songs of experience

I have too too many thoughts buzzing in my brain, so I had to set up several draft folders for future blog ideas (nerds, narcissism, The Outsiders and S.E. Hinton, one-legged man at the mailbox, tammie’s summer, running with the lone wolf vs. the buffaloes, etc.). The reason I am full to bursting is that I had zero time for solitary reflection over Christmas break. As I said in an earlier post, my ideal life consists of time for the three R’s - reading, running, and ruminating. Well, when you’re a mom with three kids home from school from December 13th until this very morning, some 21 days later, you must sacrifice the third R. Maybe my brain was percolating on the back burner, like a computer in “sleep” mode, but it wasn’t until today that I was allowed to flip the full-on switch.

I could go into the gargantuan list of responsibilities that we moms (gladly?) do, but it might sound like what my old running partner used to call my “bitch of the day.” Suffice it to say, every holiday taste treat was baked; every present was purchased, assembled, wrapped, and placed under the fully decorated tree; every out-of-town gift addressed and mailed, every Christmas card sent, every song sung, every board game played, every activity planned and executed, every meal prepared and cleaned up after, every sock washed, every dream listened to each morning … Narnia- check; King Kong - check; charades, pictionary, cards (Hearts and, hey, I shot the moon!) - check, check, check!

It is a round-the-clock labor of true love. But worth it. Oh, so worth it. My eldest recorded a cd of her own fiddle playing for our Christmas present, my mushy-kisses-hating middle daughter gave me a mod-podged vase with a huge pink heart smack in the center, and my industrious youngest made her very own button flowers for the vase - colorful buttons glued on to the end of “big toothpicks” (actually, shish-kabob skewers) that she saw on ZOOM.

So, I am full of ideas and love this first free day of 2006.

When I read in Alice Munro’s short story, The View from Castle Rock, of a turn-of-the century doctor, on board a ship heading from Ireland to The Americas, asking his patient, whose baby he just delivered, “What will you do in Canada West?”, I felt a kindred shock of recognition in her reply:

“It seems to her the silliest question. She shakes her head - what can she say? She will wash and sew and cook and almost certainly suckle more children. Where that will be doesn’t much matter. It will be in a house.”

Domesticated.