Snow Day

We had our first real snow day of the year; all last night, after a treacherous drive from the college home to get Jonah, I kept having dreams that I'd wake up and the grass was green; I had to go to work. And actually, I love my Thursday classes and am not going to be able to teach Emily Dickinson in early American lit this semester and am genuinely disappointed I didn't get to spend today with my students. Instead, Jonah and I snuggled on the couch all day, watched the yard fill up with snow, the window go blank with a blizzard. Then an even more treacherous drive to his father's house and I was reminded of the time my grandparents took me and my cousin Tim, the eldest boy cousin (but three years younger than I) to the Museum of Science and Industry one balmy late spring day. I remember leaving, walking down the steps past the stone lions, and straight into a humid, hot breeze. The sky was marbled; Lake Michigan frothing beside Sheridan Drive. At some point, somewhere in Winnetka or Glencoe, the tornado sirens began to blare, and we saw a waterspout over the Lake. Grandma Betty began reciting the rosary, and since she was (strangely) without beads, made Tim and I count her Hail Marys, Our Fathers. Tim and I sat in the back of the giant Chevy Caprice, threw Kleenexes out the open window. Counted.

And every night since Jonah was born, I've said the rosary. Ever since I remembered how to feel fear, to feel love, to feel at all. Oh, I'm hardly Catholic anymore, and was never a very good one (the Nicene Creed? I've heard of it. Couldn't tell you what it says, except that in Latin, which I've sung a million times, it begins Credo in unum Deum, which I think means i believe in one God).

And so tonight, the house weirdly quiet except for the occasional whine of wind through the windows, a neighbor's snowblower, the dogs sighing and stretching out on the kitchen floor, I'm back to my familiar loneliness. Today, as I was dropping Jonah off, and his father and I got along as well as we ever can, there was the slightest twinge toward family, toward what I walked away from. Oh, some days all I want is Midwestern normalness--to be married, to have a family, a tidy suburban house, an eight foot Douglas fir in the living room, vegetarian chili cooking in a crockpot in the kitchen. I deeply miss being able to curl up next to someone at night, to tuck myself beneath a shoulder, to hold someone's hand in the dark.

Or, at least I miss the idea of these things. As I've never had the best of luck choosing romantic partners (are you batshit crazy? A passive aggressive depressive? An abusive asshole? Please apply!) I've never actually had these things. But sometimes, I miss them terribly all the same. My therapist tells me this is normal. My friends tell me it isn't insane that I would fall for someone who isn't crazy, and he might fall for me.

My mind? Not so convinced. But then, I am also reminded--by the cat curled around my shoulders, the dogs at my feet, drafts of poems waiting on the rickety desk, the tidy suburban house I bought on my own, the freedom and space my life has opened into, the boy who tucked his head beneath my arm, tucked his hand in mine and said, without prompting, I love you the most, Mom--that my life is also remarkably beautiful in a way I've never experienced before. And none of what I have now would I give up. For anyone. The best, hopeful angels of my nature tell me that I won't have to. I'm not sure I'm there yet to believe it, so for now am becoming friendly and familiar with this loneliness. The new dog, Max, stretches out next to me at night, and it's warm in the bed.

And so I'm left with my old loneliness again, an empty night and four-day weekend, a snowy world. I've got cookies in the oven; the house smells of vanilla and sugar. Tomorrow, I can go anywhere, do anything.

What a miracle, this.

Solitude

For the past three weeks, to battle the rising tide of anxiety (holidays! family! attraction to unavailable men! three weeks behind on grading!), I've been getting up before dawn, settling on the couch in the living room, with its twelve foot, uncurtained window that faces east, the backyard, the woods. With my too-strong cup of coffee, I've attempted to pray, talk myself into or out of the rising waves of panic, of waking up with my jaw already aching, with a short temper.

Internet, if I could avoid grocery shopping for the entire winter season, i would. The only things that seem to relieve this swell are solitude, Jonah, and the woods. At the grocery store, as people dally and take up too much space, I become terrible. Fucking MOVE! I exclaimed at an old woman in a power scooter who was talking on her cell phone in the middle of the cereal aisle, moving about 2 inches per minute and dragging another cart along side of her. Filled with brownie mix and Kahlua.

On my days to myself, I end up doing too much: painting my office, walking both dogs (there's a new one now, sweet as can be but 65 pounds and strong as hell) through the woods, running 5 miles. And then at night, cross-legged on the couch, my legs start shaking and I can barely raise my arms over my head.

But it isn't the despair I have fallen into so many times in the past. It isn't the terrible void I felt trapped in for so long.

A long rope of smoke eases out of the neighbor's chimney, the furnace here chugging along and the half-shaved cat (for real. the most pathetic animal ever) on my shoulders, the dogs at my feet. Chickadees and juncos at the feeder. The bare slashes of tree against a pearled sky. Behind the scraggly woods, the thin black vein of Portage Creek, then highway, then woods again. Such a blessing to be able to settle into myself for what feels like the first time ever, to be able to feel what it's like to be alive.

Who Stole Baby Jesus THIS Time?

It usually happened this way: all of us would be in Grandma Betty's living room, the candy in the cut crystal candy dish on the shelf fused into one giant wad of dusty corn syrup, Scary Baby Jesus staring down at our coats on the bed in the downstairs bedroom, someone playing the out-of-tune spinet in the piano room, plates of stuffed peppers and what we called 'torte' and which was some terrible combination of rice, eggs, cheese, Italian parsley. Mostaciolli for dinner, hopefully with marinara, sometimes with chili (they looked the same in the chest freezer downstairs, side by side in quart Ball jars. And let me tell you, chili mostaciolli is terrible. THE WORST. Usually, someone would throw up.) In the basement, the grown ups who smoked would be smoking, Grandma would have a Manhattan. At some point, the grandkids would force everyone to watch that year's Christmas production: usually about grumpy old men, forced child labor, magical angels and stray cats. The kids would eat in the children's dining room; the adults in the real dining room. We'd hide a FisherPrice tape recorder in the adults' dining room to see if they were talking about us.

But sometime before dinner, when it was still light outside (and since we ate, generally, as people do on the holidays at grandparents' houses, around 3pm), the doorbell would ring, and one of Northbrook's finest would be outside, and Grandpa Tony would get served with papers about the (annual) illegal erection of the creche in the public triangle.

These, I suspect, are my sanitized, nostalgia-seeped memories of the holidays. The above usually happened on Christmas; Thanksgiving was at my maternal grandmother's house and consisted of hours of awkward silence, a whole bunch of cousins I didn't know or who were also 40 years older than I (my grandmother had 10 children). As I got older, however, particularly once I went away to college and got to, at least temporarily shed, the mantle of Sara-who-has-much-potential-but-fucks-it-up, Sara-who-is-failing-highschool, and Sara of the terrible perm, Sally Jesse Raphael glasses, braces and acne--the holidays became increasingly difficult, anxiety-laden. It was guaranteed that if I went home I would not eat for a week, would get sick, would feel fat, etcetera. My mother in particular is someone who doesn't eat in public, and who often exclaims how little she eats, but then eats in secret, after everyone else has gone to bed. By the time I was seventeen or so, I had avoiding-eating-in-public down to a science, knew how to sneak food when no one was looking, knew how to feel terribly guilty and ashamed for my inability to control what I ate, or didn't.

When I was married, holidays meant Ja-kass's family in Paw Paw and Marshall--people who were, I suppose, nice enough but Ja-Kass had a rocky, at best relationship with all of them. he hadn't spoken to his mother for eight years before we got married because she slept with his best friend and lied to him about it; his extended family had watched him drink and fight his way in and out of jail; his father and sort-of stepmother, bloated with their restaurant excesses of money and small town power, would shower us with expensive but impersonal gifts, avoid actually talking to either of us.

It's a cliche, of course: that loneliest month of the year, those weeks between the end of November and the end of December. After my divorce, that first holiday season I couldn't go an hour without bursting into tears: Christmas carols on the radio, church, the thought of being alone, without Jonah at all flattened me. But it's gotten better: we're with dear friends tomorrow, Christmas I've decided to stay home, put Christmas presents under our own tree, start building our own idea of normal.

But I admit, Internet, it gets tiring building a life up from the ground. For a week now, I can't sleep, eating is questionable, and I'm fighting that old feeling of inadequacy, of being not-good-enough (I said to Hadley on the phone recently, please tell me I'm not crazy to think a normal person would find me attractive. You're not crazy, of course, she said. Asked why. Because I have yet to actually go out with someone who's not a whackjob, I said. I seem to be really good at attracting crazy, so when I am attracted to someone who's a nice, normal person it seems impossible for it to be reciprocated.)

But I do have so much to be thankful for. I love my job and feel blessed to be able to do what I do every day, and have such (generally) wonderful students, past and present. To be part of their lives and to be given the opportunity to share what I'm passionate about with others AND get paid for it. I have a sweet and wonderful house, and what feels like the luxury of coming home every day to a safe and non-toxic environment where I'm not scared I made anyone angry or disappointed someone. I have the quiet and time to write. I have remarkable, beautiful and steadfast friends. I have understanding and brilliant sisters. I have found a spiritual home and grounding. And I have the most remarkable, funny and miraculous child. And, perhaps most importantly, I have this gift of finding my way back to my self.

I've been thinking a lot lately about this idea of self, particularly in poems: the closed, inward looking, sometimes claustrophobic self that I've lived much of my life in, the particular, idiosyncratic self of, say, Plath or Brigit Pegeen Kelly or CK Williams or Mariann Boruch, the expansive, somewhat detached (Transcendent?), expansive self of Roethke (North American Sequence), Charles Wright, Emerson. The self persists, like a dying star, Roethke writes in Meditation at Oyster River. Hope is the thing with feathers wrote Dickinson.

In either case, I'll take this world, ascending and dying and possibly the only one we'll get.

(The photo is the illegal and famous nativity scene that my Grandpa always put up, well, illegally. He paid my sister, on the right, to paint it. For some reason, I helped. It got set up in front of St. Norbert's with the devil eyes on it. Also, when it was still at the triangle, a spit of public land in the middle of town between three roads, and when the triangle was under construction, someone put hard hats on all the figures, and someone else stole baby Jesus and replaced him with a giant troll doll.)

Early Thanksgiving

I have spent so much time describing loneliness. This morning, the yard wet and the sky like milkglass, a few things that have gotten me through the past ten, and particularly three, years of descent and ascendance:

My sweet bird, who crawls into bed with me every night, who tucks his feet beneath my stomach, who has taken our sickly, mangey cat as his special project, and who reminds me every day
that god must exist and that I am capable of love.

My church friends: the choir who welcomed me into their family; the quartet, Corlyn, Joe and Howard, who have opened their homes, hearts and friendship to me, who have become part of my family. Although choir practice can be a chore, it is also the steady of these past ten years. Corlyn and Joe's children, Abbi and Ben, who are Jonah's favorite friends and cousins. My dear friend Laura,who was one of the first people to reach out to me after the divorce, although I didn't know her well. Who scoops up Jonah when he panics and demands to stay with me when I'm supposed to be singing, who is equal parts snark and optimism.

Hadley and Dusty, who have never wavered even when I was absent for much of my marriage, who have always been an open house, open ears and shared snark and mischief. I love these two like they're my siblings--well, except without the terrible things I did to my sisters (hairbrushes to the scalp, hammers to the toe, etcetera).

My sisters, who although I don't see them often, are my partners in trying to find a way out of insecurity, toward self.

The cat on the windowsill, the dog asleep on the bed. All of it. All of it.

Feministing

One question: does gender matter? As a poet, am I a woman poet or a poet-poet? (Or, in the words of my grandmother, a poetess?) Is my womanhood just a matter of biology, or is it cultural, like being raised Catholic is cultural, like being Caucasian and raised in upper-middle class suburbs cultural?

Well, it's more than one question, but my answer is a resounding yes. Let me explain:

On Thursday, I had an interesting exchange with a colleague. He's not someone I know well; in fact, my only previous interaction was to return a flash drive erroneously left in my mailbox. Then, a week or so ago, he approached me in the Writing Center--put his hand on my shoulder (this, dear reader, was the first indication that any interaction would be, well, off). He wanted to know about gender; rather, he wanted permission (as it began to be clear) to write a piece (which I've never seen) that asserted that when women have power, things get royally fucked up. Perhaps it's more about an imbalance of power, I countered. Perhaps whenever one group has too much power, things get fucked up.

Then I was reading a link on a friend's web page--two women writing about the mother/non-mother dichotomy and how it affects their lives, work and choices as artists.

Then the way I lived a dual life myself: in one half, I played dumb and incompetent to my ex-husband's supposed ability--unable to fix the toilet, unable to successfully rake the leaves, afraid to walk alone in the woods for fear of being jumped. In my other life, I was a straight-A student at a prestigious private college, then a driven graduate student, college professor; I was a semi-professional singer. Etcetera. That half-life of marriage, abuse, self-annihilation seems almost impossible to me now. It is hard to reconcile how I successfully, until the birth of my son, lived them both, how I didn't see how they cancelled each other out.

As a girl, when I realized there were different standards for girls and boys, I thought it asinine. Of course I could someday be President, or a priest (stupid Sister Luann who told me I couldn't), or whatever. Of course I could be as smart as the Stein brothers (or as lackadaisical and nonchalant as the other boys in the back row of algebra class). What seemed out of reach to me was the girly stuff: having a a boyfriend, being pretty, being skinny-popular-graceful-sexy. And this, not the intellectual or creative stuff, was the tragedy of my life: that I was destined to be a spinster aunt, have 36 cats, live on the margins of normal society.

What I didn't doubt was that I would have the same access to career, intellect, writing, as any man. And perhaps I was also in denial of the shadow life I was living--part of me knew it was, as an ex-boyfriend once said, a kind of performance art and a temporary low point in my life. But another part of me couldn't conceive of any other life than that: stuck in the small living room on Boylan Avenue, an infant heavy in my arms, and my only glimpse of the world the few birds at the feeder. Maybe then it was evident: my views of being a woman deeply contradicted my views of being a person. And then I decided they shouldn't, and I decided to try it on what felt like my terms.

As if it was that easy. But three years out, knee deep in a life of my own making, I am trying to stitch back together that broken "I" into something cohesive.

What any of this has to do with writing? Well, my woman-ness, my being-a-mother, my struggles with my body--all of them have to do also with my writing. I am a woman writer, a mother writer, but I don't see either of these as limiting. One of the old saws of the mother/non-mother debate is that men don't identify themselves as 'men writers' or father-writers, but being male, being a parent is a sidebar to their creative or professional life. Of course, most white Americans don't identify themselves as 'white Americans' (unless they're part of a white supremacy movement) or consider their whiteness to be part of the lens through which they view the world.

Maybe it's because we inhabit a world that fetishizes victimhood--Jerry Springer, Maury, the lot of them. Maybe it's easier to admit to being part of the oppressed than to acknowledge privilege. It is the same reaction I get from many men (and women) when I call myself a feminist: I'm out to get them. I'm somehow angry. I'm definitely unreasonable (that cult of hysteria again). But as much as we fetishize victimhood, we are also a culture that tells those who are oppressed, those who have genuine complaints that whoever complains is responsible for fixing the problem. The rest of us who like things as they are just fine are hardly responsible, and rarely going to fix it.

Well, I'm rambling. As a writer, of course I write out of a particularly female experience. They way I've been trained to see and interact the self, the world is in some part female. And in some part privileged middle class American. And Midwestern. My female experience perhaps has biological roots, but just look at the toy circulars coming in the Sunday papers: little girls get tea sets and kitchen role playing toys; boys get guns and sports equipment.

And as a poet(ess) who often writes through the lens of 'I'--whatever persona that I might be--it's an inherently limited and specific experience I speak out of. Like all writers, I think. Anyone who claims to be without particulars, as a wing-nut roommate once claimed that, because she was from DC, and because DC was a cosmopolitan area, she was therefore accentless--anyone who makes this claim is mistaken.

And I do consider myself somewhat unscathed by the mother/non-mother debate, in the end. My choice to have a child, to raise my son on my own (for now at least, I don't rule out a changeable future), to pursue my career as an artist and teacher AND believe that I can, with the help of a society that supports parents, raise an intelligent, sensitive and deeply loved child--perhaps it is because it is my lot and I MUST do it, but I wouldn't choose any other lot. My best friend is a non-mother, and although my day is consumed with things she has little interest in, I don't think either of us believes that the other has compromised part of her essential self for these choices. Mother or not, I would always be the one who chose more chaos over order; she'd always be the one who chose structure.

I'm left, this evening, with nothing but a blank picture window (must, MUST get curtains! Sheesh.), the Leonids somewhere in the upper distance, and an empty house. My old fight against silence. But it isn't so bad. It is, after all, the only life I'm going to get. I want this one to count.

Three Things

One.

Today, in class, we were in the library, students attempting to navigate the card catalog, decipher the Library of Congress classification system. I sat and read Chekov, fielding questions: how do I find a book? where's the author listed? Is this by Edgar Allen Poe, or about Edgar Allen Poe? What do those numbers mean on the back (spine) of the book? This entire entry could be about how people don't use libraries, don't read, are flummoxed when Wikipedia is banned as a research source. However, this part is about what I overheard. At the table behind mine, a group of my students were (sort-of) working. Two girls, one boy, all of whom generally sit in the far back corner of the classroom. You know these students, of course. There because the college says they have to be, convinced college, grades, writing are a colossal waste of time until they get a degree, which will magically give them a chance at a middle-class existence. "Dawn" and "Aimee" are best friends from high school; both white, both attractive in a conventional sense. Dawn told me last week she was getting extensions; she wears heavy black eyeliner, has remarkably long legs; wears skintight leggings. Aimee doesn't look much different: pale-skinned, dark haired. Typical 18 year old wardrobe. "William" wants to be a pilot, comes from an middle class family. All of them do: the kind of families who believe college is nothing more than a means to an end: a job. None of these kids are particularly academic; they're clearly just treading water until the next party, the next text. They took AP courses in high school, but don't see much merit in learning for learning's sake.

Perhaps this sounds condescending, but I don't mean it to be. They're essentially good kids, although the kind whose nonchalance can get on my nerves, and the kind that I feel a need to get to know to prevent my writing-them-off. Anyway. I was reading Chekov and heard Dawn tell Aimee and William about a job she's starting, as a server. Aimee, who has just told me she's going to school to be a kindergarten teacher, asks if they're still hiring. She's never had a job. her dad is getting tired of buying her new Macbooks, new stuff. She asks Dawn what she wore. Did you wear a low cut shirt and show your cleavage? She includes me in the conversation, continues it's because Dawn has huge, you know. Both girls nod. Aimee tells me she's enrolled in a modeling program that cost her father two thousand dollars for classes. She and Dawn continue to debate the merits of different outfits for Aimee's hypothetical interview. Aimee jokes she'll threaten that if they don't give her a job, she'll tell them she'll take out what's in her back pocket. And then it'll be a tampon or something.

None of these students think it odd, or inappropriate, or demeaning to consider that Aimee might or might not be hired because of her sex appeal. This restaurant is NOT hooters. They seem to agree, tacitly, that this is a legitimate interview tactic. I interject: that's not how you're going to get a job, Aimee, I say. I think you have a lot more to offer than that. They laugh, as if I've told a joke.

Two.

Kalamazoo passed an ordinance last night, by popular vote, that protects gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people from discrimination. Maine rejected a gay marriage amendment by a narrow margin. I was never prouder to be a Kalamazooan; however, I am continuously saddened by the backlash, by the narrow-minded, bigoted comments. When my students in my American literature class began learning about the Enlightenment, after weeks of Puritan typology, they attacked the Enlightenment ideal that all men are equal. One student quoted me in her midterm as saying "All men are equal. As long as you are man, and a whitey." Well, that's the abbreviated version, I suppose. However, they immediately jumped upon the inherent hypocrisy: in a culture that condoned slavery, misogyny, how could they espouse such ideals? What is an American? I asked in the vein of deCrevcecoeur. It's freedom! the students replied. But, as Aunt Lydia suggests in Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale, there's freedom to and freedom from and they're not quite the same thing.

Normal is what we think it is, I tell my students. It takes a lot for us to believe that another version of normal won't kill us.

Three.

Ja-Kass and I took Jonah to his physical yesterday. Ja-Kass was his usual belligerent self: haranguing the nurses about the emulsifier in the vaccinations, refusing any eye contact with me, refusing to hand Jonah over to me when Jonah begged. When we got home, after school, after dinner, and we were standing in the bathroom and he was brushing his teeth, he told me I only love you, Mama. I told him he could also love his father. That he could love both Mom and Dad. But I love YOU, Mom, he said. But I love you. And when I woke up this morning, his head was on my shoulder, his feet tucked under my leg. How did you get here? I asked. I don't know, Mom, he said. I just seem to get here every night.

The house is quiet without him tonight; the radio, the neighbor's leaf blower until ten o'clock, the heat clicking on, off, on again: it only points at the silence. At the dark, at the empty garden.

Election

Here in Kalamazoo, we're waiting for news on an antidiscrimination ordinance, which would prohibit discrimination against gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people in housing and employment. It was unanimously passed by the city council last year, and then a group of wing-nut bigots protested, got enough signatures to make it a ballot initiative. And after 2004, when Michigan banned gay marriage, I'm holding my breath. I want to believe in the better angels of our nature, that we truly do believe that all people are created equal and deserve equal treatment. And so, we wait.