The Other Side

9.7.07

I looked up from folding some laundry last night while my son played Guitar Hero and his friend sang Leonard Skynrd's "Free Bird" alongside, and saw that my kitchen was off kilter. It seemed to be slanting and the doorway was on a slight diagonal. I wasn't drunk, nor had my glasses slipped, and we were not in the midst of an earthquake. The whole thing just seemed askew. Yet perfectly normal.

I think it's the normal that threw me there for a moment. The hum and buzz of family life weaves around me lately, catching me around the middle like a weaver trapping a moth with her shuttle cock, passing her threads under and over, colors mixing in a pre-planned pattern, around a flitting fluff of grey. I recently saw a weaver in action in Mexico and she spoke about her art as she wove without a thought, it seemed. She showed me a brochure for some incredible tapestry exhibits that used materials like recycled metal and broad swathes of fabric instead of the traditional yarns we imagine. One piece was huge, 20 feet high, a golden crush that resembled a discarded gum wrapper. I was struck by its incongruity, soaring above a floor somewhere, when it looked like it should be shining in the sun, some snake's shed skin. But then, it seemed as normal as a painting on a wall and I smiled.

The kids are back in school, their packbacks filled with new supplies, their pants a bit too short after a summer's growth spurt. Hanah's skin is tawny brown, my Hungarian roots showing through her derma-layer. Noah's hair has lightened and streaked from his latest effort to grow an "emo", the latest hairstyle amongst his skateboard heros, long bangs flapping like curtains across his eyes. The daily rhythm, up at dawn, of packing lunches and shooing out the door has replaced the summer's sleep-ins as the planet gently turns away from the sun and the light shifts. Our fall is summer here with record heat waves and hot dry air, but my inner calendar is set to autumn and the shifts of a life centered around the children's daily march forward. Hanah, all of 8 yet turning 9 shortly, asked the other day what colleg would be best for her and I laughed. "Wait, you're only in 4th grade, let's slow down a bit, okay?"

Perhaps it's their accelerating maturity, or my crossing the half-way mark or their ever so slight pullings away that tipped the domestic picture yesterday. Judith Warner wrote a book about this insane life we mothers lead, trying to do, be and have it all in the 21st century. We fill up our plates at the smorgasbjord of life and one day it's all too much, or just enough and we can or must put the plate down and pause, lest we drop it and ruin all.

I have a quote on my wall from Joseph Campbell "We must be willing to give up the life we had planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us." What is a plan, but a dream well constructed? Does this mean that we give up dreams so that we can truly be in the life we are actually living? What if one has been asleep in one dream and then awoke to another, one that now calls with urgency? Is that truly the life now waiting for us or was it the life orginally planned? When my kitchen teetered last night, I thought, how did I end up here with all this domesticity woven around my ankles when my plan had been to trot through and save the world? Have I grown up, given up, gotten small? This family is part of the dream I had, yet it also included something bigger. And it continues to beckon beyond the kitchen door, the front yard with its spitbug infestation, the streets of LA with their endless billboard enticements.

Yet this morning the house has righted itself, or I have found my sea legs again in the quiet of dawn's introspective light? And the buzz will soon begin again as kids arise and schedules unfold. This raising of children, to do it well with attention and care, seems a most important task as so many of us end up miserable, endlessly wanting and filling our leaky psychic buckets with food, drink, drugs, the myriad offerings of our market economy. I have some time left to do this job well, yet cannot ignore the other side of motherhood waiting to embrace and assess me. When their energy leaves the house, I must have my own so that this shifting doorway does not crumble.

That, then, is the dream, the life planned, to keep building foundations under those castles in the sand. The Mexican day of the dead celebrates the "other side". We seem to fear it. But daily we die a bit, and yet, wake again to keep living. And so we must. And so we do. And that is the dream. To live. The shuttle cock continues to weave, and we can always change to a different thread with which to create our tapestries.