The Not-Ever-Still Life

The chronology of fulfillment

noreply@blogger.com (Robin (noteverstill/noteversewing)) — Tue, 09 Dec 2014 02:02:00 +0000

For as long as they have been able to speak, if a kid asked ever what time is it? I always gave the same answer, having nothing to do with the time.

This is, in truth, not even that good of a song, nor one I particularly love. But it is a song that was out exactly the time in my own collision of coming of age and noticing song lyrics and it is permanently embedded in my brain. So the answer is always 4:30, whether it is or it isn't.

I have only a small arsenal of being purposely annoying to my littles, but this is a core tool in it. And it makes them motivated to learn to tell time.

I'm not such a musically oriented person, but some songs do that to you, don't they?

source

But then the day came, as it had to, since it was clearly destiny. The Day. The one we'd all trained for since the moment, practically, when they each were born.

May I present: First Grade Homework.

Also known as: Validation.

The inherent split personality of being almost five

noreply@blogger.com (Robin (noteverstill/noteversewing)) — Sun, 07 Dec 2014 23:41:00 +0000

We're stopped a traffic light. It's dark outside, we've been in the car awhile, and his sisters aren't with us. This is the Dreaded Scenario: he has to entertain himself.

He has his pant legs pulled up over his knees. Boredom prompts creativity and appendages become toys. He pulls his sock as high at it goes. It's not an interesting sock. Navy, knit, undoubtedly, due to its gender-neutral tone, multi-handed-down. It has that no-color fuzz at its surface of a thousand washes, a thousand kid yanks, a thousand moments of parents patiently or not corralling toes within its stitches. Its color goes deeper as he pulls the fibers from each other, exposing parts rarely seen by light or air. He watches the gradient come and go and he pulls and releases.

Almost five is an age ripe for wonder. He pulls yet further and sees through the latticework tiny quadrants of his own skin. Look, Mama! My leg says 'hi' here and here and here and here and here and here and here! He rubs the stretched sock (poor sock) and the texture of its ribs so ribbed now to their utmost. For at least a moment, he's found something that captivates him completely.

Feel my leg, Mama! Feel this! I reach back absentmindedly just before the light turns green. We're almost home and I'd like to be there. I rub the sock, thinking this is its last glory, and the leg within, thinking I care for it more than any pair of socks, and this is a sacrifice worth a peaceful ride home in this awful traffic. "I feel, sweet boy. Feels like you! Feels like love." I make the left turn.

Almost five favors scatology over sincerity at every opportunity. No! It feels like BUTT! Ha ha ha! I said BUTT!

And that's my boy.

Busted.

noreply@blogger.com (Robin (noteverstill/noteversewing)) — Mon, 01 Dec 2014 04:15:00 +0000

We went away for Thanksgiving and (I fell completely off the blogging bandwagon) and came back this afternoon and I headed out to Target for some provisions, like you do. Then:

A stray chunk of concrete was sitting in my path as I pulled through an intersection I've crossed a thousand times. And I've always wondered: are they a problem, those rogue chunks? And I've always wondered: where do they come from? And I still don't know the answer to the latter, but the former is a yes. They are the original purveyors of road rage and they rise up and take bites. And you thought road rage was a human trait. The road, it rages. At us.

We've spent much of the past two months juggling cars as my geriatric station wagon has been complaining of its aching bones, most recently by declaring seatbelt mutiny. The back seat's middle belt walked off the job and wouldn't engage, meaning I couldn't put three kids in the car. Getting it fixed was a dedicate-a-day proposition, as it involved pulling out the back seat bench. It was a calendaring feat that we avoided for as long as possible, mostly by trading cars whenever one of us needed to be able to drive all three kids. My old lady wagon spent a lot of time in airport parking lots lately, as the lovely husband took to driving her on his way out of town, and I spent a lot of time helming his minivan. I have no love of his minivan, but as winter comes I do not argue its tushie warmers.

The only way to catch our flight on Tuesday without stranding a car anywhere involved me driving the lovely husband's minivan to work crazy early while he drove my wagon to drive kids to school and to the garage where finally she got her seat belts back in working order. She got home just for us to abandon her to six days in Boston without her, and now we're back, And in my first three miles behind her wheel again, she did let me know just how she feels.

But the joke's on her because for that little stunt and an undriveable wheel, she got herself towed straight back to the garage. And we're sharing a minivan again tomorrow, and I shall glory in its tushie warmers and remind myself that like with petulant toddlers, we should not take too personally the tantrums of the old and infirmed. Cranky car.

And what does one do while waiting for a tow truck? Try to catch up on blogging, of course. Did you miss me?

Third grade project work

noreply@blogger.com (Robin (noteverstill/noteversewing)) — Mon, 24 Nov 2014 03:56:00 +0000

We've had a fourth kid all weekend (luckily I think she's fantastic). She should have just moved in. She was here almost all day yesterday and we're rounding 8pm and she's still here today. The giggles, they have been a rolling sound machine. The project has covered the whole dining room table and spread to the floor and there are toothpicks and tissue paper everywhere.

I have seen this project in the school halls for four years now, and never knew just what was involved:

-the whole cardboard collection from the recycling bin
-a million hours
-a zillion laugh breaths
-all the toothpicks
-all the glue
-all the brown paint
-all the two different rolls of duct tape
-the demise of one pair of scissors

I should be grateful it didn't lend itself to glitter.

The thing is due December 2nd but there's extra credit to be had for bringing it in early. It was fun to see E work with one of her peers, but based on the state of the dining room, I'll be glad for this project to leave the house tomorrow.

Preschool Thanksgiving lunch

noreply@blogger.com (Robin (noteverstill/noteversewing)) — Fri, 21 Nov 2014 20:46:00 +0000

For today's lunchtime adventure I went downstairs to eat with G and his class. The school brought in a whole catered meal but G wouldn't try any of it, not even the corn, because it was off the cob and he let us all know emphatically that he does not like his corn in pieces. It's all supposed to be on one holding piece for biting. That's not good corn. That's yucky broken corn.

So he ate his regular chicken nuggets and no corn and was plenty thankful. The class said a benediction over the food together:

We love bread.
We love butter.
But most of all...
We love each other!
You.
May.
Eat.

So I was thankful for their secular adorableness as much as for spending lunch with my boy and for my double serving of yucky broken corn.

And then he declared real Thanksgiving over, now that we'd eaten together, and next week doesn't have to happen. So happy Thanksgiving, and if you have any trepidation about next week's festivities, I have in proclaimed that you do not have to partake.

Parent-teacher conferences

noreply@blogger.com (Robin (noteverstill/noteversewing)) — Thu, 20 Nov 2014 04:39:00 +0000

My lunch break today was a walk downstairs and outside and in the other door to meet G's lead teacher for our conference. I love these meeting because I think of my kid in a certain kind of way: is he going to throw up again, is he outgrowing those shoes and where is his left mitten, how is he feeling about kindergarten next year and does he really understand what it means to go to school in a different place?

His teachers think of him as: can he count to 17 and then pick out 17 individual objects to correspond to the identified number, his handwriting would probably improve on a faster curve if he would settle which hand it is he writes with, he's a nurturer to the other children in the class. "He's a lover, not a fighter," his teacher said to me today, summing up how he'll show affection through spontaneous hugs or hand-holding while the boy closest to him in age and de facto counterpart will show affection through instigating some tussling. The curriculum provides guideposts to development and we can talk about his progress not in the intuitive shapeless way I love him but analytically. It's not how I naturally view much of anything so I love when it's all laid out so cleanly for me to ponder with wonder.

I love the view of this kid through another person's eyes, through another measuring schema. It catches flecks of who he is that I don't pick up on my own and suddenly he's more realized, and even more interesting than how I thought of him before.

The teacher, whom I've known since she was fresh out of high school and helping in the infant room, filled me in on all the other details, too - how she's close to finishing her degree and what she wants to do next, how the boyfriend of forever is talking marriage. She's watched me, since the day in May 2006 when I walked away from a three-month-old E, figure out motherhood. I've watched her meet the challenge of adulthood.

She smiled and said it can't end here, and if she takes the boyfriend seriously one day and agrees to marry him, maybe she'll call the girls up to be bridesmaids. I told her she best not whisper that idea until it's a sure one, or my girls would be clamoring to go dress shopping tomorrow. No matter what, I said, the noteverstills will be there to celebrate.

The strength of this daycare facility is in how fiercely it loves my kids but not in its successful adherence to paperwork rituals, and so I can't really predict that I'll have another parent-teacher conference in the spring or summer before G leaves forever (and so do I). Or it'll be a pro forma thing as we discuss graduation plans and sign exit paperwork. And maybe she'll wear an engagement ring by then and maybe I'll come to terms by then that work has been such a cozy place for me for so long because it's an extension of home, with my literal family members and surrogate family members cocooning what's most important to me under the same roof where I type and talk all day. And come next August, it becomes just a workplace, losing through no fault of its own that which makes it most special to me, and I have to close old chapters and figure out the outline for new ones, and do so without my network of teachers downstairs setting out the guideposts.

Fears forgotten

noreply@blogger.com (Robin (noteverstill/noteversewing)) — Wed, 19 Nov 2014 04:45:00 +0000

I gave a presentation at work today to a couple hundred people through the strange experience of live webcasting. There were maybe 80 people watching from the same room as me and everyone else was at one of our field locations, watching via video and sending in comments and questions through internet chat and telephone.

When I was selling myself toward this job before it quite properly existed about a year ago at this time, I remember surprising myself by volunteering that I don't mind public speaking, and then surprising myself again by realizing in my head that I wasn't embellishing. I really don't mind public speaking, and when did that happen?

(In my office we speak about Myers-Briggs personality type a lot, and I find the stuff fascinating. I'm an INFP. You?)

So I gave this presentation today. It was about 25 minutes and to our agency's managers and supervisors, all of whom surely have been members of that cohort longer than I. It went well and it was well received and I finished tired in the way I always feel after engaging with lots of people, but not depleted in the way I used to feel when such an action would have terrified me.

And this is so interesting to me, because I was the shyest kid you ever did meet and growing into adulthood I went to great lengths to avoid public moments. And then somewhere in the time of the past decade where I had a quiet job that demanded very little visible attention, the thing that most terrified me ceased to terrify me when I wasn't paying it any mind.

I had to catalog other major changes, things I would have described as foundational to my personality, and I can only come up with two: I no longer completely loathe tomato sauce (although I'd still choose anything with a cream sauce or butter sauce or pesto or no sauce over something tomato-based). And I'm not as bothered by the color yellow as I used to be.

I still can't bite into a water chestnut, for what that's worth, and I'm trying to think of another thing that terrified me but nothing ever scared me as much as the spotlight. And I wonder if maybe for this disappearance of fear I have you to thank, letting me write to you here steadily for seven years, facelessly, just characters to a screen and that you find my words after the fact is confidence-boosting without confrontation or real-time assessment. You're a very reassuring group, you know. I never found any blog trolls, just love and support.

So I ask with a smile, what else can you fix for me?

Despondent aggressive

noreply@blogger.com (Robin (noteverstill/noteversewing)) — Tue, 18 Nov 2014 04:33:00 +0000

(vs., you know, passive aggressive.) That was the weather today. The emboldened storm that covered so much of the country in snow just mauled us with rain, but it was a mean rain, relentless, hostile. It wasn't sit-on-the-porch-and-smell-the-pretty rain. It was I-need-a-person-sized-ziploc-bag-with-an-airhole rain. And we were in it all morning. The boy was sick today, not sick-sick, but emphatically not-going-to-school sick, so we went to the pediatrician who couldn't see us until 10:30 so we dropped off the girls and got gas and went to Trader Joe's and Target and the butcher and the pediatrician because what else does one do between dropping off the girls and 10:30?

Now we have a prescription and the temperature has dropped twenty degrees but the rain has stopped. I'm not much for dreading Mondays, but in the Monday dreaders camp I feel an affinity tonight. This was a Monday but we got through it.

Alexander and the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad angle

noreply@blogger.com (Robin (noteverstill/noteversewing)) — Mon, 17 Nov 2014 04:11:00 +0000

We took the kids to see a movie today, because the sky looked like winter and I loathe winter so we paid money to coop them up in a more spacious indoors than our own indoors. The problem with indoor living is that certain little humans can't hold still much, and indoors demands the dignity of a little holding still, so I watched the movie through the crook of an elbow like this:

The trick to movies with that small human used to be to go at naptime, and he'd curl up in my lap, and I'd have a snuggly warm movie experience.

But now the trick is to go anytime, but go early enough to get the front row seat before the cut-through, the one with the railing overlooking the (thankfully for us) vacant wheelchair spaces, and let the boy stand up at the railing for two hours, because sitting is just asking too much.

The problem with movies in the winter and a standing boy is I don't get my two-hour snuggle. And I do so hate not being warm. So this vortex thing needs to go away before I start carrying a Snuggie in my purse.

Love is a resource-hogging, patience-busting thing

noreply@blogger.com (Robin (noteverstill/noteversewing)) — Fri, 14 Nov 2014 21:29:00 +0000

The daycare director keeps a drawer of stickers at her desk and every child knows that. Many children say goodbye to her and happily accept a sticker on the way home.

You know whose child doesn't let it be that simple?

Each evening, sweet Mister asks for a sticker. For himself. He affixes it to the back of one hand. Then he asks for one for me, which I may not decline, because I would be denying him the pleasure of sharing generously of his sticker-acquisition talents. And then he asks for one for each girl (one at a time) and for his daddy.

And only after he's wearing a sticker and I'm wearing a sticker and he's wearing three more stickers can we leave.

On "vacation"

noreply@blogger.com (Robin (noteverstill/noteversewing)) — Thu, 13 Nov 2014 04:38:00 +0000

So then the lovely husband had to be in Boston, and undoubtedly the reason Tuesday I was fretting about sleeping through an obligatory snuggle was because I knew the opportunity for this particular mom-failure was looming in the form of Wednesday.'

Guess what happened.

When the lovely husband is out of town, it's always for work. The man works a lot of work. He's one of those thrives-on-work uber-successful really young always taking on bigger challenges types. Like how when he was hired at this place it was to create a new program, a big whole program, and he did that and runs it and then two years ago realized it could have a little-brother program, so he created that, too, and his thing and the other thing were identified as one of the five key initiatives of his place, so now he runs both of them and with a spotlight (which he loves, because it makes him work harder, even if he doesn't say so) and it requires staff in offices all around the country and he's always going to those offices and one of them is Boston.

So he's away, working like a crazy worker workaholic, and G has taken to calling these business trips vacation. As in: will Daddy be home from his vacation tomorrow?

And it's half sweet and I picture the lovely husband on a sun-warmed beach with a pineapple drink in his hand; and it's half infuriating because honey ain't nobody getting any relaxation going on with this scenario.

So I succeeded in the snuggle and the snuggle and the other snuggle, I got to it. And then I did, I fell asleep, on the edge of a twin mattress. My toes were cold because I'm not allowed much blanket, but rest assured my earlobe was toasty warm. The lovely husband was enjoying an uninterrupted night's sleep in a large child-unencumbered bed somewhere in Boston and I was teetering on the edge of robot sheets, as the mama who hasn't taken vacation is called to do.

All of which is to tell you vacation's over, it's back to work, and here that means posting to my blog every day in November, and did you think I missed Wednesday? I did not, because now I have posted this to Wednesday. It's my blog post and I'll backdate if I want to.

(...backdate if I want to, backdate if I want to...)

And you can't stop me.

The first snuggle is the best snuggle

noreply@blogger.com (Robin (noteverstill/noteversewing)) — Wed, 12 Nov 2014 03:32:00 +0000

The older girl had a terrible headache and I got her to bed before the other two and she said are you coming to lie with me? and there is no answer to that but 'yes,' because she has become Of An Age where sometimes she just wants to read herself to sleep and swiftly fly the years, you know, such invitations must be regarded with the esteem they are due. And an end-of-day snuggle is filled with several whispered last stories, a sleepy girl, the comfort of a small warm body, and stillness.

Of course I fell asleep.

The younger two came upstairs for bed, and the boy was zonked from visiting day at the girls' school, and he fell asleep almost instantly, although there are nights when he queues up for snuggles; and I read to L and we turned off her lights and she whispers confessionals in the dark, her thoughts she doesn't otherwise give attention, and she is the best fall-asleeper, 60 to 0 with no warning, words, blink, light snores. But her body is yet smaller, so strong by day and featherlight at night and I don't want to disturb her. I lie there in the rhythm of her breaths, and of course I fall asleep.

And such are the nights, two snuggles, two sleeps, and the lovely husband awakes me, spins the bedroom rotation, awakes me again.

(And such are the other nights when there is no present lovely husband, he of both the snuggle qualifications to share the work load and of the man-of-steel ability to stay awake through said snuggles; and I fake-snuggle in quick succession, two minutes and out two minutes and out two minutes and out, nobody satisfied, nobody feeling a perfect drop into slumber; all because I panic that I'll fall asleep and not address the next queued-up kid.)

So I had two power naps, and came downstairs to eat the rest of the dinner that I didn't finish because of the snuggle-starting terrible headache, and then the zonked boy started crying. bad dreams, too sweaty in his footie pajamas, the ones he wears every day now, never mind it was 70 degrees today he needs his footies, and he always has nightmares when he sleeps hot. So we change him to a t-shirt and he climbs in bed and scoots way over and says I need your ear, which for him is the part of snuggle that matters. And then I am banished, penalized for earrings, and asked to return with accessible lobes, and again I climb in a small person's bed.

And a third power nap per evening is not a thing, so this is the point where either I fall into a deep sleep, nullifying the concept of 'evening,' or I lie there fake-patiently, just waiting waiting waitingwaitingwaiting for the distressed child to find a path back to dreams. The last snuggle is not the best snuggle unless I renounce my own bed and settle in, but that's not really ever a good plan, for there are things to be done and blog posts to type, so I balance on the edge of a twin mattress composing a narrative about the hierarchy of snuggle quality.

How to Monday

noreply@blogger.com (Robin (noteverstill/noteversewing)) — Tue, 11 Nov 2014 04:55:00 +0000

Tomorrow is Veterans Day, which for the adults and the boy-child in this family means a day off, and which for the girl-children means school day, but not just any school day, Visiting Day, which is when the adults and boy-child find they do not actually have any day off at all but sit attentively for many hours in first and third grades, respectively, switching on and off so as not to miss a thing.

But that's tomorrow. Today was Monday. And whatever you think about Mondays is not what that boy-child thinks about Mondays. And whatever you think

about Mondays
or about children who wake up before the alarm clock
in their parents' beds because they always wander in
and jump up smiling four inches from your face

the boy-child pulled my eyelids open to say with complete delight it's Monday!!!!! and that's how I woke up but I couldn't be sad because who could be sad in the face of so much Monday-based happiness? Monday-based happiness is a 6am unicorn, but Monday in preschool is show-and-tell day, and you can't argue with the goodness of that.

So today was Monday, and it was show-and-tell day, and it was Monday with a whiff of Friday, because everyone at work had that jumpy sense of not coming in tomorrow.

And that's how you Monday.

Tomorrow is Tuesday, which as we've established is fake-day-off day, Visiting Day, but it's all good because the girls are super excited. The real trouble is Wednesday, which will play like Monday, and won't be friendly at all. But we don't have to think about that yet, just boys who wake up smiling at the glory of what could be at the beginning of a Monday.

I beat the bridge

noreply@blogger.com (Robin (noteverstill/noteversewing)) — Mon, 10 Nov 2014 04:05:00 +0000

That was the tag line: Beat the Bridge.

This bridge:

source

The Chesapeake Bay Bridge is more than four miles long, and until now, was the thing that always stood between me and the beach. For anyone in central Maryland that bridge is iconic as the path to vacation.

Today I crossed it without a car.

Now it's not just another bridge I've crossed by car.

The real value of butternut squash ravioli

noreply@blogger.com (Robin (noteverstill/noteversewing)) — Sat, 08 Nov 2014 16:55:00 +0000

I went out tonight, real grownup out out, met some friends for dinner, talked a lot, laughed more, commiserated, encouraged, lamented. It was wonderful.

The lovely husband and I don't go out enough, and I don't go out enough like this, either, friend time and story swapping. It's too easy to be too tired to go anywhere, or to think about how the kids really go to sleep better with both parents home and they so often have only one due to the lovely husband's unrelenting travel schedule. It's so easy to default to not going anywhere. And my overtaxed brain does need its quiet hours, so even when I want to go I often don't want to go at all.

So tonight was fantastic, as such a night almost always is if I convince myself out the front door. Hey, friend with the birthday excuse who reads here sometimes, thanks for the impetus. I'm consider myself very fortunate to be in your circle.

And all the rest of you? The ones where you also say to me and I to you: we should get dinner sometime soon? You should call me. That should happen.

(By which I mean: text me. You know I don't answer the phone.)

Crowning glory

noreply@blogger.com (Robin (noteverstill/noteversewing)) — Fri, 07 Nov 2014 09:30:00 +0000

It has been a very important week in the noteverstill house. Remember when a certain someone gave herself a drastic haircut?

And then another one?

It's been yeeeeaaaaaarrs. But that certain someone is once again sporting a lovely, patiently-grown PONYTAIL.

You never knew a hair elastic could hold so much pride.

Peppa's curse

noreply@blogger.com (Robin (noteverstill/noteversewing)) — Fri, 07 Nov 2014 04:39:00 +0000

The boy-child is in love with a British cartoon called Peppa Pig, which features Peppa Pig and her brother Georgie Pig and their parents and their adventures and their lovely Britishisms. There are delightful implications, like how when we go to the grocery store and rather than asking to ride in the cart, G will ask if he can ride in the trolley.

And then there's this: with great admiration in his voice, a reference of great esteem being made, G has taken to calling me Mummy Pig.

image source

Underbelly

noreply@blogger.com (Robin (noteverstill/noteversewing)) — Thu, 06 Nov 2014 04:03:00 +0000

In my building at work, there are sections of the main hall that have floor-to-ceiling windows looking out onto the world. Sometimes I get up, just to stand, to stretch, to walk, to leave my computer, and I go to the water fountain to refill my water bottle. The fountain is in the hall so I leave my suite and I see the real world, the one I sort of forget when I'm in front of my computer.

From my fourth-floor hall, the trees are down below. They were particularly luminous today, golden and umber resplendent on the approach to their season finale against and thick gray sky. It was the color of trees against sky that pulled me to the window but it was the ladybug that kept me there.

On the other side of the glass a ladybug was walking up the surface, an inch and a world away from my face. I watched its soft side undulating to move in straight lines, six hips?, maybe? working in pairs to go a distance. I don't know if they're called hips on a ladybug. I don't know how to describe what I'm seeing even as I see it accomplishing its task right before me. I watch its tender parts exposed to me, feeling safe against glass to it, and then it lifts its back wings, the uninteresting ones, and then its front wings, the dotted pair we love, and in the time I have to think that I never even remember about a ladybug that it has those other wings, its gone for places I'll never see. It was wonderful, its motion, even as I know I barely understand it.

It made me think of graduate school, in people-years also an inch and a world away, when once I was trying to describe something about heightened perspective in shallow sculpture. My professor thought I had an interesting idea, possibly a new one, which is the holy grail of graduate school, but she and I couldn't find enough supporting literature to develop fully the idea I wanted to express, and on my own I couldn't identify or create the vocabulary. That's a whole other story, how I left at least two good ideas in graduate school and walked away, and how I'm completely okay with that, and how that's a perspective anathema to a successful graduate school experience and how my thesis advisor and maybe even my parents didn't understand that I was content not to pursue any farther, I had other interests pulling me in other directions. And maybe only now, where I find myself occupying a fairly high-profile position at a name-famous institution, does the played-out history support the confidence I put into my intuition that my path to happiness (as includes, luckily, success) wasn't the most obvious one before me.

The sculpture was Donatello's Annunciation, and I'm not even Christian but I have a serious thing for Annunciation scenes, and Donatello's is my favorite, and years later when the lovely husband and I were in Italy and art history was already a thing of my past, I cried when I found it in Santa Croce and stood before it. I cried then for its magnificence, and for finding myself on a pilgrimage I hadn't known I was making, and for how incredible it is how much there is to know and how little I do. The scope of potential always humbles me, and standing under my favorite Donatello after scrutinizing its image for years and being right there and still not summoning the words to describe what I now was sure I was seeing -- it was fantastically gratifying, in its beauty as a piece and in confirming my humility before the greatness of ideas.

And then I thought about this today, watching the ladybug whose parts and movement I can't describe, and lots of people, I know, feel scared to feel small in the world, and I love it. I find it safe, and somehow thrilling. It's reassuring to know I'm tiny and ignorant because that means there are a million good choices out there, not one best choice, even if others see a clear path, a lot of ways to do a thing or get from here to there or explore and discover.

That's the sort of thing I find reassuring regarding work, specifically, where I'm trying to build out an idea and I don't have a path to follow and I do have lots of support but also lots of scrutiny. And I don't know what to call the ladybug but I know to watch him fly and I never learned how to describe Donatello's shapely juxtapositions but I knew enough to get my idea advanced enough to leave it with someone else who could spend (and enjoy doing so) more time pondering it and I remember every part of my career from graduate school then to the fourth floor today has come on the confidence of following the non-standard choice, four times, now, I think, from there to here.

And it was just a ladybug, just a water break, and there goes my brain connecting dots and it's a thing I used to think was a little strange about me, this internal spigot that won't ever just relax, and now it's a strength and makes me arguably as good as anybody at shaping the thing that demands to be built out and it's with a lightness that I return to my computer, glad for the moment in which I reminded myself that I am comfortable with there being a lot to learn, a lot I don't know.

image source

Cropped image of The Annunciation by Donatello, c. 1435. The piece is not big and is positioned on the church wall at higher than a person's head, so it's really difficult to photograph. This isn't even my photo, though I have plenty of awkward Annunciation photos of my own, but we were there in 2004. Those images are on film and I'd have to scan them. Can you even imagine?

And if you really want your poor head to explode thinking about how something was carved 600 years ago in unnatural proportions so it would "read" well from beneath and how that purposeful distortion makes the very modern dependence on photography unreliable, as photography expects a perspective of its own, let me show you how my brain connects Donatello to a contemporary quilt artist named Luke Haynes. That has nothing to do with anything, but I wouldn't have been there to notice the ladybug if I didn't always love how small and bright the trees look from the fourth floor.

This is a meager solitude

noreply@blogger.com (Robin (noteverstill/noteversewing)) — Wed, 05 Nov 2014 04:28:00 +0000

When I was a child in New York and I'd walk with one of my parents down to the church two blocks over to vote, the air was as sacred in the voting booth as in a sanctuary. The booth was a whole structure, enclosed. The curtain pulled thick and dark. You were alone with your political conscience (and your observant daughter). The metal levers registered your ballot selections with satisfying, official clicks, not unlike a manual typewriter. They glinted, too, in the single-bulb light. You stepped out, your citizenship renewed through this essential act, not unlike maybe a baptism. You walked back home and the November air was always cold and crisp and clean and good, because this was democracy in action, and toggling levers was righteous.

I went by myself to vote today, depositing first children at home so I might have just an act (just one) of silence. There is no booth, not in Maryland and maybe not anywhere. There is no church. I vote in an elementary school cafeteria. There are no levers. I swipe a touch screen. There is no sacred space, just two plastic walls, not even walls, wall-lets, reaching from my waist to my shoulder.

I'm a liberal in a liberal county in a liberal state and sometimes I think my vote is a foregone conclusion, but still I go, though it's less satisfying, there are no levers to affirm what I've done is serious and important. I go for duty now but it's a meager glory and a meager solitude and now we stay up late watching the returns and our state isn't a sure thing after all, and even the unshiny act proves interesting and important.

Falling back and flying forward

noreply@blogger.com (Robin (noteverstill/noteversewing)) — Tue, 04 Nov 2014 04:40:00 +0000

1) Eastern Standard Time is a thug in a lonely alley. I left work under cover of stark darkness. Last week I had rosy skies and tonight I was a fugitive, crawling away and wishing for starlight. The LED lamp lights are so cold, so white, and they backlight the maple leaves, glowing orange in a defiant argument of color. Soon they'll be gone, too, and I'll plan my tailspin of seasonal affective disorder, but winter's not hear yet, just my dread of the thing. I make very little distinction between the two. Either it's summer, or it's not, and as of this week daylight itself has abandoned me.

2) The enrollment process for 2015 kindergarten opened up last week, and today I submitted G's application. Whoa.

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Yeh don' know what yeh are?

noreply@blogger.com (Robin (noteverstill/noteversewing)) — Mon, 03 Nov 2014 04:01:00 +0000

The eldest wild has always been the cautious type, as you, dear reader, certainly know, and protective of her tender heart. So when yesterday evening she announced she was ready to begin reading the Harry Potter books, I was glad to have this already thought out, and I suggested that I believe she might be ready for the first three. (I have not maternal fortitude enough to hold that girl's heart intact through losing Cedric, let alone her calm through Voldemort's rebirth.) I was surprised, though, because she's been expressing interest for more than a year, and always insisted she couldn't, she wasn't ready at all.

(I have serious concerns, too, that at the end of this month I'll be telling you how I was forced to do my best to do so, how she'll read and read and read and not be able to stop at the front cover of four.)

She was serious, too, and started pulling from my favorite section of bookshelf.

She read about a third of the first book yesterday and was falling in love, both with the book itself (because how could she not?) and with her cultural awakening. She's heard reference to everything therein, and she was joining a common language. In the completely un-self-conscious way little kids speak and she less and less frequently does, she said at bedtime last night, I just need to read all the Harry Potter books and watch the Star Wars movies and I'll be a cool kid.

I had three immediate reactions: you're already so cool, kid. And: you don't need those cultural markers to be cool. And: I totally get it -- sharing the common language does feel cool. So I didn't say much. I just gave her a squeeze.

She read a bit more this morning and then she struggled to put the book down when we had to leave, but she had plans to meet friends at the nearby indoor rock-climbing place. She can't read in the car -- like her father, it makes her feel sick -- but she brought the book for the ride, anyway, just to have it in her hand. On the way home she said, I feel brave for reading Harry Potter, because not all of my friends will read it yet. It's known as a scary series. So that was it, I thought. She didn't want reassurance that it wasn't scary; she wanted identification with being one of the brave kids who could forge through the scary.

We read about the first four chapters together last night before she lost patience with the pace of read-aloud, but not before I had one of my greatest parenting moments yet, giving Hagrid's voice to the line, "Harry - yer a wizard." And when, after we got home from rock-climbing, Harry, Ron and Hermione approached the entrance to the dungeons at the novel's climax, we read aloud again together until the end.

And when she asked for book two, I said "I think you have to wait until Friday." I cited the single-mindedness with which she read this book and my concerns for school and homework and reasonable bedtimes. And she, knowing how she loses herself to books (and indeed, how she's so often been irritated with my nonresponsiveness when I've lost myself to a book) recognized a truth in my thoughts and acquiesced.

But I could pry the book from her hands each evening if I had to do so. Really I just want to give her time to savor this beginning, and her self-identified bravery, and the magic of this very special magic.

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Name game

noreply@blogger.com (Robin (noteverstill/noteversewing)) — Sun, 02 Nov 2014 03:47:00 +0000

My parents are here, and I always like the perspective of the occasional visitor on the state of the children. They're so big, and all that, growth that I see daily and don't notice, mannerisms developed and shed, new tastes and food preferences, they make a startling new composite of a person for the drop-in relative.

These are the only grandkids so they've dictated all the terms they've felt like dictating. My parents said they'd be Grams and Gramps, and the girls accepted as such, but G doesn't appreciate a subtle distinction. So he calls them Boy Gramps and Girl Gramps, and so on their arrival our home fills with sentences like this: Boy Gramps, Girl Gramps is looking for you! And he's been using those terms for several years now, unwaveringly, undissuadable, and still they make me laugh.

__________
Today is November 1st, which means it's NaBloPoMo, and since 2007 I haven't misssed a November day of blog posting. This is the first year in which I'm just not confident I'll be able to post every day. I haven't written much about work but since the spring time it's become an attention-demanding thing it never really was before. There are two truths about that: 1) it's good, because I feel my own utility in a way I never did before, and my over-active brain can wear down now, tired from use, which feels as satisfying as intensive physical exercise; and 2) I used to mentally compose a lot of blog posts during the day as I went about my work, the work that didn't need full brain wattage from me. Those days are over and I'm not a bit regretful for that...but we'll see how this November goes. This might be the November of Just Vignettes, No Long Stories. We'll see. I've set a goal of showing up, and here I am.

On this bittersweet day we give pause to honor daycare Halloween, 2006-2014

noreply@blogger.com (Robin (noteverstill/noteversewing)) — Fri, 31 Oct 2014 12:32:00 +0000

Disguised unconvincingly as a small human child, the young dragon loped to the car. Docilely, he allowed the straps. His might was on the verge of a great awakening. His strength, his glory -- he could feel them inside himself. Solidifying, readying.

There's a reason spectacular creatures carry the heart of all the greatest stories. His emerald scales glittered untamely in the pale sunlight. Even when he wasn't doing anything that special he was magestic.

Would he be a hero today, a champion, gracing preschool with his grace and light? Or would all that energy come unbounded today, delivering chaos and destruction? Nobody ever knows in sunrise what a day will bring.

Nobody knows what a young dragon's future holds.

The fleeting evenings

noreply@blogger.com (Robin (noteverstill/noteversewing)) — Mon, 27 Oct 2014 03:52:00 +0000

I hold a fear, the worst kind, the one in which I'm recognizing an inevitable truth and fretting on it anyway, one years off and yet it bothers me, one that is so unexceptional and declining and trite; not a fear of getting old, exactly, as if that isn't banal enough. I fear the day when I'm a little old lady who has to wear turtleneck sweaters in the summer. When I get cold I can't get warm and winters make me cranky and I've always understood "cold in my bones" not as a phrase but a state of being and every year it becomes more acute.

And I really loathe turtleneck sweaters, you guys. They make my neck claustrophobic. But I am going to have hoods and shawls and scarves. And by that list I mean: I will have them all at once upon me. And still I will be cold; and I'll look back on my 30s when I didn't know how not-yet-cold I was.

So the girls were choreographing a show yesterday. They were on the front lawn. L was wearing just her underpants at just the last season, maybe, where it's (allegedly) warm enough outside to do so and she's childlishly immodest enough to do so. E was in a tank top and shorts. There was one star in the sky, then two, and to the left the air was fuzzy gray and cobalt and to the right, just over the neighbors' oak, the blues dropped into fuchsia and clementine and gold. We always get the best sunsets just over the across-the-street house lines, just out of perfect sight. They make me want to climb on the roof, every time.

E had a baton with sparkly streamers that she got at the circus ages ago and L had a baton made out of two paper towel rolls, one wedged into the other for length and gravitas. And the show was long, which is all the things childhood should be, because they'd spent forever outside choreographing, outdoors and free play and imaginative reuse and rhythm and math and whimsy and creative spirit. And they wanted me to watch their show. And I barely could, because I don't know if you know this, but it's late October and the sun was running away. I was cold.

So one brought me the stool out of the bathroom that they climb on to reach the faucets and spared me the concrete stoop or cool grass. And one brought me my sweater, draped over the newel post. And I carried out my mug of tea and huddled in the shawl of my collar, foreshadowing the pitiful shrunken shivering creature I'll one day be.

The show was like most of their shows, a capella humming and some combination of gymnastics, silliness, very measured turn-taking, and improvisation. It was nearly too dark to see and a third star came out, a fourth and a fifth. And I was so cold and getting colder. But they weren't, they were joie-de-vivreing, you know, gloriously yawping with discards salvaged from the recycle bin, and soon it will be too cold outside even for them.

And I'll do anything to stave off winter so I sat and beamed and clapped and smiled, for the show and its encore and its other encore, because they still felt the zest of everything.

A first last

noreply@blogger.com (Robin (noteverstill/noteversewing)) — Tue, 14 Oct 2014 03:43:00 +0000

Last week I stayed late at work while the lovely husband collected all the kids so I could venture downstairs after hours to G's preschool. It was back-to-school night.

I almost didn't go, having sung and danced this routine before. It was my ninth back-to-school night there. Same classrooms, same teachers. The same core group of women have raised my babies from infants to readers, from burp cloths to flying leaps. I knew what they'd say, and a sweep of gratitude and nostalgia made me once more want to hear them say it.

Today I spent the day with G, as his school and my work were closed for Columbus Day. The other three had regular days and next year he'll go off as well, this day no longer ours, just mine. And oh I'll sleep and sip coffee and hug my solitude. But beginning with that evening in the classroom last week I was shoved into a small panic that this is the beginning of littleness's end.

I gave G his bath. He sits in bubbles so thick they fly when he blows. They cling in his crevices, folds of baby fat sure one day soon to melt away forever, and he plays naked and happy, oblivious, having no want for privacy or solitude, only that I hand him another toy and bargain again three more minutes until hair washing. The girls take showers now. And of course they do, but, oh.

He asked me to tie his shoes and then he asked me to switch my shoes so they might match his and then he stomped in a rain puddle because that's what four-year-olds do and then his feet were wet and he wanted to change his shoes and then he wanted me to change mine. He called our day an all-day date and how cute that he wanted us to match and it won't be much longer, I'm sure, that he wants us to match. It was our last Columbus Day together, but it was last week, back-to-school night, that knocked me askew.

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