Summer book list 2022
A conversation with my mom the other day, in a frenzy where I was leaving my family for a remote corner of the world where no one would find me: “…and I have like 20 books I’m reading but I don’t remember which one’s I’ve started or where I’m at with any of them!”
“I’m the wrong person for this problem, I never know what book I’m reading!”
I’m a firm believer that the books on your shelf will tell me where you’re at in your life. One time we were staying at an aunt and uncle’s house who had recently uprooted their lives as empty nesters and had just moved into a new town. We were visiting, and the uncle I’ve always admired had his bookshelf near the basement guest room we were staying at. I snuck a peek at his current titles and it only made me admire him more.
A person’s bookshelf is nonverbal communication into the inner workings of their psyche. There, I said it! It is that deep & soulful. Let me offer you my inner psyche, ahem - summer bookshelf - for perusal:
Summer Book List
The Little Paris Bookshop – Nina George
Gift From the Sea – Anne Morrow Lindburgh (on repeat each summer)
Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest – Suzanne Simard
Summer of ‘69 – Elin Hilderbrand (free little library near the park my daughter plays)
The Idle Parent: Why Laidback Parents Raise Happier & Healthier Kids – Tom Hodgkinson
Maiden to Mother: Unlocking our Archetypal Journey into the Mature Feminine – Sarah Durham Wilson
The Heroine’s Journey – Maureen Murdock
Women of the Bible: 25 Enduring Stories – Special LIFE Edition
If Women Rose Rooted – Susan Blackie
The Sand County Almanac – Aldo Leopold (free little library again, I must start giving books back!)
The Quilters, Women & Domestic Art – Patricia J. Cooper
Sunflowers, A Novel of Vincent Van Gogh – Sheramy Bundrick
Ya-Yas in Bloom – Rebecca Wells
Mama + Mini Book list (Toddler, 2yrs+)
We have graduated to library days where River is willing to go for the toys, and the toys only. When I encourage her to just pick out one book before going back to play, she has consistently grabbed titles to do with pooping, underwear, and any other excrement kids have coming out of their bodies before she returns to lego-building, rocking fake babies to sleep, and staring at older children. I like her style. Here’s what I choose for her to have my needs met at bedtime:
I Sang You Down From the Stars – Tasha Spillett-Sumner & Michaela Goade
Julían is a Mermaid – Jessica Love
Powwow Day – Traci Sorell & Madelyn Goodnight
Max and The Tag-a-Long Moon (she genuinely likes this one, gifted by Bebe) – Floyd Cooper
Babies in the Forest (board book) – Ginger Swift
No More Pacifier for Piggy! – Bernette G. Ford
Tallulah: Mermaid of the Great Lakes – Denise Brennan-Nelson & Susan Kathleen Hartung
A Rare Family
I was out the door with my copy of The Artist’s Way in the passenger seat before I noticed grabbing it.
It was a sleepless night; partly because of the wine, mostly because the little one was wide awake from witching hour until the dawn bird’s first song. I woke up dreadful. Unfulfilled, angry, resentful. It’s the booze, the baby, most definitely the sleeping husband just laying there. Luckily the first chapter kicked in quicker than caffeine and forced me to find the core fault.
“Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent.”
I’m fatigued with each foot dipped in separate pools. It’s like I have 10 feet! and they’re all tripping over each other. One hour I’m submerged in my career, the next I’m negotiating crackers with a toddler to get in the fuckin’ car sweetheart. Negotiating isn’t my strong suit. Toddlers are like dogs, they sense your insecurities and they pounce. My daughter eats a lot of crackers, is what I’m saying.
I may be the matriarch of this schedule for my daughter but don’t assume I like it every day. The years go fast so hold on to every moment they say as if that will stop my tears on random Sundays as her independence grows. That does not help the constant push-pull heartbreak-happiness that your child is healthy & growing…away from you if you’re doing it right. Big eye roll to the stereotypical Mom advice that isn’t advice but a passive-aggressive veil to not talk about the dichotomies we’re so clearly living in. Let’s skirt by the loud disruptive screaming in the room that some of these early days just aren’t fulfilling. Some of these days feel like you’re trying to get that spring-loaded wiggle worm back in the can and sit still for a second. It doesn’t mean you’re an ungrateful Mother to admit that. Your child still feels loved by you and wants to “hold you Mama” when the last dusk bird coos her babies to nest at night.
My mom is my biggest mother example. She didn’t have the life of an unlived parent while raising and childrearing. Not that that hasn’t brought challenging conversations with her now that I’m an adult trying to raise a child, but thank goddess she showed me a Mother deserves a life of her own in addition to being a Mother and she needn’t grovel for it at every turn. The child will have to fall in line with that to some degree as a result. This is an unpopular opinion, I’m sure. It’s insinuated in multitudes that Mother is the ultimate goal instead of a welcomed layer bestowed upon the already multi-faceted woman. When I wondered if we couldn’t have children, Mother was the ultimate goal so I appreciate and understand that season. I was that season and could be again, this is not either-or. I guess I’m just trying to navigate this mother layer in tandem with the artist layer I’m just not willing to give up and I can’t pause any longer. I’m of the belief this will benefit my daughter when she stops bugging me about the crackers.
“A rare family, faced with the myth of the starving artist, tells its children to go right ahead and try for a career in the arts. Instead, if encouraged at all, the children are urged into thinking of the arts as hobbies, creative fluff around the edges of real life.”
I’m grateful I’m part of this rare family Cameron explains. The blank stares and polite changes of the subject have reinforced this in many conversations throughout my life so far. Like the ugly duckling who doesn’t know they’re beautiful because they’re hanging out with a different bird species. Now that I’m a Mother, I know this wasn’t a family default I was born into.
It was my Mother.
She crafted it. She fought like hell for it. Together with my Dad, they made our family’s environment a breeding ground for dreaming and acting upon it throughout their many lived lives as our parents. I was the child who got to witness worlds before I ever left the nest.
Keep those feet in all those different pools. Your child’s inner artist may look back on their rare family with gratitude someday. After the therapy sessions, of course.
Touch
What do you spend your days touching?
My child’s hand.
Whole vegetables, chopped and steamed.
The pen. The paper. The favored candle in amber glass.
Skin. His. Mine.
I smile at the irony.
All this time seeking in my mind what my body spends the entirety of her day holding.
There is nothing more to do.
A Mother's Embrace
Is writing really a bad idea?
I guess it is a bad idea the same way having kids is a bad idea. Your heart will break and there will be tears and you are so tired all the time. And yet. There is also bliss. Unimaginable joy. Euphoria.
There is LIFE in all its twisted glory.
Keep on writing…—but not for success. Write to tell us your truth.
— Kati Helsinki, in a letter to Steven Pressfield
My truth — the last two-ish years I’ve been enthralled in birthing, and subsequently raising, our child. I have been roaming another world completely. I’m softly returning from a landscape of labor, trauma, pain, mysticism, magic in the mundane, anxiety, overwhelm, the deepest love, a daughter who holds the key. I faced death and therefore life. Deep tearing throbs still, breast as nourishment, wild desire, fevers, chills, a range of excrements that leave the body from clear to opaque, milky to bloody. I’m unsure if I’ve fully returned from the underworld or if the work of transformation is still happening. Maybe it always will be from here on out. From maiden to mother.
It’s all a mess and it’s the deepest being alive I’ve ever known.
The message sent to me is that these stories are for the privacy of a medical room. They are not for meal-time monologues, coffee chats, and surely not for women or men who are not parents.
It’s been my experience that the medical room is too bright, sterile, masked, and devoid of the warmth and rawness this trip through transformation requires. Not all of the doctors and nurses are to blame, they are overworked and underslept in this season of pandemic but the patient has to deal with the fallout somehow. This story needs holding. It can not be thrown into the receptacle next to used N95s and forgotten rubber gloves.
This story needs a Mother’s embrace.
The best vessels
There is less time to obsess away these days, with a little one in tow. You would think this would make writing easier but it has paralyzed me instead. I’ve come closer to understanding why with Brian Eno’s take on surrender and control, via Austin Kleon:
“We’ve tended to think of the surrender end as a luxury, a nice thing you add to your life when you’ve done the serious work of getting a job, getting your pension sorted out. I’m saying that’s all wrong.
”I don’t know if you’ve ever read much about the history of shipbuilding?” Not a word. “Old wooden ships had to be constantly caulked up because they leaked. When technology improved, and they could make stiffer ships because of a different way of holding boards together, they broke up. So they went back to making ships that didn’t fit together properly, ships that had flexion. The best vessels surrendered: they allowed themselves to be moved by the circumstances.
“Control and surrender have to be kept in balance. That’s what surfers do – take control of the situation, then be carried, then take control. In the last few thousand years, we’ve become incredibly adept technically. We’ve treasured the controlling part of ourselves and neglected the surrendering part.””
The best vessels surrendered. They let themselves be moved by the circumstances. I am in a season of surrender and it is uncomfortable. We are taught control will bring us what we seek because we will have chased after it and wrestled it to the ground. There is a tempting veil of certainty in this approach to everything from selecting the next job to following the Google map to your next destination. We can make whatever we want surrender to us. This is only one side to the story. And I’m on the other side; surrender.
So many moments up to this point in my life have been about controlling the outcome. I’m very good at control, most people are when they’re telling everyone else what to do. Now I’m in a season of surrender without any tools or guidance. Surrender doesn’t come equipped with tools or guidance. Are there any companies, sports teams, armed forces being taught how to lose properly? The definition of surrender suggests it is negative and you do not want to be the one surrendering. It is described as being a victim, a weakness, losing to an opponent or an authority figure.
While these are all true instances of surrender, I am focusing on the surrender of my internal, personal life. My direct experience of the last couple of years as of late where my body was at the mercy of pregnancy, my career at the mercy of the white man’s bottom line, and our world at the mercy of an unknown pandemic.
It’s the first time I’ve had to truly acknowledge the hard truth that many women have learned earlier than me; I am less than in the eyes of society because of my gender. That’s a lot to unpack, a lifetime’s worth. What I’m getting at, in Enos’ metaphor of the surfer, is there is a time for control, a time for surrender to the elements, and a time for control again, and the cycle goes on. I am not in the control part, I am learning how to surrender to the elements, and I must admit — I kinda like it.
Like a well-flexing vessel, I need to find the function of being intentionally bent so that I don’t sink.