both sides now

one of my favorite songs is joni mitchell's 'both sides now', her artful description of all those feathered canyons just waiting to be explored. on a lot of days lately, i spend my drive home from work, my head in the middle of cloud canyons.

i was always one of those kids, immersed in the moment of something so that i often forgot i was in the middle of class when i should have been paying attention — the snow falling outside was much more beautiful — or sitting in a chair reading a book, when my sister told me where she was going before she walked out the door. (in my memory, the fact that i couldn't remember where she was earned me admonishment and punishment by my father, who rarely yelled at all.)

as an adult, so caught i was in a room full of readers of my own work — or in the presence of other writers — that i admit to (almost) forgetting that back home, i had a couple of kids, a husband, a dog and loads of laundry waiting for me to come back. that can be a bad thing, but for writers, it is almost a necessity, the ability to escape your own kitchen table and into the clouds from time to time.

i used to be better at it, the whole immersion thing, but in the past few years i've found myself way too distracted, by technology — and that fact that every day, it seems, i have to learn something new about it to do my job. by facebook — though how i love connecting with folks. by the weather. by food network and yesterday's to do list. by reading. by failure. and by all that napping i so like to do.

but somehow, in the last month or two i have found that old ability again and have put my head right back into the clouds.

years ago, before i even had children, my sister had her first. my sweet little niece, who looked a little bit like Tweety Bird, found herself looking at clouds one day and said: mama, where do clouds sleep? back then my sister and i talked every day, and she called me to tell me what cute thing little susan hooks had said. cute indeed, enough to nudge this dreamy-headed girl out there under the vast blue georgia sky and see for myself what the clouds were doing. 

and i wrote myself a little book, for my niece and for my brother's daughter — both about two at the time — carefully cutting and gluing construction paper shapes of windows and moons — my father's nose was the moon, his skinny legs jogging giant's knees, don't you know? — fastening cotton balls to the pages for the clouds.

when my daughter was born i made one for her — i still have it. (true to my nature, there is an actual typo in the handwritten manuscript.) at the time i was taking a children's book survey class at a local college. the final exam was to write a book (YEAH!), and  i wrote another book about bats in the attic with a similar construction paper cover. that book won the class award, though garnered a scathing critique from a woman who actually published such books. it's in my home office, collecting dust.

through the years my 'cloud book' as I came to call it, took on as many shapes as clouds themselves, amoebic in rhythm and rhyme to the point that no matter how much i loved the verses individually, they never seemed to work together. so eventually it hit the drawer.

a few weeks ago, though, i dug it out again. inspired by reverb11's prompts of what's blossoming in you?, i spent what seemed like hours looking at just what it is clouds do. and i revised. i asked my dear poetic mentor, sally buckner, if she would take a shrewd pen to it, and with her help, the problems with the rhythm and rhyme so stuck in my brain shifted like a stormy sky clearing itself to blue.  i wrote new verses, felt the lullaby take root in my head where it stayed, gently rocking my days.

And magically — after changing a word here, a line there, it is done.

it's been a long time since i could say 'done' to any of my creative work. years. i have a lot of 'almosts' and a few false starts, but to have something complete and wholly its own feels good.

and this time, i am hopeful that when i ever have grandchildren of my own, i won't have to give them to construction paper cutout version made from leftover cardboard — i can give them the book.

so hopeful i am, that over the past weeks, in addition to finishing, i reached this crazy head of mine higher in the clouds. and today i sent my manuscript to an agent. 

only once have i queried an agent, and it didn't turn out well. turns out i wasn't ready, hadn't done my homework — about the agent or her clients — and i am pretty sure there was a typo in the letter. (why do i always do that?)

but this time, i studied what to do, printing my manuscript as if it might be a book (these days, though it doesn't involve actual scissors and glue, it does require an understanding of how to print on both sides of the paper on a desktop printer, so each page is right side up... no easy task, let me tell you.) i looked at the pacing, the placing of the words on the page, studying other picture books i love for understanding of just how that works. 

and in the end, i liked what i created. a lot. (is this bragging? i hope not.)

i haven't always been so intentional. when i was just out of college, i sent my resume to the Atlanta Journal and the Washington Post — having never read either paper or been to Atlanta (i'd only driven around DC), not even bothering to check that my clips — and probably my resume — were riddled with typos. thank heaven, literally, that my next resume went to a much smaller paper and to someone who could see beyond my errors and my naivete.

i've sent essays i've written to magazines but never told anyone. didn't want to have to admit that i failed. but today it feels less like a failure than a leap of faith. somebody gets published, and those who do don't keep their manuscripts in the drawer.  (Some of the worst books i've read i've actually bought in book stores, so what is that about?)

it's a long shot, to be sure. and if i don't hear by the end of July, I am supposed to submit elsewhere. which i will do. right now, as summer begins, i'll move on to the novel i've been writing for too many years to count, knowing now that recent history proves i can finish something. after that, there are others in the drawer, so there is still much yet to do.

wish me luck. i'll keep you posted. having read an article posted by Lyn Fairchild Hawks, a great writer who a few years ago shared one of those rooms where i lost myself, i know it might take awhile. lyn is at 100 rejections for her young adult novel. but she has not lost hope. for katherine stockett, it took 60 agents before one said yes. and having let the cloud book sit in the drawer for so many years, i think i can be patient.

in the time being, i'll keep my head in those clouds. somehow i still keep looking up.

and if you feel like it, poke your head up there with me, into the feathered canyons and above them, where the sky is always the most brilliant blue.

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who do you say that I am?

years ago, i opened my mailbox to find an unsigned letter that can only be described as hate mail. a few days before, i had written an opinion piece in the local newspaper — my first — about the 'academically gifted' designation at my daughter's school. she was not labeled as such, scoring abysmally on those end of grade tests i came to abhor by the time she hit high school. Not 'gifted', according to a set of questions with bubbled answers, she was among a handful of students left in her grade one day while the AG kids went on an overnight trip to a museum in a city across the state. even the teachers went. and everybody spent the night in the museum. sounds fun, doesn't it? those left behind had a substitute teacher and watched Disney movies as i recall.

after the piece ran, a few people from our school i served with on the PTA board wrote letters to the editor challenging me, and i was glad for it. some of us have to be bench sitters — sometimes not picked at all. we all can't get the blue ribbon at the end of the swim meet. but my frustration was not at the gifted program per se, it was the treatment of the 'non-gifted'...the expectation that a day watching movies was the best they deserved. 

(in later years, i would teach writing to all levels of kids from first grade to high school, and among the best writers were those designated as 'academic'.)

i don't want to start this debate again. we've moved on. 

back to the letter. the writer — who felt she knew just enough about me to make it personal — suggested that if i read something besides babysitter club books to my child maybe she would be gifted. (now how did this person know what my daughter brought home from the school library?) she went on to write that if i spent less time mopping my kitchen floor and more time engaging my children that they both would be gifted. really?  (for the record, my son was later designated as AG in language arts, so i guess i left crumbs on the floor for at least a day or two and paid him some attention. the dog was bound to lick them up anyway.) i seem to recall playing Memory with him at least twice in 18 years. wouldn't that do it?

as i read the letter i thought: this person has been in my house. she is someone who hates me thinks she knows me, though apparently hadn't snooped around not well enough to know what titles my children's bookshelves contained. my daughter loved the babysitter club books, yes, but at home we read the classics, the Newberrys and the Caldecots. (true: that by the time my kids had reached the fifth grade they had passed me in the math department, but don't attack my reading list.)

what makes me angry as i think about this now is not only did i feel attacked for my mother skills, but i allowed that letter to stop me from writing for a very long time. from the thing that is my soul. i shrank from expressing my opinion for fear of the backlash. 

somehow, though, i didn't teach my child to shrink. i knew her inner beauty, her humor, her brilliance — and her sheer tenacity — would take her places, even if her bubbled answers said she wouldn't go far. and so we kept at it, encouraging her to be our own little miss engine that could.

those test scores would never earn her the 'gifted' moniker of most of her friends. yet she thrived. excelled in student government, edited the school newspaper, even earned a couple of small scholarships. (i admit to wishing she would, just once, be tapped for the honor society, but it was not to be. damn that geometry! curse the chemistry!) 

when the time came, she was wait-listed for the college of her choice — on her very first visit she knew in her soul it was the place for her. 'i'm going to see them,' she told me when the letter came. and she did. walked right into the office of the dean of admissions saying: just let me in. i won't disappoint. 'she's borderline,' the dean said, but a few days later, they accepted her.

and she did as promised. graduated in four years if not with honors, then honorably, proudly, beautifully — with a major and a minor.

'if only every one of my students could be like her,' her advisor told her dad and me.

within three months, she had a job in her career field in NYC — a goal she had set for herself when she first saw the city at 13. two years ago, she found a new job, where she recently won the office's 'unsung hero' award. she has a blog,too.

and this morning, she reported to the corporate communications office of one of the largest — and among the most respected — newspapers in the country. she'll be working there one day a week. my child. my beautiful apparently ungifted child.

my friend Mel writes a terrific blog. she is not afraid to put her mind down on paper, but after just her second post, a riled up reader posted a comment that disturbed her. what do i do? she asked. it's part of the game, i told her. but don't let it stop you from saying what you need to say.

:=:=:

i burned that letter long ago. got back to writing at last, choosing most often to write about my own life — knowing any wrath would most likely come from my husband. and i can handle him. but i always wondered who might have been so angry at me to write it, and to put it in the mail. i have learned enough in the years since to wonder what in her own life was so unsettled that she felt the need to attack me and my child. did i know her well? do i know her still?

back then, i wanted the chance to answer her, to shake my fists in her face and say just watch what my daughter can do. but she didn't do me the courtesy of signing her name. now i want to say SEE? And this: that some of us don't need a piece of paper to predict how we'll do in the world. some of us become our best selves because it never occurs to us that we can't. or shouldn't. or won't. and sometimes we do it because of the silly paper, we know so strongly that it is wrong. 

i do have to say that my daughter likes to keep her home clean. comes to see us and can't wait to do the laundry and clean out the dishwasher. i'm not nearly as manic in my mopping as i was when she was a child, but i love the fact that i taught her something when she was growing up in my very clean — if not particularly gifted — house.

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a few words

Mothers cradle and they rock.

They coach and they soothe,

aggravate and persist,

sing and celebrate,

praise and punish,

meddle and forgive.

Mothers worry and they hope.

They confuse and they cheer,

scold and brag,

spoil and surprise,

inspect and apologize.

Mothers worry.

Mothers pray and they mourn.

They plant and they believe,

provoke and protect,

bandage and bend,

push and pick up,

Mothers cope.

And they bathe us

in their love without ceasing,

and give us room

to breathe.

Children cuddle and they coo.

Children reach and they console,

annoy and prevail,

challenge and accept,

inspire and emulate,

pray and pretend.

Children play and they create.

They celebrate and they whine.

tickle and rebel,

inspect and energize,

climb and inquire,

Children dance.

Children play and they grieve.

They doubt and make believe,

Dream and disappoint,

struggle and soar,

hide and seek,

children hope.

And they grow without ceasing,

when we give them room

to breathe. 

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and while you're at it, give her a bath

From In Mother Words, by Susan Byrum Rountree, 

Copyright 2003 (revised May 2011)

When I gave birth to my daughter on a frigid morning in December almost 28 years ago, I thought that meant I had become a mother. A baby to rock and coo to, that’s what I’d wanted for so long. But it wasn’t until a few days later that my transformation occurred. It happened when my own mother, who’d come to take care of us for awhile, walked out my front door with my husband and said: “Give her a bath while I’m gone.”

Now you have to know my mother to understand the power of these words. Take a bath, she was always telling me while growing up, and make it scalding. It’ll serve to scrub away whatever ails you, be it headache, splinter or broken heart.

She’d been right, of course. I’d even followed her advice not four days before. Tired of being swollen and perpetually in wait, I lowered my nine-months’ pregnant body into a scalding tub and sat, knowing this was exactly what my mother would advise me to do. And believe me, it soon cured what ailed me and my baby. A few hours later, in the middle of the night, the baby who would be named Meredith told me it was time to come into the world.

A week later, when Mama handed my daughter over to me before heading out the door, she knew full well that “Give her a bath” was code for me — her own baby girl — to take my place among the mothers of my family. It was time, not to take the bath, but give it.

Of course I resisted. I’d watched her give Meredith a bath on the giant sponge on my tiny bathroom counter, but aside from wringing a dripping washcloth over her squirming body, I’d never been in charge. I had no idea how much baby bath to use or if I should wash her hair. Where would I put her while the water was heating up? What if it got too hot? How would I, with only two hands between me, find all the soiled places between her folds, hold her slick form without dropping her on the floor?

I heard the door slam behind me and pondered all these things in my heart. Then I stared at the pink form in my arms, realizing for the very first time that my mother would be going home soon, and this baby was mine to keep.

As I remember this, I think about the time we’d been studying the Chinese culture in 6^th grade, and I asked my mother if I could take one of her china bowls for show and tell.

“Only if you don’t break it,” she said to me. So I wrapped it carefully in newspaper, put it in a paper grocery bag and set out. That afternoon I triumphantly walked the mile home, juggling my mother’s bowl and an armful of books. I made it all the way to the back door, then paused, the books and the bowl in one arm, trying to open the door handle. Need I say more?  If I couldn’t be trusted with a china bowl, how on earth could I be trusted with a baby?

I thought about not giving my baby a bath at all and just saying I did. I mean, she looked clean enough to me. But after 20 years of living under the roof of the master of bath giving, I knew full well she’d find me out.

Poor Meredith. I tried to be gentle. Her wide eyes watched as I tested the water and soaped the soft cloth. She was tiny, slippery, not six pounds, but to me she weighed 16. I was as careful as I knew to be, and after a minute or two, my heart slowed a little, and I began singing to her, marveling at the very idea that this tiny form was so much a part of me.

When my mother came home that afternoon, Meredith was not only clean, but fed, burped and sleeping. I had finally begun my journey as her mother.

Soon enough, though, you learn that when you are out in the world with your new baby, everyone becomes your mother. They are well-meaning when they tell you you’re holding her the wrong way, offer advice on how to properly burp her or what to do if she won’t stop crying. Sometimes their advice is worth keeping.

I learned this lesson on my first trip out of the house with Meredith when we paid our first visit to the pediatrician’s office, that command post for mothers who claim to know more about how to raise a baby than other mothers in the room.

 This was January, middle Georgia, and though that part of the South is known more for its gentle winters, 1984 began as the year before it had ended, biting cold and blustery.

I had dressed Meredith for her outing, first in t-shirt and diapers, then in tiny white tights and pink sailor dress. Next came a hooded sweater and socks. After that, a quilted snowsuit that was so big her feet didn’t reach the toes. Then came a blue toboggan, bought when we thought sure she’d be a boy. The final layer was made up of two, mind you, two soft blankets.

 So tightly bound was she that you could barely see her tiny face. Her body wouldn’t bend in the car seat, not doubt, since she’d doubled her weight in the 10 minutes it took me to dress her. Never mind. My baby would not be catching cold in this weather.

When I reached the doctor’s office, the nurses gathered around to see her. I beamed, at this most perfect creature I’d created, almost by myself.

“Take some of these covers off this baby,” said one of them, surely a mother of 10. Could she tell that I’d been at it less than two weeks?

 I stood back, mortified, as she began to peel the layers away from my newborn, revealing the face of a child who has loved hot weather ever since.

 “Always be sure that you give her space to breathe, ” the nurse told me.

(If I’d tried to take Meredith out of the house when my mother was still visiting, not doubt she would have been the one to give me this advice. I related this story to my sister, and she admitted that though her daughter was born in the middle of August, the first time she took her outside, she wrapped her accordingly. My mother, who was a witness to this folly, was quick to remove the layers from my niece, lest she have a heat stroke. )

Give her a bath, give her room to breathe. I think of my own mother, and how many times she bathed me, not only in scalding water to scrub my ills away, but in the love she gave while I was growing up. I had no other model and surely I didn’t need one. She gave me room to breathe, too, to learn the ropes without her looking over my shoulder every minute.

We all need the bath to still us, and the breathing room to keep our lives moving forward on our own power.

Bathe the baby. Then give her room to breathe.

When I look back on these almost 28 years of being a mother, I know I’ve tried to follow these two rules. Both my children, now grown, know all about the power of the hot bath, and though they may think I’ve suffocated them with my questions about their lives, I hope they can appreciate those times when I’ve given them some needed air, allowing them to shape their own futures the way they see fit.

One day it will be my turn from my children to mother me. I hope they’ll remember that I’ll need to be bathed, not only with water, but in love and understanding. And I can tell you for sure, I will never outgrown my own need for room to breathe.

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21 — a little ramble down the road

i remember the day i met my little niece, kendall. she was a newborn, lying on my grandmother's bed on a summer sunday, and suddenly i wasn't the baby of the family anymore. she didn't look like us — we the fair haired, blue-eyed blondes as babies — she, a  dark wisp of hair framing a pudgy face (now that was like me). As i studied her features, i searched for traces of my brother and sister, my parents in her face.

i remember watching my grandmother — her knotted fingers dancing over kendall's tiny pinched lips in hopes of sparking a giggle — wondering how this little baby with the brown hair and olive complexion would fit into the 'we' we had always been.

this was new to me. all of a sudden, our little family of five had grown to seven — with my sister-in-law, then eight with baby kendall — we would be 10 by that fall, as my second niece, susan hooks, would be born just six weeks later. In another six I would be married. how could it be that we had expanded so quickly, when we had been five for so long?

another five years, and we were 13, with the addition of five little boys and another girl, two of those children my own.

the three girls grew up and fell in love, had the whole fairy princess wedding thing only a few months apart. in between, one nephew found out he was a father of a one-year-old. blink, and our original five had multiplied ourselves by four. you would think we were rabbits.

laura gray

a week ago, we became an uneven number, as kendall had the second great-grandchild for my parents, a baby girl.

21. i seem to recall that my father used to say he wanted enough grandchildren to have a basketball team. now we have two starting lineups with a pretty deep bench on each. (baby laura gray, at 20 inches, is pretty tall, come to think of it.) we could have a whole tournament roster before we are finished with our expansion project.

about a month before lg was born, my parents came to town for a baby shower for her. the first thing my dad said when he walked in the door was that he wanted us to look at our calendars and find a date when he could show us the farms. my father rarely asks his children for much, and so we wanted to oblige.

we are not farmers. but my grandfather grew up with a man who farmed sometimes, and bigdaddy like land. i spent many sundays in my childhood in the back seat of his ford, driving down dirt roads, watching bigdaddy pick up a clod of dirt and throw it, pull a bloom off the cotton plant and crumble it in his fingers. from the back seat of his car i learned how to tell soy beans from cotton, to appreciate the beauty of a perfectly-laid field of tobacco, rows of corn not parched from summer sun. in his own garden, which was massive, i helped my grandfather dig potatoes from the ground, pick corn and tomatoes, helped my grandmother shell butterbeans on the front porch. i knew just about where my grandfather's small farms were — one down the road just north of their little village, the other on the way to nags head, near the great dismal swamp. but daddy, at 82, wanted us to know exactly. and so on saturday, we went.

the first i would call a field. it's where the man who rents it from my father and his sister used to plant a few rows of sweet corn at the edge nearest my grandparents' kitchen, so they would always have corn for Christmas. on one side is what used to be their kitchen window, on the other are their graves. 

bigdaddy chose this burial spot so my grandmother could look out at him, there under the cedar tree that shaded his headstone, as he waited for her to join him one day. the cedar tree is gone now.

on the day of his funeral when i visited my grandfather's grave i felt suffocated, for if ever there was a man all about fresh air, it was my bigdaddy... and there, stuck under all that ground, he couldn't so much as a wisp. an unreasonable thought i know, for if ever there is a man in heaven, it is him. just his body is under all that earth. but still.

there is a story, that on the day bigdaddy was buried, a man who had worked with him had shown up too late to view his body in the funeral home, so while the family greeted relatives and friends inside the church, the funeral guys surrounded his casket, opening it up, so the man could pay his respects. it was a glorious fall day, and 20 years later i think of that day and how my grandfather likely took a great, deep breath looking out at the blue sky above him, the clouds swirling by and was just at peace with God. and life. and death. nobody ever told my grandmother, but i know she would have liked this, his last grasp of air.

when i looked at his grave this week, i found a small blue flower growing next to his foot stone. life. again.

my husband and i drove with my parents to two other small farms that day, then ended our tour in a place i have never been. though as the crow flies not four miles from where my grandparents lived for over 60 years, i had never even seen — nor had known it was there — the family cemetery where my great-grandparents are buried. my grandfather's parents. it sits behind my father's cousin's house.

now my grandfather was the youngest of 13, so my daddy has a lot of cousins. one of bigdaddy's sisters was named mildred minnesota— living in the northeastern corner of north carolina i know not why —  but aint (aunt) minnie is there. as is moses, my great-grandfather, and mary, my grandfather's mother.

my father at the family cemetery

moses died not long after my father was born. no doubt, since my grandfather was so much younger than his oldest siblings, moses knew some of his great-grandchildren. as i stood over my his grave this week i wondered what sort of man he was — born just 10 years before the civil war began, died just six months before the stock market crash of 1929 — he must have had a thing or two to say.

and he must have been a good man, because his youngest child certainly was a good enough man to require someone who respected him so much that he asked the casket handlers open it, one last time, to the open air.

on saturday, as i looked around this little family plot, eyeing the stump of a cedar tree that must have shaded ol' moses from the hot sun, i couldn't help but think that bigdaddy had chosen beneath the cedar tree as his resting spot because his father had done the same.

what does this have to do with little laura gray, you ask. well, i'm getting to that. 

my father, just the other day, asked my mother if she thought when she was young that she would ever live to meet her great-grandchildren. "I never thought about it," my mother said. Somehow I think my father did. His own father met every single one of his greats, those children of my siblings and my cousins who are now grown and making their ways in the world. Though daddy yet has not met laura gray, he will soon, knowing i am sure that he hopes he can meet all of the greats in his life yet to come.

great-bigdaddy moses didn't know me. he died just four months after my father was born. but if you start with his youngest child, add my grandmother, my father and his sister — their spouses and their children each...

i am number 21 on that list. just like little lg is on ours. 21.

maybe someday her grandfather will bring her to the farms, show her where her great-great grandfather built his house and watched over his bluebirds. where her grandfather grew up. maybe he will take her to the family cemetery. i hope, though he is not so much the family storyteller as i am, he will tell her a little something of the people whose names are on the stones, will tell her just how much it means that she is tied to them, and to their land, too.

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