Nice Mums*

I forgot that Mother’s Day is here.  So I’ll put off talking about my daughter Lisl The Eight-Year-Old Homework Demon.  Instead, let’s talk about the most important/most dismissed job in the world. Motherhood.

It just occurred to me that this mothering gig is not really a job at all.  I mean, it’s a chore, filled with triumph and defeat and sometimes wanting to shove your head through sheet rock.  And minutes later your heart swells to the size of Jupiter or maybe a little bigger.  But forgive me for being the 1,000,000,000th person to say that mothering is so much more than a job.

Moms are much more than caretakers.  They are people who invade and move into the psyches of their children forever.  Not because they’re pushy, though nature did make us that way, but because they’ve been asked to.  Children’s minds start out as blank slates or canvases or lumps of clay (some media are easier to work with than others).  In fact, I bet some children’s minds are like blogs being written.

"Kissing Mums," "Scolding Mums," & Purple Mums*

But kids grow up and in almost everything they do, in some way, however teensy, it comes back to mom.  How they clean, how they don’t, what they wear, what they think about health care reform and that donut hole.  We are rebellions against or faithful repetitions of Mom’s Way.  So, it’s less like we’re doing a job (snipping flowers, baking bread, firing an entire staff in hostile takeover) and more like we are existing on the big screen and setting up our permanent residence in our kids’ brains and hearts.  We’re like sedimentary rock, aging thousands of years, adding a layer of color and something for 5th grade classes to crack open and talk about.  We are becoming part of of the terrain.

Of course Freud thought it was a good idea to start every conversation with, “Tell me about your mother.”

And that’s a really important job, to be fodder for therapy sessions.  But, again, it’s not a job we do deliberately.  It’s every breath we take.  It’s every spoonful of probiotic yogurt.  It’s the way we react when we’re showing our children youtube videos of Les Miserables at night and Lisl The Eight-Year-Old Homework Demon suddenly screams, “MOM!  I have STEP testing tomorrow.  Get OOOOOUUUUT!”

Every move counts.  No pressure, Mums.

So it’s no wonder that on Mother’s Day our desires are very simple.  A little peace and quiet in our trailers, time off-screen.  Or a dinner not made by Mom, but by the handsome husband, supportive friend or the neighbor with benefits.  And maybe some flowers, too.

*Photo Credit:  http://www.public-domain-image.com/plants/flowers/mums/index.html

Speaking of faith, according to Wikipedia, the most trusted source for the knowledge-free folks of the universe, the shamrock is rumored to be a religious symbol.  It represents the official Holy Trinity.  Yup.  One part in each little clover-leaf.  That’s cute.  What sort of pantheon does the daisy represent?  And what kind of faith lives in the overlapping, circling petals of the rose?  Is it a celebration of Mormon polygamy?

What, then, does the four-leaf clover represent, and why is it lucky?  Can the Trinity actually be improved?  Maybe the fourth leaf represents a commitment to shopping at Pottery Barn.  Or converting to Shakerism in adulthood.

In any case, it’s the happiest imagery of any country I can think of.  Who doesn’t love gold?  And the rainbow.  What a wonderful, disarming image.  Who can be unhappy and combative in the face of a rainbow?  In fact, I seriously wonder if this image would have military power.  Kill ‘em with kindness tactical warfare.  Throw rainbow stripes on a uniform and most of us will be singing like Kermit the Frog.  How about a heart on every helmet?  I’m really not kidding very much.  This leads to my favorite real-life war story of ALL TIME.  My brother’s.

He was involved in a war that shall remain nameless defending a country that shall remain nameless, lest Wikileaks decides to post my blog on its website, exposing me for blogging about war and rainbows and a pretend place I like to call the HIGH PERFORMING MAGNET SCHOOL.   Anyway, my brother was the gunman on top of the vehicle that was at the apex of the triangle formation of jeeps that were to enter an enemy base.  The enemy (sorry, but this is the only appropriate word in battle) was standing outside in impressive numbers.  The driver of my brother’s jeep, who was to lead the capture, got scared just like a human being might, and he slowed his vehicle.  My brother, ever the fearless soldier, screamed, “GOOOOO! GOOOO!”  And the jeeps went.

As they approached, they saw the enemy soldiers with their hands in the air, begging for their lives.  My brother and his company left their vehicles, holding the surrendering opposition in place by the aim of their M-16s.  The desperate “don’t shoot, don’t shoot” persisted.  Everyone was afraid.  Some soldiers were screaming.  Oddly, the ones with the guns were screaming the loudest.  My brother, ever the fearless soldier who was the kind of kid who would give you his Storm Trooper action figure if you just asked for it, put his gun down.  He took a step toward the man at whom his gun had just been aimed.  My brother extended his hand.  They shook.  My brother’s fellow soldiers, some of them still screaming, saw this.  They eventually lowered their weapons and did the same.

Now when will they make a movie scene like that?

So, yeah.  Rainbows, cliches, disarming symbols, disarming battles, and the Irish.  Happy St. Patrick’s Day.  Now, if I can just find a way to make a vegan corned beef and cabbage for our deeply Californian guests on the 17th.

I love Wikipedia, and I use it regularly.  But having worked in academia, I have been trained that it “SHOULD NOT BE USED AS YOUR PRIMARY SOURCE,” and that some of the content is questionable.  So, what does this mean?  I use it all the time, but I do so with extreme guilt.  That said, please support this valuable resource.  Where would be without it?  Let’s stay knowledgeable and guilty.

DONATE TO WIKIPEDIA.

Holy absentee blogger!  Do I really have the gall to publish this stale Valentine post?  February 14, 2011 seems a lifetime ago.  Sorry, but I’ve been busy.  I won’t give you excuses, but since you insist…I was so busy.  This week I had to lose faith in my fellow man, regain it again, lose it one more time, then not care at all, and then slightly care, sort of.  If you think that’s not exhausting, then you’ve never been Greta Koenigin.  Anyway, it’s all world politics on my mind.  You know, this that, etc.  Not buying it?  Okay.  Here.  Have a post.

Typically, Mr. Koenigin and I celebrate Valentine’s Day with the standard, hard-won Date Night, the glorious sip of Gatorade in the triathlon of parenting children who often scream too much. This year, with three girls who are of the ages to be obsessed with hearts, flowers, and the idea that boys grow up to kiss girls, we decided to have a family Talenvine dinner with them.  And Date Night can fall on an ordinary Thursday, when roses aren’t so expensive, and we don’t feel obligated to buy them.

Family dinner was fun.

Maybe a tradition of a Talenvine’s Day family dinner will come in handy when the girls grow to be heartache-y teens without boyfriends.  They can sadly shovel food in their mouths as three gorgeous Gregs take out their three best friends to Olive Garden, Baja Fresh or Baker’s Square.  They will sigh through their V-day teen singlehood, and my husband will sit across the table from them, high-five-ing himself until his hands bleed.

But maybe the best reason for a family Talenvine’s dinner is the fact that we won’t be tempted to order and eat a gourmet dessert like chocolate molten whatever, something flambé, a cobbler or anything with decorative drizzle.

We get to have these homemade sugar cookies instead.  Yum.  The end.

So, I had to complete the project I’ve been wanting to take on for THREE YEARS:  Martha Stewart’s handmade dolls. And this is fine, thrifty, thoughtful and fun, but it had a price:  two back-to-back almost-all-nighters; puffy, painful hands;  and a BLOWN OUT TIRE FROM A LATE-NIGHT KINKOS PATTERN XEROXING RUN.  Yes, for Christmas the universe didn’t give me a Kindle, but it cost me FOUR KINDLES WORTH OF NEW TIRES.  “You have all-wheel-drive.  You’ve gotta replace all four tires.”  All because of metal on the freeway.  AND!  And, and, AND while I was sitting in the darkness of the long winter’s night, on a freeway off-ramp with my juiceless cellphone, I had a California Highway Patrolman PASS ME.  Yes, he inched by to see if I needed help, but all he could see was a lopsided car with HAZARD LIGHTS FLASHING and the shadowy figure of a human being inside.  But he drove by!  To get help, I’m sure.  No.  Nothing.  After several minutes, NO-THING.  And the off-ramp was so dangerously dark that he couldn’t even TELL that I wasn’t blond.  He had no IDEA that I was almost forty.  And he STILL DROVE AWAY, not with sirens on to pull over a supermodel traveling one mile over the speed limit, but he drove slowly in pursuit of…donuts?  Or to a recreational drug confiscation?  I didn’t feel protected or served.  Thankfully, after 10,000 cars passed me by, a nice man with lots of cologne came out of a shiny Jaguar and asked, “You need help?”  I said YES and told him that he was making the CHP look especially lame this Christmas.  And he lay on the ground in his nice sweater to change my tire.

So, I returned home, the dolls got made, and the very heavy taunting three-year-old monkey jumped off my back and died.  I was very tired, and the house, which took more several hours to clean, became dirty again after fourteen hours of the Christmas Day toy explosion.  And I said to myself and everyone else, “NEVER AGAIN.”  Insanity is bad and so is sewing for twelve hours straight.  And the love of Jesus is going to have to manifest itself some other way next year.

But…  When the tree gets put away, and the rich reds and greens come off the walls and counter tops, and the misfit candy mysteriously ends up at my husband’s work, I will feel peace.  A peace that could only come from the relief of the insanity of Scramble, Sew, and Suffer.  All will hit a comfortable neutral, and we will look back at Christmas with a diseased, forgetful fondness.  And after a year of Not That Much Stuff we will be ready for Hustle, Bustle and Spend again, after which time our heads will hurt like the bellies of gluttons as they eat desserts with hard sauce, following courses of frisée, duck confit, and beef tenderloin with new potatoes.  What the hell are new potatoes?  But we will again feel the addictive release of Undecking the Halls and begin another eleven-month march into the next season of overdoing.  Secular, societal ritual cannot be more religious than this one called Christmastime.  Rankin, Bass, and the spirit of Charles M. Schultz will, in complicity with Target and Macy’s, make sure we all know who Jesus is.

Linda is a sweet lady of 79 wonderful years.  She loves Christmas.  And every year she pulls out bags of sparkly synthetic snow and covers five tables in her guest room.  She lights up her 50-plus tiny homes and invites friends and neighbors to see.

While I do worry that she has a shopping disorder, I am moved by the spectacle that she with her frail hands and tired gait must have taken weeks and weeks to assemble.  And my kids love it.  And.  So do I.

I realized that the appeal of these Christmas villages is not that they are so different from my life.  They are different.  There is snow, but no shovels.  There is life, but no one is working.  There is joy, but no one is in traffic or in line or in trouble.  This is different from the real world, which as we know is fraught with the alarming presence of alarming things: naked TSA screenings, scabies, and the fussiness of the upper middle class.  But the little villages, in all their Hallmarkish perfection, aren’t that different either.

Every bit of optimism in these buzzing electric towns is real.  It’s just condensed into one little moment on one patch of five folding tables.  And it takes a concentration of this hand-picked reality to highlight the wonderful sprinkles of life in our own world.  Sometimes we just need to stand outside ourselves for a few minutes.  That’s what miniature Christmas towns let us do.  We can stand outside people just like ourselves and enjoy it so much that we want to cram our big butts into the resin seats of their taverns.  Or, we get ourselves so excited to re-enter our own life-sized villages, even though the service at RJ’s is not nearly as courteous or service-like as the stonework tries to convince us it is.  And our three-year-old will stand up in the booth 36 infuriating times.

But we squeeze our butts back into our own lives, a little inspired by our experience as outsiders.

Fifteen minutes at Linda’s, with a cup of watery hot chocolate in hand, is a meaningful fifteen minutes with the family.  Thank goodness she has the love of clutter to deliver this magical perspective to us.  I still think she has a shopping problem.

Sugarplums not dancing and ready for eating.

What is a sugarplum?  It just occurred to me I have no clue.  We take for granted that they exist, and we don’t even care to know what they are.  I always pictures purple beings coated in sugar that dance.  In your head.  In fact they all dance.  The Sugarplum Fairy.  They are not edible, and they are always dancing.  And they are so 1800s.  Did Tiny Tim want sugarplums?

So I did what all Americans do when they just don’t know the answer to the secrets of the universe.  I Googled.  And in three minutes, I not only knew what they were, I knew how to make them and which blogger in Des Moines makes them and likes them.  If you would have told me that twenty years ago, I would have said, “That’s weird.”  What greater dimension of information accessibility will another twenty years bring?  The ability to track anyone’s thoughts?  The ability to track the thoughts of our thoughts?  If that’s so, whatever will the HIGH PERFORMING MAGNET SCHOOL parents think of me for thinking they are stupid?  And what would their thoughts think?  And the thoughts of those thoughts?  Maybe this advancement will be more tolerable to modern minds.  And I will sit with my outdated WHITE Kindle, discussing the marvels of beaming books into my place on the glider.  And my great, great, great grandchildren will be having virtual play dates where kids in different continents can jump off cliffs together and NOT DIE.  All the while mama thinks about dinner that cooks via synaptic fires, though the sauce clumps when she’s in a bad mood.

But I’m shamefully off topic.  In fact, I haven’t touched the topic.  Here’s a recipe for good old-fashioned sugarplums from Saveur.com.   Make them, and know your poetic images.  As if poetic images should be researched and baked.  Well, they’re not.  NO BAKING REQUIRED FOR THIS.  And they taste good.

Even Natalie Portman, who lost 20 pounds from her already rice-paper-thin frame for the movie Black Swan, is chiming in:  “In what other field is it acceptable to judge artists by how big they are? It was just amazing all of the pressure on dancers to starve themselves.”

In what other field, in what other field…hmmm….let me thiiink.  (fourteen second pause) Uh…how about…the film industry?  The industry that manufactures reality for us to take in with each buttery, salty scoop of popcorn.

Macauley’s comment, though shocking, is really not that shocking.  He expresses the sentiment of producers, directors, audiences, and much of the world’s women who can’t eat twelve french fries without hating themselves, punishing themselves, and wishing they were dead.  And the room for error is minuscule.  In the world of fat-phobic heads, women are usually a full eight pounds between being dangerously thin or morbidly obese.  Insanity about the female form is not exclusive to this one crazy reviewer.

I take two things away from this.  First of all, Ms. Ringer’s response:

“I am not overweight.”

Healthy minds and bodies can exist in the face of pervasive societal or, in this case, industrial insanity.  And this rock-solid perspective is coming from a recovered anorexic.  ATTENTION WOMEN AND GIRLS:  YOU HAVE A NEW HERO IN JENIFER RINGER.

And second, the New York City Ballet has cast in a manner that violates the older, emaciated aesthetic and offends nostalgic onlookers who know little and care nothing about the price of this aesthetic.  Offend away, NYC Ballet.  Women and girls are counting on you.

I see progress on the horizon.

Related articles

• “Fat” Ballerinas & The Black Swan Diet: Don’t Let The Times Set the Tone (blogher.com)
• ‘Sugar Plump Fairy’ ballet dancer says she suffered from eating disorders (telegraph.co.uk)

I instinctively know not to speak to dancers or choreographers unless they speak to you.  They are busy.  They have wood and cotton in their shoes.  Their groins hurt.  Some are hungry.  And, their posture is straight.  This alone makes them very intimidating.  You can be correct about everything in the world, but if you look more like Quasimodo than the swan next to you, you are immediately wrong and pitiable.  Best thing is to remain quiet.

And choreographers are serious business.  They command the troops of weightless swanlings.  Swanlings defy gravity by virtue of their physical strength and discipline.  They don’t need God or stage machinery to assist them.  They fly, float and act lean.  And the choreographer commands them.  There is no stronger force in the universe than a choreographer.  I saw this phenomenon in action.

Choreographers spend their days in a kerchief, tight pants and funny shoes.  How do they come up with these ragged ensembles?   No one on any runway is wearing this.  Even the Berkeley thrift stores, a source for throngs of bourgeois college students who desire the sexy-impoverished look, don’t have these styles on their squeaking racks.  Yet, choreographers wear these dance rags like queens in full royal dress.  And they look good.  This comes from a confidence to be feared.

And when dancers hand you the giant teapot, you’d better be ready.  It is a serious undertaking we are engaged in.  The last thing I want to inspire is frustration in a poorly dressed Swan Queen, who with a change of thought can switch from a standing and speaking position to a graceful jackknife pose in mid-air.  Her body can be morphed into a decorative, deadly weapon, like she’s Bernardo in West Side Story.

So I grabbed and handed-off props all day.  I spent so much of the day not-doing, that I didn’t want to screw up the five times I actually was doing something for ten seconds.  But I did.  And I’m sure I went from being thought quiet, dumb and overweight to, possibly, This is the only thing you have to do.  Maybe in your six hours of idleness you could mentally prepare enough to handle putting the Jack-in-the-Box on the chair and taking it off again. If I were a Choreographer-Swan-Queen-Alpha-Omega-Be-All, that would be my exact thought.  And with the point of my toe, I would order the stage plebe’s death, and mindlessly mark an unenthusiastic circle of sashays as the deed was carried out by seven-year-olds dressed as toy monkeys.

But then there was the Toy Solider.  The professional dancer.  The guest artist who came from that Portland company (by way of Louisville).  His leaps onstage inspire similar leaps of your heart.  In fact, his body does what our souls would do, were they not so weighted down by Hostess Donettes and Facebook habits.  It’s empathy we feel.  We know those leaps.  Our brains perform them all the time.  But television is just too good for us to actually do them.

After the Shopping/Battle Medley, the Toy Soldier lands a grand jeté and twirls off stage left, beaming and arabesquing all the way.  He hands me the giant cheeseball.  Never has a fiberglass cheeseball been more triumphant than the during the preceding five eight-counts.  And in that brief moment offstage, the Toy Soldier looked at me, smiling, with spritely blue eyes that seemed to say, “Thanks for holding my cheeseball, sweetie.”

Such kindness coupled with utter theatrical heroism made my worship of him go from casual to fundamentalist to homeschooler.   I realized then and there that I have been out of the theater far too long, and that I need many, many more elegant men of the ballet in my life.

Music is important to us.  My husband and I are singers.  We both have day jobs.  My husband’s pays well.  Mine pays nothing and involves wiping noses, doorjambs, and yelling at kids on the way to school.  Only because they try to stop walking.

So when our little Lisl took on the task of learning an instrument, we enrolled her with anticipation, excitement, and a very heavy pretense of “No pressure at all, dear.”  This first recital was a mini moment of truth.  How would she do?  Would she play like a scientist?  Like a poet?  Would she pee all over the piano bench, adding another stain to the 30-year old rug in Mr. Donovan, her teacher’s, living room?

The concert was set up so sweetly.  Glittery garland covered almost every available ledge and fixture, and voice and piano students sat in rows.  They were dressed in reds, greens, plaids and blacks.  Boys wore pants and sweaters, and girls wore dresses with the faux bows in all the usual places.  Then the music began.

Actually, it began after a long introduction by Mr. Donovan, whose barely audible, nice-teacher voice, went on a bit about the fact that Christmas is celebrating the birth of a baby.   And his name is Jesus.  This was not too big of news to the audience of mostly parents who have probably at least heard of Jesus by now.  But it was a bit odd that he was speaking so openly about Jesus being God.  Especially since this was the fourth day of Hannukah and that most of the folks celebrating Hannukah think Jesus was just another nice man trying to be their king.   And doesn’t the separation of church and state imply that you shouldn’t talk about Jesus in your living room to strangers who might not care?  Perhaps not.

And the kids played and sang.  One after the other.  Some loudly.  Some softly.  There were the note-note-notey artists and the one who made the piano sound like it has ten-thousand keys on it, to the point where you think, God that’s pretty, but maybe I hate the piano. There was the loud singer with the great timing, and the interpretive pianist with the interpretive timing.

In between each song, Mr. Donovan went on about the angels and the shepherd and the star.  I wanted to act surprised or give the oh really nod to be polite, but I probably looked like I was in horror because I was struggling so hard not to let my face say I KNOW.  He continued on about “the mighty king” and the “people everywhere” like he was reading a page from Bing Crosby’s sheet music.  I think he even went on to say the word savior.  The one with the capital S. Clearly, the gentle, dapper, elderly music teacher has forgotten where he lives.  Doesn’t he know that EVERYONE is a Savior in San Francisco?  And only if they feel completely validated by the idea, and this self-agreement can be rescinded for any reason, at any moment, in any manner comfortable and pleasing to the pending ex-Savior.

Then the secular portion of the program began.  We were going to be saved (with a small s) by “Up on the Housetop” and “Silver Bells.”  What is there to left to say about reindeer?  They say enough with a single overhead flight.  And silver bells?  They sound pretty, and the girl in the red velvet with the glittery headband did them justice, in a squirmy-four-year-old-at-the-piano way.  But Mr. Donovan is very thorough, and he went on to describe Santa Claus.  His looks.  His clothing.  The whole intent behind gift-giving and how he lands on the roof.  I even learned about Santa’s using the chimney to get inside.  This was actually a surprise to us since we live in a condo with no fireplace.  How ever does he get in and eat the cookies on the Santa’s Cookies plate?

The kids played on.  And the grandmother next to me wept as her little grandson plunked out the First Noel.  I thought of my daughter’s grandma, my mom, who wished she could have been there weeping through the plunking by her granddaughter.  But grandma had accidentally scheduled a cruise and was surely being tortured by this on distant, tropic waters.  Maybe, there, she was crying, too.

The best part of the night was the fact that our daughter, who looked like she was going to fall over with nerves, played the piece and finished without stopping, crying, repeating one measure six times, or flooding the room with urine.  She played.  Through nerves and all.  And her performance gave us enough to keep us hopeful that she will carry the torch of music-making.  We think that hope will take us all the way into June when the next concert happens.

Fortunately, there is nothing obvious about June for dear Mr. Donovan to feel obligated to share with us.  The phenomenon of graduation?  The beginning of summer?  What is summer really?   Have you ever taken the time to break it down?  Maybe, he’ll impart a little information about an event called Father’s Day.

Seriously.  Cards don’t mean much.  They are delightful, but they do not make or break our existence.  Except when suddenly Marvelous Madeline doesn’t send you the card-stocked, polka-dotted masterpieces, with the ribbons and vellum and (sorry, that was 2005).  But the last time MM sent a card it was 2005.  And what happened?  How did we get removed from the list?

Did she lose her address book in the most recent move?  Was it something I said?  Did she have a nervous breakdown?  Did she injure her elbow again?  We haven’t seen each other in years.  We were only coffee friends.  Once in a while.  We drifted into former coffee friends, which is fine, but what has become of her and her 7-layer greeting cards?

And that’s the thing.  A whole universe is communicated by not communicating.  And she may have reasons or no reasons.  Maybe she decided that she prefers smoking FAT CIGARS and sipping gin for the eight hours she would invest in greeting card fabrication: look, select, type, edit, send, receive, complain, receive again, stuff, stamp, send.  Maybe she forgot!  Maybe her kids are getting acne or maybe she lost the taste for coordinating outfits.  Maybe her husband refused to dress in Daddy ‘n’ Me Rudolph wear.  Maybe Madeline stopped putting out so much.

But what if the whole world stopped the frivolity of sending cards because they felt it was too frivolous?  And the whole world became sensible with their time and stamps?  And no one had any idea what their cousin’s grown Canadian children looked like?

It seems we are either on frivolity overload or underload.  Maybe Martha Stewart overwhelmed us with great ideas.  Are we are suffering from Option Trauma?  And since we can’t possibly do even 20% of her catalog activities we go catatonic and do zero.  At least I do.  Or did.  Or didn’t do.

So the question remains.  Opt out?  Not?  And what will become of the inquiring minds who, rightly, expect a pictorial update from the Koenigins?  Might they have a conversation for me?  Will they write my 12-page monologue, with all the entrances, exits, and outfit adjustments marked?  And thus begins the vicious cycle of greeting cards.  It spirals out of control until getting out is no longer an option.  And January 1 of each year is spent brainstorming themes for next year’s holiday greeting cards.

Maybe I better send holiday greeting cards.

Or maybe not.

Related articles

• Tips for Greener Holidays: Cards (wholefoodsmarket.com)