Making It Up

On Saturday, my cousin and oldest friend - and easily one of my best friends - got married. It was a full and wonderful weekend of flower-arranging, omelet making, nail painting, wine drinking, scheduling managing, vow witnessing, dress tugging and hair curling. I was her best woman, or as Daniel put it (and don’t ask me where he read it) her matron of honor. More exactly, Daniel said I was her mahTRON (not MAYtron) of honor, which sounds somewhat better and vaguely cyberpunk.

Mostly what I feel now (back home, children tucked up in bed) is that sort of wistful feeling of “nothing nice will ever happen again” that you get after a play ends. I really do think there should be more days when we can wear floor length dresses and carry flowers. And tomorrow I might be able to tease out one strand of thought from another, but tonight they look like spaghetti and I am thinking of a large bowl of frozen yogurt with warmed chocolate syrup poured over. Because after the wedding (and before the wedding and even during the wedding) is life. And sometimes life needs chocolate syrup warmed up and poured over.

But to leave you with something more profound than ice cream, here is the poem they asked me to read during the service:

HAPPINESS, Edith Wharton

This perfect love can find no words to say.

What words are left, still sacred for our use,

That have not suffered the sad world’s abuse

And figure forth a gladness dimmed and gray?

Let us be silent still, since words convey

But shadowed images, wherein we lose

The fullness of love’s light; our lips refuse

The fluent commonplace of yesterday.

Then shall we hear beneath the brooding wing

Of silence what abiding voices sleep,

The primal notes of nature, that outring

Man’s little noises, warble he or weep,

The song the morning stars together sing,

The sound of deep that calleth unto deep.

While it’s completely illogical (captain), I like signs, symbols and portents. Perhaps I don’t go as far as plunging a pin onto a page of the Bible, but if, for example, I’m wondering if I want a drink and then, out of the blue, Ed says - would you like a drink, I’d be inclined to take that as a sign that I should in fact have a drink. Or if I’m trying to decide what to have for dinner and steak is on sale, that’s a sign. Admittedly, these are sort of everyday signs of the type that might lead you to think that I love an exterior excuse to justify doing what I really want to do. Mmm. Maybe.

But tonight there is a sign of the proper old fashioned blood and ashes kind, a real Mayan, Druidic, Pharonic torches and sigils kind of sign — a lunar eclipse. It doesn’t matter if it’s a sign for good or ill or great huge goat sacrifices. It’s a sign. A moment. Something that feels irrational, momentous, different. Portentous.

And I’m going to take it as a sign that darkness passes and that even in the penumbra, there are interesting colors, beauty and the promise of emergence. That’s a good sign.

Every so often I read about other people’s snow days or their lazy afternoons of knitting or watching television or (gasp!) being sick in bed and I would envy them. I could barely remember a life when such afternoons were in my grasp, but if I did remember them, I cursed the girl I was for squandering the hours in wandering the house or eating cheese or watching Red Dwarf episodes. Free time, I thought to myself, is rarer than diamonds and three times as precious. Free time must be used wisely, I thought primly. Free time must be filled with productive and useful things that never otherwise get done. Nice things, to be sure, but things that you can look back at in the evening and say — I did that today.

In the past year, a few of those afternoons have made their way into my life again and I have welcomed them with joy. Oh, what I will do, I gloat, with five free hours. Paint three rooms and read the news and write a blog and write a novel and paint a masterpiece and plan a party and write ten emails and finish knitting a sweater and have a shower and do a hundred sit-ups and meditate for an hour and make a ragu and eat tofu for lunch and piece a quilt and clean the basement and wash the floor and call my mother and learn some French and practice the piano and go for a walk and take some photos and drink more coffee and make a friend and brush my hair and do all the laundry and rewire the kitchen light switches. And then I’ll think up more things.

What I actually DO do, however, is laze about. Mostly. I knit a bit and read a hundred blogs and perhaps put the breakfast dishes in the dishwasher and call my sister and that’s about it.

Because otherwise, it’s not free time. How do you know you’re rich with time if you’re not squandering it like a millionaire?

I’ve got these fancy headphones my dad handed down (to Ed, he thought, but they never got that far) and they block out the world. They almost give me a headache, so great is their commitment to one set of sounds, that is, the noise from the Ipod. I wear them to fold laundry or to knit in bed except that after a while, I grow nervous. What could be happening in the house that I would not hear? Murderers could enter wearing tap shoes, gazelles could drop in for coffee, Random House could be banging on the door, demanding that they publish my as-yet-unwritten novels, my children could be whining for a glass of water Mummy, the neighbors could be doing the nasty with bells tied to their heads and I’d only hear Neil Gaiman’s lovely voice as he reads Neverwhere to me. (Yes, to me and me alone, such is the power of these headphones and my love for Neil Gaiman.) It’s both strange and unsettling. We locate ourselves in the world through sound. The heat coming up (or more likely, going off). Ed’s footsteps as he makes tea. The dryer humming. The children breathing. These are the sounds that let me know where and who I am.How our senses locate us in space, in the world, in our lives is increasingly interesting to me — not least because we’ve discovered that Daniel can’t locate where in space sound comes from, which accounts for much of his anxiety. (I’ll let you know more about that as we learn more.) What it has meant for me is that I am suddenly grateful every time I turn my head towards a sound, confident that I know I’m looking the right way. Grateful for the sounds around me.

I’ve been blogging since 2005 as Stuntmother over at Blogger. It was a wonderful time, all that writing and bonding and anecdotal parenting stuff — and then it seemed to fizzle out. I started I Do All My Own Stunts when Ed was away traveling for his PhD for weeks on end, and when barely a day went by when I didn’t feel as if I’d averted some spectacular parenting disaster by the skin of my stuntmothering teeth — and when disasters struck on the rest of the days. In those days, I was mothering two young children pretty much full time, and what emerged was a blog primarily about identity, motherhood, parenting and children. With some knitting thrown in.

Then the children grew a little older, Ed stopped being a student, we moved and I realized that I needed to identify as ‘mother’ like I needed a hole in the head. What I needed was to find out where the non-mother, non-wife I had got to in what had become my life.

I needed a fresh start (a fresh hell, as Dorothy Parker once said). This is it.