I've been thinking, lately, about the difference between being a mom in your twenties and being a mom in your thirties. There are ten years between my oldest and my youngest. And it seems I notice nearly every day differences in how I am mothering Kaleb and how I mothered Haley. I am much more patient with Kaleb (which is good, because he's MUCH more difficult than Haley was!) and I think I can more clearly see what is worthy of worry and what is just not worth stressing over. But I think the most important knowledge I have gathered---or, maybe, have just begun gathering---is the absolute necessity of paying attention and savoring everything.

I so clearly remember how frustrated I sometimes felt in my days as a young mom. Haley was just four and a half when Nathan---my third---was born, and Jake wasn't yet two. So, I had two in diapers. Sleep became a myth. My days were full of toys, clothes with innumerable snaps, whining, tears, skinned knees, those glistening white baby teeth. I was surrounded by trikes, bottles, wipes, Disney paraphernalia. And I thought it would last forever. Don't get me wrong---I adored my babies. But it seemed that they would be babies forever, that I would never be free of "momma" being my only defining characteristic. I became a solitude junkie---I craved it more than anything else.

But, you know: it did end. Before I had Kaleb, I was on auto pilot. I could decide to go somewhere and then just go. I felt free. But, as life always goes, I also felt sad. Why hadn't I realized that those days filled with babies really would end? Why didn't I savor it more? Take more pictures? Write down more details? So now, here I am, with another baby and these things that I have learned. And I'm implementing them. I will never complain about changing a diaper. I will laugh at him while he eats instead of wishing he'd hurry. I will kiss his toes whenever I want to and gaze into his autumn-colored eyes whenever I can. And I don't think I will ever again crave solitude like I did back then. I know now that solitude will return. I can wait for it. But these baby days? They are never coming back. So I am unabashedly savoring them.

Last night I stayed up late to watch the women's figure skating event. I'd DVRed it because Survivor was also on, and my husband wanted to watch that much more than ice skating. Since I was late getting started, I decided I'd only watch the skaters who really interested me. The American skaters were a must, of course, and I didn't want to miss the Russian, Slutskaya, who in my heart I hoped would win---her story is one of true courage, determination, and perspective. I found myself a little bored by the program of the woman who eventually won the gold, Arakawa; her skate seemed exacting and very proficient, but not very passionate. After watching all those medal contenders, though, I can clearly say that none of them were my favorite.

My favorite was Silvia Fontana, an Italian skater who had retired from the sport but came back to it so she could participate in the Olympics in her home country. Winning the gold was never the point. The point was to participate, just one more time, in the sport that was her passion. I loved watching this woman skate because, while her program was of course not perfect, it was passionate. Not in a theatrical way (like Sasha Cohen's) but in an I-love-this-experience-and-I'm-living-it-to-its-fullest way. She was alive. And she had a look in her eye, one that I know.

See, a long time ago I was a gymnast. Not the sort who'd ever make it to the Olympics, but one who could have won a college scholarship to a good (but not fabulous) university squad. I left the sport when I was sixteen (my last competition was, in fact, on my sixteenth birthday) for myriad reasons. But I still dream about it, at least once a month. In the dreams, some things are the same as they were when I was sixteen, the gym, the ache in my always-bleeding hands, the chalky air; the atmosphere of team camaraderie underlined with competitive tension. I walk through the locker room, I bounce on the tramp, I feel the scratchy blue carpet of the floor. My coaches are there, too, still wearing their 80s hair and their swishy pants. I am still afraid of my beam dismount and I still wish, without ever saying it, that those coaches would pay attention to me like they do to the girls whose parents can donate much more money to the booster club than mine can.

Some things are different. I am always aware, in my gymnastics dreams, that I am now a mom and a woman in my thirties. The body I have now hangs invisibly around the taut, strong, lean one I used to have, and I think about my kids as I practice switch leaps or pound down the vault runway. Now, I can clearly see through my favorite coach, Jack; his fierceness was simply his way of motivating us. But still. These things run through my head without consequence. What matters, in the dreams, is that I am flying again: weightless, I flip, leap, tumble and, best of all, swing. I remember every second of my bar routine and I swing through it over and over. The politics of the gym don't matter, or my age or financial status or the brand of my leotard; all that matters is that I am flying again.

And when I wake from these dreams, I usually cry, just a bit, missing that feeling---the one Silvia Fontana had in her eye last night. The one that said "I am here. I am doing with my body this thing that I love, and it is fabulous. It is so, so good to be back." Maybe that feeling matters far more than the gold medal.

Yesterday, one of the women I go to church with called to ask me if I could teach a mini lesson on Thursday, something about journal keeping or life histories or family history. Immediately, I thought of Sage Hen's Challenge, in which she's writing a thematic life history over the next year. And I thought of Kelly's Altered Notebooks. Now, I've been meaning to start writing on the topics that Sage Hen is sharing, but I just hadn't started yet. This little teaching assignment was just the push I need! I thought that, since I keep my regular journal on my computer, I would use a pen and notebook approach for this life history.  I had just the notebook to use, one that I'd bought on clearance at Target last October---it has the hard cardboard cover that is so great for altering.

As I worked on this project last night (stayed up until 1:30, which used to be habit for me but now is really, really hard), I realized that I hadn't had an original thought about the project. I borrowed from Kelly. I borrowed from Sage Hen. I even borrowed words to use on the altering! It's made me think a bit about the nature of creativity. As a writer, I've learned that I improve my writing skills when I read a large variety of other writers, not to copy them but to learn from them. Is it possible to do the same thing with scrapbooking, to see others' work and be influenced by it, but not STEAL their thoughts? I don't know. But---I like my notebook anyway. I like the thought of it filled, a year down the road, with my thoughts written by my own hand. Here's the notebook:

My only dissapointment? I realized only AFTER I'd stayed up late to finish that they need me to teach NEXT Thursday! DOH! Oh, well; at least I'm prepared in advance!

(the quotes are: "the question 'who am I?' is answered by what I write" e.e. cummings.

"I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear." Joan Didion

"We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection." Anais Nin

The value of life lies not in the length of days, but in the use we make of them." Michel de Montaigne

and a poem also by e.e. cummings, although I took it out of poem form so it could scroll around the rest of the text:

i thank You God for most this amazing

day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees

and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything

which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,

and this is the sun's birthday; this is the birth

day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay

great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing

breathing any--lifted from the no

of all nothing--human merely being

doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and

now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

During the two years between the time I finished my associate's degree and when I went to college to start working on my bachelor's, I did a lot of studying on my own. I knew I wanted to major in English, so I created my own little line of study---criticial theory, poetry, fiction, poetry, writing books, poetry. Since the eleventh grade, when the Bangles' song about The Bell Jar got me curious about who this Sylvia Plath might be and my English teacher introduced me to Edna St. Vincent Millay by requiring me to do a project on her, I've been a driven reader of poetry. So while I was studying on my own, I attempted to figure out which poets I "should" read and which poets I liked. Anne Stevenson was one of the poets I fell in love with, and the following poem is one of the first I tried to read critically. I'm not sure I fully understand it still, but it haunts me; I think it is beautiful. I liked trying to figure out what it might be saying because it is so full of researchable little tidbits---what exactly is Himalayan Balsam? (A common weed.) What kind of spiders? And some of the lines...they are what I used to tell my students are "mmmmmmm lines," language so good, precise, surprising, and exacting in its metaphor that you want to eat them. Better than chocolate. So I'm sharing it here as the first in a line of poems I just want to have on my blog because I love them---because I want to feel that I am doing something with these things I love, if only just sharing them with whomever might stumble across my blog.

Himalayan Balsam

Orchard-lipped, loose-jointed, purplish, indolent flowers,

with a ripe smell of peaches, like a girl’s breath through lipstick,

delicate and coarse in the weedlap of late summer rivers,

disheveled, weak-stemmed, common as brambles, as love which

subtracts us from seasons, their courtships and murders,

(Meta segemtata in her web, and the male waiting,

between blossom and violent blossom, meticulous spiders

repeated in gossamer, and the slim males waiting).

Fragrance too rich for keeping, too light to remember,

like grief for the cat’s sparrow and the wild gull’s

beach-hatched embryo. (She ran from the reaching water

with the broken egg in her hand, but the clamped bill

refused brandy and grubs, a shred too naked and perilous for

life, offered freely in cardboard boxes, little windowsill

coffins for bird death, kitten death, squirrel death, summer

repeated and ended in heartbreak, in sad small funerals.)

Sometimes, shaping bread or scraping potatoes for supper,

I have stood in the kitchen, transfixed by what I’d call love,

if love were a whiff, a wanting for no particular lover,

no child, or baby, or creature. ‘Love, dear love,’

I could cry to these scent-spilling ragged flowers,

and mean nothing but ‘no,’ in that word’s breath,

to their evident going, their important descent through red towering

stalks to the riverbed. It’s not, as I thought, that death

creates love. More that love knows death. Therefore

tears, therefore poems, therefore long stone sobs of cathedrals

that speak to no ferret or fox, that prevent no massacre.

(I am combing abundant leaves from these icy shallows.)

Love, it was you who said, ‘Murder the killer

we have to call life and we’d be a bare planet under a dead sun.’

Then I loved you with the usual soft lust of October

that says ‘yes’ to the coming winter and a summoning odour of balsam.

I've been thinking lately that my blog is not really very English geeky. It's just my rambling ideas. At the same time, I've been thinking about the book A Wrinkle in Time. This was one of my favorite books growing up, and a few months ago, I glanced through it again in the library. Haley was reading it in her lit circle at school, and I wanted to refresh myself with the plot. As I skimmed the book, I was amazed at how the ideas---the themes, I guess, and the new thoughts that L'Engle presents---have stayed with me. I'd taken those ideas as an eight- or nine-year-old girl, let them into my head, and made them part of the way I think.

So how does that connect with my blog? I'm going to start writing about the books I read. Does that sound strange?  My goal in doing this is to add a different level to reading, so that I'm not just consuming words, but adding my voice to them. Each time I finish a book, I'm going to write about it. This isn't going to be a plot summary but a sort of conversation between me and the book, a kind of Reader-Response Criticism that probably will say more about me than about the book. So, without further ado, my Book Note on The Lord of The Rings.

Stop the groans. At least, I think there will be groans because every time my husband sees me reading this trilogy, he groans. "How many times are you going to read that?" he invariably asks. Kendell isn't a reader so I've long since stopped trying to explain the read-a-book-more-than-once concept. It's OK that he doesn't get it. But his comment, when I started reading them yet again a few weeks ago, made me think: what, really, is it about these books that brings me back again and again? Is it just the story? the characters? the language? Tolkein's gift for making a new world?

What draws me back again and again is all of those things. But at a deeper level, it is this: the books comfort me. I first really read Tolkein---by "really reading" I mean reading closely and thoughtfully instead of the quick, mostly-skimmed-it-because-I-wasn't-ready perusal I gave them in eleventh grade---at the end of a very difficult  year. Kendell was working temporarily in NYC after the World Trade Center bombing, so I was alone at night once the kids were in bed. I read them in ten days, sitting in front of the Christmas tree. During that year, Kendell had been laid off, then worked for a start-up company that never managed to really do anything, so we were constantly on edge about what might happen in our future. We didn't have any idea how things would get better. So when I came to these words, at the end of The Two Towers, I literally wept:

You and I, Sam, are still stuck in the worst places of the story, and it is all too likely that some will say at this point: "Shut the book now, dad; we don't want to read anymore."

That was exactly the point I was at in my life: if my existence were a book, I'd not want to read anymore. It didn't seem possible that anything would turn out all right in the end. I flipped back a page and re-read this:

The brave things in the old tales...I used to think that they were things the wonderful folk of the stories went out and looked for, because they wanted them. . .But that's not the way of it with the tales that really mattered, or the ones that stay in the mind. Folk seem to have been just landed in them, usually---their paths were laid that way, as you put it. But I expect they had lots of chances, like us, of turning back, only they didn't.

I did want to turn back (I still want to turn back), to the days before that big change, when Kendell had a good, cushy job, a big income, no chip on his shoulder or defeat in his eyes. I wanted to go back to the days when I thought that all you had to do was have faith, and then your desires would be given to you. But because this "tale" or experience I was in was one that really mattered, to borrow Sam's words, I couldn't turn back. I had to push on into what seemed like absolute darkness, with no light to guide my feet.

And each time I read these books, I think about the comfort they brought me that night. If my life were a tale, The Lord of The Rings would be a symbolic object. Tolkein is careful to point out, in his introduction to the books, that while some people think that the ring is a symbol of something, or Sauron is a symbol of something else---usually Hitler---he didn't intend it. For me, it's not so much the ring, or any of the characters, that is symbolic. Instead, it's the journey itself that intrigues me. Or, more precisely, the journey the Fellowship takes, each member ending up in his own destination, and how the journey is so alike to what we experience in life. Especially I am drawn to Frodo's increasing despair; he doesn't think he will be successful or, if he does manage to toss the ring into the fires of Mordor, he doesn't believe that he will return. And in a way, he doesn't return, at least not as the hobbit he used to be, which is why the Shire no longer holds any peace for him; he is too changed.

Just as the stories Sam admires never really end, the journey doesn't end, either. Think of all the detours Frodo must take before he finally makes it to Mount Doom. His large struggle is made up of many little struggles, interspersed with little blessings, like the rabbit stew and Faramir. Even what seems like something negative---Sam and Frodo's long march with the orcs, for example---actually brings them closer to their destination; they are made stronger without actually choosing to be so. How like life is that? It so closely mirrors the way that I feel about life's challenges, which is that there is never really an end to them; we are all traveling to our individual ends---our personal Mount Dooms, if you will. Sometimes things are harder; sometimes we are forced to be stronger than we think we are. And sometimes, luckily, we are blessed with small reprieves, the solace of friendship or family. The point, I think, is that we must carry our peace with us.

And this journey will change us. Each of the members of the fellowship is truly different at the end of the books; Gandalph changes colors, Merry and Pippin grow taller, Gimli discovers that he can befriend a dwarf and thus begins to see his own prejudices, Aragorn becomes the king. So, too, does our journey change us. The changes sometimes feel too difficult; sometimes, like Frodo, we find that we can never "go home" again. But even if home will never come back---or, at least, home as we thought only home could be---the journey will continue and, eventually, bring us to somewhere new that can become home.

Each time I re-read The Lord of The Rings, I also think about what an acquaintance said after she saw the first movie. "Sure you should see it," she said, "if you like seeing monsters get their heads cut off."  I guess that, if you only look at the books as a story, that might be all you see, wars and black orc blood and goofy little poems. But a deeper look will show why so many people continue to read and admire them. A true Tolkein aficionado knows that to love them requires delving, the slow and careful kind Gimli would like to do to Rohan's caves. This digging brings a strange jewel: comfort.

Today has been one of those days. Not filled with any big, overwhelming challenges, but just sort of a DAY, you know? I woke up feeling discouraged; "woke up" is the key term, since I'd done it four other times during the night. Kaleb is not sleeping (before our trip to California, he slept 10 hours straight, but I've not been able to get him back into a schedule) and whatever hormone allowed me to be OK with getting up four times a night when he was a newborn has long since dissipated. I'm not OK with this! And it's making me more than a wee bit discouraged. I've started the process outlined in Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child. It's working a bit---he's not crying as much at bedtimes. But I want him to not wake up at all!

Plus I am feeling very blue about some things that have been happening with a long-time friend.

And my big kids argued all morning.

Not to mention it was my day for the kindergarten play group that Nathan belongs to. Now, I love kindergarten play group---on every day but Wednesday. These are all good, polite, well-behaved kids. But they're still kids, and when it's my turn to have five extra kindergarteners over, I tend to get a little bit grumpy.

Let's not even think about how fat I am feeling.

So I decided that instead of wallowing in my dejectedness, I would go outside. After all, the newspaper this morning reported that January was the warmest on record for the entire country, and this first full week of February is shaping up to be a beautiful one, full of blue skies and white mountains and actual sunshine. (While this sort of weather normally sends me into a frenzy of global-warming anxiety, I decided to just let it go today because, after all, whether I worry about the environment or not, I can't fix it, right?) I got everyone coated up, put Kaleb in his stroller, and walked to the school. And then I walked around the trail by my home. And then I decided to walk around my yard looking for something green. And guess what I found? Not only green---two sweet little snow crocuses, already blooming. Purple ones.

And then I could remember: even in winter, outside still exists. Sunshine still exists. Soon I can spend entire afternoons digging in the dirt. Which also means: even when I'm grumpy or frustrated, there is always color if I take the time to look. I remembered a favorite quote, from Rilke:  The earth is like a child who knows poems. Already it's starting to recite the verses it's memorized.

Saturday was Jacob's baptism. It was a wonderful experience and I have found myself looking at it through several perspectives this weekend. The one I want to write about here is what I realized about my sisters. It's been a few years since we've all had our photo taken together, but here's one anyway, from Christmas 2003:

Conveniently, we're arranged by age; Michelle on the left, then Suzette, me, and Becky, the youngest.

When Becky and I were little, I was so mean to her. Now that we're older, I adore her. Since we were closer in age to each other than we were to Michelle and Suzette, we get things about each other that they don't. Our adult lives have also brought us many similarities. So I knew, or at least I was fairly certain, that she'd be OK with giving a talk at the baptism, since Jacob asked. She was nervous, but she did it anyway.

And she did such a great job. Becky's like me: a great big crier. Meaning: give us a situation with a little bit of emotion, give us words to say; our forehead veins will start to throb and we'll cry. So of course she made me cry during her talk. What made me smile (over my tears) was that she got teary, too. As I sniffled my way through her talk, I thought about how my new brother-in-law (married to Kendell's sister) had told me that he thought Becky and I look so much alike. I can't see it in our faces. But we do feel alike.

After the baptism, we had a lunch. Usually people have these post-baptism lunches at their homes, but since we had forty-five people to feed, we held ours in the gym at the church instead. I got all of the food out, then rushed outside so our friend James could take some pictures for us. When I came back in, Michelle and Suzette had organized the food on a central table, set out the glasses and silverware, and cut the rolls. They both have catering experience and just seem to have a natural talent for making big meals run smoothly. When I discovered their work, I felt very pampered. And safe. I realized that, although we're all grown up (this year, we're all in our thirties for the first time together), I'm still the little sister. They're still taking care of me.

Which brought my thoughts to my own family. It absolutely breaks my heart to know that Haley will likely never have a sister of her own. Whenever we are out and about, I notice families with more than one daughter and am filled with sadness. To take the edge off, I tell myself the platitudes: one day she'll have fabulous sisters-in-law; she'll find great friends who will be like sisters; she'll have her own daughters. But these ideas only placate, not heal, because I know it's not the same. Not having a sister means she'll never have that life-long connection that comes from growing up in the same household with another girl. She'll never feel that comfort of knowing her sisters are simply there, that the role of "sister" never goes away. This both breaks my heart and makes me even more grateful for my sisters.