Good morning, good mornings
Waiting for the school bus.
Funny postscript to my last post on my forgetful daughter. Yesterday, the school bus arrived, she said goodbye, I watched her walk across the street and board the bus. A couple of minutes later, the front door slammed open and she rushed into the house. “What’s happening?!” we said. “No time to talk! I just forgot a few things!” “And the bus driver BROUGHT YOU BACK?” “Yes!” Rush, rush, slam.
I ran to the door to see what she’d forgotten — backpack, lunch? Nope.
SHOES. Running shoes.
And the bus driver brought her back. Now that’s a special bus driver.
Here are a few other things we do in the morning, before leaving for school (with apologies for lousy cellphone photos).
Practice piano and violin. Read.
I really enjoy our mornings. Kevin and I both get up before the kids. I run or go to an exercise class. He runs the dogs and does yoga and strength exercises in our living-room. He makes a giant smoothie for the kids’ breakfast (yogurt, kefir, almond milk, bananas, frozen fruit). Various people take showers. Dishwasher is emptied (by the kids; this is a new routine). Big kids pack their own lunches. Kev packs his lunch, plus lunches for the younger two (I think they could manage it on their own, but if he’s willing to do it …). What else? First load of laundry goes in the washer. Musical instruments get practiced. Forms get signed. Dogs get fed. Weather gets checked. Music is played.
It’s a sweet start, and worth the early hour, says the woman who remembers being a night owl, once upon a time.
xo, Carrie
Remember your shoes
I’m trying to get more organized, she told me this morning. To which I replied, I think you’re already pretty amazingly organized. Even if you forget your shoes at school sometimes.
She performed three times at the Kiwanis music festival this week, placing in every category. This required months of work to learn, then memorize, then master the intricacies of each song, not to mention to perform under pressure. Yesterday, she handed in a major school project she’s been researching and writing for months (on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the subject she chose). Next weekend she’s performing in a play, representing several months’ commitment to rehearsals. And she continues to play/practice soccer several times a week, and will start refereeing games this month. I think she’s also singing/playing ukulele with friends at a school coffeehouse. How she’s not curled up in a fetal position in a corner somewhere is beyond me. Instead, she seems pretty chilled out. I would swear she’s having fun. If she looks a little nervous in the photo above, it’s because it was taken right before her first performance on Monday. She was a little nervous. (So was I.)
Here’s what I’d like to say to her. Yes, you’re a bit scatter-brained sometimes. Sometimes you tune everything out and daydream. This can be annoying when the bus is waiting for you, or it’s past bedtime. But I think you’re plenty organized. You see the big picture. You know how to get where you’re going, and that it takes patience and steady effort. You also seem to know what matters: all of the steps along the way. So how about this: You keep doing what you’re doing. And I’ll help you remember your shoes.
xo, Carrie
PS But even I am not so organized as to iron your shirt…
Odd perks of the job
An unexpected perk of writing a book called Girl Runner was being asked to review running shoes for a running magazine (iRun.ca). In total, twelve pairs of shoes came through my front door this past winter, and I tested and wrote about all of them. The magazine will be running my full piece in their next print edition, which comes out soon, but meanwhile, here’s a link to one of the shoe reviews posted online earlier this week. It’s for the Saucony Triumph ISO, a shoe I liked a lot and continue to wear often. (Side note: I’ve got Triumphs and Boosts and Wave Riders; shoe manufacturers remind me of car manufacturers–it’s all in the aspirational naming.)
I have to say, this is making me ponder subjects for my next book in a totally different way. Just kidding. But seriously: if I wrote about ponies, would someone give me a pony? Please?
xo, Carrie
PS Random photo of goats. I don’t have any photos of ponies on hand.
Storm in the calm; calm in the storm
Sunday felt like a quintessential Carrie-style day. I was on my own with the three youngest kids, with Kevin and Albus at a soccer tournament in Ohio (yes, back-to-back weekends in Ohio, switching up the parent/kid combo). Despite wishing to sleep in, I got up (relatively) early to run the dogs. While running, decided to bake bread. Vacuumed the downstairs. Grabbed a quick shower. Cleared the dining-room table. Made lots of coffee, plus waffles, plus cut up a watermelon. Fooey helped set the table and organize. And then my sibs arrived for brunch — yes, this had been planned in advance; it was my idea! And then we all relaxed and ate and chatted at our leisure, sitting around the table for ages. Even the kids sat and enjoyed the conversation (listening intently, quietly, miniature big-eyed spies soaking up intel from the adult world). And the bread came out of the oven in time to be “dessert.” Mmmmm.
After everyone left, I put AppleApple in charge and went for a run with a friend. After that, there was really just laundry, leftovers for supper, and a whole lot of downtime to talk and read together.
While in the midst of the morning prep work, pre-shower but mid-bread, I texted Kevin to say: “I feel like sometimes I make life too complicated …”
And it’s probably true. I probably could arrange things differently. I probably didn’t need to bake bread, for example. I didn’t need to squeeze in a run. I didn’t need to offer to host brunch on a weekend when I was parenting alone. But it all worked out so awesomely that I’m going to reassure myself: how you do stuff is just fine. Go ahead and keep doing it, not because you need to, but because you want to. Keep making life complicated. It’s complicated; not too complicated. There’s investment and reward. It’s busy, but we have a lot of fun — I have a lot of fun (and the kids need to know: moms just wanna have fun, too). Best of all, for those of us who enjoy adventure and excitement and a shot of adrenalin in our every day, complicated makes every day is a little bit different. There’s variety amid the routine, chaos in the order, storm in the calm. But also, thankfully, calm in the storm.
xo, Carrie
PS Girl Runner was reviewed this weekend in the Independent on Sunday (UK) — the only novel in a round-up of running books, in celebration of the London marathon: “It’s a joy to read about a woman finding pleasure in her body that isn’t sex or diet-based.” (Not that there’s anything wrong with sex or food, the author of Girl Runner would just like to add …)
Unmarked moments
“There’s a big white flower behind one of the stumps, Mom, I’ll show you.”
Dream: I am at a long conference table set up in my mother-in-law’s back porch. Two women sit at the other end of the table, conducting an interview about art for live national radio, but I’m just here because it’s a convenient place to work. Earlier in the dream I spent way too much time anxiously trying to figure out why my children missed the school bus; the children are everywhere, all around the house, when I know they should be in school. So I’m sitting here, trying not to be too obvious or interrupt the interview, trying to work. I think that my work is writing, but when I look down, it turns out that my work is chopping potatoes. End of dream.
Things I’ve done since 5:30AM yesterday: ran with a friend, helped children practice violin and piano, made supper in the crockpot, washed three loads of laundry, meditated twice, blogged, edited an essay, answered emails, texted with friends and family, picked up and dropped off kids for piano lessons, worked on novel while sitting in car between pick-ups/drop-offs, visited with a friend while at piano lessons, attended a soccer coaching clinic, had tea with husband (talking soccer, hockey, and Fun Things We Want To Do), read books and newspaper, listened to radio (news and songs), slept, did strength exercises. Waited. Hurried. Tried not to fight with time.
I think of time in blocks and chunks and sections. I think of myself as travelling between these blocks and chunks and sections and trying to negotiate the transitions as smoothly as possible, trying to settle in wherever I’m at and not resist what’s happening. But sometimes it feels like what I’m resisting is time itself. These chunks of time, this careful measuring of hours and minutes, calculating these small openings and anticipating these sudden slammings-shut gives me a sense of urgency. A sense of urgency is very helpful when working to complete a big project. But to enjoy being alive, to relish it, savour it, swim with it, you need to be flexible, you need to let go of the sense of urgency in the moments when urgency would only serve to make you anxious or frustrated.
Because life is full of many many tasks and events and rituals that are long slow dreamy, unrelenting, without obvious beginnings or endings, mundane, repetitive, completely necessary, or completely unnecessary, often lovely — not projects. Not artifacts. Just unmarked rivering moments in the flow of time. If there’s a balance I seek, perhaps it’s between these two states of being: the urgent efficient ambitious project-driven state of creating something new; and the flow of life as it unwinds through its time, through its here and now, and being here, present and without the need to make anything of it.
xo, Carrie
