Jen Lee

I could write an entire post about my fantasies for the summer, but here’s just one for now:  long days (almost every day) spent in Prospect Park, lounging in the shade while the girls romp in the Long Meadow, or exploring the Ravine.

Here’s how the reality goes.  Amelia, after getting bug bites up and down both legs and feet, is now feeling bug-phobic and cries out in alarm every time we spot an ant.  Then in the meadow, the girls don’t know what to do with the grass, the space.  Instead of lounging in the shade, I chase them around and we take turns being The Chased One.

It’s funny how many times we need to be shown how to do things we expect to come naturally.  Whether it’s playing in a field, offering an invitation for friendship, or putting pen to page and moving it, having someone dive in and play with us can be just the guidance or encouragement we need.

Technorati Tags: Jen Lee, play, Prospect Park, summer

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Photo by Amelia

Have you ever seen the show Project Runway?  This reality show/competition for fashion designers can get my blood pressure up almost to the normal range with its demanding personalities, insane challenges with ridiculous time frames, and drama drama drama.  Those contestants are tough, I thought.  That was before summer vacation.

Having my kids both home all day makes me feel like a contestant in Project Preschool Mommy.  Maybe I’ll launch my own competition; I don’t know if I could win it, but I promise you, I’d be a fierce contender.

Welcome to today’s episode.  Our first contender, Jen Lee, is in a coffee shop, armed with art supplies, her preschooler and a sleeping baby.  Her craft plan of cutting shapes and gluing them has just been sabotaged by a petrified glue stick.  The whining will mount to wailing in five.  Four.  Three. Two.  What will Preschool Mommy do?  Ahh (crowd noise).  She was quick to create a peekaboo craft idea with cutting shapes and passing them through a drawn box with a slit cut in the opening.  Her preschooler is happy–she’s still in the game!  Uh-oh.  That lasted three minutes and the preschooler made a mistake coloring hair on the circle-turned-face.  She’s yelling, It looks ugly!  I hate it! The customers around them are fidgeting and the baby is stirring.  Is our contender on her way out?  No!  In a flash of scissor work, she’s fashioned a wig for the circle face.  With this kind of creativity and speed, I think this one could make it to the finals.

Today’s next challenge is a long walk home at the end of a hot day.  How will Jen Lee occupy her preschooler for the duration?  So far, we’ve heard complaints of tired legs, thirst, and itchy bug bites and the preschooler is only walking slower.  Wait, our Preschool Mommy is reaching in her bag for something.  It’s a Secret Weapon Moment, for sure.  It’s–it’s the iPod!  Cued up with Candy Man by Sammy Davis, Jr.?  Slam dunk!  That song is getting them home with smiles.

Tune in tomorrow to watch Project Preschool Mommy challenge our contestants to a public screaming tantrum, and see what creative ways they come up with to extricate their preschoolers from the playground equipment when it’s time to go home.

Technorati Tags: Jen Lee, motherhood, preschoolers, Project Runway

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Photo:  My sister and my niece in Prospect Park.

I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.

From The Summer Day by Mary Oliver

I have the most precious video from today, but I can’t bear to post it and risk it being used in an unsavory manner.  We watched Singin’ in the Rain today, and it was Amelia’s first musical.  What was your favorite part? I asked her afterward.  She was decisive, The costumes.  The girls’ costumes.  Thanks to our friend, Marina, she borrowed a new costume to wear today–a bridal costume, which she wore for hours.

After the movie, she requested music, classical so she could do the singing herself.  Then she danced.  Twirled with her arms above her head.  Rolled her head from one shoulder to the other, then tossed it back like she was in a kiddie shampoo commercial.  When Lucy tried to join in, they clasped hands and spun under and through the bridge of their arms.  It reminded me of how good art inspires us to express something new, to dream a new dream of who we might be in this moment or in the future.   How I wish I could have seen the dreams she was dancing!

Technorati Tags: art, dancing, Jen Lee, Mary Oliver, The Summer Day

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Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness.  The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is. –Willa Cather

If you don’t tell the truth about yourself, you cannot tell it about other people. –Virginia Woolf

“You know what your problem is, Jen,” a wise woman once said.  “You’re a Nice person, and Nice people are compulsive liars.”

I blinked in shock and then let the words sink in.  I scanned my memory for evidence to either confirm or deny this revelation, and remembered a recent trip to the furniture store with a new friend.

“I like this piece,” I said, pointing to a sofa.

“No way–not me,” she said.  I cringed. “I like that one,” she pointed a few minutes later.

Me–hating it, “Yeah, it’s nice.”

Roll montage of a lifetime of the same.

She’s right, I thought.  I am a compulsive liar.  A compulsive people pleaser.  If I were an animal, I’d probably be a chameleon.  I can easily be anything you need me to be–an introvert, an extrovert, agreeable, indignant–anything, that is, except for myself.  That is the flip side of this particular coin:  the forgetfulness of the true self, and eventually its annihilation.

What do I like, I wondered.  Half the time I didn’t even know.

That conversation set my feet on the path back to truthfulness, and I’ve been stumbling my way along ever since.  This is the most daunting thing for me as a writer:  the challenge writing poses to tell the truth to myself, then to the public.  I do not like to (of course) think of myself as deceitful in a malicious way; it’s an almost involuntary glossing-over or posing, like I’m always tilting my best side toward the camera.  All in the hopes that you’ll like me, nevermind that inauthentic people are difficult to like.

So this is my practice, my yama:  truthfulness.  The closer I get to telling the truth about myself, the more truthful my writing becomes, and thus the fates of my writing and my soul are entertwined.

Technorati Tags: authenticity, deceit, Jen Lee, truthfulness, Writing

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Photo: One of our neighborhood gardens, by Meg.

I knew I was in trouble after I said something in the last post about trying to distract ourselves from sadness. Brené Brown was in my head right away with, “Our children need to learn to sit with discomfort and pain.” It was like a bad omen–maybe I should have edited the post right then so as not to tempt fate.

Alas, I did not edit the post. I arrived at school to find Amelia tearful after another student accidentally sprayed her in the eye with perfume. I could tell she wasn’t up for festivities, so we bailed on after-school playtime and headed home to regroup before trekking to the library. We hadn’t been home an hour when it happened.

Gasp. Wide eyes. “Mom, I forgot my pictures,” and then the wailing began. A year’s worth of artwork, left at school in her drawer. I checked the clock and then did what any Good Mother would do, right? I called the teacher on her cell phone. “Is it too late? Are you still there?” I asked her.

“I told the children–I told them, anything they left would be thrown away. They already came and took away anything that was left in the room.” A tragic mistake that could not be fixed. The sorrow–Oh, the sorrow. We’ll sit with the sadness, I thought. We’ll just feel it and be with it. We crowded into the rocking chair, Amelia wailing in my left arm and Lucy leaning over periodically to kiss me on the cheek and grin from my right arm. This continued for a very long time. Amelia went through the spaces of loss.

“I am Not Even Moving until we get them back, and if we don’t get them I’m Never Moving Again. I will stay Right Here Forever.”

“They are going to recycle my pictures and turn them into something else.” Now like a siren, “I don’t want them to be something else.”

“I want Daddy! I want Daddy to go get them. Let’s just go find them, we’ll go to school and tell them–We Need Those!”

I confess that I ran through every possible scenario in my mind by which I might fix this. None of them were even plausible. I went through all the I Should Have Known Betters and regrets of my own. I resisted the temptation to distract her from the pain with a trip to The Chocolate Room. No, no, no. Life is like this, I reminded myself. Better that she learns now. Sometimes we make mistakes that we can’t fix. Sometimes we suffer heartbreaking loss. We must go through it, and we will go on. I looked at the clock. How many hours of tears would this wound take to clean?

When I felt my confidence weaken, I went into another room and pulled up Brené’s Parenting CD Discussion Guide for The Gifts of Imperfect Parenting: Raising Children with Courage, Compassion and Connection. I’m doing the right thing, right? I wanted to know. It said, when we numb shame, fear, anxiety, sadness, vulnerability, grief, uncertainty, and disappointment (and teach our children to do the same), we automatically dull our experiences of joy and compassion.

Amen, amen. No numbing. We sat and had more tears. Finally (only a single hour after it had begun), Amelia’s storm finished and we were ready for that trip to the library. When Justin came home, she recounted the tale to him with sadness, but no more tears.

It is so difficult to hold the heartbreak, theirs in my arms and my own in my chest. But it is only one time of many, and learning to experience it will build our resilience for the future. Or at least that’s the bet I’m placing.

Technorati Tags: Brené Brown, discomfort, Jen Lee, parenting, Sadness, sorrow, The Gifts of Imperfect Parenting

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Photo by Kendra.

I love school. Amelia loves school. We’re doing our best to skip gracefully into summer, even though we’re both a little nervous. I’m trying to think of fun things to do after she finishes at noon tomorrow to help distract us both from how sad we are to say good-bye to the families, the friends and the teachers, one of whom is retiring. Many, many of her classmates will attend other schools next year, or move to other countries over the summer. Next year will be all new. Again.

“I am always beginning the world, beginning the world,” Karen Peris sings. I know just what she means. I look at Amelia, and realize we’re feeling the same things. Uncertainty. Curiosity. Excitement. Worry. Anticipation. I promise her playfulness, rest and wonder. My job for the next eight weeks is to keep that promise.

I do not know what to promise you, dear readers, except that I’ll do my best to live a full and rich season and to share it with you when and how I can. May playfulness, rest and wonder be yours, as well in the long, light-filled days ahead.

Technorati Tags: Karen Peris, summer, vacation

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This is what I know so far about writing a novel. It begins with a place that pulls you in–a shop that offers something your religion never delivered, or a field that calls to you like the origin of a dream. It might be a place outside of you, or a place inside that’s been overlooked or unmapped.

Then curiosity or compulsion pulls your knees down, entices your fingertips to claw into the earth–frantic and clumsy at first, then patient and gentle as time spends itself like your only currency. You pull up bones: large, small, strange and plain. They heap on every side of you, and when you think you’ve found them all you sift through them. You place the ones that seem to go together in a big burlap bag, stacking extras on a log nearby in case they make more sense later. A bag of bones. This is the first draft.

Next you pull out the bones and categorize them, manipulate them like puzzle pieces while you look for the form that will hold them. The place called you silently, somewhere deep in your body, but now the bones whisper so you can catch it if the wind blows just right. If your own clamoring is still enough. They tell you of someone they are wanting to be. So you listen and you arrange and rearrange until you have a completed skeleton and only a couple spare bones that may or may not be necessary. Tuck those back in your bulap sack and admire her form–this bare bones lady used to be nothing more than an underground longing. This is the second draft.

The listening isn’t easier now, you just have to listen longer to hear each curve and fold of flesh as you paint on muscle and movement. You dream of other places, other bones, but you cannot leave her now. You try to prove something with your devotion–that you can be dutiful, or brave; that you can see her truly, or be faithful to her to the end. You spin each strand of hair and knit each fiber of her skin. This is the third draft.

You do not worry about dressing her–if a publisher wants to send her into the world someday, her wardrobe will be arranged. However, that remains a far-off proposition as long as she is looking at you with the crazed eyes of one who knows her very existence is in the hands of another. As long as she begs you to finish, to do her justice, you job is to listen. Listen and fall to your knees. Listen and dig. Listen and build. Listen and paint, spin and stitch. Thus is a novel made.

Technorati Tags: Jen Lee, novels, Writing

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It was this kind of day yesterday.

Bright, gently unfolding, a little too beautiful at times to be real life. After Amelia’s Pre-K graduation ceremony, we played at the playground, then walked to a restaurant for lunch with some of the other moms and kids from her school. The weather was about seventy and sunny, and we ate in the shade, in the garden. Then we walked up to Prospect Park’s Long Meadow, where they were setting up for tonight’s live outdoor performance by the Metropolitan Opera. While the kids looked for treasure and traveled from one imagined game to the next under the shade of giant trees, a recording of the opera came through huge speakers and filled the meadow. I literally felt like I was in a movie, and when one of my mommy friends busted out a round of cartwheels down the hill, I thought I would burst with joy. I hope this was just a rehearsal for summer, that our days will be filled with friendship and timeless play.

Maybe it was just what I needed to soothe my anxiety about how I’m going to keep my writing commitments with my days absent of silence or solitude. How I’ll find time to have an original thought before September. I need the rest as much as Amelia does, I remind myself. There are times to work head-down, to study with diligence, but other times are for leaving the watch and computer at home. For playing in the mud under a green canopy and cartwheeling down the hill. For remembering that these moments are beautiful, even when we don’t have the Metropolitan Opera to remind us.

Technorati Tags: Jen Lee, Metropolitan Opera, Prospect Park, summer, Writing

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I loved Michael Pollan’s book, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, which informed me about the politics, ideology, economics and ecology that form the complex web of our food production and consumption. It also offered the most simple, logical and sound recommendations I’ve come across. The book is a great blend of thorough research and skillful writing, and a pleasure to read. If you’re considering reading In Defense of Food, or if you’re curious but don’t have the time, listen below to WNYC’s Leonard Lopate in an interview with Pollan that gives a nice overview of the book’s main findings and recommendations.

Technorati Tags: Eater's Manifesto, In Defense of Food, Jen Lee, Leonard Lopate, Michael Pollan

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I’ve been wrestling with shame and imperfection, two of the topics from Brené Brown’s lecture series (her distinctions are infiltrating my lexicon, as you will see). All of my existence resides inside those two words, or at least it feels that way at times. I find myself too often in a double bind: of course one must admit one isn’t perfect, but we can’t name imperfections, and we sure as hell can’t point out someone else’s (or at least not if she is in the room). We grasp so desperately at connection and belonging and we think imperfection will be the grenade that busts the system to pieces. An individual might be imperfect, but the system, the community, cannot be. Or, we can admit that it must be (it would be prideful not to), as long as we don’t name or discuss what those imperfections might be. If I want to pull them out and speak about them, I am not fostering growth and understanding, I am being disloyal. Unappreciative. Insensitive to people’s feelings.

It’s okay to be imperfect, just as long as you don’t ever talk about it.

I’m ready for a new system. It works like this: imperfection is not at war with connection and belonging, it’s the soil they grow in. You may get something that looks like a connection plant outside of embracing imperfection, but I promise you it is weak and malnourished. So I might seem rebellious, but that’s because I am. I’m tired of relationships and systems that are shells of what they could be. The path of silence is a dead-end road to authenticity, so I’m taking another route.

This isn’t easy. Even after I posted “self-diagnosis and home remedies” I went through a shame spiral that looked like this: –Just because you feel down doesn’t mean you have to write about it, people don’t want to read about that. –But Amy said it helped her to hear about it. –Well, I’m sure you don’t give equal time to your ‘up’ times, so what kind of impression does that give people? It’s bad enough that you’re brooding; why must you do it publicly?

I guess I’m just imperfect. And tired of not talking about it.

Technorati Tags: belonging, Brené Brown, Connection, imperfection, Jen Lee, shame, silence, systems

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