How I feel about my daughter getting her driver's license:
1. Thank the Baby Jesus! No more paper grading in a cold car, waiting on yet another self-important coach.
2. Omigod, is she really old enough?
3. Omigod, am I old enough?
4. Think of what I'll do with all those extra minutes.
5. What the hell am I going to do with all those extra minutes?
Here's what I did the night she drove away for the first time on her own:
1. Visited my parents.
2. Drank two glasses of very good homemade wine.
3. Cried--for the first time in two years--on my husband's shoulder.
Thursday, July 29, 2004
Tuesday, July 27, 2004
July 27
There is, I think, a part of us that relishes all the attention we get when we are ill or hurt. Many of my students try to write, in gruesome detail, about car accidents or the moment they discovered they were diabetic. Women love to tell each other stories about the difficulties they faced bringing their babies into the world. The value of our selves is underscored when even complete strangers go out of their way to assist us or show us compassion when we are facing a physical crisis of some kind.
Then, there are those parents who feel this same thrill, vicariously, when their children are ill.
Julie Gregory writes about her experience as a child of such a parent in Sickened. Her mother, she claims, gave her pills which caused her to have migraines. Then she was taken to the doctor and encouraged to look "ill," while her mother elaborated on a host of symptoms both real and imagined till the doctor prescribed some new procedure or medication. When the doctor over time refused to continue treatment, mother and daughter moved on down the road to another medical facility in search of more "competent" doctors. Gregory was subjected to a number of exploratory procedures, including a heart cath, which she believes were completely unnecessary, in her mother's search for a doctor who would consent to perform open heart surgery on her.
The story Gregory tells is horrific and sad; her parents take in and exploit foster children and veterans in order to supplement their income. Gregory is, by turns, physically and emotionally abused, and is so busy visiting doctors that she has difficulty keeping up in school. Her father eventually burns their house to the ground in order to collect the insurance money.
My sympathies are with Gregory, but I must say, memoirs make me nervous. There is, even in some of the best, a self-righteousness that creates a wariness in the reader. There are many sad Cinderella moments in this book meant to engender pity in the reader but which fail to add much to our understanding of Munchausen by proxy. When Gregory writes of how her mother cut her shoulder-length hair into a shag, I couldn't work up much concern. I loved my shag haircut when I was a kid, even though my mother also had to talk me into it. Then there was the wet t-shirt contest Gregory participated in as a teenager. Even as she is describing the action--allowing someone to pour water over her chest and wriggling out of her shirt and jeans to satisfy the growing demands of the rowdy crowd at a racetrack--she wants the reader to believe she did this to earn money for her parents, to bring their family together. I would have an easier time swallowing this if she extended to the other competitors the same compassion she wants the reader to feel for her. (Chris Rock once said in an interview--and I tend to agree--if your daughter strips, then you did something wrong as a parent.) Instead, she compares her rival to herself this way: "Miss Blonde-banged long-hair, and me: innocent country girl." Later, she describes how "Miss I've-definitely-done-this-before decided to up the ante and turned right around to show her bottom to the crowd..."
Upon finishing this book, I felt a little woozy and sick myself. I would have liked more information about the prevalence of this mental illness (Marc D. Feldman, M.D., attempts to do this in the foreword, but uses only generalities, stating there are 1,200 new cases of MBP reported every year and that many go undetected, but I still wonder how many documented cases are in the U.S. at any given time as well as an approximation of those that remain unreported) and what the medical establishment is doing to safeguard children's lives, for I know that it is a much better known condition now than it was in the early nineties, when Munchausen by proxy became the subject of television dramas and crime fiction.
I wish Gregory the best, and hope her work in the field of psychiatry unlocks the riddle of this bizarre family-crippling illness.
Then, there are those parents who feel this same thrill, vicariously, when their children are ill.
Julie Gregory writes about her experience as a child of such a parent in Sickened. Her mother, she claims, gave her pills which caused her to have migraines. Then she was taken to the doctor and encouraged to look "ill," while her mother elaborated on a host of symptoms both real and imagined till the doctor prescribed some new procedure or medication. When the doctor over time refused to continue treatment, mother and daughter moved on down the road to another medical facility in search of more "competent" doctors. Gregory was subjected to a number of exploratory procedures, including a heart cath, which she believes were completely unnecessary, in her mother's search for a doctor who would consent to perform open heart surgery on her.
The story Gregory tells is horrific and sad; her parents take in and exploit foster children and veterans in order to supplement their income. Gregory is, by turns, physically and emotionally abused, and is so busy visiting doctors that she has difficulty keeping up in school. Her father eventually burns their house to the ground in order to collect the insurance money.
My sympathies are with Gregory, but I must say, memoirs make me nervous. There is, even in some of the best, a self-righteousness that creates a wariness in the reader. There are many sad Cinderella moments in this book meant to engender pity in the reader but which fail to add much to our understanding of Munchausen by proxy. When Gregory writes of how her mother cut her shoulder-length hair into a shag, I couldn't work up much concern. I loved my shag haircut when I was a kid, even though my mother also had to talk me into it. Then there was the wet t-shirt contest Gregory participated in as a teenager. Even as she is describing the action--allowing someone to pour water over her chest and wriggling out of her shirt and jeans to satisfy the growing demands of the rowdy crowd at a racetrack--she wants the reader to believe she did this to earn money for her parents, to bring their family together. I would have an easier time swallowing this if she extended to the other competitors the same compassion she wants the reader to feel for her. (Chris Rock once said in an interview--and I tend to agree--if your daughter strips, then you did something wrong as a parent.) Instead, she compares her rival to herself this way: "Miss Blonde-banged long-hair, and me: innocent country girl." Later, she describes how "Miss I've-definitely-done-this-before decided to up the ante and turned right around to show her bottom to the crowd..."
Upon finishing this book, I felt a little woozy and sick myself. I would have liked more information about the prevalence of this mental illness (Marc D. Feldman, M.D., attempts to do this in the foreword, but uses only generalities, stating there are 1,200 new cases of MBP reported every year and that many go undetected, but I still wonder how many documented cases are in the U.S. at any given time as well as an approximation of those that remain unreported) and what the medical establishment is doing to safeguard children's lives, for I know that it is a much better known condition now than it was in the early nineties, when Munchausen by proxy became the subject of television dramas and crime fiction.
I wish Gregory the best, and hope her work in the field of psychiatry unlocks the riddle of this bizarre family-crippling illness.
Monday, July 26, 2004
July 26
I finished Haddon's book last night, and loved it to the end. Two little bits of criticism: I didn't believe C.'s father was the kind of man who could murder anything--and if he were, there was nothing the author could do to make me like him again; and the ending seemed a bit rushed. But don't they all, anymore? Is this due to authors' desire to be done with their work, for godssakes, or is this the result of some confab with an editor who feels the need to stuff as much information as possible in at the end? Regardless, a great read.
Last night, my husband and I pulled on a couple of warm sweatshirts and went to an outdoor performance of The Merry Wives of Windsor--thoroughly enjoyable on its own, but enhanced, of course, by a couple of bottles of homemade Merlot. Falstaff was a hilarious, dissolute fellow, and the wives themselves were quite merry. The doctor suitor had trouble managing his French accent, and showed an alarming preference for Italian now and again. Otherwise, it was one of the best community performances I have seen. It could be that I was all too easy to please after attending my husband's twenty-year-class reunion, a dry, dreary event that lacked the alcohol and music needed to properly lubricate the participants. Mostly, we stood in little clumps and nodded at each other while our eyes glazed over. A few pictures of kids were passed around and we did our best to act interested, but really, no children are as beautiful or talented as one's own, so hang all the rest of them!
A cold, rainy Monday it is. Garden work is out and the house is clean, so I suppose I have no excuse to avoid the manuscript.
Last night, my husband and I pulled on a couple of warm sweatshirts and went to an outdoor performance of The Merry Wives of Windsor--thoroughly enjoyable on its own, but enhanced, of course, by a couple of bottles of homemade Merlot. Falstaff was a hilarious, dissolute fellow, and the wives themselves were quite merry. The doctor suitor had trouble managing his French accent, and showed an alarming preference for Italian now and again. Otherwise, it was one of the best community performances I have seen. It could be that I was all too easy to please after attending my husband's twenty-year-class reunion, a dry, dreary event that lacked the alcohol and music needed to properly lubricate the participants. Mostly, we stood in little clumps and nodded at each other while our eyes glazed over. A few pictures of kids were passed around and we did our best to act interested, but really, no children are as beautiful or talented as one's own, so hang all the rest of them!
A cold, rainy Monday it is. Garden work is out and the house is clean, so I suppose I have no excuse to avoid the manuscript.
Saturday, July 24, 2004
July 24
During this week's teaching workshop, throughout all our discussion of teaching writing, I couldn't help feeling--in some ways--that we are making much ado about nothing. Not that writing is nothing, or that illiteracy doesn't exist, but that all our heuristics, and theory, and pedagogy will come to nothing at all if students don't read. My belief, as a writer and avid reader myself, is that reading is the foundation of writing. All the rest of it, spelling, vocabulary, sentence structure, even the practice writing situations, work only in conjunction with what the student has learned from reading-- a lot of reading.
Of course, I'm writing this just as the NEA has released those depressing statistics that spell out, quite clearly, that American adults are not reading. If the adults aren't reading, I fear children won't be far behind.
We didn't really address reading in any meaningful way in the workshop, partly because of that unnatural split in the academy between English literature and English composition. Each side has planted a flag on its own territory, and the students are left to sort out the sense of it as best they can. How can Faulkner's writing--with his bizarre, woozy, yet dead-on awareness of audience and point of view-- not be addressed in a complete study of composition? How can a English literature class neglect to examine even one of Woolf's weirdly beautiful sentences to see how it affected those souls who struggled through the years between the wars?
Students who read--and writing teachers who read--quickly come to the understanding that there are few, if any, hard and fast rules in the writing of English. It is as functional, and sometimes as lovely--if in the right hands--as clay. They learn how to manipulate ideas and, if they're truly clever, audiences with words, punctuation, and structure whose sole purpose of existence is in the service of delivering ideas to an audience.
Well, enough.
Currently, I am reading The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon, an absolutely compelling novel from the point of view of a 15-year-old boy with autism. He is brilliant (knows all the prime numbers to 7,057), fears the color yellow, and has been accused of killing a neighbor's dog. He hasn't, of course, but decides that he will find the murderer.
There is nothing cute or sympathetic in this book. Haddon allows the character to present himself, and as an autistic child, Christopher does not seem to be capable of self-pity or cutsiness. Instead, he is entirely and oddly admirable as he is. A Spock of a child, he sees a shadow world the rest of us miss altogether, when he dissects common parlance (and how illogical it is) and examines personal idiosyncracies, not just in himself but in others who are less aware of themselves than he is of himself.
Brilliant without yet falling into the clever trap (I'm only on page 50), it's one of the stand-out books that I've read this year.
Of course, I'm writing this just as the NEA has released those depressing statistics that spell out, quite clearly, that American adults are not reading. If the adults aren't reading, I fear children won't be far behind.
We didn't really address reading in any meaningful way in the workshop, partly because of that unnatural split in the academy between English literature and English composition. Each side has planted a flag on its own territory, and the students are left to sort out the sense of it as best they can. How can Faulkner's writing--with his bizarre, woozy, yet dead-on awareness of audience and point of view-- not be addressed in a complete study of composition? How can a English literature class neglect to examine even one of Woolf's weirdly beautiful sentences to see how it affected those souls who struggled through the years between the wars?
Students who read--and writing teachers who read--quickly come to the understanding that there are few, if any, hard and fast rules in the writing of English. It is as functional, and sometimes as lovely--if in the right hands--as clay. They learn how to manipulate ideas and, if they're truly clever, audiences with words, punctuation, and structure whose sole purpose of existence is in the service of delivering ideas to an audience.
Well, enough.
Currently, I am reading The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon, an absolutely compelling novel from the point of view of a 15-year-old boy with autism. He is brilliant (knows all the prime numbers to 7,057), fears the color yellow, and has been accused of killing a neighbor's dog. He hasn't, of course, but decides that he will find the murderer.
There is nothing cute or sympathetic in this book. Haddon allows the character to present himself, and as an autistic child, Christopher does not seem to be capable of self-pity or cutsiness. Instead, he is entirely and oddly admirable as he is. A Spock of a child, he sees a shadow world the rest of us miss altogether, when he dissects common parlance (and how illogical it is) and examines personal idiosyncracies, not just in himself but in others who are less aware of themselves than he is of himself.
Brilliant without yet falling into the clever trap (I'm only on page 50), it's one of the stand-out books that I've read this year.
Wednesday, July 21, 2004
July 21
Last night, HK, a dear old friend of mine, took a look at Cabin Creek and delivered the verdict: No more short story nonsense--time to grow up and write a novel! I waffled on this point throughout the first draft, opting for the quick thrill of short fiction (that might double as chapters) publication rather than the chancier proposition of publishing a truly connected and streamlined novel. Lovely that some of these short stories have found homes in a few literary journals, but actually, this validation reinforced my tentativeness, and now, just when I thought I was nearing the end, I am stuck with the awful task of dismantling quite a few of these pieces.
She's right, I think. The best feedback, in my experience, is that which corroborrates what you already know, in your deepest heart, about your own writing. At least I have a direction in which to move after a week or two of paralyzing indecision.
Bless you, HK, for your honest and insightful advice, and best of luck with your own awful list of revisions.
She's right, I think. The best feedback, in my experience, is that which corroborrates what you already know, in your deepest heart, about your own writing. At least I have a direction in which to move after a week or two of paralyzing indecision.
Bless you, HK, for your honest and insightful advice, and best of luck with your own awful list of revisions.
Monday, July 19, 2004
July 19, 2004
The "publish" button below is pretty intimidating. The truth is, most of my journaling is written in the happy knowledge that it will NEVER be published. This means, of course, that I will never be held accountable for ugly thoughts or feelings, or even perfectly justifiable but unsparing criticisms of myself and others. To go from that spiral notebook beside the bed to a forum where everyone can see is worrying. But we all know there is anonymity and safety in numbers--the lone farmhouse on the country road seems more a target than the cookie cutter house in the middle of a neighborhood. So, I guess I can call this journaling in plain sight.
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