As you might have noticed, I haven’t been here – or really anywhere around the blogosphere – lately. And there’s good reason for that. In less than a month, strong men with a big truck will pull up in front of this house and load up all of our belongings – thousands of books, the cherry cradle that a neighbor built for my parents when I was born, too many toys – and move them 600 miles to the east.

That’s right: we’re moving. Back to Connecticut, back to my home state and the state that I hope will come to feel like home to my kids and my husband.

The last few weeks have been full of tasks that feel simultaneously mundane and weighty: sorting through outgrown baby clothes, acquiring boxes to pack up our things, dusting the living room – and dusting again – to get the house ready for visits from potential buyers. And the move itself is ripe with the bittersweetness that accompanies any big change. We are thrilled to go, even as part of hearts remain here with the friends we’ve made and the house to which we brought all three of our babies home.

My heart awash in emotion and my head aswirl with details, I find myself comforted by simple things: homemade spaghetti, walks with the kids, and, of course, reading. In addition to recent narrative favorites – Ian McEwan’s Sweet Tooth and Michael Pollan’s Cooked - I find myself turning to poetry, Robert Frost’s imagery and Mary Oliver’s thematic heft the perfect companions right now. I’ve also gotten lost in a new poetry volume, Rachel Barenblat‘s Waiting to Unfold. Rachel’s collection records her first year of new motherhood. Through her beautiful images, Rachel perfectly captures the anticipation, helplessness, and humor of those early months. Reading her work, it occurs to me that poetry is the perfect medium for describing infancy – that of a child and that of a parent. As Rachel demonstrates so capably through crystalline details that capture the “punctuation mark” of a sleeping child “on the blank page of [his] crib” or his “sly and sideways” glance of defiance, poetry’s precision and concision slice to the core of these unretrievable moments. And although it’s ostensibly a collection about blossoming into motherhood, Waiting to Unfold feels full of metaphors for the journey I am about to take with my family: learning how to walk, as it were, in a new town, into a brave new world.

I’m not sure how much I will be here in the coming weeks. As my days fill with the tasks of decluttering and cleaning and packing, the call to the page feels dulled, as though there’s so much thinking to do that all I can manage is to pack a box and seal it up. But please know my thoughts are with all of you, with gratitude for the community that you have given me that exists beyond state boundary lines.

Happy Mother’s Day, my friends.

Would you be surprised to learn that Mother’s Day was created by a woman who was never a mother herself? I know I was. In fact it was a daughter, Anna Jarvis, who was so proud of her own mother’s life and work that she lobbied to create a national holiday honoring all mothers and the work done by women’s organizations.

Please click over to The Happiest Home to read my profile of Anne Marie Reeves Jarvis, the mother and tireless community advocate for whom Mother’s Day was founded.

In addition to being a history buff, I am also a big fan of historical fiction. The period that fascinates me the most is Tudor England, and especially the reigns of King Henry VIII and his daughter, Elizabeth I. Like many of us, I devoured Philippa Gregory’s juicy The Other Boleyn Girl. More recently, I was captivated by Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, Hilary Mantel’s masterful, Booker Prize-winning fictional biographies of Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s chief advisor.

In all of my reading about this era – fiction and non – my thoughts always turn to Catherine of Aragon, Henry’s first wife and the woman who became a pawn in his insatiable quest to provide England with a male heir by any means necessary. Catherine was Spanish royalty; a dutiful, loving wife; and the mother of his first legitimate child. Nevertheless, once she proved unable to bear him a son, her crown did not rest easily on her head.

Please click over to The Happiest Home to read the rest of my profile of Catherine of Aragon, the latest entry in our historical motherhood series.

Image:  Portrait of Queen Catherine by Lucas Hornebolte via Wikimedia Commons.

I’ve been in a funk lately, simultaneously buzzing with ideas and struggling to get them down on paper. A series of nuisance interruptions hasn’t helped: a root canal, a bad back, taxes, taxes, taxes.

So I’ve decided to try to ease myself back into regular writing by following the lead of Lindsey at A Design So Vast and offering my answers to some of the questions from the Proust Questionnaire, a popular 19th century personality survey best known for the responses Marcel Proust provided to his friend Anoinette in her “confession album” – and for responses offered these days by celebrities on the last page of Vanity Fair magazine.

Alrighty, here we go, with thanks to Lindsey for the inspiration and invitation:

Over at 3 Things for Mom, founder and editor Lauren has created a website devoted to offering readers a daily Truth, Tip, and Find courtesy of a collection of blogging moms. In her words, “It’s like having your favorite bloggers over for coffee in your PJs every morning.” I’m honored to be over at 3 Things for Mom today, serving up my own Truth, Tip, and Find.

Please stop by and check out my post and then stick around to check out the other voices who have quickly made 3 Things for Mom one of my favorite new blogs.

Image: 3 by Ted Sakshaug via Flickr under a Creative Commons license.

As many of you know by now, Lindsey Mead was one of my first blog loves. I found her site, A Design So Vast, months before I launched Motherese and was inspired then – and continue to be inspired now – by the clarity of her reflections and the poetry of her voice. I can’t think of anyone better suited to put a seal on our This Is Childhood series than Lindsey:

I spent my teenage summers at a wonderful, rambling house on the Massachusetts shore with several families.  There was always a tangle of children and we got in the habit of going for swims after dinner.  One summer, there was phosphorescence.  I have never forgotten those unexpected, bright swirls of light, otherworldly, as blinding as they were fleeting.

Ten is like that.  Ten is phosphorescence.  Ten blazes brightly and vanishes so quickly you wonder if your eyes are playing tricks on you.

Ten is a changeling.  In her mahogany eyes I see the baby she was and the young woman she is fast becoming.  In one moment she’s still a little girl, clutching her teddy bears before bed and in another she is a near-teenager, dancing and singing along to Nicki Minaj.  She oscillates between wanting to bolt for the horizon of young adulthood that she can see and wanting to shrink from it, nestling instead in early childhood with me.

Please click over to A Design So Vast to read the rest of Lindsey’s luminous reflections on ten. And please be sure to visit the other This Is Childhood writers. It has been an honor to participate in this series with such a collection of beautiful writers and beautiful spirits.

ONE – Aidan Donnelley Rowley

TWO – me

THREE – Nina Badzin

FOUR – Galit Breen

FIVE – Allison Slater Tate

SIX – Bethany Meyer

SEVEN – Tracy Morrison

EIGHT – Amanda Magee

NINE – Denise Ullem

TEN – Lindsey Mead

When you think of Erma Bombeck, the word “feminist” probably doesn’t leap to mind. Instead, you might think of your mother’s well-worn copy of one of Bombeck’s ten bestsellers or a yellowed clipping of one of her syndicated newspaper columns stuck to your childhood fridge with a magnet.

And, perhaps, that’s just as Bombeck would have wanted it, having made a career, as she did, out of lampooning her life as a suburban housewife. But Bombeck was in many ways a feminist. A working mother herself, she nevertheless believed that the women’s movement needed to expand to include the voices of stay-at-home mothers. As she strove to balance her own career and family, she also worked tirelessly — if in vain — for the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment.

Please click over to Literary Mama to read the rest of my profile of Mother/Writer extraordinaire, Erma Bombeck.

Image: Erma Bombeck via Wikimedia Commons.

Denise Ullem’s is one of my favorite voices in the blogosphere. Sensitive, smart, and funny, she never fails to captivate me with her words and her ideas. In this week’s entry in our This Is Childhood series, Denise brings us a look at nine.

Abby is Nine.

Her experiences contain threads of both the universal as well as the unique, weaving a life that is distinctly hers. My mind traces the memories of our nine years together, bounding from her infancy to just this morning at the kitchen island.

Sometimes when I’m with her, I see traces of her as a toddler–round and full, with mischief and joy flitting across her features like a sprightly fairy. Other times, I see mature, angular hints of the woman that she will someday become.

I think of her pending teenage years, knowing that the unbridled joy and terrible heartache which mark every life will, too, mark hers. Friends will throw sharp-edged words, mistakes will be made, love interests will chose others, sleep will be lost. Knowing that I must allow her to endure these inevitabilities is softened only by the knowledge that she will also experience piercing joys: a first kiss, a first driver’s license, a bowl of cookie dough at midnight with a kindred friend, the pounding bass of a favorite song, the soft hue of a pink sunset.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. For now, she is Nine.

Please click over to Denise’s blog to read the rest of her essay. And be sure to follow along with us every Tuesday as we commemorate the mess and magic of childhood with a post on each age from one to ten.

ONE – Aidan Donnelley Rowley

TWO – me

THREE – Nina Badzin

FOUR – Galit Breen

FIVE – Allison Slater Tate

SIX – Bethany Meyer

SEVEN – Tracy Morrison

EIGHT – Amanda Magee

NINE – Denise Ullem

TEN – Lindsey Mead

Earlier this year, the world lost a mother and writer whom millions had come to think of as a friend. Pauline Phillips, better known as “Dear Abby,” died of natural causes on January 16, 2013 at the age of 94 after years of battling Alzheimer’s. In addition to being the author of the most widely-syndicated news column in the world, Phillips also paved the way for future generations of writers and bloggers for whom writing publicly about private life has become second nature.

Please click over to The Happiest Mom to read the rest of my post on Dear Abby, the latest piece in our Historical Motherhood series.

Image: Pauline Phillips, November 1961, courtesy of Easter Seals via Wikimedia Commons.

I’ve been in love with eight ever since I taught third grade right out of college. In this week’s This Is Childhood essay, Amanda Magee perfectly captures the simultaneous innocence and maturity of eight:

These years are motion and fire. They are amorphous and finite at once, molten lava coursing through time, inexplicably and unapologetically racing and slowing to form the many facets of a spirit.

 

You are eight and I have been infatuated and tormented by you since that first blush of pink on the plastic stick. It was in the tiny bathroom at work that I first saw it. Surrounded by cinderblock and overflowing brown, crumpled paper towels, I realized that you were inside of me, and my life changed.

ONE – Aidan Donnelley Rowley

TWO – me

THREE – Nina Badzin

FOUR – Galit Breen

FIVE – Allison Slater Tate

SIX – Bethany Meyer

SEVEN – Tracy Morrison

EIGHT – Amanda Magee

NINE – Denise Ullem

TEN – Lindsey Mead