{by Eddie Carroll from One Pixel at a Time}
@MiddletonRare | Gnilleps on Flickr
shared via Posterous
{by Wolf of Just Add Father}
Don’t open the door to the study.
Take down a lute.Rumi
I wake up too early and lie in the dark, thinking. I have eight unfinished ToDos from yesterday. I go downstairs and open the study door.
On one shoulder sits a little man, saying, Lute! Lute! Play the lute!
On the other shoulder is another little man. This one says, Are you good enough yet? There’s work to do.
I think the lute man was there first, at least that’s the way I remember childhood. But the other man soon followed. He’s pretty much run my life since the first grade, and maybe before that. My wish for Nick, my eight year old son, is that he listen to his own lute man for as long as possible.
My fear is that the other man is already whispering to Nick. The idea that I can help Nick put this man in his place is a great seduction for me. Perhaps all it means is that I want to help him to be me, doing it right.
Nora and I try not to mindlessly praise Nick, avoiding “Good job” and such when we can. Instead we say things like, “Look at that yellow line you’ve drawn there. It’s twisting like a river.”
Nick likes to draw. But he worries that he’s lousy at it. This worry used to stop him cold, but now he draws and draws anyway, I’m glad to say. For the moment the lute man is winning.
A couple of years ago I got him a book about mistakes that turned into useful inventions. Not-sticky-enough glue that led to Post-Its, and so on. But the book was more for me than for him. It gave me something to say when he complained about himself. I told him he needed to make 10,000 mistakes to get good at something.
“It doesn’t look like it’s supposed to,” he’d say, showing me a drawing.
{by Nish, The Outdoor Wife}
All I have is the unsung in me.
The unwritten, empty pages blank,
Words piled up thick behind the whites of eyes
and the skin of my teeth.
The tiny voice speaks bold and
claws out from fingernails,
Unspoken.
I have a heart of superglued glass.
I have the ink on skin
that bleeds out onto paper.
All I have is hellfire passion
burning slow and set aflame by only
one man’s touch. His.
He unearths me with gentle hands to
untamed skin and I am left
undone.
{by Megan Boley from MegaGood}
The larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder. ~Ralph W. Sockman
“All this grass and and he does this” by Megan Boley from MegaGood | @MeganBoley
shared via Instagram
(by Stacey of Is There Any Mommy Out There?)
I expect it to be like a cloud. That moment of walking in the door.
A gold-tinged cloud scented orange with an undertone of cinnamon. It’s more like hitting a wall of thin arms and loud reedy voices, their smiles bright, their garbled tales spilled at my feet like slippery fish from a basket. I am surrounded by noise where I anticipated hugs set to the flicker of a silent movie.
The baby is up. Quiet time is over. It’s time for snack. They played in a tent. Do I want a cookie? That one is hopeful. They made cookies with Daddy. Might they perhaps, if I wanted one, have a cookie too?
My brain is frozen, shocked and sluggish, like the marble-eyed deer we nearly hit three nights ago on our wild escape through Palouse hill country into the night. Why oh why does it smell like fish?
It is one of those things they don’t tell you about motherhood. This matter of going away and coming back again. Or maybe, to be fair, it is one of those things that can not be taught. Like child birth and that instinct that tells you this fever is serious and not like all the others, this can not be explained before it is experienced.
It’s not that you miss them. Or maybe that’s just me – I might be odd in that respect, though I doubt that I am alone. Three years into sharing my thoughts on mothering this way, I believe firmly that I am never alone. There is always someone out there searching for this nugget, this truth, this strange fossil of a thing that they find buried in themselves and that they are glad to see someone else hold up to the light and turn around, curious. Will you look at this? Isn’t that odd? Look at how the shell turns back on itself. A new creature entirely.
{by Ms. Picket To You of Post Picket Fence}
Kids at a pool: it’s the epitome of fantastic wretchedness.
They swim and dunk and dive and flop unattended and fully entertained and working up to an excellent exhaustion. The sunscreen melts off the minute it’s applied, but their bodies are submerged, so: only shoulders get burnt, maybe noses. They paddle and flop and hunt quarters at depths taller than they are. They coordinate games named “Baby Dolphins.” They get drenched and pickled and giddy all at once.
But the goggles are too tight or too loose or worse than her brother’s. The towel is too soggy but worthy of a battle, a whippingatyou, smackingatyou battle. The sister’s belly flop is half-assed and “mine will be better and hurt more than hers” and WATCH ME WATCH ME WATCH ME will echo across the chlorine, over the deck chairs, past my magazine, and straight into my face. Straight into my face over and over and over: WATCH MEEEEEEE!
{by Valeria from The Red Balloon Photography}
A SOMETHING in a summer’s day,
As slow her flambeaux burn away,
Which solemnizes me.
A something in a summer’s noon,
An azure depth, a wordless tune,
Transcending ecstacy.
~Emily Dickinson
{From Deidra at Jumping Tandem}
Remember those boxes of 64 Crayola crayons with the built-in sharpener?
In my world, it didn’t get much better than that.
I could spend hours with a box of crayons and a coloring book. My grandmother or my mother would color one page, and I would color the page next to it.
As the years went by, I took pride in my ability to stay in the lines.
