(long heavy sigh) twilight

I was a girl
before I was a feminist.
Tuns out
the girl is stronger.

What could possibly bring me out of my eight month blog hiatus except a young adult vampire romance series? A hiatus bookended by the profound (election of the first African American president) and the ridiculous (werewolves and vampires). So it goes.

But I admit: Stephenie Meyer has captured my imagination. When Twilight mania hit last fall, in conjunction with the release of the film, I ignored it. Eschewed it, even. I added it to the list of fads (Birkenstocks, The Simpson’s, Harry Potter, the umpteenth resurgence of Chuck Taylors) I have avoided so as not to get caught up in the zeitgeist. Working in a high school and being an advisor to ninth grade students, many of whom are girls who fell in love with the series as middle-schoolers, the avoidance was short-lived. Soon after the DVD release, I watched the movie through Movies on Demand. It was good– aesthetically pretty exciting. The characters are beautiful, of course. The scenery is spooky yet magical. The climax is sexy. I was thoroughly entertained, and I thought I could discount the mania with authority.

But, I am almost loathe to admit, the story stuck with me. The love-sick, hopeless romantic 14-year-old girl in me, who is closer to the surface than I imagined, couldn’t stop thinking about the intense against-all-odds love between the two main characters, Bella and Edward. Then, my critical feminist mind started going to work on the details. This vampire romance was a thinly-veiled version of “the purity myth”! The “consummation” or penetration in this case was the bite (of Bella by Edward) that would render her immortal. Bella, eager to be with Edward, at all costs forever and ever, wants the bite. At prom, end of junior year– Bella wants the pain, the burning, the death of her human life that she knows will ensue if Edward injects her with his venom. Edward, ever the chivalric hero, wants to protect Bella from her own hasty desires. It is he who worries about “her soul” and cannot bear to be the cause of the end of her human life– no matter how much he loves her. (He and his clan only bite humans and convert them to the dark side as a life-saving measure. They also control their thirst for human blood and feed only on animals– “thinning the herd” where necessary. These are humane, compassionate and environmentalist vampires.)

And again, I am loathe to admit, I found this conflict sexy! I wanted to know more about the author– Was she trying to use the vampire myth to reinforce abstinence-only propaganda? What was the point of hyper-idealizing the male protagonist? Did she want to inculcate her devoted adolescent female audience to a certain morality?

So, I Googled her, and what I found was the story behind the story:

I know the exact date that I began writing Twilight, because it was also the first day of swim lessons for my kids. So I can say with certainty that it all started on June 2, 2003. Up to this point, I had not written anything besides a few chapters (of other stories) that I never got very far on, and nothing at all since the birth of my first son, six years earlier.

I woke up (on that June 2nd) from a very vivid dream. In my dream, two people were having an intense conversation in a meadow in the woods. One of these people was just your average girl. The other person was fantastically beautiful, sparkly, and a vampire. They were discussing the difficulties inherent in the facts that A) they were falling in love with each other while B) the vampire was particularly attracted to the scent of her blood, and was having a difficult time restraining himself from killing her immediately. For what is essentially a transcript of my dream, please see Chapter 13 (”Confessions”) of the book.

Though I had a million things to do (i.e. making breakfast for hungry children, dressing and changing the diapers of said children, finding the swimsuits that no one ever puts away in the right place, etc.), I stayed in bed, thinking about the dream. I was so intrigued by the nameless couple’s story that I hated the idea of forgetting it; it was the kind of dream that makes you want to call your friend and bore her with a detailed description. (Also, the vampire was just so darned good-looking, that I didn’t want to lose the mental image.) Unwillingly, I eventually got up and did the immediate necessities, and then put everything that I possibly could on the back burner and sat down at the computer to write—something I hadn’t done in so long that I wondered why I was bothering. But I didn’t want to lose the dream, so I typed out as much as I could remember, calling the characters “he” and “she.”

From that point on, not one day passed that I did not write something. On bad days, I would only type out a page or two; on good days, I would finish a chapter and then some. I mostly wrote at night, after the kids were asleep so that I could concentrate for longer than five minutes without being interrupted. I started from the scene in the meadow and wrote through to the end. Then I went back to the beginning and wrote until the pieces matched up. I drove the “golden spike” that connected them in late August, three months later.
So after reading that and the rest of the FAQ pages on her website, I had a new problem. I was now completely intrigued with Meyer as a writer and mother. The genesis of this story was something I could completely relate to– of course not to the same extent. Because Meyer found a way to pursue this story as doggedly as she did makes her a bit of a hero in my mind.

At that point, never mind that I had seen the movie– I had to read the product of this woman’s labor! As someone who is curious about the writing process, I had to see the result of something that began as a dream and became a constant distraction from motherly duties.

At this point, I never thought I’d get past book one. Book one in the Potter series had had no lingering effect on me. I was sure I’d be as immune to the world of Meyer as I was to the world of Rowling.

Of course, I was wrong…

Two poems about looking at the same two rivers

Dominion

by Eleanor Lerman

We spent the night in Maryland, in an old house with stonr floors

and stairs as steep as a bookcase

An October landscape crouched outside the windows: bent

trees, low hills

Witch country,I told you. No, you said, there were no witches

in the slave states

That didn’t help. I went to sleep and dreamt about a woman

who had something in her eye

She was given an operation, and when she woke up, she was dead

(This really was my dream.) I feel funny, she said to the nurses,

but they wouldn’t name the problem

Ha ha, you said, when I related this in the morning. You really have

been watching too much TV

Then we drove on to Washington. A gray day in the capitol,

though that hadn’t stopped the crowds

Schoolchildren were touring the FBI building, nuns were lunching

at the CIA

The Freedom of Information Act, I decided, had changed everything:

the spooks, the sergeants

were all quick to grant us access: These are your museums, they

pointed out

These are your files (Like every other mild paranoid my age,

I believe I have a file

though I’m sure it’s pretty flimsy. Someone like Patty Hearst,

on the other hand,

probably has one a mile wide.) There are still lots of secrets

in these buidings, you remind me

And I believe that. There are secrets everywhere. Secrets in us

Later, I wanted to see a famous building with walls converging

in a famous point

that everyone has to touch, including me. It’s like rubbing

the backbone of a beast, folding your hand along the spine

of a sleeping world

Don’t do it, you warned me, though I had said I would

for weeks

It will only make you feel crazy. And you were right:

for hours

I felt as if I had a soul, and that soul had mingled with

a million ghosts,

a million handprints of the touring public. I tell you and

I tell you, you sighed, but you never listen

All over the world, in every language, someone is saying that

to someone else right now

Later, we drove on to Harper’s Ferry. Sunlight made a

dramatic entrance in the afternoon,

dropping thin golden shafts between still-threatening clouds

We parked the car and crossed a footbridge that led back

a hundred years,

past flood markers and plaques commemorating John

Brown’s raids

On a steep street, in a shop that had been built before

the Civil War

I stopped to buy a button from a soldier’s uniform, lingering

for a long time over my choice:

blue, because they saved the Union, or gray because

you have to sympathize with tragedy?

In the end, of course, I bought them both. You bought

a map of the Chesapeake and sat on a stone wall

eating ice cream,

planning the rest of our trip. I walked on, climbing

a path to the Maryland Heights

and up there on the cliffs, buffeted by winds, by death,

history, dreams, war, and information

I wondered, Over what do I have dominion? Don’t think

that even now I have a clue

though it was a reasonable question to ask in a place where

I could see the convergence of two great rivers

but no further south, over the curve of the earth, to wherever

they were going

Earthly Love II

I have burdened you with the trust
of decoding my silence. All summer
I had stories of things I didn’t want to say.
When memories move in suddenly,
unexpectedly, you tire in their
refragmentation of the present.
You are too aware how this moment
may later crowd the simple act of being
somewhere else.

As if spending days
counting series of lasts were not enough, my father
listened to a speech from his childhood. He remembered
thinking German tanks might troop down his street
and take him away. He stares as he listens,
lonely like it is the P.A. system in his
elementary school. Like it is so many things.

This is always what’s at stake.
What to do if it comes and wondering what to do
when it does. I’ll tell you about the handgun I’m
afraid my father will use because he has seen
tumors become the size of a small universe.
I’m not asking for your interpretation to be mine—
even when death makes us want to name something
we can always need.

But the silence wedged in between
our small comments about what we see—
even when memory is busy labeling two unrelated things
the same. The blank look across the same river.
The nothing in your hand,
this means everything.

How I opened my classes in September

I believe in cultivating a life of the mind.

I believe giving our brain the food it wants, honing our thinking can give us the mental equivalent of a sword, making intellectual samurais of us all.

I believe our world could use more intellectual samurais, compassionate as they are smart.

Although I have always loved TV and movies (including Gilmore Girls, and I hate to say it, occasionally America’s Next Top Model) I believe our culture often appeals to our basest qualities.

I believe our desire can be reprogrammed for the sake of lining another person’s pockets.  I’m not original in this, but I believe corporations can co-opt our very human-ness, our wanting—to the point that we barely recognize ourselves.

I believe as your teacher, I am in service to something that counters that force.

Because

I believe we all deserve to be part of an institution whose vision, goal, purpose, and practices are not regulated by profit.  I believe one such institution is a school, and that is why I am here.

I believe we are all powerful.  Yet I believe we often check that power by boxing ourselves up in categories like “I’m not a math person,” or “I hate to read,” or “I’m not musical.”

I believe even as we find our one true passion, we eclipse other passions we may not have had the chance to discover.

I believe we are all poets.

And I believe understanding a poem teaches us how to live.

I believe boredom is a symptom of fear.  If we get bored, I think we are afraid—afraid of what it feels like not to be small.  Afraid of the bigness of the world that makes us small.  With our boredom, we deflect that bigness, lock it out with our own apathy.

Therefore, I treat “boring” as a matter of perspective.  Instead of saying something or someone is boring, I say one’s perspective suffers from boredom.  Boredom can be tolerated or eradicated…if you choose to see possibility in your own intelligence.

I believe one’s mind is like a big magnet.  We magnetize our brains with everything we read, and the more we learn, the stronger its pull becomes, until nothing is beyond the reach of its force.

In short: We are what we read.

I believe when we develop our minds (our ability to reason, imagine, create, interpret, connect) we increase our ability to find aspects of our world interesting.  I believe the more developed our minds are, the more interested and interesting we are able to be.

I believe if we reason better, imagine more, create deliberately, interpret well, speak thoughtfully and connect often we become our own entertainment, our own fulfillment.   And we create more paths by which we can travel.

This why it doesn’t matter which road you take, the one less-traveled or not; it is you, not the road, that is in control.  You determine the story of your life, because as you are living it, you are telling it.

I believe writing teaches us our mysteries.  It preserves our pasts, keeps us in service to our memory.

I believe each of us has a story, and we owe it to ourselves and others to bear witness to that story.  When we become conveyers of our own story, we can live more fully, and more truthfully.

I believe writing is a necessary skill, but even more than teaching you how to write, I’d like us to become authors—people who live inside language, who use language to create worlds, and become world enough for themselves.

I believe English class is not important just because a box on a college application says so.

I believe the ability to interpret challenging pieces of literature and art is a privilege everyone deserves.

We humans are meaning-makers, caught up in the details and ramifications of our own stories. In this class we will read and try to understand and when we do, I believe we will be honoring the very make-up of our being.

Understanding literature can help us see the symbols, foreshadowing, images that shape our stories and become our lives.

I believe life gets better when you are past the phase when the collection of digits that make up your standardized test scores becomes a major means by which you are taught to characterize your capacity.

I believe in school rules.  I believe if you chew gum in class someday someone other than yourself will have to scrape your gum off the bottom of a chair you did not buy or make.

I believe you deserve to cultivate an attention span not broken by the temptation of texting.

I believe food tastes better in the cafeteria.

I believe in taking hats off at the front door.

I believe music is amazing.  I believe music is the keeper of memories we’d otherwise lose if they were not connected to a particular song. And I believe songwriters, even the bad ones, are the bards of our time…

So I am thankful for the innovation that has made thousands of songs portable, but I believe in unplugging ourselves from this world so that we don’t feed the beast of our boredom.

I believe, in a perfect world, grades would not exist.  But I believe they satisfy the fears of people who are afraid that if left unchecked, nothing would happen in schools.

I believe if I don’t grade it, it doesn’t mean the assignment doesn’t matter.

I believe I have done my job when you no longer have to ask me “is this right?”
I believe I have done my job if I make myself irrelevant.

Here’s how I believe that happens:  Whatever the assignment, you find a way to discover what part of you that assignment evokes.  Bring yourself to the task and you will discover yourself in it.

I believe journeys are spiritual and intellectual, not just physical.  I believe honing our intellectual swords, meeting challenges, and bringing ourselves to a task can be revolutionary.

I believe a group of people can be a sacred space.  When secrets have been shared, lives discovered, voices heard, we have all been a part of something that transcends the everyday.

And because of those spaces, we will never be the same.

This, I believe.

What else?…Sarah Palin

Sometimes in my most solipsistic moments I begin to see national or world events as some divinely provided symbol sent as commentary on life.

And so it happened that as I was going back to work, feeling pangs of motherly guilt, and crying about daycare drop-off in small out-of-the-way places at school, the world send me Sarah Palin.

Could the cultural myth of the Supermom, revised and burnished by the reluctant approval of the religious Right, be any more ironic?

But there she was iconicized in the form of the New York Times website, her biography perfectly dovetailing the profiles of undecided voters. Thrust forward were her credentials as a mom: five kids, mother of a special needs child, hockey mom, army mom. All of this while hunting moose, whistle-blowing, and cheering on her snowmobile-racing husband. Oh, and governing the state of Alaska.

Sarah Palin did not make me feel inferior as a mother. But, the heralding of Sarah Palin as mother underscored the cultural biases that, on some level, impact how I feel about my own parenting. (I wonder, was Hillary Clinton villainized as she was in ‘92 because she’d only had one child? Was her lack of productivity as a mother reason to doubt her ability to advise her husband? Was it reason to fear her stanch feminism?)

With the hullabaloo around SP, I saw the old trap for mothers that I and my mom-friends still feel the pinch of today. SP (with her red high heel sandals, up-do, and carcass of a grizzly slung across her couch) embodies the old perfume commercial whose jingle I can still hear in my head: “I can bring home the bacon…fry it up in a pan…and never let you forget you’re a man…’Cuz I’m a woman…” Ah, yes. Isn’t that what feminism is all about? Elevating the status of a woman by talking about how a woman can do all the things a man an do…and more?

In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir discusses the history of how women’s bodies have been misunderstood. According to Aristotle I believe, women were incidental (convenient?) receptacles for sperm– the real source of humanity. Indeed, women’s bodies have been as much about what is seen as what is unseen…And perhaps eroticizing women’s bodies is compensation for all that is unseen and misunderstood.

It’s a leap, but Sarah Palin– for all her highlights, beauty contestant photos, and newscaster sheen– is another example of a myth thrust in front of women to tell them what they are. But who needs to have women explained for them, really? Sarah Palin is the latest in a long line of patriarchal fantasies. She is another fantasy of male cultural reproduction…She represents the fantasy of what a patriarchal world wants to believe it can produce. And ironically, this fantasy has been sold to women as the epitome of female power– of female choice!– and of feminism itself.

Of course, it’s not ironic that Sarah Palin is anti-choice. In order to keep the male patriarchal fantasy alive, the fantasy must reproduce. Therefore, women in this fantasy cannot have control over reproduction. Which is another way of saying sex, for a woman, must be about reproduction. Sex, for a man, can be about desire. Again, Sarah Palin embodies both. Sarah Palin is not a notch in the belt of feminism. She is another version of the old mold, slightly revised to co-opt the language of feminists.

And every morning, when I leave my little boy, I am happy to go work and sad not to stay at home with him. The choices are a blessing. But they are not without consequences, a reality the mythological, supermom, “cake and eat it too” example of Sarah Palin will never address.

Highway 231, I think

There’s an RV heading south at 3 in the morning, and I’m in it.  In fact, I’m driving.  A student of mine is in the passenger’s seat and her designated job is to keep me awake as we careen from Montgomery to Pensacola on this two-lane rural road.
The blackness is a blackness I know: clear-cut groves of pine trees, soybean fields.  Matchbox houses at awkward angels to this snaking tongue of a highway.  Our last stop was a strip-mall parking lot, four states away, where we made dinner, played with trinkets we’d collected, and discussed famous stories of the road.  The other teacher and seven other students are now asleep and my driving cradles whatever expectations they have of morning. What road I can see seems lit from within.
To stay awake, I tell Jenny about my hometown.  Sand dunes hide missiles pointed toward Cuba.  Whole houses, remnants of back-to-back hurricanes, remain washed into the Gulf.  I recall fighter pilots whose faces I can see as they buzz the beach on crowded July days.  I tell her about the children on Sundays who, wearing long sleeves on street corners, hold signs foretelling eternal  damnation.  I tell her about the fiancé from high school who proposed to me in a mall, a story we will later laugh about on a playground in Louisiana.
Now, I know, we are nowhere.  I know enough about the road to know it is nothing in itself but a story and I caution myself against the thoughts in my head.  What if I fall asleep and crash this RV?  What if we careen off the road into a ditch?  What if a semi comes barreling across the yellow line into the nose of this cab?  I haven’t learned yet the kindness of the road because we are weeks away from the Mojave where, at 11 PM, we’ll discover a blown-out tire at a gas station  minutes before a mechanic pulls up and offers to replace it for free.

This too is true: One of us will dream of suicide, one of us will teach in Germany, one of us will drop out of high school, one of us will marry a lawyer.

For now, I convince myself that the phantom headlights suddenly turning from the ditch into the side of our cab is another runaway fantasy. And years later, at a desk or stopped in traffic, I’ll wonder what’s become of those travelers, I’ll wonder where the last pin on the map stuck and whether they ever made it out of that deep night, that long road.

You Mean What You Do

Sometimes a serendipitous juxtaposition of two otherwise random events seems to click them in place, and a revelation occurs. In my world, these events, rightly or wrongly, yield truths—sudden insight into the morass of data.

Take for instance Jon Stewart’s interview of former white House Press Secretary Scott McClellan and the Broadway hit musical Wicked.

I just happened to see both yesterday.

I appreciate Jon Stewart’s needling the former press secretary who was trying to have his cake and eat it too. Although McClellan repeated the phrases “culture of Washington” and “basically good people” to sum up his conclusions after leaving the White House, Stewart wouldn’t be placated by these tidy, contradictory conclusions. As McClellan admits, there was a conscious, calculated decision to “obfuscate” the truth about the financial cost of the war (to say nothing of the irrevocable human cost). While Stewart tried again and again to get McClellan to admit the obvious— that that kind of calculation is tantamount to lying—McClellan balked. “They’re basically good people,” he insisted. And said “I have great affection for the president…it’s the culture of Washington…”

Nine hours later, I am watching the musical that explores the question “Are people born wicked, or do they have wickedness thrust upon them?”

In the first hour of the musical, it is clear that Galinda (who eventually becomes known as the good witch) is really an opportunist (whose mispronunciation of common words is reminiscent of another self-righteous opportunist). Her supposedly “good” acts are really calculated moves made to give her what she wants and cast her in beatific light. The truly good deeds are practiced by Elphaba. Her putrid green coloring and intelligence, make her an easy scapegoat; thus, she eventually becomes the Wicked Witch of the West. The play redeems her. Even as legends malign her, it is evident she is a true revolutionary motivated by love.

Forgive the oversimplification here: That the willful ignorance of the Munchkins in a fictitious musical can be compared to McClellan’s revelations. But his insistence that the men who organized the Iraq War (using propaganda, post-9-11 fervor, and false intelligence reports) are “basically good” proves the impotence of his ideas. How much are we to allow “good intentions” to excuse? And what does it mean to be “basically good”?

What is obvious from the Jon Stewart interview and the musical is how easy it is to deceive the masses. Even if your main goal is not deception itself, if deception is what you use to reach your goal (even if it is done unwillingly), you are not good.  And yet, if you juxtapose The Wizard of Oz with Wicked, you see how slippery terms like good and bad are.

The play seems to side with the Aristotelian definition that a person with questionable motives, imitating a good person’s act, must then also be good. Glenda in the end uses her popularity to champion the ideas of  Elphaba. The true revolutionary must die while her disciple rules in her stead.  Or, seeing the good witch and the wicked witch  side-by-side on stage, it is clear that the play is saying the moralistic split between good and evil is insupportable.  Each needs the other to co-exist.

My husband likes to say “you mean what you do.” It’s comfortable to think that the amorphous soul can harbour some truth, even if that truth never manifests itself in action. But, the easiest way to check what you believe is to see what you do. That is who you are, despite how “good” others may feel you may want or try to be.

The Red Tent, or raising children in a community of women

The year of being full-time mom is coming to a close. The city is fully spring now, and yesterday we had our first hot day. The streets are beginning to hold on to the sour smell of garbage swill, and since two days ago, we’ve had the windows open 24/7. Fall is too close.

This time has been so sweet, of course, because it is fleeting. I’d like to say it’s been all daffodils and roses the entire 14 months, but the truth is, it has been terrifying, frustrating, stagnating, and, well, hard. Even as I type those adjectives, the Uber Mother voice rears up inside and raises her finger to chastise me. Isn’t this the most important thing you’ve ever done? Can’t you think of someone besides yourself? Don’t you love your son????

I both hate the Uber Mother, and want to be her. I want to hear her, and I want to shut her up for good. At least, I think, I am beginning to understand her.

I don’t know how or if I tried to prepare myself for motherhood. The goal of “growing up, going to college, getting married, and having children” was pretty heavily ingrained from early on. It’s not a path I ever denied or tried to see around. When I hit my mid-twenties and had no immediate marriage prospects, I sought depression, not options. Eventually, I got out of the habit of waiting for something to happen and told myself that I might just have to consider other paths. I stopped thinking about wanting children because I wanted children to be a conversation, a possibility that came from a conversation with the right person. I didn’t want children to be this “one size fits all” dream that I’d have to lodge another person into.

As it turns out, the right person did want children, had already had one, and was game for at least one more. His approach to parenting was more intuitive, less about books and experts and psychologists and focus groups. Given to over-thinking any new challenge that comes my way, I welcomed this laissez-faire attitude.

I live in an era in which market forces have successfully translated love for one’s child into all kinds of accoutrements, including $800 strollers, $1500/hour doulas, pre-natal yoga, lactation consultants, a whole section at Barnes and Noble, DVDs, movement classes, music classes, sign language, etc. Preying on the natural anxiety that arises from trying to care for another human being, mega-baby stores have thrived.

Of course when a generation inherits a new array of technology and insight into time-honored traditions, it tends to want to “out-do” the previous generation, big time. I casually asked my mother-in-law one day about leaving my son crying in his car seat while I went to the bathroom. (I was feeling guilty about not being enough, to the point where I was feeling selfish for actually going to the bathroom!!!) Trying to encourage me to give myself a break, she said “Sometimes, you just have to put them down and let them cry.” My sister-in-law, who had given me a Dr. Sears book for Christmas, overheard this and said “I don’t think you should ever leave your baby alone to cry.” She then re-told a memory of waking upin the dark,  alone in her crib. “I felt so abandoned,” she said.

The not-so-subtle guilt my sister-in-law was laying on her mother is also evident in the Sears’ books. Too often, the book I have “begs the question” when it defends attachment parenting. For example, when talking about bedtime, the book asks do you want bedtime to be a calming, comforting ritual in which parent and child bond? Or, do you want it to be a schedule forced on your child, even when s/he resists? I’m paraphrasing here, but the use of guilt in these parenting books, and in others, is pretty obvious.

So, where does an anxious mother go when she needs advice and support? Of course, I ask other mothers and fathers on the playground. Of course, I have to resort to my own instincts, and of course, my own personality (good or bad) influences every parenting decision. I have not been “remade” into Uber Mother as the commercial world would have me believe is possible.

A few years ago, a colleague recommended that I read The Red Tent by Anita Daimant because she thought it nicely dovetailed a book we both taught, The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. I read the book, and it is a nice companion to Atwood’s dystopian novel. Atwood’s novel creates a world in which women are the architects. In this world, infertile women get to be mothers, and the fertile women are slaves to the matriarchs. In The Red Tent, Diamant re-imagines a Biblical tribal world in which women have a kind of matriarchy within a larger patriarchy. The women– sisters, mothers, wives, daughters– bear the responsibility of bearing and caring for the children. In these roles, they rely on their bonds and generations of knowledge that have been gained by first-hand experience and passed-down through careful training. These women learn about raising children by watching many mothers, every day, and by being mothers to others’ children before they have their own.

Sounds romantic– I know. Too romantic, and I hate to fall prey to the practice of idealizing an older culture. But, I feel that all of the impositions of the Uber Mother try to instill what was possible when women had a real community in which to become mothers. Today, we move away from families, we buy into the “experts” ideas about how to raise our children, and we think we have progressed when we abandon whatever ideas may have gotten us through our imperfect childhoods. We approach motherhood the way we have approached doing well in school, or competing for a job, establishing a career. The idea that succumbing to some kind of shared, experiential knowledge is advanced, seems passe.

Perhaps these products and books and experts try to get us to believe we can get back to the garden, the the state of perfection, to a state of innocence, where nothing is ruined and one’s upbringing is without abandonment, anger, fear, or loneliness. That’s a lot of pressure to heap on a parent, but I know I feel it. And I hear it in others’ rationale of their parenting. Instead, I’d like to be back in that Red Tent, with my grandmothers, my mother and her sisters. I’d like us all to be muddling through. They’d tell me it’s all going to be OK, and I’d believe them.

I Believe

I believe in cultivating a life of the mind.

Although I have always loved TV and movies (including Gilmore Girls, and I hate to say it, occasionally America’s Next Top Model) I believe our culture often appeals to our basest qualities. I believe our desire can be reprogrammed for the sake of lining another person’s pockets. You hear me? I believe corporations can co-opt our very human-ness, our wanting—to the point that we barely recognize ourselves.

I believe as your teacher, I am in service to something that counters that force.

I believe honing our thinking can give us the mental equivalent of a sword, making intellectual samurais of us all. I believe our world could use more intellectual samurais, compassionate as they are smart.

I believe we all deserve to be part of an institution whose vision, goal, purpose, and practices are not regulated by profit. I believe one such institution is a school, and that is why I am here.

I believe in democracy, but I believe democracy in a classroom can approach chaos. I do however believe in dialogue and our ability to find a common ground.

I believe we are powerful. Yet I believe we often check that power by boxing ourselves up in categories like “I’m not a math person,” or “I hate to read,” or “I’m not musical.” I believe even as we find our one true passion, we eclipse other passions we may not have had the chance to discover.

Despite what you may think, I believe we are all poets.

Remember this: There is always so much to learn, so much worth knowing, so much worth doing as long as in the process we are not bringing harm to ourselves or another.

Therefore, if we get bored, I think we are afraid—afraid of what it feels like not to be small. Afraid of the bigness of the world that makes us small, we deflect that bigness, lock it out with our own apathy.

Therefore, I treat “boring” as a matter of perspective. Instead of saying something or someone is boring, I say one’s perspective suffers from boredom. Boredom can be tolerated or eradicated…if you choose to see possibility in your own intelligence.

I believe our mind is one big magnet. We magnetize our brains with everything we read, and the more we learn, the stronger its pull becomes, until nothing is beyond the reach of its force.

I believe when we develop our minds (our ability to reason, imagine, create, interpret, connect) we increase our ability to find aspects of our world interesting. I believe the more developed our minds are, the more interested and interesting we are able to be. I believe the capacity to be interested and to find material interesting is a mark of intelligence and imagination.

I believe if we reason better, imagine more, create deliberately, interpret well, speak thoughtfully and connect often we become our own entertainment, our own fulfillment. And we create more paths by which we can travel.

This why it doesn’t matter which road you take, the one less-traveled or not; it is you, not the road, that is in control. You determine the story of your life, because it is you will tell it.

I believe writing teaches us our mysteries. It preserves our pasts, keeps us in service to our memory. It makes us precious, which we all deserve. I believe each of us has a story, and we owe it to ourselves and others to bear witness to that story. When we become conveyers of our own story, we can live more fully, and more truthfully.

I also believe the ability to interpret challenging pieces of literature is a privilege everyone deserves.

And this privilege is not gifted by me, or the DOE or whatever college you will attend. I believe that ability is in service to our species, our DNA. Humans are meaning-makers, caught up in the details and ramifications of our own stories. In this class we will read and try to understand and when we do, I believe we will be honoring the very make-up of our being.

We need this skill—not just because there is a box on a college application that asks how many English credits you’ve earned.

Understanding literature can help us see the symbols, foreshadowing, images that shape our stories and become our lives, and I don’t know about you., but mine is a story I want to recognize and understand and WRITE WELL as it is happening, not once it is too late.

I believe life becomes a little better when you are past the phase when the collection of digits that make up your standardized test score becomes a major means by which you are taught to characterize your capacity.

I believe in a perfect world, grades would not exist. Yet I believe since you and I will never live in that world we need to do consider an important distinction: Do you want to HAVE the A, or do you want to BE the A student?

Think about that one….

I believe if I don’t grade it, it doesn’t mean the assignment doesn’t matter. I believe I have done my job when you no longer have to ask me “is this right?” I believe I have done my job if I make myself irrelevant.

Here’s how I believe that happens: Whatever the assignment, you find a way to discover what part of you that assignment evokes. Bring yourself to the task and you will discover yourself in it.

I believe journeys can be spiritual and intellectual, not just physical. I believe honing our intellectual swords, meeting challenges, and bringing ourselves to a task can be revolutionary.

I believe a group of people can be a sacred space. When secrets have been shared, lives discovered, voices heard, we have all been a part of something that transcends the everyday.

This, I believe.

Motherhood and Magical Thinking / 1

May 9, 2008
What exactly is magical thinking?

With all the references to magical thinking (and I’m recalling two memoirs in particular, Magical Thinking by Augusten Burroughs and Joan Didion’s reflection on grieving The Year of Magical Thinking), I’m compelled to find an actual definition of the term.

The Wikipedia entry is so illuminating, I have to copy part of it here:

In anthropology, psychology, and cognitive science, magical thinking is nonscientific causal reasoning that often includes such ideas as the ability of the mind to affect the physical world, correlation equaling causation, the law of contagion, the power of symbols, and the meaningfulness of synchronicity.
Magical thinking can occur when one simply does not understand possible causes, as illustrated by Sir Arthur C. Clarke’s suggestion that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” (see Clarke’s three laws), but can also occur in response to situations that are largely random or chaotic, such as a coin toss, as well as in situations that one has little or no control over, especially those one is emotionally invested in. (Indeed, this can be seen as a special case of failure to understand possible causes: specifically, a failure to understand the laws of probability that guarantee the occurrence of coincidences and seeming patterns.) See below for more specific examples.
Sir James George Frazer and Bronisław Malinowski said that magic is more like science than religion, and that societies with magical beliefs often had separate religious beliefs and practices.[citation needed] The difference between science and magical thinking emerges in 17th century philosophy. Both worldviews are mechanistic and based on causality, but the scientific worldview is distinguished by the scientific method and by skepticism, requiring the falsifiability of any scientific hypothesis.
According to Frazer,[1] magical thinking depends on two laws: the law of similarity (an effect resembles its cause), and the law of contagion (things which were once in physical contact maintain a connection even after physical contact has been broken). These two laws govern the operation of what Frazer called “sympathetic magic”, the idea that the manipulation of effigies or similar symbols or tokens can cause changes to occur in the thing the symbol represented. Typical examples of sympathetic magic include the use of voodoo dolls, and the fetishization of cargo cults. Others have described these two laws as examples of “analogical reasoning” (rather than logical reasoning). Magical thinking is a common phase in child development. From the age of a toddler to early school age children will often link the outside world with their internal consciousness, e.g. “It is raining because I am sad”.
Typically, people use magic to attempt to explain things that science has not acceptably explained, or to attempt to control things that science cannot. The classic example is of the collapsing roof, described in E. E. Evans-Pritchard’s Witchcraft, Magic, and Oracles Among the Azande, in which the Azande claimed that a roof fell on a particular person because of a magical spell cast (unwittingly) by another person.
The Azande knew perfectly well a scientific explanation for the collapsing room (that termites had eaten through the supporting posts), but pointed out that this scientific explanation could not explain why the roof happened to collapse at precisely the same moment that the particular man was resting beneath it. The magic explains why two independent chains of causation intersect. Thus, from the point of view of the practitioners, magic explains what scientists would call “coincidences” or “contingency”. From the point of view of outside observers, magic is a way of making coincidences meaningful in social terms. Carl Jung coined the word synchronicity for experiences of this type.
Adherents of magical belief systems often do not see their beliefs as being magical. In Asia, many coincidences and contingencies are explained in terms of karma in which a person’s actions in a past life affects current events. Likewise in the west, ideas of “motivation” and “positive thinking” in themselves achieving outcomes are not seen as magical by those who tout their benefits.
A common form of magical thinking is that one’s own thoughts can influence events, either beneficially, by creating good luck, or for the worse, as in divine punishment for “bad thoughts”. Freud reflected on these phenomena in his essay, “The Uncanny”. These beliefs reflect an incorrect understanding of the boundaries of self; one can indeed will to move one’s own arm, but not the ashtray on the table, at least not by any direct means (e.g. we can will our arm to move the ashtray, or there may be even less direct routes of influence). We can also make the opposite error: thinking that outside agencies can see into or influence our thoughts (paranoia).
Another form of magical thinking occurs when people believe that words can directly affect the world. This can mean avoiding talking about certain subjects (”speak of the devil and he’ll appear”), using euphemisms instead of certain words, or believing that to know the “true name” of something gives one power over it, or that certain chants, prayers or mystical phrases will change things. More generally, it is magical thinking to take a symbol to be its referent.

Caveat: Blogging lends itself to one’s exhortation of ideas in an asumed vacuum. I can say some thought, relatively unique among the flurry of my general everyday thoughts, and put it here, as if it has had no precedent in the history of humankind– a kind of magical thinking in and of itself. However, I am sure what I am about to say has a precedent, I just don’t know what it is. That said, the following observation may seem a bit inflated, overly full of itself.

The stories of a culture create a kind of matrix within which our actions and ideas take shape. That matrix (or context) can dictate a person’s way of thinking. This isn’t brainwashing, necessarily. But when immersed in stories with a particular pattern or outcome, our brains begin to follow those well-trained pathways willingly.

Although the post quotes that magic is more like science than religion, when I see this definition, I think of religion, specifically my own Christian upbringing. Is this bad? Does this diminsh religion because it is merely an institutionalization of poorly concluded causal analysis? Or does the connection elevate magical thinking to something uniquely human, developed over time, that we have come to need? For example: Adherents of magical belief systems often do not see their beliefs as being magical. In Asia, many coincidences and contingencies are explained in terms of karma in which a person’s actions in a past life affects current events. Likewise in the west, ideas of “motivation” and “positive thinking” in themselves achieving outcomes are not seen as magical by those who tout their benefits. Are these examples of “magical thinking” another way that humans craft a narrative (authority) that can serve as a kind of moral compass?

I’m beginning to plan lessons for next year, and I’m considering teaching The Scarlet Letter for the first time in ten years. What a fantastic example of magical thinking! From the righteous mob at the scaffold, to the guilt-ridden Dimmesdale, to the penitent Hester– all engage in different roles, serving the same end: redemption.

Come to think of it, The Great Gatsby exhibits its share of magical thinking…And One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest makes magical thinking the norm because the story is told from an unreliable narrator who tells us “it’s the truth, even if it didn’t happen.”

Maybe all literature is a kind of magical thinking???

As the title of this series (Motherhood and Magical Thinking) suggests, I have had time to notice my own brushes with this kind of thinking. Specifically, I have been living with this assumption that after spending a year away from teaching, I would automatically resume my old life. The change I have been trying to accomodate is staying home for a year. I have ignored the obvious fact that I will never return to the way I was as a teacher. I will never be able to pick up the patterns I forged over 10 years. Yes, undeniably parts of me will be the same. I’ll still use discussion more than independent or group work, I’ll still assign mor paper than “creative” projects, I’ll still have to work not to ignore students sitting on the left side of the room, etc. But the energy, the way I worked, and how I used my time: Gone. The habit of letting work expand to fill any and all time I had: Gone.

I have files and boxes of teaching materials waiting for me, presumably to help ease my transition back into teaching. But their usefulness is practically unrecognizable, as is the peson who so earnestly prepared them and stowed them for safekeeping.

Lessons I’ve Learned from the Road / vol. 1

May 7, 2008
Lessons from the road

The plan was hatched in San Antonio before we headed west on highway 90. We were in the RV parked outside one of our student’s homes. The eight kids we’d been traveling with for seven days were inside, finally enjoying some TV and life outside a 29’ mobile home. My colleague looked at me desperate. He’d had enough of our ambling ways, our random stops along back roads. He wanted a destination. He wanted to be sure something would happen. He wanted to be able to plan.

What he wanted was contrary to the whole point of the trip. The class was called Destination: America. We were traveling back roads with no direction other than the intention to go west or south from our starting point: Dayton, Ohio. We eschewed fast food. We stopped whenever even one person wanted to stop. We limited long stretches of solitude (usually provided by CD players and head phones). We didn’t allow ourselves the luxury of backtracking. Our goal was to cast off our notions of America and find a new America through the out-of-the-way places.

And, I would be naïve not admit that we hoped to do the same with notions of ourselves.

By the time we had reached San Antonio, we had had $2 a person lunches at a tiny diner in Indiana. We had ambled through a small town along the Ohio river, we had seen porpoises swimming along a sand bar in Florida, we had picnicked at night alongside the USS Alabama, some of us had tasted pigs feet, we had danced until midnight in the French Quarter, and we had lazed on the Gulf Shore in Gallatin, Texas. It seemed as though the trip was proving Kafka’s maxim that “The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.”

And yet, my colleague was restless. He needed a tangible goal. We plotted a point, timed the hours of driving, and estimated the time it would take to get us there. He asked me to tell the kids that, as the drivers, we needed a break from the road. I did, and the next morning we were off.