The curious thing abut a skylight is that the sky reduced to a small rectangular patch suddenly seems so much further away, so much further up. I lean back and am nearly overtaken with vertigo. How different this is from lying on one’s back in a broad and grassy meadow where the world seems evenly divided between earth and sky, where the same breeze pushes clouds from horizon to horizon and passiving waves of sunlight along the bowing tips of tall grass.

Only it never worked. I got dry and empty too soon and it was no good trying to force the tears and the observation of myself crying was not conducive to getting good and worked up.

But this twelve-year-old stuff is different, because I look at my kid and I see myself at that age, remember this as a place where the divide opened up between my insides and my outsides, between the way I intended things and the way they actually came out. This is the age where I would try to be sweet, try to be good and be so irritated that minutes later I was again fighting with everyone in my family, the age where labels of “sensitive” and “princess” were sort of teasingly given, only they still chafe like scratchy tags sewn inside tight shirts. This was the age when it felt like something was really wrong with me, that things weren’t ever going to be okay, the age when I ached with being misunderstood. It was the dawning of self-consciousness, of looking around at how everyone else was doing things and realizing I didn’t measure up, that my clothes were wrong, my body awkward, the braces, my skin…

So when my sweet first-born does start doing the things that are tormenting his brothers — teasing or taking things — it isn’t that I see him as blameless. I see his threshold for tolerating them acting like, well, themselves, doing things that shouldn’t bother him, but do, tremendous crimes like chewing wrong or licking their drinking glasses, lowered, see how this builds up into the explosion when he tells a brother to stop, the brother screams in indignation, it escalates. And I haven’t figured out how to make the conflicts, torturous as they are, go away. But I know that I cannot tolerate how much it hurts him when he feels like everyone in the world is against him. I don’t want to endorse his prickliness, but I think he needs someone on his side. Of course he seems to recover much more quickly than I do, I’ll still be brooding over a conflict when he’s moved on to another mood entirely.

We go for walks. He talks about feeling excluded at school — not actively excluded, just more, not-included, and this one I remember too, feeling like everyone else was spending all of their time with everyone else outside of school and I never got to see anyone. That I was safe, sure, invisible, on the fringes of a large group of safe friends, but it was not the same social order I had known before and I wasn’t sure how to navigate it. I wish I could hand him the books that helped me survive it all, but he hasn’t found his way back to books that way yet. (Anne Frank that’s what he needs! And then maybe Catcher in the Rye before it’s assigned in school and an English teacher has the power to ruin it for him.) He’s got music. I miss him when he retreats into headphones, but I’m so grateful he’s found something he needs there.

At his cello recital I watch the high school seniors play, seeming like grown-ups next to him, five years older, the assurance they project, their comfort with themselves up on stage. I sort of long to see him safely through to that point already, to skip all of the agony between here and there — except, of course I keep being hit with how quickly it’s all going and how I don’t want to miss a second of it. It’s the knife-twist of birth order, everything is the most intense with him, his capacity to surprise me, my anxiousness about the next stages, the blind spots I’ve got, the tremendous amount I still have to learn, the difficulty in untangling myself from him.

I write things down, partially I want to convey this amazing unfolding to the grandparents, aunt, uncles who don’t get to witness it first hand, but also for myself, knowing I take it all for granted but I won’t remember this stuff clearly by the time I’ve been through it three more times. He’s so quick-witted, he notes a traffic sign “Construction Zone Fines Double” and says “Sometimes life is like a giant board game.” That he combines a wit( which I’m not completely recapturing here) with a serious-mindedness, a commitment to justice and projects and idealism seems to me the loveliest combination of qualities. I am simultaneously charmed and exasperated by his insistence on wearing the same corduroy jacket and hat all year, regardless of the weather. And touched that he wants to wear fingerless gloves like one of the cellists in the band Apocalyptica, which — oh it seems like the marker of a new kind of having a hero for him. A year ago everything was superlative “best movie ever” “favorite place to go for dinner” and since his birthday it’s all just “it was okay.” He is cool. Or he wants to check what all of his friends think. And yet he does think for himself, is independent-minded. None of this captures him, of course, but I don’t stop trying. I hold on in order to let go.

What I think I fear most is having the exuberance carry me to the fabric store and pick out yards of gaudiness that I can get home and be too inspired to even find a pattern for before I find myself weeping in the scraps of cut-up fabric, each representing the age-old feeling of having a notion of a finished product that I don’t have the skills to quite manage, the picture in my head that my hands cannot fit to paper, the idea I don’t have the words to express, the sense of being mired in patterns of amateur ineptness, the paint turned to mud, the paper wrinkled and distressed and overworked beneath my grubby, sticky hands. What was in my head was so glorious, and what is in my hands so tawdry.

And sometimes it occurs to me that mood is a wind, and that with a little knowledge of my own sails, beating to windward is possible, I can sail close-hauled and advance against the wind, something that seems impossible to my land-lubber’s mind. If the exuberance is a running position for the sailing, almost dangerous in its speed, then to despair is to be in irons, and all I can do is “push push pull pull” easing myself into a position to catch the next wind with a small daily discipline, a walk, some music, another attempt, a fresh piece of paper.

I wasn’t consciously thinking of Aristotle, either, when I started classifying the way objects get invested with meaning, rising up, as it were, out of the sea of functionality to be briefly invested with symbolic value before sinking back into pure functionality. I have a pair of socks whose meaning ought rightly to be, you know, they keep my feet warm. But the ways they get invested with meaning seem to me to be these:
1) origins: The socks are made from wool of sheep grazing on my grandfather’s farm
2) intention: My grandfather worried about my poor cold feet and gave these socks to me telling me he wanted my feet to be warm
3) sacrifice: My grandfather gave up his morning cup of coffee from Starbucks for a month to buy me this pair of socks
4) star power: My grandfather saw a pair of socks like this on Kate Winslet and decided they’d look good on me, too.
5) association with an event: I wore these socks the night that my grandfather and I went to dinner and he met my future step-grandmother.
6) flattery: My grandfather told me how the color of these socks set off the color of my eyes so I feel pretty every time I wear them.
7) irritation: These are the socks my grandfather keeps leaving on the floor that I have to put in the dirty laundry whenever I am straightening the house, and man does it annoy me.
8 ) guilt: These socks are itchy and I only put them on when my grandfather is coming to visit and he asks if I like them and I lie and tell them they are the best socks ever and then he knits me another pair.

The thing that gets to me though, is that if a pair of socks can be brought up out of the sheer functionality that makes them socks to be given meaning, we do the opposite thing with people. They may wander through our lives with all of the story and associations that would make every single individual worthy of long contemplation of just the sorts of questions you would ask to unlock all of the stories that this person has inside of them, but pragmatically? The story needs to recede into pure functionality so you can get the check deposited and the line of twenty people waiting behind you for their Friday of evening to begin can move forward, even though the bank teller might be able to tear your heart open with the story of the first time they lost a pet.

It’s harder, maybe, being the mother, and feeling consumed by my functionality in other people’s lives. I don’t expect my children to wrap their minds around my full personhood, even though I was delighted when my twelve year old did ask “What music did you listen to when you were my age?” Maybe that particular question felt laden with my awareness of his awareness of the divergence of our stories: I had a story before my children existed, they are developing their own stories in which I hardly figure.

I guess were I feeling more rigorous about filling out my own personal philosophy I might question the opposition of function and symbolic meaning, thinking à la Virginia Postrel, that the best gifts are both useful and have a pleasingness, of aesthetic and symbolic dimensions. chilled, I put on the socks from my grandfather, noting like Pablo Neruda how my feet seem unworthy of the “woven fire of those luminous socks.” I end musing about books, which carry all of the externally-granted symbolic aspects — my grandfather recommended it! and just looking at the cover I can feel the prickle of grass under my legs, just starting to sweat, smell the freshness of the mowing, see the shadows of leaves dancing on the page as I lay under the tree at my grandfather’s reading it — and then build worlds of inner significance, too.

It’s a semi-serious joke that I’m homeschooling myself towards the MFA that I won’t go into debt for (and this makes me wonder what value it would have) while Raven’s trying to get a new business going, but I am not required to write a term paper (nor for that matter, to grade it!) Still. Watching the world go a little nuts over swine flu this week (maybe not the world, so much as the social media that are my portal to the world most days) I am still sorting my response to a semester of imagining the end of the world.

Honestly, the feminist writings threw my kilter just a little more, becoming lenses for examining my own choices, the compromises that have re-shaped my world view since the last time I read a lot of feminist theory fourteen years ago. And part of me wishes I did have to write a term paper just to get my responses all sorted out. I think the thing I find most frightening is thinking I have made decisions out of honest consideration of our circumstances, of what is in my children’s best interests as well as my own, only to find out I was frightened of trying for something bigger, or that it was the path of least resistance in the face of institutional sexism so deep that I was merely reinforcing it. I have an unwritten blog post on not being defined by reproductive status that I am afraid remains unwritten while my children and their schools consume a good part of my energy for thinking, for writing.

What about the end of the world? The lens I haven’t been able to set aside is the Bahà’í promise that we are part of an ever-advancing civilization. I worry this sounds completely implausible in the face of all the evidence to the contrary, the sense of environmental, economic, or medical doom looming. Honestly, I love living in a community where sustainability is on everyone’s lips, where ideas of peak oil and reducing your carbon footprint are given serious consideration, especially if it’s the only alternative to living as if the world were created for our rapacious consumption. But I also try to balance that against the ease with which I could slip into fear and hopelessness.

The most recent copy of the parenting zine hip Mama had an article, “The Year of Living Fearfully,” by Erica Etelson that broke my heart, about having spent a year of her young son’s life experiencing such anxiety about peak oil that she couldn’t be the parent to him that she had promised herself she would be, that she experienced the pain of seeing her kindergarten-aged son worrying about her.

It resonated with a conversation with my father about the reversal in the expectation of each generation that the next will somehow have a higher standard of living. I suppose I don’t feel capable of calculating which generation has had it best; I might envy some of the freedoms my parents or grandparents had, but I also am impressed at all of the knowledge that lies at my children’s fingertips and their skills at accessing it.

But even if we were to bomb ourselves back to the stone age next week, I think what I feel is a responsibility to improve my children’s ’spiritual’ standard of living, by which I suppose I mean a degree of self-awareness in interacting with others, a rootedness in how deeply loved they are, a degree of reverence for the mystery around them, and a host of qualities like compassion, kindness, generosity, patience, perseverance, and an ability to think for themselves balanced by the expression of respect for authority. And while my valuing of all of these things are rooted in my own Bahà’í identity, seeing those values reflected in most of my parenting cohort does give me hope. My reading of the Bahà’í notion of an ever-advancing civilization is that material progress has to be balanced by spiritual progress, and that the two together will enable us to solve the problems that we face as a global community. More, that the equality of men and women (and the eradication of racism, and the elimination of the extremes wealth and poverty) is seen as part of the spiritual advancement of our civilization helps me throw my belief behind it.

And I have veered away from the specifics of the post-apocalyptic readings, the way that Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland immediately threw me into skepticism of any utopian project and whether the Bahà’í project is a utopian one, to musing on Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker’s storytelling as an unreliable transmission of culture. Skipping entirely Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and questions of sincerity of belief in one’s own utopian project not protecting one at all from its aftershocks. Or the two Californian books, Carolyn See’s Golden Days and Jean Hegland’s Into the Forest which were both so perfectly set in California that they reinforced my hypothesis that we like the apocalypse as the last remaining frontier when one can go west no longer, not to mention both having qualities of the Lifetime movie vicarious experience of the unthinkable that we watch and cling to as if they were evidence that we would be among the select to survive. It was Harpman’s I Who Have Never Known Men read right before Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress that convinced me that I lap up the post-apocalyptic eagerly as metaphor for feelings of inexplicable desolation and isolation, sometimes finding the fresh start and sometimes mere survival of hopelessness.

So no term paper, but a quiet celebration that I have made it through all of the readings, often with no one to talk about how it was all affecting me (for example, cleaning out the pantry in a battle against pantry moths, I would look at a can of food with an expiration date last summer and think that after the apocalypse I wouldn’t give a damn about expiration dates.) But noticing friends’ Facebook statuses reflecting real anxiety about swine flu, I think I have gotten something else contemplating the end of the world as we know it, a reinforced sense of how I can consciously choose hope, and also compassion, not out of naive optimism but because that choice matters. Very little in the post apo reading was more horrifying than Dave Egger’s account of the Sudanese war refugee experience in What is the What. We sort of know that the world cannot continue indefinitely as we have known it, but the unknown aspect of how it will change is frightening. The fact that a car accident is more likely to kill one than the swine flu is small reassurance, given all of the different ways that human beings inflict suffering on one another. But the only way I know to fight against the horror is to try and bring my children up with kindness and compassion.

The problem I encounter is how nothing strikes me as particularly skiey. The sky is so much its own thing, the closest most things get to resembling the sky is in color, but then it doesn’t take much attention to realize that there isn’t a single color by which I’d characterize the sky.

Maybe, I think the problem is that I am a person who scurries, eyes downcast, generally lacking the spiritual wherewithal to contemplate vastness or meteorological temperament. It could be that the sky is lately representative of all the directions from which grasping talons could without warning descend.

(This shows up in my morning pages and I am delighted to have something that is neither laundry list nor complaint, that doesn’t worry about one of the boys, that reminds me I like words as words even before they are freighted with things to tell. Raven, sitting next to me on the bed where I use a lapboard to write in my journal has reached out, maybe tentatively because I have been a little prickly the last few days, and in one of those startling moments when you realize how you are feeling first of all by noticing your own body language, I realize my shoulder has relaxed, muscles melting under the warmth of his hand: the prickliness isn’t there this morning!)

Skiey, has this other dimension then, possibility and boundlessness, the limits on possibility are as laughably small as my own scurrying figure. The changes of the sky carry the astronomical regularity of the sun’s minute by minute, month by month, tracing out the planes of the ecliptic, but also the chaotic change of dramatic switchings from dark to light and back again as winds from far off gorges chase clouds down the valley where this city perches. I resist with all my might the cheap metaphor, the unforgivable conceit, but note that I can relax where the sky touches my shoulder as if it were my husband’s hand, reassuring me of this connection, not scared off by my prickles.

I worry about words facing extinction, wish someone maintained lists of endangered species that I could do my part for by bringing them slowly back into more common usage, but consideration of skiey makes me think that I wouldn’t want it to be too common, exactly either, that the things I want compared to the sky are rare, special.

This sort of thing is always a little uncomfortable, of course. I race back through my Twitter stream making sure there is nothing indiscreet, and I suppose it’s much more about the blog. And I start thinking about caveats: I don’t blog when I am off having a terrific time do other things (because I am off having a terrific time doing other things!) and being able to blog when I am feeling frustrated/lonely/overwhelmed does help. I try very hard not to violate the privacy of anyone around me, and worry about anything reflecting on Raven.

I have no real idea who reads this except for regular commenters, most of whom I talk to or communicate with outside of the blog so they know that after a rough patch things do get better and easier. But then I see somebody I haven’t seen in months and get a sympathetic “everything okay?” and have the strangest feelings. It’s not that there’s any one thing I’ve written about that I regret, but I worry about a cumulative effect. I suppose this is why blogs get password-protected: you worry less about being misconstrued. At the same time, I worry about living in a world where people don’t talk openly or honestly about the things that are hard for them, because there is nothing as horribly disempowering as feeling like not only do you have problems, but you are the only person in the world with these problems. And what I love most about blogging tends to be the conversation, the insight, the sharing, the not being alone with the hard stuff.

Still, I feel like I ought to make it known, somehow, things are good here. Not easy, but good.

Still, some mornings I hate waking up.

And of course feeling middle-aged and staid and domestic, the weird invisibility of motherhood in the Charlie Brown imagery of faceless legs and muted trumpet voices, which seems to have as its questionable alternative a new cultural paradigm of MILFs and this image of the destructive, selfish egocentric mother who keeps thrusting herself in as the center of the story of her children’s lives. I wonder vaguely if I should go find examples of either of these mother images, or non-images, to illustrate what I mean, but they seem universal enough I’ll trust you to find them. The point more is that while I question the sweetness of dreaming of courtship when I am happily married, (have I internalized some objectification, that I don’t want to pursue, mind you, only to be pursued, and this makes me question my own feminism) I also question what the story is of being a mother, how it can be appropriately told because it is neither about me, however much it has changed me, nor have I become invisible, even though sometimes I feel like what my children most need is for my presence to gently recede.

Also I observe: we now use “mother” and “parent” quite happily as verbs. But what is the verb for actively working at the partnership of marriage, of trying to grow and nurture, create that “fortress of well-being”? I married him once, but have found that the being married is so much more actively regularly re-committing and examining, is coming up a little short and apologizing and trying harder, and getting scarily vulnerable and trusting, and maybe no verb could capture all of that. But then does mothering actually capture the tenderness and the frustration, the humor, the pride, the fear, the realizing what you have been doing isn’t working and it’s time to humbly ask for help, try a new way of doing things?

And then I am thinking about Martin Buber’s whole I-Thou thing and the fading into the background of my self as I address myself to parenting and that’s not exactly how it is, and there’s also the helplessness of everything I cannot do for my children, and it occurs to me that when we use parent as a verb, in that sentence the parents are subjects and the kids somehow the objects. And the relationship I have with my kids, while asymmetrical, isn’t like that. Anymore than being married is like being pursued.

I have been preoccupied by this NPR story I heard on how in languages with grammatical gender, the gender of the words affects perception of objects. Which kind of bolsters what I already knew, that the words we use matter. And if I were ever to have an institute it would be the Institute for the Responsible Use of Metaphors. So people like that parenting ‘expert’ who talked at our co-op meeting last night wouldn’t describe one child in conflict with a sibling as a “victim” (it’s my ambition that in my house, there are no victims, because that story seems harmful to both parties). And so it matters to me that I find a way both truthful and loving to talk about motherhood and marriage, about daughterhood and sisterhood and friendship. And when I get all disgusted with how seriously my blog seems to take itself, how dreadfully earnest the tone can be, I have to remember that this pursuit does matter. It’s easy to veer, in talking about these things into something soft-focussed and pastel and sentimental or just go straight for the diaper humor, and yet the truth is somewhere between those, or encompasses both and goes beyond them.