Minkgirl Muses

HOPE SPRINGS ETERNAL

Today is the first day of spring on most calendars. It is also my half-birthday. That cosmic convergence makes the day extra special to me. The 21st of every month is a fresh start day for me though. Since I entered the world on a 21, the possibility of rebirth seems a bit more graspable on this over all other days. I love new beginnings. In addition to the 21 days, they also seem possible after holidays and retreats. How many have I had in my life? How many moments of hope?

“Aha! Now I’ve got things figured out. This time I’ve got life where I want it. I’m going to eat right, exercise, send thank-you notes, be responsive to friends and take the time to be really present with everyone I meet!”

It sounds like a good life. I don’t know why it fades so quickly from my view. Today, as I contemplate the new beginnings mindset, I am aware of two things.

1) A good life only seems possible when one is in a generous open state of being – rested, well fed, and satiated with affection and beauty.

2) Daily life in America is a “grind” that wears you down and uses you up. Despite all your best efforts toward health and optimism, again and again you find yourself in survival mode – tired, poorly fed, lonely, disoriented. In this state, it is all you can do to take care of your basic needs. Even if there is time (which there usually isn’t), there is no energy or will to be kind to other people, to make sustainable choices, to be curious or open to what life puts in your path.

Related to this is the over-stimulation factor. When I first return home from a trip, it seems possible to remember things – call my friend back, drop a note to let someone know I enjoyed their company, take the car in for servicing. But after a few days, everything seems overwhelming – there are more errands than time, more people to connect to than I can emotionally stomach, more things to do than I can remember. This chronic over-stimulation is a lifestyle norm in our culture. And in this state, something new is virtually impossible.

One of the great gifts of moving to a foreign country is how the strangeness of your new environment shatters your sense of familiarity and comfort with your old environment. My friend Jen says:

”When you go to a new place, your senses are heightened. You don't know where things are, what to expect, what is expected of you, how to do things. To compensate for your inexperience you have to really concentrate the way a child does, mobilize all of your senses. And when you do that, you wake up.”

The part of me that has woken up in the relative stillness of my London life is a girl I haven’t seen in a long time. She may have disappeared during college or shortly thereafter – right around when I entered the “world of work.” She is a girl who’s greatest pleasure comes from looking at the sky, from reading, from taking long flights of mental fancy. She measures her days in terms of experiences rather than achievements. She is not ambitious, productive or efficient.

1st Corinthians instructs:

“When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man I put away childish things.”

And this is what it means to be a grown-up in American culture – to put away a part of ourselves, to hide her in a cupboard, starve her into submission, and pretend that she is no longer us.

But that child is the source of all our creativity and goodness. She recognizes and yearns for beauty. She is addicted to joy. If we sprung her from her long captivity, she just might rescue us with an ingenious scheme, a daring contraption that could catapult us into a more imaginative and satisfying life.

And that is what I’m trying to do here. I like to tell people I’ve just met that I’m on “sabbatical” or that I’m trying on full-time mothering. But really, I’m trying to overcome my enslavement to a modern lifestyle that demands that I work and sweat and strain to acquire and achieve until I explode or expend myself completely. I’m a ripe candidate for this kind of cultural hari-kari – a first born, slightly anxious, overly analytical, good-girl who likes to please others and derives her primary sense of self-worth from work. I come from sturdy peasant stock. I have tremendous endurance and can deny myself everything and just keep going and going. But for the past 15 years or so, every 21st, I would look up and wish for something else – another kind of life with a slower pace, more light, and more room to breathe. And the new perspective that the strangeness of London allows, the possibility of seeing like a child again, seems like an absolute life-buoy to me – one that I reached for intuitively last fall when Boss Dog (my husband has asked for a cool blog nickname too!) was unexpectedly offered the job here. The only catch was that to grab the buoy I had to let go of everything else – friends, family, artistic community, and any kind of place on any kind of ladder. The vertigo of this decision still has me reeling. And yet, it reminds me of a favorite long-forgotten quote from my college years:

“They say it’s prudence to gain the whole world and lose your own soul, but your soul sticks to you if you stick to it, and the world has a way of slipping through your fingers.”

- Captain Shotover (Heartbreak House, George Bernard Shaw)

So my wish for today, on the first day of Spring 2007, is for the ability to remember next month and next year what I can see and feel so clearly now. May your wish, whatever it is, come true too. And may you be blessed with an extra helping of joy this week.

Be well.

Labels: Rebirth

STAR SYSTEMS

Do you ever have a 5-star day? You know the kind I’m talking about – a fresh croissant with raspberry jam for breakfast, your favorite pair of jeans warm from the dryer, sun-kissed air that whispers past your skin implying every kind of possibility for your future. Perhaps you meet with someone and engage in an enlivening conversation, the kind that makes you feel like you’re finally figuring things out. Maybe you have a piece of satisfying work to do. Maybe you do nothing more than putter around your house all day, turning over this and that, replete with the comfort of familiar objects.

I’m not having a day like that today. In fact, this has been a 3-star week so far. Nothing really wrong, but nothing awe-inspiring either. A bit more house-work than I consider ideal (but isn’t there always), fewer activities than last week, and a rather extended patch of PMS, which has the tendency to gradually sour my mood like a puddle of milk left lingering in the sun. But still, I wake each morning and am tempted to meet the day by my persistent hope that with luck and the proper attitude, today could be a 5-star kind of day.

As you can tell, even 15 years post-college and 8 years post-grad school, I’m still obsessed with rating systems. I think we all are. It’s one of the chief diagnostic tools we use to determine whether we are doing it right, whatever it happens to be. We all still long to “make the grade”, “make the cut”, and prove our self worth by doing things better, faster, and with greater ease than those around us. Even those of us who claim not to be competitive still compare our present self to past selves, continually looking for signs of improvement. I don’t know if it’s a first-born thing or a raised-to-go-an-Ivy-League-college thing or a I’m-as-good-as-a-boy thing, but I have been a praise junky my whole life. My self-worth meter lights up like a Christmas tree whenever someone compliments me or tells me what a good job I’m doing. It’s like oxygen. I don’t know if I could live without it.

The depth of my addiction to external validation was driven home recently in humiliating fashion. I called up my favorite professor from grad school – someone who I’d always considered a mentor – allegedly to ask advice about my ongoing career shift from quasi-artist/non-profit slave to university professor. We chatted for awhile, and I was really getting the warm fuzzies from having this grown-up conversation about being artists who are making strong life choices, when he said rather abruptly “Well, is there anything else? I’ve got to run.” And there wasn’t anything else – he’d given me the contacts he had to share – he’d listened to me blather on about who I am and what I want in my life – and now he needed to get back to his own life – one through which many many students have passed and will continue to pass. And I suddenly realized that I’d really called him to get an “A” on my life, and I felt like a total dipshit.

This is all on my mind today, because I am just about to prepare a “star chart” to use as a behavior motivator with my 2 – ½ year old. This is a tried and true method for encouraging toddlers to excel in life’s less enticing activities like tooth-brushing, pea-eating and staying in bed at night. The deal is the little tyke gets to put one sticker on the chart for each loathsome life-task he accomplishes, and when he gets 10 stickers, he gets a toy or treat of some kind. Essentially a complicated form of bribery outlined in colored marker, this approach is endorsed by Super Nanny and nearly every mother I know who has survived the toddler years. I think Gman will love it, and I expect it to help us gain some traction on the daily tasks that are causing headaches right now. And yet, there is a way in which I feel like I’m about to introduce my son to crack. Don’t get me wrong – he’s already sampled the sugary delight of pleasing others. At music class he sticks to the teacher like glue, following her every move and demanding more than his fair share of her attention. At home, he knows exactly when a “look at me Ma!” will distract me away from my personal pursuits and cause me to extol his virtues. He is an alpha male through and through – built to elbow his genetic competitors out of the way for any biological or social advantage he can glean.

But in the back of my mind, I know that we are standing at a cross-roads. Will we as his parents make choices to further hard-wire his brain and ego to achieve, compete and succeed, or can we find subtle ways to subvert biology and culture to show him that “being” has as much value in life as “doing.” Oy. You’re thinking too hard is probably what my mother would say to me right now. But I wonder. Will Gman grow up to be like me? Do I want him to be? Or do I want to fashion him a boat of reeds and leaves and push him away from the shores of prosperity into the river of self-love – a river I have eventually learned to drink from, but after many long and painful years in the desert. Maybe he can lie on his back in the boat and look up at the real stars – the ones that continue to live and die with no thought of us and our frantic scratchings on the earth. Maybe he can tell himself stories about before he was born – beautiful, complicated tales with no real beginning or end, full of language the rest of us have forgotten how to speak.

Labels: Family Life, Mamahood, time

HANGOVER

I have a hangover today. But it’s the good kind – the clarifying kind – no headache, just a pleasantly empty feeling in my head, like all my thoughts have been sucked out. Last night I went to a “Mum’s Night Out” hosted by the local chapter of a group called the National Childbirth Trust. Consider that name for a moment – this nation considers the birth of a child something worth investing in, something to gather riches for, something to promote on both a local and global scale. And therefore, it engages a group of its sagest citizens (women of all sorts who’ve had children themselves) to bolster the common good by developing and sharing resources with one another for successful birthing and parenting.

But back to the hangover. It’s particular flavor is humble house white, followed later by something sweeter – a desert wine? I think I had about 9 glasses. No kidding. Europeans are famous for their hospitality, and people just kept topping me up. Never one to leave a glass full for long, I knocked them back along with my tasty apple, walnut & goat cheese salad, my baked sea bream with caper mash, and my raspberry crème brulee. Yum, you say? Yum, indeed. I was drunk enough when I got home, that I had to go straight to bed, as the room was spinning a bit, and I couldn’t make my mouth move properly. I hadn’t meant to drink so much, but there you are. We so often do not do what we mean to do.

The first twinge came at 6:03am as I lifted my head from the pillow while attempting to coax a milk-bent Gman into my bed for a bit more shut-eye. A few minutes later in the kitchen, I noticed that when I turned my head, my eyes were a bit slow to follow. Then I dropped a part of the bottle and bent down to retrieve it. Ah, yes. The familiar head rush, the sense that all your vital organs have lost their moorings and are sloshing about inside your body, including your brain, which feels like a sneaker thumping around in an empty dryer. Hmmm. Why is this? I learned somewhere once about the chemical processes that are inspired by excess drink, and why they cause the distinctive hangover symptoms – headache, dizziness, upset stomach, and that feeling that your brain is knocking about in its pan without proper lubrication. Let’s see what wikipedia has to say on the subject…whoops, fingers misfired (more evidence of my hungover state) and I got Hanover instead (which turns out to be a German city nestled on the river Leine)…It seems amazing that we knew anything at all before the internet…ah, here we are…

Hangover (Causes)

Hangovers are multi-causal. Ethanol has a dehydrating effect (such substances are known as diuretics), which causes headaches, dry mouth, and lethargy. Dehydration causes the brain to shrink away from the skull slightly.^[3] …Alcohol's impact on the stomach lining can account for nausea. Due to the increased NADH production during metabolism of ethanol by the enzymes alcohol dehydrogenase and aldehyde dehydrogenase, excess NADH can build up and slow down gluconeogenesis in the liver, thus causing hypoglycemia.

Another factor contributing to a hangover are the products from the breakdown of ethanol via liver enzymes. Ethanol is converted to acetaldehyde by the enzyme alcohol dehydrogenase, and then from acetaldehyde to acetic acid by the enzyme acetaldehyde dehydrogenase. Acetaldehyde (ethanal) is mildly toxic, contributing to the hangover. These two reactions also require the conversion of NAD+ to NADH. With an excess of NADH, the lactate dehydrogenase reaction is driven to produce lactate from pyruvate (the end product of glycolysis) in order to regenerate NAD+ and sustain life. This diverts pyruvate from other pathways such as gluconeogenesis, thereby impairing the ability of the liver to supply glucose to tissues, especially the brain. Because glucose is the primary energy source of the brain, this lack of glucose contributes to hangover symptoms such as fatigue, weakness, mood disturbances, and decreased attention and concentration.

OK, well, I got a little confused around “enzyme” and lost the plot entirely by “dehydrogenase”, but it’s good to know that there is a scientific reason why my brain feels funny. Yet, despite the toxicity and the tiredness, I still enjoy a good hangover now and then. We grip everything so tightly in this life. Sometimes swallowing a whole bottle of muscle relaxant is what’s needed to make us finally lose our grip long enough to look around and see how good everything is, and how maybe all the things we’re gripping aren’t really real anyway – not as real as the pale blue sky this morning with wispy white clouds, or my son’s face while we were making pancakes, his little tongue jutting out of his mouth in blissful concentration. Later on, when I looked at my own face in the mirror, I noticed all the lines had gone. It was smooth and pale and worry-free. The flip-side of a hangover’s “decreased attention and concentration” is an inability to remember your to-do list, or the bills you were fretting over, or any of the other petty tigers that have your mind by the tail on most days. I say Viva Vino (in moderate immoderation of course!) Just be sure to convalesce on a sofa where you can see the sky.

Be well.

Labels: hangovers, mothering