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Family Of Five

• Sold: Toyota Sienna XLE AWD

  24Apr
  Categories: Me, Moving, My Daily Struggle Comments: 0

  
  Perhaps we sold our minivan today.

  I’m trying to be happy about it. It’s good that it’s selling. Better than trying to move overseas and getting stuck making payments on a car we’re not using, right? But I love it. I don’t want someone else driving their kids around in it, I bought it for us.

  First, I know there are many reasons lots of you hate minivans and therefore are prepared to have no sympathy whatsoever for me. I’ll grant they are big, sometimes gas-guzzling, no-style having, sellout mom-mobiles–but my minivan is so comfortable, so easy, such a motherfucking pleasure to drive that I don’t care what anybody thinks. The doors on my minivan open at the touch of a button, and if you’ve ever tried to corral a pre-schooler in a parking lot while balancing a baby on your hip and loading groceries in the trunk, you can begin to understand the value of this feature. My minivan has a DVD player in the back, with headphones, so that when we drive to Tahoe, or Yosemite, or L.A., I can listen to raunchy hip-hop while the kids sing along to Laurie Berkner. My minivan even has four-wheel drive, which means we can take it to the mountains in winter. To put it simply, I love my minivan.

  This downsizing process has surprised me. I had no idea I was so materialistic. I could try to defend myself by saying that my feelings about my things are caught up in my feelings about my family. I love the van because my kids love it, because it’s easy to haul all three of them around in it, and because it allows us to drive long distances in comfort. I love my house because it’s spacious and bright, and whether my kids are splashing in our pool, flipping over the back of the couch or fighting at the kitchen table I’m imagining us in a dingy London apartment in a couple of months and I’m thinking, “What am I doing to them?”

  Tags: Anxiety, bitching & moaning, Moving

• Art

  20Apr
  Categories: photography is amazing Comments: 0

  Feeling alright today. Wishing I’d take some pictures again already. I miss my camera, and yet it sits right here on my desk, within easy reach. It’s as if I don’t want to pick it up and use it—don’t want to get lost in the camera vortex, which is prone to sucking me in and keeping me under for hours at a time. I didn’t realize how photography was so much like writing until I started trying to take artistic pictures. I thought photography might scratch my artistic itches in a less time-consuming way, but I am learning that artistry in any form takes time. It takes time, and concentration, and practice.

  Even though snapping a photograph takes only a fraction of a second, really good photographs take years to learn how to see, and getting every little thing right in an instant: framing, perspective, depth of field, exposure—takes focus, practice, luck.

  Like writing, photography is surprising because what I imagine in my mind’s eye is rarely what I actually capture in the camera. Sometimes it’s better than what I’d hoped for, sometimes not. Almost always, though, it’s different. It’s the same with writing; I imagine a story in my mind—it has a particular texture, a narrative thrust, particular characters I want to work with. It has an amorphous shape, maybe, as a story about something I’m interested in. But then in the writing of it I often veer fairly far from my projected course. The possible storylines are just too limitless, and each potential path branches off into so many interesting others, that each choice I make seems more arbitrary than the last. And so I follow it to whatever end I find, and when it’s done, it’s its own gemstone, its own object, and it is never precisely what I planned when I first sat down to write it.

  So, anyway, I miss my camera, that’s sitting right here.

  Tags: Anxiety, little mysteries

• waiting for my house to sell

  19Apr
  Categories: Family life, Motherhood, Moving, My Daily Struggle Comments: 0

  Sitting here surfing while the baby sleeps, dreaming, always dreaming, of the next thing. I should be working while she sleeps. There is so much to do, and never enough time or energy to do it. My Friday babysitter just called to tell me she can’t make it tomorrow, and she’s going home for the weekend. It’s hard, because I need the help. I just get more done when I have it, but I feel a fair amount of guilt at not being able to manage alone. Like I’m spoiled. Like I should get more done. Always, like I should get more done.

  Our house has been on the market for about 3 weeks. We had one offer fall through, but I’m not sure the buyers were ever serious in the first place. Turns out they have a reputation around the neighborhood for making offers and walking away. I felt jerked around in the end. Other houses in my neighborhood have sold, and quickly. I have faith that the right thing will happen; it just takes a little time. It’s hard managing my messy boisterous household though, trying to keep the house ready to show at a moment’s notice.

  Doing lots of yoga the last 2 weeks. It helps manage my mental state, which is somewhat fragile. The financial aspect of this move is tough enough, but there is so much emotional impact as well. Tim and Natalie are pregnant, with twins. We won’t be nearby to share in that while their babies are small. I am taking my children from this beautiful house, where we swim and snuggle and laugh together, and spiriting them across the sea, far from everyone and everything they know. I maintain my belief that ultimately this move will be good for all of us. But it is hard, hard, anyway.

  Tags: Anxiety, Moving