Live It Yourself

“My mother should love me—is that true? This is the death of a dream. Can you see one good reason to keep the story that anyone should love you, ever? Have you ever tried to love your perceived enemy? It’s hopeless. Who would you be without this story that your mother should love you? You’d be you, without all the efforting. Without the mask, the façade. It feels like freedom to me.

Wanting your mother to love you is like being in a straightjacket. It’s like being a dog on the floor just crawling and begging, with your tongue hanging out: ‘Love me! Love me! I’ll be good! I’ll be good!’ Make a list of everything you want her to do for you, then do it for yourself, and do it now. This is the real thing. You want it from her? Turn it around and live it yourself.”

~ Byron Katie, from Question Your Thinking, Change the World

Guide Her, Protect Her

A Mother’s Prayer for Its Child
by Tina Fey, from Bossypants

First, Lord: No tattoos. May neither Chinese symbol for truth nor Winnie-the-Pooh holding the FSU logo stain her tender haunches.

May she be Beautiful but not Damaged, for it’s the Damage that draws the creepy soccer coach’s eye, not the Beauty.

When the Crystal Meth is offered, may she remember the parents who cut her grapes in half And stick with Beer.

Guide her, protect her when crossing the street, stepping onto boats, swimming in the ocean, swimming in pools, walking near pools, standing on the subway platform, crossing 86th Street, stepping off of boats, using mall restrooms, getting on and off escalators, driving on country roads while arguing, leaning on large windows, walking in parking lots, riding Ferris wheels, roller-coasters, log flumes, or anything called “Hell Drop,” “Tower of Torture,” or “The Death Spiral Rock ‘N Zero G Roll featuring Aerosmith,” and standing on any kind of balcony ever, anywhere, at any age.

Lead her away from Acting but not all the way to Finance. Something where she can make her own hours but still feel intellectually fulfilled and get outside sometimes And not have to wear high heels. What would that be, Lord? Architecture? Midwifery? Golf course design? I’m asking You, because if I knew, I’d be doing it, Youdammit.

May she play the Drums to the fiery rhythm of her Own Heart with the sinewy strength of her Own Arms, so she need Not Lie With Drummers.

Grant her a Rough Patch from twelve to seventeen.Let her draw horses and be interested in Barbies for much too long, For childhood is short – a Tiger Flower blooming Magenta for one day – And adulthood is long and dry-humping in cars will wait.

O Lord, break the Internet forever, that she may be spared themisspelled invective of her peers And the online marketing campaign for Rape Hostel V: Girls Just Wanna Get Stabbed.

And when she one day turns on me and calls me a Bitch in front of Hollister, Give me the strength, Lord, to yank her directly into a cab in front of her friends, For I will not have that Shit. I will not have it.

And should she choose to be a Mother one day, be my eyes, Lord, that I may see her, lying on a blanket on the floor at 4:50 A.M., all-at-once exhausted, bored, and in love with the little creature whose poop is leaking up its back. “My mother did this for me once,” she will realize as she cleans feces off her baby’s neck. “My mother did this for me.” And the delayed gratitude will wash over her as it does each generation and she will make a Mental Note to call me. And she will forget. But I’ll know, because I peeped it with Your God eyes.

Amen.

Listen to Tina Fey read from this essay on Fresh Air (April 13, 2011).

Like a Brick in Your Pocket

Playwright David Lindsay-Abaire got the idea for Rabbit Hole after hearing stories about couples who had lost their children. He was the father of a young child himself and he remembered something Marsha Norman suggested when he was studying at Julliard. “She said, if you want to write a good play, write about the thing that frightens you the most.”

In this scene from the movie based on the play, Becca (Nicole Kidman) and her mother Nat (Dianne Wiest) have started packing up toys and clothes that belonged to Becca’s son, Danny, who was killed in a car accident about eight months earlier.

I really like this scene because it explores an insight into grief that applies broadly to a variety of losses that we all eventually face.

BECCA

Mom? Does it go away?

NAT

What.

BECCA

This feeling. Does it ever go away?

NAT

No. I don’t think it does. Not for me it hasn’t. And that’s going on eleven years.

It changes though.

BECCA

How?

NAT

I don’t know. The weight of it, I guess. At some point it becomes bearable. It turns into something you can crawl out from under. And carry around—like a brick in your pocket. And you forget it every once in a while, but then you reach in for whatever reason and there it is: “Oh right. That.” Which can be awful . But not all the time. Sometimes it’s kinda . . . Not that you like it exactly, but it’s what you have instead of your son, so you don’t wanna let go of it either. So you carry it around. And it doesn’t go away, which is . . .

BECCA

What.

NAT

Fine . . . actually.

Arrival

A Girl by Ron Mueck

Morning Song
by Sylvia Plath

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.

The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry
Took its place among the elements.

Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue.
In a drafty museum, your nakedness
Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.

I'm no more your mother
Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind's hand.

All night your moth-breath
Flickers among the flat pink roses.  I wake to listen:
A far sea moves in my ear.

One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral
In my Victorian nightgown.
Your mouth opens clean as a cat's. The window square

Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try
Your handful of notes;
The clear vowels rise like balloons.

Excruciating Vulnerability

“When you ask people about love, they tell you about heartbreak. When you ask people about belonging, they’ll tell you their most excruciating experiences of being excluded. And when you ask people about connection, the stories they told me were about disconnection.”

~ Brené Brown, from “The Power of Vulnerability” TED Talks, June 2010

 

@c4chaos

Immaterial Wealth

“The support, the privilege, really comes from having two parents that said and believed that I could do anything. That support didn't come in the form of a check. That support came in the form of love and nurturing and respect for us finding our way, falling down, figuring out how to get up ourselves…I learned more in those [difficult] times about myself and my resiliency than I ever would have if I'd had a pile of money and I could have glided through life. I honestly feel that it is an act of love to say, 'I believe in you as my child, and you don't need my help.' "

~ Peter Buffett, discussing his book, Life is What You Make It, on Morning Edition, NPR (May 6, 2010)

The Uncovering of Language to Its Sacred Condition

“I do feel that images are gifts. I don’t know if they create the soul, but they certainly reveal it. The image is a revelation of sorts, therefore apocalyptic as opposed to ecliptic. While eclipses cover, an apocalypse is an uncovering. The writing of a poem is the uncovering of language to its sacred condition. Many people who don’t write poetry think that poetry is prettified language. But poetry undresses language down to its manifold meaning. I keep imagining the body of God naked, radiating meaning and significance and voice; somehow we cover it, and dress it up so it becomes prose. And I feel like images come from the body; it’s kind of a body wisdom. ”

~ Li-Young Lee, from “Poems from God,” by Amy Pence, Poets & Writers, November/December 2001 (subscription required)

* * *

To Life
by Li-Young Lee, from Behind My Eyes: Poems

Who hasn’t thought, “Take me with you,”
hearing the wind go by?
And finding himself left behind, resumed
his own true version of time
on earth, a seed fallen here to die
and be born a thing promised
in the one dream
every cell of him has dreamed headlong
since infancy, every common minute has served.
Born twice, he has two mothers, one who dies, and one
the mortar in which he’s tried. His double
nature cleaves his eye, splits his voice.
So if you hear him say, while he sits at the bed
of one mother, “Take me home,”
listen closer. To Life,
he says, “Keep me at heart.”

Tearing the Page
by Li-Young Lee

Every wise child is sad.

Every prince, is a member of the grass.

Each bud opening opens on the unforeseen.

Every wind-strewn flower is God tearing God.

And the stars are leaves
blown across my grandmother’s lap.
Or the dew multiplying.

And of time’s many hands, who can tell
the bloody from the perfumed,

the ones that stitch
from the ones that rip.

Every laughing child is forgetful.
Every solitary child rules the universe.

And the child who can’t sleep
learns to count, a patient child.

And the child who counts negotiates
between limit and longing,
infinity and subtraction.

Every child who listens
all night to the wind eventually

knows his breathing turns a wheel
pouring time and dream to leave no trace.

Though he can’t tell what a minute weighs,
or is an hour too little or too long.

As old as night itself,
he’s not old enough in the morning
to heat his milk on the stove.

But he knows about good-byes.
Some of them, anyway. The good-bye
at the door each morning, a kiss for a kiss.
The good-bye at bedtime,
stories and songs until it’s safe to close his eyes.

And maybe he’s even heard about the waiting room
at Union Station, where dust and echoes climb
to the great skylights

accompanied by farewells
of the now-going, to join the distant
farewells of the long gone,

while a voice announces the departure
of the Twentieth Century for all points West.

Yes, every wise child is heart-broken.
A sorrowing pip,

he knows the play
he’s called away from each evening
is the beginning and end of order
in a human household.

He’s sure his humming to himself
and his rising and falling ball are appointed
by ancient laws his own heart-tides obey.

But he can’t tell anybody what he knows.

Old enough to knot his shoelaces,
he’s not old enough to unknot them.

Old enough to pray, he doesn’t always
know who to pray to.

Old enough to know to close the window
when it storms, old enough to know the rain,
given the chance, would fall on him,

and darken him, and darken him, the way
he himself colors the figures
he draws, pressing so hard he tears the page.

Being Alive and Being Together

From “Mindfulness in 2 Minutes,” by Chade-Meng Tan, Huffington Post (February 24, 2010):

Most evenings, before we sleep, my young daughter and I sit in Mindfulness together for two minutes. I like to joke that two minutes is optimal for us because that is the attention span of a child and an engineer. For two minutes a day, we quietly enjoy being alive and being together. More fundamentally, for two minutes a day, we enjoy being. Just being. To "just be" is simultaneously the most ordinary and the most precious experience in life.

As usual, I let my experience with a child inform how I teach adults. This daily two-minutes experience is the basis of how I introduce the practice of Mindfulness in an introductory class for adults.

More…

Before we were born…

…our parents were awesome.

Paul

Submitted by Chris

Autonomy Support

“…according to an impressive collection of data by Dr. Edward L. Deci and others, unconditional acceptance by parents as well as teachers should be accompanied by ‘autonomy support’: explaining reasons for requests, maximizing opportunities for the child to participate in making decisions, being encouraging without manipulating, and actively imagining how things look from the child’s point of view.

The last of these features is important with respect to unconditional parenting itself. Most of us would protest that of course we love our children without any strings attached. But what counts is how things look from the perspective of the children — whether they feel just as loved when they mess up or fall short.”

Alfie Kohn, from “When a Parent’s ‘I Love You’ Means ‘Do as I Say’,” New York Times (September 14, 2009)

Love and Its Near Enemy

From The Self-Esteem Trap: Raising Confident Compassionate Kids in an Age of Self-Importance by Polly Young-Eisendrath:

Most of us think of love in terms of the comfort, passion, closeness, or beauty it will bring us. We imagine the enjoyment of passing hours and days with our beloved, who pleases us in touch, smell, and conversation. Perhaps we even think of living happily ever after. Unfortunately this is not love but its intoxicating sibling, idealization. Buddhists use the term “near enemy” to mean a superficial or misleading twin of a valuable state or attitude. In Buddhist parlance, then, we could say that idealization is the near enemy of love. If we mistake idealization for love, we can be harmfully misled in our connections to others and ourselves.

The special self is the creation of idealization. Exceptional, extraordinary, perfect: these are not the descriptions of any real human being, a person with weaknesses as well as strengths. If we have heard repeatedly how talented, beautiful, smart, or promising we are, we may grow up with an intolerance for weakness and difficulty in others, and a greater intolerance for imperfections in ourselves. Within such a self-esteem trap, we are unable to connect with others or embrace ourselves in the messy ambivalence of love.

Their Voices Seem to Come from Inside Us

Barbershop Quartet,
      East Village Grille

by Sebastian Matthews, from American Life in Poetry

Inside the standard lunch hour din they rise, four
seamless voices fused into one, floating somewhere
between a low hum and a vibration, like the sound
of a train rumbling beneath noisy traffic.
The men are hunched around a booth table,
a fire circle of coffee cups and loose fists, leaning in
around the thing they are summoning forth
from inside this suddenly beating four-chambered
heart. I've taken Avery out on a whim, ordered quesadillas
and onion rings, a kiddy milk with three straws.
We're already deep in the meal, extra napkins
and wipes for the grease coating our faces
and hands like mid-summer sweat. And because
we're happy, lost in the small pleasures of father
and son, at first their voices seem to come from inside
us. Who's that boy singing? Avery asks, unable
to see these men wrapped in their act. I let him
keep looking, rapt. And when no one is paying
attention, I put down my fork and take my boy's hand,
and together we dive into the song. Or maybe it pours
into us, and we're the ones brimming with it.

Our Most Basic Imperative

After Our Daughter’s Wedding by Ellen Bass, from Mules of Love

While the remnants of cake and half-empty champagne glasses lay on the lawn like sunbathers lingering in the slanting light, we left the house guests and drove to Antonelli's pond. On a log by the bank I sat in my flowered dress and cried. A lone fisherman drifted by, casting his ribbon of light. "Do you feel like you've given her away?" you asked. But no, it was that she made it to here, that she didn't drown in a well or die of pneumonia or take the pills. She wasn't crushed under the mammoth wheels of a semi on highway 17, wasn't found lying in the alley that night after rehearsal when I got the time wrong. It's animal. The egg not eaten by a weasel. Turtles crossing the beach, exposed in the moonlight. And we have so few to start with. And that long gestation— like carrying your soul out in front of you. All those years of feeding and watching. The vulnerable hollow at the back of the neck. Never knowing what could pick them off—a seagull swooping down for a clam. Our most basic imperative: for them to survive. And there's never been a moment we could count on it.

[Thanks Garrison Keillor! More by Ellen Bass.]

Daughter

A daughter is not a passing cloud, but permanent,
holding earth and sky together with her shadow.
She sleeps upstairs like mystery in a story,
blowing leaves down the stairs, then cold air, then warm.
We who at sixty should know everything, know nothing.
We become dull and disoriented by uncertain weather.
We kneel, palms together, before this blossoming altar.

~ James Lenfestey, from American Life in Poetry: Column 186

A Day of Sentiment

From The Writer's Almanac:

It's the second Sunday in May, which is Mother's Day here in the United States. It's Mother's Day in other countries, too, including Denmark, Italy, Venezuela, Turkey, Australia, and Japan. It's the biggest day of the year for long-distance telephone calls.

A woman named Anna Jarvis was the person behind the official establishment of Mother's Day. Her mother, Anna Reeves Jarvis, had a similar idea, and in 1905 the daughter swore at her mother's grave to dedicate her life to the project. She campaigned tirelessly for the holiday. In 1907, she passed out 500 white carnations at her mother's church, St. Andrew's Methodist Episcopal Church in Grafton, West Virginia — one for each mother in the congregation. In 1912, West Virginia became the first state to adopt an official Mother's Day, and in 1914 President Woodrow Wilson made it a national holiday.

Anna Jarvis became increasingly concerned over the commercialization of Mother's Day. She said, "I wanted it to be a day of sentiment, not profit." She was against the selling of flowers, and she called greeting cards "a poor excuse for the letter you are too lazy to write." Nevertheless, Mother's Day has become one of the best days of the year for florists. When Anna Jarvis lived the last years of her life in nursing home without a penny to her name, her bills were paid, unbeknownst to her, by the Florist's Exchange.

Divertimento

The bird wedges its voice
into the silent crevices
between raindrops.

The shower fades and slips by
like the last time my daughter
came running from the playground to greet me,
her entire body smiling,
her face full of light,
to leap into my arms.

She is running toward me now,
again and again,
but first and last are as lost
as individual drops of rain.

When was the early bird
joined by the other members of the ensemble,
all gossiping now on the risers?

When did the air’s perfume
begin to drift away?

Taking the small hand of my attention,
which has again wandered back into
what was and what might be,
I gently guide it back to all this silence
which all this music seems to be written on.

An Amalgam

“…we are not just the products of our mothers and fathers ... I am not just my adoptive parents' child and I am not just my biological parents' child. I am simultaneously all of their children and their parents' children and their great-grandparents' children…I describe myself as an amalgam of these four parents, but what’s amazing is that in my biological child I also see my adoptive family. There was a moment about a year ago when I took a photograph of my daughter and she somehow had the same expression on her face as my grandmother who she never met. So she too is an amalgam of all these things.”

--A.M. Homes talking with Steve Inskeep (Morning Edition, 7/26/06) about being reluctantly sought out by her biological mother. She wrote about meeting her biological parents in her memoir, The Mistress's Daughter.

Father and Daughter

"Father and Daughter is a film about longing, the kind of longing which quietly, yet totally, affects our lives." - Michael Dudok de Wit (Script, Design and Animation)

Michael Dudok de Wit was born in 1953 and educated in Holland. In 1978, he graduated from the West Surrey College of Art in England with his first film The Interview. After working for a year in Barcelona, he settled in London where he directs and animates award-winning commercials for television and cinema. In 1992, he created the short film Tom Sweep, followed by The Monk and the Fish (1994), which was made in France with the studio Folimage. This film was nominated for an Oscar and has won numerous prizes including a César and the Cartoon d'Or. Michael also illustrates books and teaches animation at art colleges in England and abroad.

Fifteen minute film on UK Teacher TV program of Michael Dudok de Wit discussing the work that went into The Monk and the Fish.

Filmography: Tom Sweep (1992); The Monk and the Fish (1994); Father and Daughter (2000)

Running Time: 8 minutes 30 seconds
Year of Release: 2000

Production: Cloudrunner Ltd, UK, and CineTe Filmproductie bv, Holland

Techniques: Pencil, charcoal and software application ANIMO
Other Contributors: Normand Roger (Composer), Claire Jennings and Willem Thijssen (Producers), Arjan Wilschut (Main Co-Animator), Jean-Baptiste Roger (Sound), and Alistair Becket and Nic Gill (Technical Directors)

Awards include: Independent Film Award, Ottawa International Animation Festival, 2000; Grand Prize, Cinanima Animation Festival, 2000; Grand Prix Narrative Films, Holland Animation Film Festival, 2000; and Best International Animated Film, Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Festival, 2001