Mamassage

The Same Boat

Sometimes people ask me why I blog. Well I don’t always have a good answer ready. But if I could, I would memorize the entire book - The Big Rumpus, by Ayun Halliday. I just started this paperback (50’ish pages in). But so far, it is fantastic. Ayun, who has been called “a new generation’s Erma Bombeck”, writes of the isolation associated with being a stay at home mom. She addresses much of what so many do not dare mention...everything from feeling like you are always pulling your grain before the horde of flies arrives – to never getting to do the activities you had previously taken for granted – such as peeing alone.

I whole heartedly recommend this book.

In the interest of enticing all of you, I offer the following excerpt with great hope that I will not be sued by the fantastic Ms. Halliday for plagiarism.

...We might not see eye to eye on the best place to raise our children, but we are all in the same boat.

I used to think that this expression meant that we all shared one boat, that your paddles are made lighter by the presence of others. That’s not what it means. Even on a good day, my paddles feel like they’re filled with buckshot. I’m willing to bet that every other mother’s do too. Shortly after you give birth, most of the activities that defined your identity are suspended to let you make apple juice, deal with somebody else’s snot and develop a lot of highfalututin ideas about television. You’re not being paranoid or melodramatic if you feel like you’re the only grown-up in your boat. The kids never leave the boat either, but what help are they with the paddles? Their arms are hardly bigger than celery stalks. Also, as delightfully surreal and repeatable as their beginning syntax might be, their conversation cannot sustain you through the tedious stretches. If it weren’t for those little kids waiting for you to harpoon a fish so that they can tell they don’t like fish, you’d go right over the gunwales. You can’t leave them to fend for themselves, even though they are the ones who got you into this mess. You’re stuck choking down soggy peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in that leaky skiff.

The inviting blast of an ocean liner taunts you as it glides by, its portholes twinkling like a string of white Christmas lights. Damn the passenger list of merrymakers in bias-cut gowns and party hats. It’s always New Years Eve nineteen-thirty-something on the ocean liner. Too bad you’re missing it. Then in the middle of some dark night, when you’re up, dog tired, struggling to keep your sleeping children out of the bilge water, you notice another crappy little boat a few yards out. And another. And another. The ocean is fairly crawling with boats as crappy and little as yours. Each one holds a mother tethered to a baby, a sleeping toddler or a jacked-up-three-year-old still gibbering from an ill-advised late-afternoon sugar fix. We’re all in the same boat, all right. It smells like mildewed life preservers. There are millions of these boats in the sea. We shout to each other across the waves.  Nobody will get offended if you have to interrupt her midsentence to seize your daughter by the ankle before she dives after a birthday party favor she dropped overboard, possibly on purpose.

So, yeah. I don’t always have a good answer for why I blog. But I think it might have something to do with waving out to the next little boat.

 

My great thanks go out to Ayun Halliday for writing this refreshing book.

If anyone would like more info about The Big Rumpus, A Mother’s Tale from the Trenches. I have added a link in the nightstand section of my sidebar.

URSULA, ARIEL AND -- ME?

Part of the reason for my blogging has to do with the fact that I would very much like to write a book someday. I have the gist of it in my head. I simply feel that I lack the discipline to focus for that long on one topic. (Like blogging is going to help with that, eh?)

There’s also the fear that I’ll spend a ton of time on a book, only to have it repeatedly rejected. So when I found a post on Ariel Gore’s blog, wherein she was offering advice, I gladly chimed in. 
I was even further encouraged upon finding this. 

Narnia

I’m very excited to see this film. And, with a dose of luck (and some semi-alone time complements of Chris), it looks like it may happen tomorrow afternoon. I have been awaiting this release since I first saw the commercial a few months ago. To me the world of Narnia has always been incredibly magical, for reasons far beyond the actual story line of the movie.

You see, when I was a little girl my father used to read to me every night. We went through all of the Tolkien books including the all but forgotten, Farmer Giles of Ham. I’m not certain whether it was before or after we finished Tolkien’s works that we began those of C.S. Lewis. But I do remember the wonder of it all. I would lie there in bed after my sister had long since drifted off to sleep, listening to my father describe these magical creatures in far away lands. And I never for one moment believed that they were not real. There were fauns, and hobbits, and great battles of good and evil. You just had to know where to look and how to recognize.

My favorite of the Narnia books was The Voyage of the Dawn Treador. I can’t really remember the specifics of why at this time. I imagine, though, that it may have been, in part, because this is the book in which Aslan tells Edmund and Susan that they must begin to see him in their own world – rather than continuing to visit him in Narnia. This seemed to parallel my own life (as all good stories do). For, I knew that my time with my daddy reading to me was coming to an end; and I would need to seek out the magical and inspiring parts of life for myself. I was getting older & my sister – with whom I shared a bed – was not nearly as transfixed by bedtime stories as I. But that time has always been something that I’ve looked back on with great nostalgia. It was such a wonderful gift.

When I met Chris, he loved the idea of bedtime stories, too. He would often come in and watch as I read to Maya. I could feel him standing behind me blocking just a sliver of the hallway light, as I lulled Maya into sweet and adventuresome dreams. Then, later, when I was pregnant with Kajsa, I got so tired during the day, that I often went to bed before Maya did. Chris, then, took up the role of bedside reader. I would lie in bed, hands on my belly, listening to him reading to her from Harry Potter, A Wrinkle in Time, and The Hobbit. I thought, at those times, about the importance of myth and of fantasy in a child’s life, and its connection to strong role models. I thought about traditions and how they pass through the generations. I thought about magic. I remembered my views that one simply needed to know how to recognize it when it came along.

So even if The Lord of the Rings trilogy had been abysmal, and even if Narnia didn’t look absolutely fantastic, I would gladly go to see them. I would sit in rapt transcendence. Because, to me these are far more than holiday blockbusters...these are tangible pieces of my personal history. They are small keys to my soul.