need:

· Two 8-10 gallon plastic storage boxes with lids. They should be dark, not transparent.

· A drill with ¼ and 1/16 inch drill bits

· Newspaper, cardboard or (my favorite) fall leaves

· About one pound of redworms per ½ lb of food waste, per week. In other words, you need a 2 to 1 ration of worms to food scraps. If you want, weigh your veggie scraps for a week, then procure your worms, see below.

Here’s how:

1. Drill about twenty evenly spaced ¼ inch drainage/worm transit holes in the bottom of each bin.

2. Drill ventilation holes about 1-11/2 inches apart on each side of the bin near the top edge using the 1/16 inch bit. Also drill about 30 small holes in the top of one of the lids.

3. Fill one of the bins with bedding. (this is where I went wrong by adding equal amounts of bedding, layered with the scraps as I went, instead of filling with bedding first. Oops.) Use newspaper or cardboard torn into 1 inch scraps, fall leaves, sawdust, compost, aged manure. Tearing up your paper grocery bags or newspaper or cardboard is a great meditative, fireside, winter night activity. Keep a bag or box by the fire like knitting and stare at the flames while you do it. Puts a little heat into the spell. Whatever you use, it needs to be moistened before you put it into the bin. Add a couple handfuls of soil or sand to the bedding to provide digestive grit for Viviane.

4. Add your worms. According to Cityfarmer Web site, “The two types of earthworm best suited to worm composting are the redworms: Eisenia foetida (commonly known as red wiggler, brandling, or manure worm) and Lumbricus rubellus. They are often found in aged manure and compost heaps. Please do not use dew-worms (large size worms found in soil and compost) as they are not likely to survive. “ Worm sources: if you have an agricultural extension office near you, they may be able to help. Otherwise, you can recruit your own by putting a large piece of wet cardboard on your lawn or garden at night, they’ll come up to eat the cardboard and you can scoop them up in the morning.

5. Cut a piece of cardboard to fit over the bedding and get it wet, too, then lay it on top of the bedding.

6. Put your bin in a cool, well-ventilated area. Laundry rooms, garage, balcony, under the kitchen sink all work great. Just make sure the temperature doesn’t fall below 40 degrees Farenheit. Put it on blocks or upside down plastic cups over the lid of the second bin, to catch any moisture. That stuff is awesome liquid fertilizer. (If you need more guidance, the photos at the web site above are really helpful.)

7. Start adding your scraps. Go slow at first. Lift the cardboard layer, make a hole in the bedding, bury the scraps. Bury them in a different place each time, increasing the amount of scraps as the worm population grow. Worms eat anything vegetable in nature: breads and grains, coffee and filter, teabags, fruits and vegetables. They hate meat, dairy, eggs, oils. No feces either.

8. Rotate the bins. When the first bin is full of compost and the food scraps are gone, fill the second bin with new, moist bedding. Then let the worm migration begin: you nest the new bin in the old one, with the bottom of the new bin touching the compost in the old one. Start burying your scraps in the new, top bin. The worms will migrate up to the new food and then you can use your compost for a spring planting spell. If it’s warm enough, some of the worms can go out with the compost, they are great for the garden. Just don’t keep them cooped up without access to food.

The Website above, as well as the resources below, has excellent troubleshooting advice if you run into trouble. May your worm bin be a winter Avalon for you, for Viviane and for the Goddess and the God.

Blessed be!

For directions on making an indoor bin, scrap to bedding management and more, check out http://www.cityfarmer.org/wormcomp61.html.

For plans to make a big, beautiful outdoor bin, search “worm bin” at http://www.seattletilth.org/

For a child friendly, easy Q&A format, check out http://urbanext.illinois.edu/worms/neighborhood/index.html

For more on worm composting, check out Mary Applehof's short book, Worms Eat My Garbage.

I Would Give Anything to Be Here. Now.

2010-09-16T21:48:00.000-07:00

I was just watching Mad Men. (Couple seasons ago – we rent.) And something about the way Betty was talking to her daughter about the first kiss…

The moment went from “I don’t want you running around just kissing boys,” to “the first kiss is very special… it’s where you go from being a stranger to knowing someone. And every kiss with them after that is a shadow of that kiss.” And they are looking at each other, seeing each other, this mother and this little girl.

And I thought of my first kiss with M, which was at midnight, on New Year’s Eve, such a new beginning. I had no idea what marvels lay ahead. And I thought of having that kind of conversation with the Fox someday. About kisses, or something else. The important conversations where you are looking into each other’s souls. There are so many of those ahead of us. And I thought of friends Steve and Katy and Maggie, who are losing their cat of 12 years tonight to cancer. I am sending out my love to Makita. And to them, as they figure out how to explain this to a two-year old while they grieve.

You see? It has already begun. These important moments. It would be so easy to imagine that the important stuff, the first kiss type conversations are ahead of us. It has already begun.

But I thank my friend Robin for this tidbit, a moment at Diana’s grove, when I was three months pregnant and had no idea what marvels lay ahead. And she told me about her 17 and 22 year old sons.

“They are so close, and then they grow up. And they break up with you,” she laughed a little. “That’s just exactly what it feels like, to lose someone you love so much, lose them a little.” She looked at me. “You have so much ahead of you. I would give anything to have one of my boys small again, just for a moment, when he sat in my lap and his head tucked under my chin. Anything.”

I had that today, the Fox still in my lap, his weight and his smell and his shape. It feels like being whole. There is a lot about now, about being so responsive all the time that is very hard. I give myself that. But there is so much here that I will never have again. At moments like that, it would be easy to want him to stay just this way, just this height, fitting into my lap with his head fitting under my chin. And yet there is so much ahead. So much soul and grief and those moments where time stands still and there is something more in the room. Tonight, I am very grateful for M and the Fox, for my many friends. Goodbye, Makita, brave and loved kitty. Goodnight Maggie. Goodnight Fox.

What I Learned from the Crackers

2010-09-14T21:56:00.001-07:00

Hands
Originally uploaded by jbenito's

I’ve always wanted to be ambidextrous. Wanted the creativity of being a lefty and the advantages of living in a world made for rightys. It always felt to me like the essence of not having to choose. Of having it all. Plus, I think the word “ambidextrous” is cool.

Yes, I always wanted to be ambidextrous, but never more so than now, that I am a working mother.

On the left brain: Working time, all the satisfaction of tasking, of focusing, of compressing as much production and creative spark into as little time as possible.

On the right brain: Mothering, the gift of looking into the eyes of a love that I never knew was possible and, when I can, just letting our time together drift.

And as long as I keep the two separate, I’m fine.

But I want to be ambidextrous.

I realized this today as I looked over my terrain. I’m working more, slowly building up this dream of a writer’s life where I get to make things out of words and make a difference at the same time. Right now, it feels like I am building it out of little bitty pieces. Two hours of work, two hours of mothering. Repeat. And it’s the transitioning back and forth that is the hardest. Stop tasking and start feeling. Vice versa. It’s like moving from land to water and back again, and of course, the hardest part is always the transition. Jumping in, drying off. I keep coming off of the high of working and transitioning to mama-ing and wanting to teach something. I keep telling myself: “Just lay down and enjoy watching the Fox play with the legos, Ella. You don’t have to show him how build the Vatican just now.”

I actually caught myself sneaking one of the flat red ones off of his firetruck to make my ladybug. I stopped myself, though. The second time.

I’d like to think this is creating some kind of crossover skill set, an internal ambidexterity. (Now there’s a cool word, eh?) To know when to use the left side of my brain, which is all logic and outcome. To know when to use the right side of my brain, which is all creation and feeling. I’ve been meaning to get my hands on Shari Storm’s book Motherhood is the New MBA. She says that “Rip the band-aid off fast!” applies at work as well as at home. And it’s true, I have way more skills at keeping my cool in the presence of unreasonable behavior than ever before. His and mine. Not perfect, but better. This morning, he upended a box of crackers. Fancy ones. I knew better than to let him hold the box, but he was hungry and I was cooking and I hoped he’d just eat them. I saw it happen in slow motion and I just couldn’t get there. Whoosh! Toasted gorgonzola crackers all over our dog hair floor.

I freaked.

“We don’t. Dump. Crackers!” I picked up the box and threw it in frustration. (this is not only bad mothering, it is bad grammar. Obviously, we do dump crackers.)

The Fox was startled, then upset, of course. It was a stupid, sucky moment on my part. In fact, it was not unlike some other moments I can recall, where I was managing someone, and too busy to really pay attention, and gave them a task that was important, but not enough information or training or oversight. And then got pissed off when they dumped the crackers and acted like it was their fault.

(Tell me this isn’t a teensy bit familiar.)

But then, this morning I did something I didn’t used to know how to do. I let it go and I owned up. I was so shocked at my behavior that it kind of woke me up, because – no offense to my former coworkers, but I never loved them like this. The Fox is crying, tears streaming. I knelt down and said, “I’m sorry. That was my fault. Mama lost her temper. I should have calmed down but I didn’t and I’m sorry. This kind of thing happens and it’s not the end of the world and I’m sorry.” And boy, was he taking it in. He listened and nestled into my lap and looked at me and it just… well, I don’t want to overstate things, but it felt like it fixed it. Then he got up and got the big broom and the dustbin, and I found his little broom and we practiced pushing the crackers into the dustbin together and it felt like we were sweeping up the little pieces of the broken moment as well as the broken crackers and like I could use either hand, or both at once. That I could both accomplish this task and also love my son as he deserves to be loved.

But I still think I’m gonna need full-time preschool one of these days.

Holding the Line

2010-09-11T22:04:00.001-07:00

Safety Line
Originally uploaded by Rich Baker

Sometimes it’s hard to know when to hold the line. To be the consistent, calm parent, instead of the frantic, mind-fucking parent who changes the rules every time the moon is full or just doesn’t listen.

For example: On Friday, I did a good job with this. I don’t know about your kid, but suddenly the Fox is very sensitive about who is deciding what. And what is very clear is that getting dressed and changing diapers is never his idea.

Now, friend Tracy says, “Can’t he just go out in his pj’s?”

And actually, the answer is “Yes. Yes, he can.” So be forewarned: if you see the Fox running around in an outfit that looks like green train pj’s, he’s probably been wearing them since the previous night. I am okay with this.

But I’ve been giving myself a whole bunch of exercise about how I need to figure out a way to enlist his cooperation with the getting dressed. And then feeling like a big failure, which is exasperating, and which is also like throwing gasoline on the “who-gets-to-decide-fire.” So yesterday I just said: Fox, time to get dressed. “You want to do it or you want me to do it for you?” He said: “You do it for me please, Mama.”

Yeah, right.

He said, “No, no, no, no, no!” And I picked him up and dressed him and put him back down and my heart was not pounding and Edith was not putting on her party dress. Calmness reigned. And I said, “All done! We can still have fun, honey! Let’s do something else.” And instead of launching a prolonged tantrum, he mellowed right the fuck out.

Supreme! I am kick-ass confident mama. This is the essence of parenting! Knowing when to hold the line and just do it. I am great at this! I am a freaking Nike commercial!

So then, that night, I tried it again. Despite supreme mama moment, I was winding up a couple of days of unbroken parenting and was done by the time dinner rolled around. However, this week, as well as having kick-ass mama moments, have had major Ma Ingalls moments and had all this great food cooked and ready to go. Plopped down the Fox’s bowl of brown rice with tomato sauce and cheese. (Have discovered that brown rice is excellent, nutritious, convenient sub for any pasta situation you offer it.) M and I sit down. We all hold hands. Forest says, “Family.” This is our tradition, which I love so much. Then he takes a bite of aforementioned rice and fixin’s and spits it all over the table.

Then says he wants tortellini.

At this moment, my margin of tolerance for being the short order cook is, hmm, let’s see: zero.

I look at M. “I’m done,” I say.

M says, “Forest, I’ll get you some tortellini.” Which is fine. So he gets some, and some sauce. And the Fox takes a bite.

And spits it all over the table.

Awesome.

Then he says, “I want smoothie! I want smoothie, please!”

(As I am telling this later to Eve, she says, “Oh no! Don’t do it! Not the smoothie!” That’s what you think too, right? Me too.)

And M says, reasonably, “Forest, you asked me to get you some tortellini and I did. I want you to eat that tortellini.”

“No!” He is starting to cry. “Please! I want smoothie!”

So, finally M says, “Okay, if you eat the tortellini that I got you, I will make you a smoothie.”

I am fine with all of this. I am not, at this particular moment, giving Edith the opportunity to ride her consistency pony. It’s his shoe leather.

So Forest takes another bite of tortellini and spits it all over the table.

And then he make the noise.

“That was the diaper noise,” I say, referring to when Forest had a gnarly diaper rash and M figured out that he made this sort of creaky cry when his rash was making him feel sad and confused and unable to deal.

“Forest, do you have an owie?”

“Yes,” Forest said.

“Where honey? On your foot?”

“No.”

“On your bottom?” (I hate that word, by the way, but can’t bring myself to say “ass” or “butt” to my two-year-old.)

“No.”

“Where?”

“In my mouth.”

Holy St Christoper and Mother Moon.

He fell last night, cut the inside of his lip on the teeth. The whole situation shimmers into focus. I/ we were trying to hold the line. I thought he was being a pain in the ass. (Am fine with “ass” here, by the way.)

He just wanted to stop rubbing hot tomato acid into his cut lip.

I’ve noticed that my tendency to assume his negative intentions is in direct proportion to how tired/ overwhelmed/ done I am. The other day, Steve and I were at the park with the kids watching Forest run like a really fast antelope, and contemplating how much longer I was going to be able to catch him and Steve mentioned how great it would be if we had little remotes that would just sort of turn them when they got too far away. Like those toy airplanes. And I said, as I prepared to dash after the Fox, “That would be so great.”

You know what else would be great? If I had a little remote that turns off my I’m done = You are being difficult on purpose thing

Now, Eve’s kids are six and four, and she regularly says wise and hindsighty-comforting things. Of this she says, “Honey, we do the best we can with the information we have. With kids this age, we are code-breakers… And sometimes they are just speaking Navajo.”

There are so many places to hold the line in this gig. With the Fox. With myself. With the unnecessary accommodation and with the many, many opportunities for self-criticism. So, I am going to give myself the props that I deserve, now. More often than not I remember to make these decisions with my heart as well as my head. This, I think is the key. It’s not about blind consistency. It’s about looking, and listening, and doing the best I can with the information I have. (Thanks for that, Eve.)

So, tonight, on all fronts, for me and for the Fox, I am continuing to hold the line.

Picking Berries

2010-08-30T03:33:00.001-07:00

Blackberries
Originally uploaded by Pentax Penny

Today was sweet. We went blackberry picking, inspired by Peps friend Seano, who showed up for a visit with plum fingers and a bucket of sweetness last week. The next morning, the Fox and I had strawberries and blackberries and Greek yogurt for breakfast, and if there is a higher expression of summer lovin’, I don’t know what it is.

So, today we went blackberry picking. It’s funny how I thought I’d go when/if I found a good patch, But when the time was right, all we had to do was head out the door with some buckets. FF had on a long sleeve shirt and pants, a happy accident that resulted from the fact we had spent the nap wake up searching for the missing piece to a broken matchbox fire truck. This thing, this playground find with its 3 pieces, has been a favorite toy. “Can Mama fix it?’ and then I fit the pieces back together. Hand it to him. Joy. It falls apart. More joy, because now I can “fix it” again.

And today we lost the big piece somewhere between the living room and his room – even though the house is really not that messy right now, especially considering the fact that we are in a week before a deadline, which is always the height of disorder.

Anyway, we lost the ting right before the nap, which could have been a nightmare scenario of refusing to sleep until we found it. But we looked for a while and then I said, “Let’s read Max,” (Where the Wild Things Are is once again in favor.) Said, “We’ll look for the big piece after your nap,” and he went for it. And the first words when he woke up were “Can Mama find the big piece of the fire truck?”

Sometimes I look back on FF’s babyhood and see everything I was doing wrong. How I was so uncomfortable being both so in love and so unproductive at the same time. Seems so obvious to me now, that I could have let go and enjoyed a lot more.

But today, I’ll give myself –and M—some credit. We stayed in the moment. We did the right thing for today. It’s such a tiny piece of plastic. It would have been easy to try and blow it off. I said “Yes, we are going to look for it right now because I promised and because I know it’s important to you.” And when I said that his face lit up so big. I think he wasn’t sure I was really going to do it. And we started looking, even though we had wanted to go for a walk.

After an hour, I opened the front door to do something and FF shot outside and we took the chance. M went with him. I grabbed the farmer’s market basket, a bucket, a couple of little Tupperware bowls. Remembered to bring Jack the dog, forgot gloves and shears. Next time. We walked to the nearby road with a patch of blackberry hillside. This is perfect activity for Forest. Outside, physical, together. Reaching and looking and finding. Grabbling and plucking and talking. M and I pick the high ones and plop them into his bowl. Eventually we manage to persuade him to dump his bowl into the big one by promising to give him more right away. And he believes us.

The long canes pluck at the skirt of my cotton dress, tangle in the ankles of FF pants. And once we start looking, we keep finding. A neighbor’s neglected side door, the alley by the house for sale. At every patch I put Jack in a down stay and begin. Once of the nicest things about picking berries is losing track of time: Reaching up on tip toes, seeing another cluster, reaching farther. The smell of blackberry juice and sun. Careful reaching around thorns, not careful enough, the sound and a tug as they catch they my dress again. The soft feel of the ripe berries, the hard feel of the unripe. Did I mention the smell? Sweet, sweet. Forest quiet with focus. A blackberry for Jack as a reward for patient waiting. Happy dog. Happy Forest. Happy us.

We came home with a giant bowl of berries, enough for fridge and freezer. The fire truck is forgotten for now.

Falling or Flying? Group Camping Part I

2010-08-19T13:03:00.000-07:00

It started out so well. I was peaceful. I was having deep, milestone-y thoughts.

I had illusions of being in charge.

Prologue, written on a bench with a view Friday night, before all the badness:

I'm going to be 40 in three weeks. Today, I'm wearing pigtails and a surfer hoodie. I am looking at Puget Sound. The San Juan Islands rise in the distance, a boat trailer rattles behind me. Michael and the Fox are down there somewhere, but I can't see them. I feel that I should be making some sort of "I'm going to be 40" vow... drawing some kind of line.
Besides the line of bleach I've drawn in my hair.
A man in a blue workshirt and baseball cap walks by with an old lab on a leash. The lab is in charge. That used to be me. I used to be the man. Now I want to be, I think I am, the lab.
Tonight is the first night of our Peps camping trip. Our dogs are at home. The tree below me is dying beautifully; maybe half it’s branches bare. It’s an evergreen, maybe a fir. The bare branches hold out against the blue. That is me, also. Maybe halfway there, maybe less. Somewhere between 80 and 100, I’ll fall into the ocean, not to be heard from again, except in mermaid fairy tales about the night the woman with the white stripe in her hair leapt from her life, falling, to swim the rest of the way home.
But first, she flew.

Isn't that a lovely sentiment? Don't you feel all contemplative and empowered? I did.
And then, it was bedtime.

Burr Oak 1.14.2006

2010-08-17T18:51:00.001-07:00

Burr Oak 1.14.2006
Originally uploaded by Notley

The Pit and the Happy Dance

2010-08-11T21:04:00.000-07:00

Here's why being a writer goes great with being a mom:

Flex time
Crisis inspires creativity
Starving for words with multiple syllables drives me to my computer. Although, the Fox did repeat "unconditionally" the other day.

Also, one of my favorite writers, Diana Gabaldon, has some advice on this. (btw: If you haven't checked out "Outlander," Gabaldon's historical romance/adventure, I have one word for you: Sexy Scottish Lord Jamie. Okay that's four words. but just trust me on this.) Anyway, Gabaldon says that when you are a writer, starting out, sometimes you just have to let the housework go for a while.

Hello.

And let me just say: this house is a pit. Yes, it is a pit of love and creativity. All kinds of good things are happening. I am working on a Web site for an amazing documentary about humanity's ancient relationship with trees. (And if that job is not a confirmation of the presence of the Green God in my life, what is, I ask you?) Am working on next column.

But still, the house is a pit. The clean laundry and the unclean have formed an unholy alliance on our bedroom floor, which M steps over silently every night. But I can hear what he's thinking. (Or, at least Edith can.) And don't get me started on the dog hair.

But the Fox loves to sweep. His little broom, my big broom. Really, though, he's more of a spreader than a sweeper. Can't really track the fact that the piles of dog hair are escaping.

But legos he can track. And yesterday I had this BRILLIANT idea:

Sweeping legos.

You know, it is so easy to just do stuff, instead of teach it. I want to just clean the pit, get something done with my precious minutes here and there. I have to stop cleaning to teach the Fox, to hold the dustbin and do a happy dance when he pushes the legos into dustbin. But this way lies happiness, my friends. This way lies help.

The Right Tool for the Job

2010-08-01T08:31:00.001-07:00

Tweezers on cotton
Originally uploaded by FurLined

It’s all about the right tool for the job. My finger, for instance, when the Fox looks at me with a green cork in his left nostril. This cork isn’t made of the bark of a Spanish tree. It is a booger cork, a hard plug. And I know I shouldn’t. I know because I just had this conversation with my mommy friend. She has her panties all tied in a knot because her daughter is “walking around with her finger in her nose all the time.” She was embarrassed, I was sanguine. (Which is so easy when it’s not my kid.)

“Well, she’s figured out that it fits,” I say into the phone. “It’s kind of a natural thing to do.”

Silence.

“I mean, a handkerchief is just an artificial layer we put on it, right?”

Long silence.

“But Ella,” she finally says, “it’s so gross.”

Yeah, it’s gross. And I know that “Do as I say, not as I do” is a futile strategy with a child. And I’ll probably regret this when it’s my own kid walking around with his finger jammed up his nose. But I can’t help it. My short nail is just the right length and the Fox trusts me, says “Take it OUT, Mommy!” Lifts his chin slightly so that I can slip my nail under the edge and pop the cork out to allow the Fox, like any good vintage, to breathe.

It’s all about the right tool for the job.

A knife for instance. A plastic knife for the Fox and a long slim table knife for me. You see, I have discovered a little task. A perfect little toddler task. A mommy trifecta. Something that a) we can do together, that b) is interesting and satisfying to both of us and c) is really useful.

A task so perfect that I am loathe to give it up, even now, after yesterday’s agony proved what can go wrong.

The task is scraping out the moss and dirt and dog hair that are jammed into the crevices between the boards of our deck. It is morning. I am on my knees, Forest is on his. The sun is shining on our backs. We slide the knives in between the boards and the stuff just lifts right out. It feels good. We are doing it together. This perfection continues until I slide my knife along the board and it gets jammed, there is a wood chip or something stuck in there. I push harder.

Next to me, the Fox is chattering happily. (He has taken to narrating himself in third person. I am thinking of this as a cool language development frontier, rather than the precursor to a third-world dictatorship.) He says, “Forest is PUSHING.” (He also likes to finish his sentences with all caps. See above note.) And I am also pushing. Ahead of me is a long, clean space between the boards where I have already cleared the gnarl. Behind me, it rises like a furry stripe, like our deck is a sleeping hyena. My knife is stuck, but I am going to get this sucker out. And then I give a really hard push and the hyena bites, it drives a long splinter a half-inch under my thumbnail.

And breaks off underneath it.

“OW!”

The Fox looks at me.

“Mommy has an owie,” I say. I can’t believe how calm my voice sounds. I grip my throbbing, numb, throbbing, oh, there it is, searing-slice of-pain-thumb. I stand and walk in the house, leaving Forest on the deck with his little plastic knife. I go to the medicine cabinet and get the sharp nail clippers. I cut the nail off, all the way to the pink. I walk out to the kitchen sink. I glance at Forest, who is now happily trotting back and forth between the deck and me as I lean over the sink with my peroxide and needle-nosed tweezers and ice. I am getting nauseated now, but he must know what I need, because he goes into the living room and plays in his pillow pile while I take the right tool for the job and stick the tweezers in there. Just in a little way at first. I squeeze and pull. Nothing. I can’t feel it, I can’t feel the splinter. It is all pain. It feels like there is a knife all the way down to my first knuckle. I force the tweezers in more. Squeeze and pull. Nothing. I glance at Forest. He is okay. And then I commit. I force them in hard, pushing them between the nail and the flesh on both sides of the splinter, forcing them all the way under, forcing them all the way down, carving a furrow in the healthy pink. I press them down into the flesh and then I squeeze and pull. I feel something. My knees wobble a little as I pull out most of the splinter. It has broken into pieces of hyena gnarl that are still in there and it’s bleeding now, but I grit my teeth and I go back for the little pieces, over and over, until I get them all.

This is a minor miracle, by the way. See, I am a fainter. I have fainted in restaurants, clinics, kitchens, and bathrooms just for talking about pain and blood and gore. I have to avoid violent movies and I will walk out of the room if you start telling me about the time you got stitches in your schma-schma.

I mean, I fainted during a book report once.

And yesterday, as I rose off my knees on the sunny deck, my mind did what it usually does when I am about to faint. It narrowed my vision to a field the size of a quarter, brightly lit, the size of my thumbnail. It started closing the curtains of red and black on stage left and stage right. But then it did something new. It expanded to the size of my son. Rose above me like a mommy periscope and watched him, knowing where he was. Rose above me and held me up while I smiled at him, hid my fear, calmly walked into the house and practiced ancient torture techniques on my own hand. It held me up, saying “You do not want to go to urgent care and have a stranger hold him while he cries and you faint. You have to do this. Get it out NOW.”

Two years ago, I would have been on the floor. This is another way that motherhood has tested me and then made me stronger and maybe I shouldn’t be surprised. But after so many years of being a fainter, I didn’t expect the mommy periscope. I didn’t expect that I could get bigger, and yet, it just keeps happening. Motherhood keeps calling these things out of me: gadgets and goofiness, tolerance for boogers and capacity to carve new spaces into myself. I see him. I spend every day watching the Fox, the ways he grows and changes and speaks in all caps. But every now and then I see me and I am reminded: This is a two-way street. I am reminded that, just as I helped make him, he helps make me. And I am right tool for the job.

Lists

2010-07-11T22:13:00.000-07:00

Woke up from second day of head cold. But for some reason, the snot in my head has not crowded out The List.

1. Write every day.

2. Blog every day.

3. Record my dreams every day in dream journal. (Note: Buy special dream journal.)

4. Do my physical therapy/ yoga/ ass-lifting exercises

5. Beat myself up for not doing the things on this list

Actually, the only thing on this list I hit with regularity is the last one. I felt it start this am as I watched the last coffee beans whir into an inadequate amount of grounds for our Sunday morning potta. I thought, there is just not enough in here. Someone is going to have to drink leftovers from yesterday.

Why don't my lists work that way? Leftovers from yesterday... Like "Good job, Andrews! You lifted your ass a whole millimeter yesterday. Take a victory lap (which, in this fantasy, would be a victory nap) and do something else today."

But NO. Edith wants to check off the whole list every day. Actually, what Edith really wants is to harp on number 5. This is total bullshit.

In case you are unfamiliar with Edith, this is the name for my inner critic, a technique I cannot recommend highly enough. It is one thing to "Keep your friends close, but keep your enemies closer," as said by Chinese general military strategis Sun-tzu in 400 BC.

It is another to let them wander around in your mind invisible.

(I love old quotes. Makes me feel so smart.)

Anyway, I noticed the sneaky list this morning. Sometimes it roams around in my head like a free radical, taking the sunny out of my day. Today, there is only one thing on the list that I am getting rid of. Number 5. Sayonara, Edith. At least for today.

Fire His Ass

2010-06-23T10:01:00.000-07:00

And, speaking of pushing, can I just say this:

When General Stanely McChrystal gave Rolling Stone an interview in which he mocked the Vice President, ("Bite me" was how his advisors termed it) and also said he thought Obama looked "uncomfortable and intimidated" by a room full of top military officials, he was pushing too far.

This is not a moment for tolerance or that famous calmness, Mr. President. This guy is a playground bully who has called you out. As my sassy friend Jocelyn says, sometimes you just have to unload the whammy. He needs a permanent time out. Or, as M suggests, a reassignment to latrine duties.

If there is one thing that makes a democracy work, it's civilian control of the military. McChrystal's interview was a very public total blow off of the chain of command.

President Obama, fire his ass.

Don't Shame Over Broken Eggs

2010-06-22T14:11:00.001-07:00

Tough night Sunday. We had new friends over, who have a kid the same age. Chance meeting in the toy store. They were there to preview Maggie’s upcoming birthday. We were there to replace the puzzle Forest peed on while he was operating commando.

(Having a kid and having a dog have so many things in common, not the least of which are urine and wildness.)

And lo, it happened to be Father’s Day, and I said “Come over for dinner!” They brought fried chicken, I made corn-on-the-cob and taboulleh. I had just enough time to clean up the disaster that was our kitchen, boil corn and mix some quinoa, cucumber, mint, parsely, lemon, olive oil goodness before they arrived. (The house didn’t have to be perfectly clean because this is the second time they’ve come over. I am a believer in house first impressions. First time people come over, I like things to look pretty good. Fresh clean on the bathroom, flowers in vases, etc. That way I figure they know I’m capable of keeping a clean house. Sometimes I just choose not to.)

I like these two, like the way they parent, want them to like us and the way we parent. This is a strange place to be; it’s a mixture of Jr. High vulnerabilty and the stuff my parents gave me – good and bad -- and the common sense and goofiness of the parents that we are becoming.

When you have new friends and their kid over for dinner, you get all that, plus the fun of managing your toddlers’ dinner plates together.

Here’s the tough part: the Fox has entered a pushing phase. It had just started a couple days before and on this particular night, I was not on my guard yet. I was having fun. My fun, not his fun. I know, I’m allowed this. But, the Fox was cranky and also a little over-tired and underfed and refusing to eat. So when he pushed Maggie, a big ole two-handed chest thump, I told him it wasn’t okay and chalked it up to stuff.

He also hoarded toys, threw his corn on the cob across the room and went out the dog door for the very first time. These were signs. Not his usual self. I was not paying attention.

Then, I was in the kitchen and I heard “Forest, stop that!” from the living room I rushed in. Maggie’s crying. Her mom looked up at me, big eyes blue. “He pushed her right next to the piano. I thought she was going to crack her head.” She said. I could hear the fear in her voice as I was saying “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” caught Forest, said “Forest, pushing is not okay. It’s not okay! Look! Maggie is sad. She’s crying because you pushed her. Can you say sorry?”

He said it.

But then I went on. I got mixed up inside. And I said, “Look, Forest! You made Maggie cry.” Did I actually say the words “Bad Boy!” No. I didn’t. But it was in my voice. It was.

For the record, I am for firm boundaries, but I am really against shaming, which is what happened there.

It’s funny where the buttons are. I am not ashamed of him getting dirty or being loud. But pushing is one of the places where I feel that snake rise within me. Where I forget that it’s just a behavior that he needs help with and I start thinking (“thinking” is an overstatement, by the way) that it’s about me.

The rest of the evening looked a little bit like a jr. high school dance… only instead of all the boys on one wall and all the girls on the other, it was Daddies and the Fox in the kitchen, Mommies and Maggie in the living room. The new friends were pretty beautiful about the whole thing. She shared some of her scary stuff. He called later to say "Don't get discouraged." But that night I felt sick inside, the snake having its way with me.

It's funny that this happened on Father’s Day. You see, we recently brought back an old favorite story – if you can have an “old favorite” at two years. The book is “Mama, Do You Love Me?” by Barbara M Joose. And actually, it was a favorite page of a story. It’s the one where the little girl is first testing: Will you love me anyway? She says

“Mama, what if I carried our eggs

– our ptarmigan eggs! –

and I tried to be careful,

and I tried to walk slowly,

but I fell

and the eggs broke?”

And the mama says:

“Then I would be sorry.

But still,

I would love you.”

Forest has asked me to read that page to him over and over for the last week.

How does he know this shit is coming?

Listen: there are the parts of our own parents’ teachings that we want to take with us and the parts we want to reinvent for ourselves, and the parts we want to burn with a butane torch. Everyone I know has a different ratio of these three, but everyone has at least a little of each… including my own mom and dad, I think. And that book reminded me of one of my dad’s teachings, one of the ones that I am trying to take:

My dad said out loud, frequently, “I may not always love the things you do, but I’ll always love you.”

And he always said it – crouched down, looking into my eyes, with his hands resting gently on my shoulders – at the most important time: Right after I’d messed up.

And then he hugged me.

I forgot that lesson. Not that I love the Fox, but how to separate those things. I forgot it just for a second. It’s not the end of the world and it won’t be the last time. The signs say that we are headed into some rough waters for the next weeks, months… Shoot. It will never stop being sweet and rough. But I have a good teacher. I can do better.

Sorry, Fox. Sorry, Sweetheart.

Happy Father’s Day, Dad. Thank you for the good lessons you gave me.

I’ll give Barbara M. Joose the last word on this one. After her little girl tests her by throwing water on the lamp, putting lemmings in her mukluks and turning into “the meanest bear you ever saw,” her mama replies by saying:

“I will love you,

forever and for always,

because you are

my Dear One.”

Thanks to flickr user kmevans for the photo "Broken Dreams 5.31.07"

Hot Pink and Happy

2010-06-20T14:20:00.000-07:00

So I decided to try cutting my own hair. This thought occurred to me post two glasses of Trader Joe’s viognier. I don’t know why, when I have such vivid memories of the last time I tried mixing home hair stylin’ with liquor. “Flamingo head” comes to mind.

But, I did it. And it was actually really good after the first cut. And then I went back for a second and it got a little bit better. Or at least didn’t get worse. Then I went back for a third time.

When I was thirteen, and my parents were just starting to go out to dinner without getting a babysitter, I decided to pluck my own eyebrows. My mom called to check in and, when I told her what I was doing, she said “Put those tweezers down right now. Promise. Promise me.” I did. Promise, that is.

But I didn’t put them down.

Sometimes I just can’t stop myself. Like that night, when I ended up with a single line of hairs marching across my forehead, and like when M and I aren't seeing eye to eye and I have to make just one more comment, and like last night when my hair took a slightly lopsided turn.

But, it's not so bad. The hair, I mean. At least, it's not bad enough to keep me from cutting the Fox’s hair for the first time today...

Have I mentioned that we’ve been thinking about painting our house? Maybe a hot, rose-red-pink color. But we’ve finally attained a decent balance and I don’t want to get into crazy project mode. (Even if the project is, in fact, crazy.) So we are going to do it one side of the house at a time. It might not look that great right away, but it will be heading in the right direction and we will comfort ourselves with that.

This is another way of leaving the Perfect Room. This is another way of living a real life, not living up to the imaginary one which only leaves me pissed off and scared and unable to take creative risks on pink houses or writing or frogs in the city or raising the Fox with art and verve. All of which I am still trying to do. although with a somewhat fluctuating rate of success

So, I cut the Fox's hair while M ran up to the movie store. No wine this time. I managed to get the bangs out of his eyes and trim a side... and then the boy was done. I guess it’s going to be like the house. One side at a time. Which I guess is like life. Not the made-for-tv life, but the real life, where I'm learning to hold my tongue when it helps and get out the bright colors and scissors even when it doesn't. The life that is hot pink and lopsided and happy, which is how I am feeling right now.

Thanks to flickr user Degilbo for "50 Pink Smiggle Scissors."

Frogs in the City

2010-06-19T16:28:00.001-07:00

I have a frog yen that hatched in me as a little girl and kicks its legs inside me still. Every spring, when Steven’s creek receded from the winter’s rainy flood, came tiny brown frogs, no bigger than your thumbnail, and millions, (I swear millions!) of tiny black tadpoles. There is nothing to me like that sight. I caught them in cupped hands, put them in a round glass globe of creek water with rocks and seaweed and hung the globe in my mom’s custom macramé in the kitchen so we could watch them up close, growing legs, becoming frogs. Every year the same plot and yet it was always suspenseful.

Nature is the original bestselling mystery writer.

So, today I went down to the banks of Longfellow Creek to get my frog ya-ya’s. I don’t know what I was expecting to find there; I didn’t see any frogs. But the little voice said “Go!” So, I went and dug in the soft creek bank for 20 minutes, rooting out morning glory, the zombie of invasive weeds. It has white skeletal roots and lives by swarming over and sucking the brains out of the plants that outta be there. The ones that help frogs. Then we had a break, then we weeded for another 20 minutes.

Except that actually, it was four hours.

This is why I love frogs, creeks, the undersides of trees. I lose track of time. A very wise friend said to me once that when you are wondering what your “bliss” is, ask yourself: what do I lose track of time, doing? For me, it is way up-close interaction with little plants and bugs. I was like a happy little girl, talking to the black millipedes with their pretty yellow shoes and the caterpillars in their green lounge suits.

I talked to the other volunteers as well. I used the same voice for both. I’m pretty sure they didn’t think I was crazy.

The caterpillars, I mean.

I didn’t see any frogs, but I got filled up with creek time, leaf noises, the smell of soft old logs. I felt really useful and good, taking care of our common land with the other King County Conservation District volunteers: Fred with the gravity-defying moustache, Lisa the pretty mom, Matthew, who had a splendid British accent and his young daughter Diane. Plus friendly leader Adam. I got to know them a little bit, got to know my watershed.

Hello, Longfellow Creek.

I made me want to have what I used to have. Frogs in my own yard, my own garden. Frogs in the city, again. They used to be here. They want to come back. I think it’s possible. I learned some stuff today. I think we can do it. And don’t you feel it? When you remember the house you grew up in, or the cabin by the creek, or that time you camped by the pond and you heard it, the sweet music of frog lust? Don’t you want it? That song, that reminder of wildness and how easy it is to be reborn when spring comes a calling?

It’s nearly summer now, but we still have coldness, rain. It is still a good time to plant seeds. Plus, the solstice is coming up, which is a good time to sing intent. So I will plant this seed, my face close to the earth, my fingernails stuffed with what is good and fertile. And on Monday I will do what I haven’t done in a few years, since mommy busy-ness knocked the ritual out of me. I will celebrate the solstice on the beach. The Fox is old enough to drag a stick in the sand with me, and sing, and draw pictures for the sun to see and bless and bring into bloom.

Frogs in the city. Again.

Thanks to flickr user Damian D for "Pacific Tree Frog", and flickr user Simple Circle Photography for "Pacific Tree Frog hiding on my Rostov sunflower. "

Mystery in the Morning

2010-06-09T07:29:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, we learned “Mystery.”

This is one of my favorite words. See, the Fox found a black plastic handle. Oval shaped, flat, with a hole for a securing screw. I think it was left on top of the kitchen cabinets at some point; I knocked it off while I was sketching a tree on the ceiling. (Not to compare myself to Michaelangelo, but how did he avoid a serious neck crick?)

The Fox held up the handle and said “Dat! Dat!” Which is his way of saying, “At this time, I’d like to politely request an explanation of this item.”

I said “That looks like a handle, honey.”

To which he replied. “Hmm. Do you know what it once was attached to?” (See above for actual language.)

“I don’t know where it came from,” I said.

His eyes lit up like a slot machine that has found its long lost disadvantaged granny. “I don’t know!” he said.

“Yes. I don’t know. It’s a mystery.”

“Mystery,” he breathed. (We are talking real words now, by the way.)

The handle and the conversation, over and over, occupied him through the morning, long enough for me to sketch a twisting, knotted branch that arcs over the hall door, down behind the stove, touching the floor next to the deck door and arcing up again to leaf out above the counter on the other side.

This is how live oaks do it. They turn their lower branches into a support structure of buttresses that brace the ground so that they can grow hard and heavy and high. How did they figure out how to do this? Darwin explained it, that I believe.

But I also believe that it’s a mystery.

The handle disappeared at some point, but not the words. I heard him in the car on the way to Trader Joe’s, whispering to himself: “I don’t know… came from… mystery.” I’m not sure if he grocks all that is contained in “mystery” or if it was just the thrill of me saying “I don’t know.” Either way, this is freeing. For many, many years I felt that certainty was safety. That saying “I don’t know” – how to do this, where I’m going, who I am at the moment – was shameful. Like being caught with your pants down. Hot, cheeks-burning shame.

It prevented me from leaping for way too long.

So, I’m psyched that he is getting early exposure to the concept. Hey, I figure that if I can demonstrate trying and sometimes failing and having a good time while doing it, and if I can also get him to eat something green once a week, I’m doing okay.

Am going to climb on the kitchen table, now. He’s still asleep and I’ve got a little time. Since I’ve got one supporting branch sketched out, I might as well start on one that reaches for the sun. I’m not sure what it’s going to look like yet, but that’s okay. In the immortal words of Shakespeare in Love’s Geoffrey Rush:

"It’s a Mystery.”

What the Oak Tree Said, Part I

2010-06-07T21:30:00.001-07:00

Limbs of a Beautiful Live Oak Tree
Originally uploaded by annjaber74

I promised to mention what the oak tree said. “This week,” I believe I promised.

So, He said three things:

1. Blog every day.

2. Paint me.

3. Talk about the frog dream.

I was at the top of an egg-shaped mountain. I was underneath the dome of a very old, very large live oak tree. They are called live oaks because they are evergreen and, like everything else that lives in that landscape, they are hardened to heat. The limbs are cracked black iron and the lower ones are like a layer of snakes swimming up and then down in every direction, buttresses so that the dream of the tree can be really, really big.

And, it seemed to me for those two sunny days in the toast-colored hills of Napa, they have little use for stalling.

So I’m trying to get on with it.

Now, with regard to number 1: I had dinner with some old friends on Saturday night, one of whom said “there’s nothing worse than a ritual that makes you feel trapped.” At least, I think that’s what he said. It’s a little blurry. I remember this, though: he went on to say that he has his own ritual. That he goes in to see both his little boys, pulls their blankets up over them as they sleep, every night before he goes to bed.

This is what a ritual should be like. It should feel important AND good.

Writing does that for me. Almost every day.

So number one: check.

I started on the painting too. I can see it perfectly: Murals of the branching, reaching canopy of a live oak on my kitchen and living room walls. Yesterday, our friends John and Corry sat in the living room after a fabulous late lunch that sampled their recent trip to Italy. And it just came over me. I got up, grabbed a stick of charcoal and starting climbing the couches to sketch on the walls. John moved off of the loveseat to make way and the Fox said “Mommy’s drawing!”

Number three, though. The frogs. Whew. This is the hard one. It is a scary dream in both of the ways that dreams are measured.

(One way is what happens if the dream succeeds. Is it big? Are you willing to be that big too? The other way is what happens if the dream fails.)

But, these are good things to face in the arms of a tree. I may have mentioned before my feeling of God in the trees. Especially, as it turns out, in a very old live oak tree with twisting black limbs and emerald leaves which spun a dome all the way down to the ground and was filled with caterpillars that flew from limb to limb on silken threads like flying Wallendas just before rebirth. I don’t want to overstate things, but that’s what we were there for. Falling and flying. And isn’t that what the resurrection of a dream is? Rebirth?

We thought we were there for a quick hike before going wine tasting...

Broomsticks and Smegma

2010-06-04T22:01:00.001-07:00

Like so many other parts of motherhood, my first ritual with the Fox was not what I expected. I call myself a witch, sometimes say "pagan." Mostly because I am looking for a tag with fewer syllables than “earth-based spirituality.”

Also because it pisses me off that the Roman empire did such a good job of branding pagans as bad guys.

So it is appropriate that the first ritual we did was a broom ritual. We were sweeping the kitchen. This is one my mommy proudnesses, when I succeed at turning a chore into a game that we enjoy together. The Fox pushes the chairs into the hall and then I use my big plastic broom to sweep up all the dog hair and mud and cracker crumbs and general smegma. The Fox uses his little broom to sort of spread it towards the dustbin. We were in the midst of this yesterday morning when I suddenly felt it, that opening inside that says “ritualize.” If you don’t know exactly what I mean by this, let me just say that my favorite definition of a ritual is a physical act with an invisible meaning. It could be lighting a candle to remember a loved one, it could be cleaning out your desk when you are ready for a new challenge at work. And it could be sweeping out the old feelings along with the old dirt.

(BTW: This would be a good reason for brooms to be associated with witches. But really, it’s all about beer. Back in the day, ladies who made enough homebrew that they had extra for sale would hang a broom over their door in the universal “belly up to the bar” symbol of medieval villages. Throw in a wort kettle and their entrepreneurial invention of a tall pointy hat, which allowed the ladies to be spot-able when they sold beer at fairs. Abracadabra! You’ve got your archetypal witch.)

(But I digress)

So there we were, the mom who wants to teach her son what I consider to be some basic life skills: How to sweep a floor. And how to let things go. Old feelings, old ways that don’t work anymore. Since I got back from the FAFAWOF, I’m ready and brooms are great for both of these things. Using a broom can be a pushing around of dirt or it can be a Sweep. This time, we did a little of both. I think. I said “Honey, when we sweep out the dirt, we can sweep out the old feelings too.” He looked at me for a sec. “Like sad,” I said. “Sad.” He said. Then I worried that I was telling him that sweeping made me sad, but I think he got it. Sweep it out. Sweep it out. Then I got all excited. I can do ritual with the Fox! We should make him a broom out of sticks and string! That will be so fun! Then we can light candles and talk about god and trees and – rrt. I realized that in this vision we have a toddler with a bundle of kindling and an open flame in my house.

Not so much.

So we just swept and talked about feelings and dirt. This lasted about three minutes and we used the same old plastic brooms we always use. I was sort of envisioning that my first ritual with him would be a little more magical, a little less everyday stuff. But maybe that’s part of the lesson. It’s so easy to make creating sacred moments into such a big deal that I never do it. I mean, whoever it is that you pray to, wouldn’t it be better to incorporate lots of little prayers throughout the day, little moments of being present and connected?

Wouldn’t that be a ritual worth passing on?

M and I are not on exactly the same page on things godly, but we have a good common ground and this book has a lovely, non-denominational, kid-friendly way to celebrate the seasons:

Dawn's Early Light

2010-06-03T06:25:00.000-07:00

So, the first step in leaving The Perfect Room is becoming a morning person.

“What the F&*?” you say.

Yes. And yesterday went fine. The alarm went off as it does every day at 4:55am. I opened my eyes and said “I am a morning person. I wake bright and alert at 5am.” I said this several times in a sort of three margarita slur, but I felt that it was a positive and ironic thing to say and that M would laugh. Which would be a good start to the day.

I looked at him. Sound asleep.

“Did you hear the alarm?” I shook his arm.

“Bleah! Whaaaa –?!?”

This made me feel slightly superior and smug, which continued as I made my coffee, did yoga and wrote.

But this morning. Maybe some of the oak tree magic had worn off – we’ll get to that this week, I think – but the alarm this morning was bullshit.

However. At 5:08, I rousted out of and went to make coffee. There was a green and white plastic thing stuffed through the coffee pot handle.

M was conducting his wakeup. I’ve got him figured out, now. He stands by the sink, looking out the window, eating a banana with PB and by the time the banana is done, he is awake. Without drugs.

This is so unfair.

I stared at the green and white thing in the coffee handle uncomprehendingly for a period of time. I needed to make coffee in order to understand what it was, and yet I couldn’t make coffee. Total conundrum.

“We’re out of diapers,” M said.

“Ah.” It was a diaper package. A note where he knew for sure I would get it. “I’m tired of this shitty weather,” I said as I dumped yesterday’s grounds into the worm cache.

“Morning people don’t mind the weather,” said M.

“Shut up.”

“Morning people are uncompromisingly optimistic without good weather,” he said.

Now who’s smug and superior?

Can I just say, though, that this is a wonderful, funny, handsome, amazing man? Who, by the way, was the corporate sponsor for the FAFAWOF that put my ass in this here chair at 5:39 am, second day in a row, drinking coffee and listening to the dogs fart while I leave The Perfect Room with my writing. I should have worn his logo on my sneakers during the trip.

He knows something about being a morning person. I can hear him downstairs learning a new song on his guitar.

He also knows something about how to love a woman, be a good father, a loyal friend.

I don’t think I have ever admired someone more than I do M. I mean, yeah, I was pretty blown away by Coco Chanel in the movie “Coco Before Chanel” wherein Audrey Tatou portrays Coco as a poor orphan who founded a fashion empire and who ended the use of corsets in Europe. Amazing.

But, I never watched Coco struggle with insomnia, or too many dogs, or not enough Peanut Butter to complete the ritual at 5am. I mean, these are small things, not the hardest we’ve been through. But with or without PB he keeps getting up every morning at 4:55 am and coming home to me every night and learning new songs. Plus, I love his big hair.

Yesterday he came home from work, having read my blog. “So, you are going to leave The Perfect Room?” he said, smiling.

And I said “Yes.” This is a way too late, first tribute to M, the sponsor of the FAFAWOF, musician and morning man. It is 6:20 am. He is out the door and FF is awake.

What I learned from the FAFAWOF!

2010-06-02T15:07:00.000-07:00

Before I left for the First Away from the Fox Adventure With Old Friends (FAFAWOF), My neighbor, who is a mom times three, said “You will remember who you are.” And I thought I knew what she meant, but here’s what I actually remembered:

I need old friends.

Friends who, if you’ve known them long enough, have seen you at your best and at your worst. Like when you thought satin pants were a good idea, that dishes washed themselves (sorry, gals) and the only thing better than a late night was a shared late morning, struggling up the corner café to blearily come awake over coffees and really awesome scones. And then it all starts to come back to you. How you made out with that Swedish guy on the mattress in the corner of the dance room. How the bass player strapped his bass on around her and then did a solo while dancing with her. How a man asked her sign and she said “Men at Work,” and you said “Dangerous Curves.”

After breakfast you go lie in the sun in the park.

Then you eat a burrito.

Of course, that was then. This is now, the FAFAWOF in San Francisco. We are spending a weekend together. I’ve kept close with Eve over the years, late night phone calls and long weekends. I’ve seen Caroline less but now I wonder, why is that? Because sitting down across from her was like sitting down with the best part of myself… If my best part was a lot cooler and wasn’t afraid of heights and said that she wasn’t living on the edge anymore because she only flew ultralights without broken wings since the crash.

She is just the same. So is Eve. And so am I. Underneath all the scars and trophies that the years have chucked into our shopping carts, we are the same and we instantly reconnected. Our coffee date turned into hanging out in Caroline’s room and I didn’t realize how completely we had settled into being together until Caroline’s beautiful, sparkly girlfriend came in and said “Aw, look! You’re so roommatey!” We were. We were sprawled on the furniture, laughing and shouting and shaking our heads and it could have been 18 years ago.

All of which was wonderful. But here’s the best part about the FAFAWOF. ( I love saying that out loud. Say it with me. “FAFAWOF!”) With these friends, I catch myself. I caught myself, when I told Caroline that I had painted my toenails for this trip and it was the first time in three years.

As if my child STOLE all my nail polish upon inception, and ankle-cuffed me to a pair of dirty Birkenstocks. (Would you like a little cheese with that whine?)

I caught myself making excuses to Eve, why I couldn’t write about what is most important to me. How I find God in the trees. My crazy, beautiful, magical, worldview and what nature means to me.

I caught myself, trying to live in The Perfect Room, where I suffer and do what I’m supposed to do and not a booger escapes my grasp. The Perfect Room is a sucky place to mother and a sucky place to live and both Caroline and Eve know very well that I don’t belong there. Not because they don’t love me, but because they do.

I’m going to need to see them more often. And I need to leap off some cliffs closer to home.

See, these old friends were forged hard in years of great change. Not just in those years. By those years. New soul companions do not grow rampant in gardens of safeness and competence. The last time I took a Big Jump was my 37^th birthday. The day I found out that I was in fact pregnant and a new road, which I knew NOTHING about, laid it’s first yellow brick at my feet.

That was nearly three years ago. That last leap, though, that started new crop of friends, born out of the risk that we took when we decided to breed. Nothing like motherhood to forge closeness, if you are lucky enough to find some fellow souls with same age babies. I did. These friends are new compared to my San Francisco soul mates, but there have already been some double ninja alarm calls, made and received. I think there are some cliff jumpers there.

I am fresh from a weekend of howling like a wolf with women who love me like fire because – and even though -- they know every part of me. Not just the making out on mattresses part. The witchy part, the scary dreams, the rude roommate, the wild tree dancer and the sad raw part under the skin.

All the little pieces that are lined up on the precipice saying “Is it my turn? Can I jump now?”

Yes. The answer is yes.

People, I am leaving The Perfect Room.

Roaring in San Francisco

2010-05-30T21:43:00.000-07:00

Friday, I left FF for the first time. I am writing from Napa Valley, via San Francisco, where I spent my twenties bartending and kissing strangers. And I am visiting my former San Franciso roommate Eve, who was complicit in many of the crimes committed.

This is an old roomie trip, one of the very best kind.

It was a little tough to leave the Fox. I endangered myself and others by calling M on my cell as I drove to the airport. I then started to cry.

“Are you okay?” he said.

“Yes, I’m just so happy to be going and so grateful you supported me going and I’m going to miss you both so much.” I said.

I cried in the airport, also. Just a little. On the plane. Sitting with Caroline and Eve in Farley’s café in Portrero Hill and then I was here.

God, I love this city.

We walked the sidewalks in the Mission, past the chi-chi antique shops that are now sharing elbow room with the Latin grocery stores and their warm fruits. Two guys in hats and sunglasses were leaning out the top window of a blocky building, rapping to the world. Eve started to dance, a low-down elbow boogie and the guys roared and then rapped their approval.

“It’s like being serenaded,” she said.

We went to Haight street and got carded and the door man whispered to me as I walked past “You don’t look your age.” I didn’t feel it. I felt 21 again, seeing Haight street for the first time, wanting nothing more than to live in one of the second floor, bay window apartments and wake to the street’s morning music every day. We drank snakebites at what used to be the Achilles Heel and talked with the bartender about what a “snakebite” was, vs. a “black satin,” vs. a “black velvet.” (And in case you have ever wondered: Is it a “black and tan” without Harp’s? The answer is: No. It is not.) Who cares about names? We liked our pints of pear cider layered with Guinness.

We realized that it was – OMG! – 18 years ago that we lived here. Eve called it “A Jurassic Age” since we used to get all thundered up and go down to the Mad Dog in the Fog. A lot has happened. And we talked about many of those things. But the main thing was the earthquake called “Motherhood,” which has ripped us both up and laid us back down again. It has weathered us and polished us and made us closer. I welled up again. Eve raised her glass. The dark layer of Guinness floated on the sparkly layer of pear cider, both so essential to the character of the drink.

“To Motherhood,” she said.

"To Motherhood,” I answered.

THE CHICKADEES ARE BACK!

2010-05-26T15:15:00.000-07:00

The chickadees are back.

I haven't wanted to mention it. Afraid to jinx it or something. Every morning, I sip my coffee, tense until I look out and see that they are still there, still coming and going from the nest box on our gatepost.

But we are into it now. We are past nest-building and egg warming. There are babies in there. The mama and papa are flying in and out of the nest box faster than BP executives trying to shift the blame. Last night at dusk, which lasts so nice and long as we near the solstice, I took a huge stockpot of compost down to my worm bin. But to get there, I have to go through the back gate. Actually, I don’t. I could have gone around through the side door, but I thought I’d just lift the latch sooo quietly…and as I walked through I heard the soft whoosh of the chickadee leaving the nest and wondered if I’d done it again. If I’d scared the adult off the nest for the night and doomed the babies. If you don’t know what I am talking about, you can do one of two things: You can read my post “Bad hair color and roasted chickadees,” or you can just trust me. My life is an arrow, aimed at nurturing the wild in the city, but last summer I misfired and I have a karmic debt to the chickadee gods.

But they are back and I can hear at least one little baby in there, making his bid for the bug of the hour. The box is so close to the path of our life. It’s in a stupid place, one of the many mistakes I have and will make in this attempt to live in a finer way. But I will keep trying. When winter comes, I’ll move the box. But I want so much for this year’s nestlings to fledge. I want to look up from my kitchen sink and see one hop out into the crabapple branches, test his weight in the world and decide to fly.

Happy Birthday Forest

2010-05-25T15:14:00.000-07:00

A couple days ago, some jerk cut me off on the I-5 on-ramp. He was in an old, medium blue America sedan and he was bald. We were merging, but I was clearly ahead of him and he sped up. “Don’t be an asshole,” I said, as I floored it and my mommy van ripped just enough head of him to cut in before the ramp narrowed to one lane. I merged fast on to I-5, just to prove that I wasn’t going to cut him off and lollygag. To prove, really, that I was just as fast and aggressive as him. Then I felt a little disgusted with myself. Decided that I was over it. Imagined him, now coming up on the right, needing to get into my lane and how I would slow down and wave him in with a magnanimous, languid, maybe just a little bit sexy wave. I was feeling very Buddha. He came up on the right, his face contorted in rage and pressed to the glass, yelling at me. He was almost past me when my Buddha bubble popped and I flipped him off.

And then he slowed down. Dropped right back into my blind spot. I tried to see him in my rearview mirror, flicking my eyes so he couldn’t se me looking. My heart was thumping a little bit. Was he next to me? I looked in the fisheye in the side mirror. Yes. Right there. Pacing me. He pulled up a little. He had a bright yellow ear plug in his left ear, like one might wear at, say, a firing range. He dropped back again. I needed to merge right. I dropped speed fast, darted behind him then over. Then I lost him, merging right and exiting on Lakeview Blvd. But when I stopped at the sign at the bottom of the ramp, there he was. One car ahead of me. He turned right. I turned left. All the way to my writing group, I watched my rearview mirror. Did he turn around? I made a second turn. I imagined that he had my license plate number. I went inside. And all of this was different than it would have been two years ago. When the man in the blue sedan slowed, when he started pacing me, my first reaction was what it always was: “Fuck you. If you are coming after me, come on.” But right on the tails of that, like a new eraser over old soft lead, came this: “What about Forest?”

The day before, Forest had turned two. All day long, I sang Happy Birthday to him. Every one of the 27 different times , his face split wide open with the very first words. Last year, he was barely talking. This year he stared at my slice of Palermo pepperoni, gorgonzola and mushroom pizza with extra sauce and garlic crust. I could practically see his cogs turning. Then he looked at me and beamed and said “The steam is coming UP!”

He has changed so much. And he has changed me. Not just cured my macho death wishes, (although apparently this change is still making its way to my accelerator foot) but softened me like meat tenderizer on a bee sting, and toughened me like fruit left long in the sun.

Now, he is two. I am almost 40. These 38 years that are between Forest and I will never change. They are an iron bar, separating us on the racetrack, forever holding us that much apart, and somewhere up there is a cliff, and I will go over first. Please, please, please Gods, let me go over first. I survived ten years of environmental politics like a daily vaccination of despair. I survived walking home along through San Francisco’s lower Haight every night after work, 2:30 or 3 am, smoothed out by the shot and beer back I got from my fellow bartender, walking past all those dark doorways with nothing but luck and my belief that a confident strut would unmark me as a target. I survived teaching myself to drive on the highway at 14, bored after school and later, driving so drunk on the dark Arizona roads that my best friend in the passenger seat braced both feet on the dash board.

“Am I swerving?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I can’t tell if it’s me or the car.”

“Me neither,” I said, and we both laughed, alive with our stupid fearlessness. I am not fearless now. I don’t mean to be a downer, but I’ll tell you this: Back then I thought the worst thing that could happen was that I would die. Now I know that the worst thing is that I would survive Forest.

"What about Forest?"

This question is a new compass, a shift in my North Pole. It is the awful and wonderful power of this love and it just keeps getting bigger. Happy Birthday, Forest. I love you so very, very much.

The Green God and the Vehicular Vatican

2010-04-25T14:55:00.000-07:00

I’ve been thinking about trees and trucks. Green Gods and big motorized vehicles. If I didn’t know that Satan was an invention of the Pope’s umpteenth century Madison Avenue ad firm… If I didn’t know that, I would call trucks Satan.

But I like Satan better than trucks. In the first place, Satan was modeled on a guy who I actually really love, who has variously been called the Green Man, Pan, the Horned God and some other stuff depending on whether you are Celtic or Sumerian. I like the Green God. It sums up most of what is important for me about the male divine. This is a pagan thing. Well, it’s a human thing, actually, to divide our gods into male ones and female ones. The system I use gives the female part all the usual stuff: Eternity, the source of Life. Basically the ability to go on forever, which might also be called continuous multiple orgasms of creation.

I like this in a deity.

Then her lover/son gets to be the principle of change, growth, death and rebirth. We don’t worry about the incest that might possibly be implied here. Not because we wrote memos to the bishops saying “Cover this up asap,” (Can you say, Ratzinger?) But because the male part is, like Jesus, born at winter solstice. Unlike Jesus, every year our young green man finds himself fucking by May 1 and dying old and decrepit by Halloween. (The Green God doesn’t mind profanity, for the record.) He is all men, all women, all humans that live and die. Plus, he has horns and moss in his beard, which I also like in a deity.

But I was talking about Satan.

You see the resemblance, though, right? The horns, in charge of sex and death… Whoops, I mean “sinful temptation and punishment.” Satan’s just a rebrand of the Green God. A way to bring the locals on board– in addition to the legions, that is.

(Have I mentioned that I can get on a little bit of a rant about the Roman Catholic Church? Ratzy in particular really sets me off.)

So. Instead of associating my feelings about trucks with Satan, which would be a bum rap for the guy with the horns, let’s go ahead and say “Vatican.” It’s really not about the individual. It’s the institution. The steamroller of power and incredible collection and consumption of resources that is not always but far too often used for bullshit purposes like killing bunnies and raping little boys.

There. I said it.

Thing is, the Fox loves trucks. All vehicles actually. Given how foamy I just was about the pope, it’s probably hard to believe that what I am about to tell you is true.

I am making peace with this. The trucks, I mean. I even have a little song about it. Want to hear it? Okay, sing along to Bonnie Raitt “I can’t make you love me if you don’t”

I can’t make you hate trucks if you don’t

I can’t make your heart loathe something it won’t

Dumptrucks will bang

Diggers devour

I can show you the books

Exclaim at flowers

But I can’t make you hate trucks if you don’t.

So, I’ve decided to use the principles of positive discipline and spell-casting, which are one and the same. (Put that in your Montessori pipe and smoke it.) Basically, it boils down to focusing on manifesting what you want. Today, this looked like going to the beach at Lincoln Park.

The parking lot is next to a wooded meadow. That’s where I put Alexis, our 11 year old semi-trashed minivan – friend Michele laughs every time she says “Ella drives A-Lexis.” And before you say anything, I get that I am part of the problem with my very own vehicle. Focus, please. We park next to the meadow. And we begin by saying “Hello” to Mr. Big Leaf Maple, a ginormous, mossy representative of the Green God touchable right now. He is in bloom, which is cool. Long, lime green boas of flowers swaying from gnarly 90ft branches, kind of like a Mr. Big Leaf Maple drag queen.

Then we walk down to the beach, and throw rocks and play with clam shells and the Fox ogles the biggest, baddest Vehicular Vatican around, because the Washington State Ferries dock right there.

The he chases crows. The other day he did this really cool thing. After asking me several times to make them hold still – “Mama!” Pointing at crow, “Down! Pet! Please!” – he realized I was not going to make it happen for him. So, he walked towards a particularly glossy black character, put both hands straight out and said “Be Still!" Then he whispered, "Magic trick.”

Maurice Sendak, anyone?

My heart just about exploded.

After the beach, we go back up the trail to Mr. Big Leaf. We sit on the mossy armchair his roots have created just for us and I get out the surprise, which is whatever dead crab, string of seaweed or cool rock I managed to sneak into my pocket down on the beach. This started out as a way to lure the Fox into running back to the tree because he weighs about as much as five bowling balls and I don’t want to carry his ass up the hill. But now it’s a little ritual. He sits in my lap, we talk about what we saw at the beach. I mention diving mergansers more than motorized boats and we soak up tree love and watch the grass daisies whiten the meadow like almost-May magic snow. I don’t know. I’m just not fighting the vehicle thing anymore. Ferries, trucks and buses. The arm of the Vehicle Vatican is long. But the reach of the tree love, the mossy, bossy smell of spring is right here, right now. This is older, wiser and stronger. This is magic that I don’t have to fight for. I just have to show him where the wild things are.

Bad Hair Color and Smoked Chickadees

2010-04-17T14:17:00.000-07:00

Part One

The other night, I went to see mythologist Michael Meade give a talk, wherein he said that the job of every caring person is to go out and get into the “right kind of trouble.”

This made me think of bad hair color and smoked chickadees.

I was in church full of Vashon Island hippies, the bearded and the flowy. Maybe that’s why I had hair on my mind. Even though I’m pretty sure this wasn’t what Meade had in mind, I couldn’t help but think of the night I said to myself the words no woman should ever say:

“I’m not too drunk to color my own hair.”

I had been on the way to Safeway, to buy a box of hair color. I had been stalking that box for weeks. I wanted a dark, but distinctly red brown. I was sick of my light brown highlighted hair. I wanted it to be just the slightest bit edgy, you know, but still tolerable at work the next morning at my big presentation. Somehow be the up-and-coming PR girl who seems like she has a secret life as a punk rock jazz singer. As I turned the corner to walk up to Safeway, my friend Ward pulled up to the stoplight in his battered, scary-looking, robin’s egg blue van and said, “Hey, gorgeous. Whatcha doin’?” And I said “Having a pint with you.” And hopped in.

Well. One pint turned into three. But it was the height of summer. When he dropped me off that night, it was still light outside and I always find it hard to believe I’m drunk when there’s still daylight. So I said those fated words, bought my box of cherry cola hair color and went home to pour chemicals on my scalp.

When I woke up the next morning, Monday morning, I hoped it wasn’t as bad as I remembered, but really, it was worse. I had a halo of hot pink, saturating the roots of my hair from my scalp to out about two inches. Then the pink continued in splotches, long streaks and stripes that smeared through the rest of my hair. I looked like a flamingo that had gotten stuck in a superfund site. I decided to fake it. “A French twist,” I said to myself “can fix anything.”

I got five seconds into what was supposed to be my big moment at the firm. My description of my first big press conference: coverage in the Times, the P-I, the Daily Journal of Commerce. I’m talking above the fold. It was a room full of press whores and not one of those jerks was listening. They were staring, a little slack-jawed. I think they were waiting for me to explain. Then Tim, the labor union guy, raised his hand. “Yes, Tim?” I said. “What the hell happened to your hair?” he said.

But, I don’t think that this is the “right kind of trouble” Meade was talking about. I mean, I believe in playing a part. I believe in Halloween everyday as a proactive approach to creating the story of your life. I do in my better times. But, in my worse times, when the plug has fallen out of the wall and I don’t feel the current any more, when that happens, I do shit even stupider than saying those fateful, flamingo-hair-producing words at 8 o’clock a summer night. When I’m out of the rush and I can’t feel it anymore, I start multi-tasking and not paying attention and living too fast.

I start smoking chickadees.

I put the nest box up four years ago. It’s on the north side of a fence post, above the gate into the backyard. My book said it should be at least six feet off the ground, in partial sun. It’s basically a honeymoon timeshare for chickadees without the scam meeting: a box about 10” tall, maybe 4” wide and 5” deep. A round entry hole just larger than a quarter. You hang it up and it gives the chickadees a substitute for their ordinary habitat: a hole in a standing dead tree. I can see the box from my kitchen window. Looked down on it for two years. Nothing. February and March came and went without a single shopper. And then it happened. They started checking it out. Landed on the little roof. Started going in, coming back out again. Checking it out from all vantage points. Is this a safe place to raise my kids? I bet it never occurred to them to worry about the cement pad just inside the gate. Not until July. Barbecue season.

We were past nest-building by then. No more sticks and grass, no more flying a spring relay-race of homemaking. We were past the brooding phase, where one parent is on the nest at all times and the other is flying to the supermarket to buy ice cream and pickles, or, if she was anything like me, lemons and raw pineapple. Now, it was feeding time. There was at least one chick in there. Every time a parent left the screaming started: chirp!chirp!chirp!chirp!chirp! They both ran ragged, beaks full of bugs. I watched from my window. Greedy for all signs. I’d pinned my hopes to those chickadees. I’d left my PR job far behind, as disillusioned with environmental politics as I was with home hair color, but no less concerned about the future. Like a woman trying to get over a bad buzz cut, I retreated while things grew out. I stayed home, became a mother and tried to make up for not being politically active for mother nature by helping nature be a mother in my own garden. A nest box. Finally occupied! Hope in my own backyard. My own backyard, where, overtasking, strung out, sleepless me grilled two steaks on the barbie on the cement pad. The plume of smoke rose like a hot pink chemical flume, killing every bird in the nest.

High-Heeled Hope and Clean Cars

2010-04-14T12:55:00.001-07:00

I got some good news this week. The last campaign I worked on, which passed cleaner auto emission standards for Washington state, that campaign just went national. Obama announced that he is adopting the Washington, Oregon and California standards for the country. This is good news, people. This makes me think of reggae legend Jimmy Cliff who breaks down politics in the following way: “Poli means people. And a tick is a bloodsucking parasite. So politics is the people’s ticks.”

And I think Jimmy’s right some of the time. But today, and I hope tomorrow, I think he is wrong. I think we can have democracy and business and wildness and deep green ethics at the very same time. I didn’t always feel this way. Once upon a time, I was pretty firm about the divide. You can put your wild, perfect nature over here and your dirty, inherently evil technology over there. It’s the hobbits vs. Saruman’s tree-eating pits. Although Tolkien always maintained that that was not what he meant. And, anyway, I was never as bad as my ex-roommate Bob, who wouldn’t allow the use of electricity in our San Francisco flat. He wanted everything to be candlelit. But he also shaved off all the hair on his body and walked around moaning the lyrics to his band’s songs, along the lines of “I am walking backward down the spiral staircase of deaaaaaaaath.

So, Bob had other problems.

Anyway, today, I’m feeling pretty darnn giddy. Mix it up! We can do this! Combining the wild with industry can, no must be part of the solution. And there is good reason to hope that our deepest wildest selves, our very genetic programming, can combine with market forces to become a powerful and good thing. More reason than just the new emission standards, I mean. Take, for example, the fact that very bendy ankles made our female ape ancestors super sexy. Did you know that? It’s true. Major turn-on. Female apes with more extendable ankles could forage and leap from tree to tree that much better, provide better for their ape kiddies, Darwin, etc, Darwin. And look, we’ve still got that good old-fashioned feeling! Maybe I’ve just watched too many episodes of “Sex and the City,” but the fact that our ancient bendy ankle lust can become an industry that employs many, many makers of high-heeled shoes…

Well, that makes me downright optimistic.

Thanks, President Obama.! Way to go Clean Car team! More power to you, Manolo!

Pointing to "Yes."

2010-04-05T14:42:00.000-07:00

Like so many other things, parenting turns out to be about tickling my own underbelly first, finding the hollow in my own dragon skin. A hollow like answering “What do you want?” instead of “What do you want to stop?”

Witness the poop scoop. I won’t get too detailed here. But owning dogs involves a certain amount of fecal maintenance and it kept building up because I was trying to get it done in the nap hours, which list of things to-do also included: shower, get dressed, put away laundry, feed self and write. And, if the night was nasty, take a nap. (This list reveals some of the awesome pajama-time perks of working at home. ) So, I decided that what I wanted, – see, I learn, – that what I wanted was to take care of these things with the Fox during the waking hours. So, I took the Fox down into the backyard one day with my own little positive discipline plan.

I figured I had reason to be optimistic. I was thinking of last fall when we gathered fallen chestnuts. He took to it like he had been waiting for it all his short life: he loved the hunting and the way I clapped when he found one and just being outside together. His hand slipped the chestnuts into my pocket one by one like a little warm animals.

I figured scooping would be almost the same thing. You probably see this coming.

Our back yard has a good set up, if poor upkeep. On the outside, fenced beds with fruit trees, raspberries, blueberries and strawberries. In the middle, play chips, which are eminently scoopable. So, I say to the Fox, “Can you help mama find the poop?” He is about three feet closer to the target than I am. This has advantages and disadvantages. Advantages are: He sees stuff I don’t. I’ve got implements with handles and a pail, so that’s all right. But here comes the disadvantage to him being closer than I. It sounds like this:

“Good job, honey! Point, don’t touch. Point, don’t touch. Stop. Stop! StopstopSTOPSTOPSTOP!”

And then we go inside and wash hands.

See, he gets “Point.” And he gets “Touch.” He doesn’t get “Don’t”

Now, he does gets a tiny bit better at holding back, and I get a lot faster. (He also gets a violent, purgative stomach flu a couple days after, one time, when implementation of the plan had been pretty darn good, we got distracted by kicking the ball, and I missed a hand washing, and I forgot to tell his dad and found the two of them in the kitchen, eating with their hands. But, probably, this is a coincidence. Probably not a reason for mommy jail, as some of his other friends got sick the same week. Right?)

Anyway, this got me thinking. Right here, and so many times, “Don’t” is the problem. Well, "Don't" and bacteria. But I am trying to talk about Pointing to Yes. This idea is upheld by many old and new traditions, from Christianity to the teachings of Joseph Campbell to Oprah’s followers of “The Secret.” It's not "Ask not and you shall receive not." It's not "Follow your distaste." It's the hard, hard work of being able to truthfully answer the question, What do you want? And for me, mothering is the hard, hard work of figuring out the "Yes."

Plus handwashing.

At this point, let me just say for the record: I do believe in the power of an appropriate "No.” Parents who can’t say "No" are not employing positive discipline. They are limp. There is a difference, people. But “No,” is a lousy compass for a child or a life, though it is a surprisingly easy one. I tried it for a few years, back when I was doing environmental work. “No” to everything from cars to computer parts. “No” to much of modern life.

Living with that kind of focus put the “mental” in environmental.

So these days, I’m saying “Yes” all the time. “Yes” to city gardening for wildlife. “Yes” to local food. And since, with the Fox, “Yes” has to be physical, I’m asking the Fox to point to things all the time. When he sees a cigarette butt on the sidewalk, and he bends to touch it, I say, “Point with your finger and touch with your shoe.” And he does. When I am trying to dress him, and he’s got a yen for legos instead, I say, “Honey, can you point to your pants?” And it works. He settles. Maybe you’ve caught me in an overly optimistic moment, but I believe that I am teaching him that he can choose his focus. He can live a "Yes" life.

And isn’t that what makes happiness.? Isn’t that a life skill that a mama could be proud of?

(I’m still working on a "Yes" for the scooping. There is a metaphor in this, I know. )

So, dear friend, do you know? What do you want? What are you saying “yes” to?

City Mouse, Country Mouse

2010-03-30T13:46:00.000-07:00

The truth is that I want to live in “the country.” I fantasize about it all the time. I believe in fantasizing; I think it is a powerful and positive tool for all kinds of things... But sometimes it’s also a little bit of a distraction from the fact that the Fox has taken to hollering “help me!” and then whispering “please!” over and over while I am trying to fix, for example, his rice and beans with cheddar and salsa and avocados. (Sounds good, right? I’m eating it too. All praise brown rice and black beans.) Anyway, it’s a little like trying to cook with a schizophrenic car alarm going off five feet away. So I picture us in a little cabin, way out in the woods and I fantasize:

How my dogs would be perfectly behaved because exhausted from running through endless waves of grain.

How time with the wild animals would make me peaceful crunchy earth mama, imparting to the Fox wisdom and empowerment each and every day.

How we would find all this for about $1,000 less a month than our current mortgage, allowing us to continue this one income family experiment while eating out from time to time. And eat rice and beans anyway, but only because we actually do love it.

And really, don’t it look pretty?

Thing is, there are no restaurants way out in the woods.

Also, M points out that you can’t just walk up to the pub or coffee shop in the country. So where the fuck will I go when my peaceful mama self hits the cabin fever wall and I need to just go be a woman in a bar?

You see what the problem is. So, we stay.

And, there is something to be said for staying. One of the wisest people I know, an amazing climate warrior priest named KC Golden told me once that so much of the climate problem comes from all of us moving around all the time. “Trees teach us to stay,” KC said.

But, if I am going to stay, I want animals around. I want trees and flowers. I want frogs.

Enter: Gardening for wildlife.

Look, I realize that I can’t solve all the environ-mental problems my little old self. But having the Fox has made it so important to know that I do something, every day, which makes things better. Something that, if everyone did it, would make things a lot better. Cities are part of the solution. And I say, what if cities were truly beautiful for us and for the beasts? What if that were possible?

And, actually, it’s happening already. I mean, I’ve been working on my own experiment here, including this nice little pond. I’ve got about 300 square feet of front yard that I’ve been cultivating for only a few years, and it is a wildlife condominium. If the hummingbirds and ground beetles (and even tanagers!) get any thicker on the ground, they are going to need a condo association agreement and next thing you know, it’s monthly meetings and consensus process and it’s all downhill from there.

But I mean, it’s happening on a bigger scale. Yesterday, I found out that the National Wildlife Federation (NWF) certified Alki beach, a neighborhood northwest of me, as a “Community Wildlife Habitat” just last fall. Here’s a quote from an NWF article:

"For animals that roam, contiguous yards and common areas that provide habitat help them survive and ultimately reproduce to maintain their numbers," says Roxanne Paul, who coordinates the Federation's habitat programs. For the humans who create those oases, the benefit is a close, everyday connection to animals they would otherwise have to seek out.

Hot damn. They did it. The Alki neighborhood made hundreds of yards and several public spaces wildlife welcome.

This gives me hope that I can be a country mouse and a city mouse.

Okay, I’d still have to exercise my own dogs. Okay, I still have to tell the Fox: “You can wait for your rice and beans in the kitchen quietly, or you can cool your heels in the living room” and deal with the ensuing tantrum. But let me tell you something: his favorite books these days? My field guides. I kid you not. We are spending bunches of time, looking at photos of dragonflies and dark-eyed juncos. And, we are looking out the window at our front yard, seeing the wild. And it’s just one yard. What if, instead of having to choose between all the perks of density – from pubs to transit – and the deep, soul fulfillment of living among the birds and the bees, what if we could have both? And what if it didn’t have to start with an election or a new policy? What if we could transform our cities into a place where the wild was welcome, one backyard at a time? Isn’t that a dream worth dreaming?

And isn’t that dream worth a toast? Say, at the local, walkable pub?

Resources:

Number one most and best resource: "Landscaping for Wildlife in the Pacific Northwest" by Russell Link. I love this book: it's got the wildlife photos that the Fox loves, plus plans for everything from which native plants attract birds and which common garden flowers attract butterflies to detailed plans for a wildlife pond. This book is the bomb, so much so, that you can click right through and get it your hot little self. Everyone should own it, in my opinion.

Another great resource for us out here in WA: the Washington Native Plant Society. Their site has lots of plant porn. But more importantly, it has the data on their upcoming sales: the central Puget Sound one is on May 8 in Bellevue and it is an AWESOME event and a great way to get hard to find native plants, cheap!

National Wildlife Federation Backyard Habitat Program gives you more on the four basics: Providing wildlife with food, water, shelter and a place to raise their young. As a mom, when you read that, doesn't it sound so reasonable? Hint: a wildlife pond, even a few inches deep, does all four. But if that is not your idea of fun, don't despair. A native bush like mock orange provides seed and cover, plus an amazing perfume in oh, about three weeks from now. Throw in a bird bath and a thicket of beautiful roses and you are good. Refer back to resource one. Russell Link is your man, really.

Also, big fun for kids: Nest boxes. The Seattle Audubon Nature Center in Maple Leaf sells good ones. Russell Link (have I mentioned him, yet?) tells you where to put them to create the appropriate romantic conditions for each species. If you are so DIY, Link's book also has plans for building your own nest boxes. And Wild Birds Unlimited sells them on the Web.

And tell me what you think!

Three Reasons I Feel Hopeful

2010-03-23T14:24:00.000-07:00

1. Health care reform has passed.

2. The Fox is now saying both “broken” and “sorry.”

3. I saw what looked like great sex in my front yard.

As I write this, a pair of crows is engaged in foreplay in my neighbor’s evergreen. And, this weekend, I saw a pair of ground beetles in the aforementioned act, (wasn't that what you were hoping for?) which was amazing for two reasons. One, the top beetle – I think it was the lady– had a huge scalloped wafer protruding from her shell. Glistening, if you will pardon the word.

If that was her clit, I want to be a lady ground beetle.

Second, ground beetles are a really good sign. See, I’ve got this little front yard experiment going. How much of the wild can I get into my city yard? I’m not talking blackberry brambles and mosquitoes, here. I’m talking tanagers and dragonflies – which eat a mother lode of mosquitoes, by the way. And ground beetles mean that I’m doing something right, that the invisible loom of life is threaded, that the weavers are at work, that we’re getting started on a really sexy-looking tapestry. Ground beetles mean that life is good here for the wild.

After all, it’s spring. It is time for foreplay and flowers. We’re on the light side now. As of Saturday, light is longer than dark, my friends, and I am hopeful. I am hopeful because today in the playground sand pit, my little 22-month-old future world peace leader bumped another boy and said “sorry” without being asked. I am hopeful because the richest country in the world has finally taken a step toward giving health care to the poor. I am hopeful because after ground beetles, who knows what kind of wild could be on it’s way, right now, into my front yard, my life?

Maybe this is a weird weaving of the personal and the political. But I believe in Gandhi’s “being the change, ” and I’m searching for a way to live that could work for me and the wild and the world. Really work, even though I am a worn-out mom. A way to live that breaks through the plastic isolation that life in the city can sometimes be.

A way to live that makes me feel like a post-coital lady ground beetle, full of the seeds of hope, building the web of life by my acts of pleasure.

So I offer this salute, to hope and the return of the light. Happy Equinox.

Just Say "No" to Oatmeal Air Hockey

2010-03-22T14:24:00.000-07:00

I remember the first time M turned to me with the sweet phrase, “Someday, when we are parents…”

We were spending Thanksgiving weekend at a hippy, heaven-on-earth hot springs resort in the mountains of Oregon. But our non-parent asses had landed square in the midst of a “family weekend.” The kids outnumbered the adults about two to one, which was mostly okay. Except for the rat family. Since I used the word hippy in a positive light already, I feel free to invoke its dark twin now: this family was everything wrong with hippiness. Dirty, smelly and oblivious. Six kids under the age of ten who swarmed into the mess hall to create more noise and chaos than the other 150 people combined. A totally overwhelmed mom who made more threats than she had the bandwidth to carry out, a totally checked out father who was under the impression that being a dude was being a dad.

The aforementioned sweet phrase dropped from M’s lips after we watched Dude Dad finally notice that while breast-feeding, Mom couldn’t prevent the twins from playing air hockey with their oatmeal, her screaming from across the room notwithstanding. Did Dude Dad rise and intervene? Of course not. But he did call out to the oldest, who was, like dad, chilling across the room with his peeps. “Hey little dude, could you help out your mom?” To which little dude replied, “Sorry Dad. I’m not really feeling that vibe right now? So I think I’ll just mellow here.”

Un. Believable.

And M said, “When we are parents, there are going to be some Yeses and some No’s. And the No’s will mean No.”

Which is easier said than done. But, yes Virginia, aka Jocelyn, whose LOL rant/comment on my last post inspired this one, yes, it has to be done.

(btw: We both came home from that weekend with pink eye. Plus, our luggage got sprayed by a civet cat… I don’t know why M won’t go back there with me.)

Anyway. Back to the question at hand: which is how to not be that mom. That mom who never says no, or worse, never means it. I’m there, girl. But I don’t believe it's black and white. I think you push your kids to do the best they can and hopefully you’ve got enough sense not to take a toddler who can’t sit still (like mine) out to dinner, lock him in a high chair for half an hour and then put him in a timeout for throwing his french fries. I’ve seen that one too. Saying “No” is sometimes too easy.

What’s hard is knowing what “the best” is, and setting the bar high enough. What’s hard is setting it too high, and then punishing them for failing. What’s hard is motherhood, which is threading the needle all the time.

Look, I don’t mean to get wishy-washy here. I’ve been to the wedding with the baby who screamed through the whole thing. But I think it comes down to two things:

When you say “No,” mean it.
If you can’t say “No,” and your kid is being a pain in the ass, go home.

The rest is the poetry of setting expectations, and encouraging and teaching, and loving your kids into being their best.

The rest is your business.

Unless you blog about it.

There's Gold in Them There Dry Heaves

2010-03-18T06:57:00.001-07:00

Okay, the “low-low spring sale” mentioned at the start of my last post Hot Cougar Love? That was the stomach flu. I was discounting old material because of epic vomiting. I know that as a writer mama I am supposed to spin this hay into gold, but the hay smelled like vomit and anyway, a girl’s gotta sleep.

I’m back, though. And I have to tell you: there was a hidden treasure in the whole affair. We are in the midst – no, that’s probably too optimistic – we are at the beginning of the oppositional phase. Mother Culture calls it the terrible two’s, and already, I understand why. My friend, L. Carol Scott, who has a PhD and a masters in various developmental disciplines , has a nicer frame for it. She calls it independence, the second “Childhood Treasure.” She says that the Fox is learning that, not only is he separate from me, that he is capable of wanting something different than I want. This, says wise friend Dr. Scott, is akin to waking up one morning and finding fairies in your corn flakes. Okay. She doesn’t say that, that’s my spin. His mind is unshackled: It’s a brave new world, Aldous. There’s Technicolor in those slippers, Dorothy.

There’s gold in them there dry heaves.

You see, we go in for positive discipline, because the science seems to support it and my heart says yes to it. But I am a full-time stay-at-home and though before the Fox I had never dreamed that I could love someone this much, I also long for what friend Michele calls “a competence jones.” The old feeling of knowing that I am rocking the house. Sometimes when the food is flinging and the meltdown is nigh and I am trying to find one more positive alternative, I just feel like saying “Well, what the f#$! do you want? Sweetie?”

Sometimes, on a very bad day, it feels like I am a butler for a chimpanzee with a personality disorder.

It’s the choices. Offering them to him, making them myself. They come at me hard and fast all day. He is climbing the chair. This is developmentally appropriate. Should I stop him now? He is pushing the chair. This too. He is pushing the chair over to the drawer where the knives and matches are. Just kidding. But every new learning frontier discovers some new item that we have to negotiate. It would be easiest to just say no. Not to look for the “yes.” And while, there are no yeses with the knives ( Not until after circus camp, wherein maybe he learns to be the knife thrower, please, all gods and goddesses, not the pretty one in the bullseye..) While there are no yeses with knives, they can be found in most cases. Like yesterday, when the Fox figured out how to open the middle drawer in my Chinese cabinet and got out my eyeglasses. And wanted to turn them into silly putty. And we got through that one. We were both well rested, and no puking for days, so he was able to go there. “We need to put those back,” I said. As soon as I reached for them, the tears. The warm-up whine, which precedes the scream. “Let mama show you,” I said. And wonder of wonders, he went for it. I showed him how to fold the arms, then gave them to him. And he did it! I said, “Let’s put them back in the case in mama’s drawer.” And he did that too! It felt like I had just won the fifty-first senate vote in my old campaign days. He just wanted to succeed at his job.

I know how he feels.

Hence the gold: can you spot it? Friday night, the Fox finally went to bed at 9:30. Then woke up at 9:50 with the dry heaves. Then 10:17, 10:48, 11:12. Each time, I was on my feet and in there before the second heave hit. There was the Fox in the dark, standing at the crib rail, another heave and him crying, waving both hands, “All done! All done!” Make it stop, Mama! Me gathering him up, careful not to squish his middle. “I know, honey. I wish you were all done, too.” I wiped his mouth and held him until it was over and then he passed out, just went limp. (I tended bar for many years; I know how to handle puking and passing out.) And I would lay him back down in his crib and go lay down in my bed, and listen to the monitor for 20 or 30 minutes until it started again. So it went until about 2:30 am.

The thing is: I knew what to do. That’s the gold, reader. I knew that I was “doing the right thing.” Why does “doing the right thing” have such terrible power? It is the hardest thing about parenting. It is a job, and I want to do it “right.” It is a labyrinth and I will never leave it. It is a mission and I want only, sometimes, dear divine mama, sometimes, to know I am giving the Fox what he needs to become him. And the thing about this job-labyrinth-mission is that you hardly ever do. You hardly ever know.

But not Friday. Through the sleeplessness, the laundry and the sad feelings I had for him, wishing I could make it “All done!” there were no choices, there was no uncertainty. One night where I had no rest for my body, but perfect respite for my mind: I had only to offer my love. My wet washcloth and my warm arms.

Hot Cougar Love

2010-03-16T13:54:00.001-07:00

(This post from a piece I wrote in September, now offered in our low, low spring sale!)

There are two definitions of “Cougar.” One is the definition I was looking for today: “The Cougar (Puma concolor), also known as puma, mountain lion, catamount, or panther, is a mammal of the Felidae family, native to the Americas.” I was looking up that kind of cougar on the internet and on the left side of the screen I got the headlines I was looking for: “Cougar spotted in Seattle.” “Discovery Park closed for Labor Day weekend.” Those headlines on the left. And on the right, marching down the sponsored links column: Cougardate.com. Hotcougarlove.com. Married Cougars looking for love!
Here is the other definition of Cougar: “A woman over 40 who is sexually interested in younger men.” From this, I learn that I am only old enough to be a “puma,” a cougar in training – or I would be if I were on the prowl for a younger man. I am thinking about this kind of cougar because it is my birthday. Today, I am a year away from that threshold. I am 39. I am thinking about the other kind of cougar because in my birthday card from my parents, a check to take my fifteen-month-old son, Forest, to Itty Bitty Camp in Seattle’s Discovery Park, which has been closed until Monday… or until they’ve caught the cougar. They have set out traps baited with fish and elk liver (not 25-year-old men.) And I’ve decided, I’m going to spend the money on spring-blooming bulbs and wildflower seeds. Being almost a cougar myself, I know what my son looks like to that other kind.

He looks like a potato chip.

I know what it is like to be stalked by a cougar, at night. Years ago, in the dry mountains of Northern California, I heard the sound of catpaw in the dry leaves circling our ritual fire. A long pause between every step. I know what it’s like to feel the glow of green eyes raise the hairs on the back of my neck and I wonder if he felt it…that little five year-old boy. Because there was another cougar in the news this week, not in Seattle, but in the wilds of northeastern Washington. She attacked the five year old boy when he was hiking with his family. She gripped him in her jaws by the head and neck. That is how they do it. They stalk their prey from behind. Cougars have incisors sized to slip between the neck vertebrae of their particular prey, as all cats do.

My son’s incisors are coming in now, long nights a couple of times in the past few weeks, but a secret gift, to get up in the middle of the night, walk in the dark to him, to feel him fall asleep against me again, as he once did. These days, when he is ready, he turns toward his crib. But last week, his head warm under my chin, his body heavy on mine, I rocked, caring not one bit for loss of sleep. I hold him and I think about the boy in the hospital, with head and neck wounds. He is going to be okay, they say. Maybe this is making me take our cougar more seriously. They say she came down the railroad tracks, down a wooded corridor. We design for this, for wildlife migration. By “we” I mean my tribe. The people who love nature, who strive to live inside it. I bet that other mother loved wildlife, to be hiking in the backcountry. She saved her son’s life by beating the cougar off with a water bottle. I wonder if she loves wildlife still.

I heard a man on the radio talking about the new cougar, the one who came down the railroad to Seattle. He said we should leave it there, learn to live with wildlife and isn’t this my church? I believe in predation. I believe in a food chain that is taller than I. I believe in God in those green eyes.

But this park, our huge park, is in a neighborhood. So is Ravenna Park, where the black bear ambled down into the city last year. The local media called him “Leaf Bearikson.” I am cultivating the wild in my small way, with my local eating, my gardening for wildlife. And they come. I’ve been amazed. I’ve seen tanagers and lacewings, hummingbirds and dragonflies. But look here. The large predators come and say, “I am wild, too.”

“I know this,” I say. I feel my son in my arms. I imagine the house I hope we someday have, in the woods, surrounded by old trees that make green dappled light but also, underneath them, dark places. High wide limbs for dropping down, sudden as a coat you can never take off. A coat with teeth and claws who, if she thrives, will have children of her own next year. I imagine the yard I wanted him to play in. A patch of grass close for when he is tiny. A wave as he disappears into the bramble when he is older, but still small. Still a potato chip. Even at 11, 12, 16, a running boy is a flare of the nostrils, a flex of the claws. But I still love her, our Seattle cougar. And I think this: I would not hide that cage in the sword fern, I would not bait it with salmon and elk. I would build fences, I think, around our yard. I don’t want to childproof the wild. I want to childproof a small place inside it, and call it HotCougarLove! Call it “home.”

Green Witch Column: The Sweet and Dark Power of the Veggie Bin

2010-03-11T14:15:00.000-08:00

I’ve recently gone in for seasonal food. Just some. Just a big, beautiful bin of veggies and fruits, delivered every Thursday, to our side door. It started with planning for a new baby and ended with me, elbow deep in apples, finding the Goddess in my kitchen. Let me explain.

I was eight months pregnant and the idea of how busy we were going to be suddenly became real. Friends signed up to bring us meals in the first new baby weeks because we were going too busy to cook, they said. Let alone go grocery shopping.

So, I ordered a CSA bin. That is, a Community Supported Agriculture bin. I found New Roots Organics on the Web. They deliver a big old Rubbermaid tub full of produce every Thursday. It’s all organic. I kind of have a thing for frogs, so I love that. I love the whole thing. Thursdays are a little like the Christmases of my childhood. I open the bin and the gleaming vegetables and fruits lie there, greens and oranges and reds, dewy and fresh. Like exotic fish, but without the stink. Sometimes there are things I don’t know how to cook, but, like most CSA’s, my bin contains a sheet with recipes for the contents every week. Plus, I discovered splendid table.com, where I can put in an ingredient and get a list of recipes.

Now, not everything in my bin is local. There is a company that has an all-organic and all local bin. That would be purer, more “environmental.” The average fruit or vegetable on an American plate travels 1,500 miles from the farm, and I know that’s not ideal. But the all-local one doesn’t deliver. I’d have to pick it up and with a new baby, that would be the end of that. So let me make a plug here and now for compassion with ourselves! I’ve worked as an environmental advocate for twelve years and I’ve learned to be a little gentler than I used to be. I’m looking for ways to be closer to the magic by eating food that embodies the season. I’ve also learned that "the best is the enemy of the good." (Voltaire) I’ve learned that healing the planet and ourselves is going to be a long, deep ritual and it has to do what good rituals do: build us up, not tear us down. And opening that bin of beautiful, organic, seasonal food every week builds me, inside and out.

The problem comes in October. It’s the apples. Bajillions of them, it seems. Okay, only four a week. Plus four pears. If I were uber-healthy, I’d eat all that fruit. But the weeks go by. Leaves falling, beautiful blue days, bright cold nights. The season of gold. Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday take on a different meaning. Not the start of the week, but the end of the week. The Vegetable Week. It’s a mad race to finish eating the veggies before the next load comes. I manage to use up the squash and the mushrooms, which I have heard are full of moon energy. The greens start getting washed, ribboned and tossed into anything hot. The carrots are grated, chopped and sprinkled cold on everything else. I learn how to make roasted pears. I mash them for the Fox (this is our baby’s middle name) and he gobbles them up.

But the apples. One or two a week don’t get eaten. I store them in a basket of woven willow. With plenty of cool circulation, they keep. Okay, that’s not true. I mean, I do keep them in a woven willow basket but it’s on the counter in the sun so it’s more like hot circulation. I had to compost a few… well, let’s say a half dozen. I hate rotten fruit; I hate the smell, the flies. So, I tossed the apples in the worm bin. Better them than me and the flies, I say.

Anyway, pretty soon it’s Mabon; I smell the crisp air, look for the rise of the harvest moon, and feel the balance. We are at the pivot point between light and dark, between the abundance of now and the scarcity of the long months ahead. I’ve got a pile of apples and four more coming in this week’s bin. That’s the sweet and dark power of the veggie bin. Makes you eat the season. Makes you eat fall, eat the harvest, the sum of a year’s work. So, I give in. Time to count my blessings, time to sort my harvest. Time to make apple bread.

I start the ritual by assembling my ingredients. Add to that list a jar of apple cider and a pot to heat it, a candle, a bowl of rainwater, some beautiful fall leaves. I set up a simple altar on the kitchen table. I put the cider on the top of the stove and turn the heat on medium-low. Light the candle. I pick up the bowl of rainwater and carry it as I walk clockwise around the kitchen to cast my circle of intention. I sprinkle the water as I walk, saying, “Thank you, Mother for the sweetness of your harvest.” I think of all the good things that happened this year. I think of my new son. “Thank you for the Fox.” I sprinkle some more water. The candle flickers. “Thank you for this warm house when winter comes.” I name all the blessings of summer. I have to go around and around; our kitchen is not that big and I speak until my heart is empty. Finally, I say, “bless this house in winter, Mother. Protect us and keep us close to you. Bless this bread that will feed my family.” By now, the apple cider is starting to scent the room, so I turn the heat down to low and pour a cup. And I start to cook.

The recipe is from a book called “Celebrating the Great Mother,” by Cait Johnson and Maura D Shaw. But the practice is older. The feast of the harvest goes back before the pilgrims, probably back before the written word. And the apple does, too. It belonged to Aphrodite, as well as Eve. Was cut open horizontally, to show the five-pointed star that is the Goddess’ symbol. I count my apples as I did my blessings. Eight apples to be peeled and cored and diced. My son is in the high chair behind the yellow kitchen table and the windows show a purple-grey sky. I turn on the oven, which for this feast will be south’s fire.
The apples are earth, as are the flour, the raisins, the baking soda, and the salt. Water is here, and the aroma of spices. Clove air, cinnamon wind. The Fox is satisfied with a toy I have suction cupped to his tray. My kitchen is not the grove, not the gathering of witches and drummers I usually worship with, but the Fox’s coos and his hand on the toy are a rhythm. My hands swim in a sticky perfume of apple juice and I feel the presence of the Star Goddess as surely as I did when Raven called Her out of the night sky. I feel the Green God as surely as I did when Canyon threw up both arms and shouted for the trees in the sycamore wood. This, my friends, this sugar in my hands, this is union. This is ripeness.

I am a witch because of this. The way life is made of elements fit together like puzzle pieces, the way the seasons tell the story of life and death and because I like to feel it, the roaring out of the top of my head when we get together and sing and dance and chant in a circle until the ravens come and roost around our heads in a circle of black-winged celebration caws saying “Yes!” back to us. I am a witch because I want to worship with my life.

“Eating represents our most powerful engagement with the natural world,” says author and local food proponent Michael Pollan. “It transforms the landscape more than any other human activity and it transforms and defines us.”
Yes. Let me be transformed by food, then. Let my worship be an act of love and also an act of chewing. Not obedience, not guilt. Not interested in that. This worship struts. This worship is naked in the leaves. This worship bakes.

This worship is hungry.

The apple bread is ready. I cut a thick piece and put some really good butter on it. Tasting it is like breathing the sweet air of an orchard at dusk. It is good. It feels right and I start looking forward to a year of these seasonal tastes. Tasting that fall is rich, that winter is filling, that spring is fresh and summer is sweet.

I think of English essayist William Randolph Inge, who said, “All of nature is a conjugation of the verb to eat.” My gods are nature gods; the closer my food is to the life source, the stronger my magic. So I come to you, my witchy friends, in this harvest time of the year. The table is set, the magic shimmers on this local, or organic, or seasonal food. Food that carries all Her magic, all Her life force. The apple bread smells awesome. And I say to you: Let us eat.

Ritual Resources
The easiest way to eat seasonally is to go to a farmer’s market and look at what is being harvested in your place in this time. The farmer’s market is also the closest thing to the community commons that I have found in this day and age. To meet the people who grow my food, to see my neighbors, to wear a fabulous new seasonal hat. All of these things make the farmer’s market a good time for me.
There is an amazing rebirth of farmer’s markets around the country and you can find one near you at www.localharvest.org by entering your zip code. That web site will also help you find CSA’s in your zip code. The weekly bin is more of a commitment, but also more of a convenience if, like me, you have a hard time making it to the farmer’s market every week. www.eatwellguide.com will help you find restaurants, bakers, co-ops and more, as well as farmer’s markets and CSA’s.
If the farmer’s market or CSA don’t work for you, don’t despair. You can tap into the root of the season by following some simple principles and by feeling the energy of the season. Look around. In fall, listen to the desire for warmer, heartier foods. Start going down to roots like carrots, sweet potatoes and onions. Spice things with ginger, peppercorns, mustard seeds. In winter’s icy embrace, the warmest foods of all are meats. You can find grass-fed meats of all kinds at http://www.eatwild.com/. Don’t underestimate the importance of grass-fed. That is the ancient cycle. That is the way earth makes meat. If you are vegetarian or vegan, you know the winter lure of brown foods in grains and beans, in spicy sauces and in dense breads. When spring finally arrives, the new green that is everywhere should be on your plate too. Lettuces, parsley, swiss chard. Greens, baby. Greens. The spring bird-song that I hope you are enjoying may also appeal to the predator in you. Spring means new life, and our bodies remember that means eggs. Summer is the explosion of fruits and vegetables: strawberries and summer squash, corn and broccoli and plums. Go crazy. Eat the season. Blessed be.

This piece appeared in my "Green Witch" column in Sagewoman Magazine, Issue 77. If you are looking for ways to bring more ritual, more sacred, more goddess into your life, please check out Sagewoman! I have since switched to Full Circle Farm CSA, which delivers, has pick up points close all over, and allows substitutions!)

Me and Mabel: Good Thieves, Bad Influences

2010-03-09T14:02:00.000-08:00

I am trying to surround my child with “good influ- ences.” Mostly to make up for the bad influence that I sometimes consider myself to be. And this has me thinking about two things: One is choosing a new day care. I am looking for a new place to take the Fox, since I had to fire the last place for letting him play in traffic. One day a week, which is what I think I can cover on my starting freelancer moola. Basically, I’d like a place that’s too far from home to hear the screaming, too close for me to miss the sirens. I’d like a gal about my age who is good with frogs and will teach Forest not to push his peers and bite the dogs. I want this time so that I can write and I want this time so that I can get a little perspective. You see, I’ve found that, when I spend WAY too much time mothering, I start to fall into a little mind trap that I call: Perfect love equals perfect kids.

I know this is horseshit. But influence is a two way street, and when I run out of ideas for ending the hurling of the hummus, when I am not writing and no one is sleeping through the night, I am susceptible to negative influences. I know there is no such thing as perfect, except in fairy tales. And except this morning, when the Fox ran up to me with the book “Saints Alive! A Cattle Drive” about two cows named Mabel and Molly stealing their farmer’s truck. He carries this book to me, saying “Moo!” and settles his butt into the cup of my inner thighs, tucks his hair under my chin. No such thing as perfect except this.

But, I read these books to him and I wonder, which brings us to thing number two on the list of influences: We have the cows stealing the truck. We have “Goodnight, Owl” wherein the squirrels and sparrows and sundry other animals keep owl awake all day. Owls waits until everyone is asleep and screeches them all awake. We have a book about how dinosaurs clean their rooms, but the vastest bit is on the order of “Does a dinosaur stuff all his teddy bears under his bed? Does he put dirty pjs behind the door and throw wet towels onto the floor?” Okay, the answer is no, obviously. “A dinosaur doesn’t, he does all his chores.” But these books are right up there with the toilet training manual that shows the potty as a hat. If his nerves are wiring up right now like Lance Armstrong on the final leg of the Tour, if his little synapses are springing like steroid-laced-sunflowers, (no offense, Lance) does he need these ideas? I ask you. I mean, of the three, he’s got the wet-towel-dinosaur and the midnight-screeching-owl down. And, as a woman who taught herself to drive at fourteen by stealing the truck and taking it out on the highway, I don’t doubt he’s got a cattle drive in him. But he also picks flowers, holds them out to me. He turns the taps on the gas stove when I am not looking so that I come home a house that is one matchshy of an inferno. But he helps me unload the dishwasher. I am a writer. I am a writer. I need to play these words like Yo-Yo Ma need to play the cello, even if I am closer to the third seat in the high school band. I am a writer. But look here. Look at this child who says “Snuggle” and “No!” with equal fervor. He is becoming. All around him, the visible world leaves an invisible impression.

This is how it is to be a mother. There is no capital “M.” I am a mother like I am a writer, like I am, every night between 7:30 and 8, a dishwasher. I carry all of me into it. I try harder with Forest than I do with the dishes. But I am still me. Impatient, creative, laughing, sarcastic, restless, friendly, alone. I try to leave sarcastic at the door. The truth is, I wouldn’t give care of Forest over to almost anyone I know. Including me. And I need time. He is, in my mind, a native tree frog in a city pond, sensitive and changeable. Or he was. Until he started biting the dogs.

Speaking of negative influences.

He does this thing when he is mad. He takes his Mr. Jekyl potion and gives me this look. This hairy eyeball. His eyelids sort of flatten out and he bares his teeth, he puts prune pits into his pupils. He says, “I hate you” with a look. And I, if I am not too sleepless and have written lately, I sing “the wheels on the bus go round and round.” And they do. And, mostly, whether I am perfect or not, he gets on board.

2010-03-02T13:53:00.000-08:00

Reason 1. My friend Max asked to post my writing to his blog, to which friend Eve said, "That's cool, but get your own already."
Reason 2. Dream writing job that I would be perfect for required blog.
Reason 3. Made mamablog-related vow two months ago. And just because I've never kept a new year's resolution before... well, see reasons 1 and 2.

So here we are. And, since we are here, let's talk about YouTube and the Fox, which is what we will call my almost two-year-old son. We have so far avoided what the pediatricians call "screen time" and what so many mom's who are just as desperate (and way more mentally healthy than I am) call: The Babysitter. I am talking about TV. I am talking about Owls sinking their talons into fuzzy little mice, eviscerating said mice and eating them whole. I am talking about video wildlife, pixelated red in tooth and claw.

You may have guessed from the moniker that I am trying to raise a little boy who loves and understands the wild even more than I do... in fact – and I've never said this out loud before – I sometimes fantasize that if I take him outside often enough while his little nerves and nodules are wiring up, he may learn to be multilingual. After all, they say that languages are easy to pick up at this age. They say sign him up for Spanish or Chinese. And, forgive me for being just a little bit wind-in-the-willows here, but couldn't he learn, for example, what crows are saying? What trees mean?

And, really, couldn't he do some of this through YouTube?

Because, when I said that we've avoided screen time, I wasn't counting YouTube wildlife videos. Just a couple. A couple a day, sometimes. But then we act them out. As in this theatrical review of an amazing Australian “ water holding frog,” which, according to National Geographic, buries itself in the mud for two years or more. So. Picture us laying on the bed with a plush frog stuffed animal. "The frog buries himself in the mud" (inching frog under the blanket) "And he goes to sleep" (Holding down blanket while the Fox impatiently tries to move this show along) "And then it rains and he," (favorite part coming up here) leaps out. He LEAPS out." And much leaping ensues.

Cute, right? The first fifty times. So then I show another, different video, ‘cause mama needs a change of pace. And thus it begins. He loves it so much it’s scary. Points at the laptop and shouts “Hog! Hog!” Or whatever.

On the one paw, I want him to learn about and love animals and frankly between the Seattle rain and the general lack of close encounters with the wild in the city, this is pretty awesome. Also, it solves the problem posed by lack of the concept of “gentle.” Even when we handle the worms in the garden, the casualty rate is high (see my piece on friend Max's blog. He also writes great short stories) and I can’t help it, I wince.

And on the other paw, we are walking on the wild side on YouTube. What's a wild mama to do?