writing about cooking, parenting, reading, writing...
Read more at Literary Mama!The girl is entranced by books. One of the first places we see her is in a bookshop, where she slides a ladder around to find and borrow a book she can't afford to buy, a book she wants to reread. The astonished proprietor ("but you've read it twice!") gives her the book and she leaves, rereading the book as she walks, singing happily.
"Oh, isn't this amazing/It's my favorite part, because, you see/Here's where she meets Prince Charming/But she won't discover that it's him, 'til Chapter Three!" She sits by a fountain and settles in to enjoy the book, sheep crowding her at every side, water falling behind her.
I'd never seen myself in a cartoon character before, but watching Belle on the big screen transported me back almost twenty years, to a summer of rereading. Staying at my grandparents' house in Connecticut, we had only the books left behind by my mother and her sisters. Like the movie's Belle, I carried my books outside. Grandpop had planted a Christmas tree grove and the trees formed lanes and little rooms, circles carpeted with pine needles and hidden by thick branches. I would carry a book into the cool shade of one of these pine chambers and read, inhaling the musty fragrance of old books along with the sap-infused air of the grove. Disney's Belle brought that former self back to me, reminded me of who I'd been and who I hoped my daughter might become: an outside reader: taking books outdoors and unmooring their stories.
Labels: children's books, literary mama, reading
Labels: fearless friday, mothering, mothertalk, reading, writing
Labels: cooking
A bad day can always be redeemed with biscuits, although who's going to make themselves biscuits at the end of a rough day? Until I learn the biscuit recipe that involves melted butter and no rolling pin (Libby?), not me.Labels: cooking
The first time I was pregnant and poring over name books, I quickly realized that naming a child is the one decision a couple makes that allows no room for compromise. If your favorite name happens to be the same as your partner's 3rd grade playground nemesis, that's it; you have to find another option. An old Saturday Night Live skit shows a couple arguing so fiercely about naming their baby -- each of them turning the other's suggestion into a playground taunt -- that they wind up divorcing.
The second time around, we had to at least pretend to consider our son Ben's suggestions, like "Telephone" and "Benna." Eventually we agreed on two girl's names and crossed our fingers that these would be enough. But I packed the name books in my hospital bag, just in case. In the pictures of us in the hospital after our second son's birth, a whiteboard listing various possibilities is visible in the background: Daniel; Josiah; Leo; Elijah. We left the hospital with our red-haired beauty still unnamed, and the hospital staff distressed. "What's really the problem with filing this paperwork later?" I asked. "Well," someone finally admitted, "If the baby doesn't have a name, it makes it harder for us to bill you."
Well then, I thought, I'll be rushing right back.
It took us three days to settle on Elijah, three days during which our friends and family -- all of whom had seen that whiteboard -- kindly kept their opinions to themselves.
This all came back to me when I went to see The Namesake (Mira Nair, 2006) with a friend who is expecting the birth of her second daughter any day. She and her husband haven't yet settled on a name (although their four year old lobbies hard for her choice by making elaborate drawings of the letter C) and as we waited for the lights to dim I thought of how often lately she and I have sat through to the very end of a film, reading the credits carefully in search of potential names.
Labels: family life, literary mama, mama at the movies
1. If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think,
2. Link to this post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme,
3. Optional: Proudly display the 'Thinking Blogger Award' with a link to the post that you wrote (here is an alternative silver version if gold doesn't fit your blog).
I keep experimenting with recipes that use whole lemons (peel, pith and all) and having made this twice now (once for my parents, once for my sister and her family, so both times for excellent baking critics!) I think this Meyer Lemon Cake is a winner. You boil the lemons (regular ones or the milder Meyer variety) for thirty minutes or so and then seed and puree them so that you don't have any big chunks of peel, just lots of intense lemon flavor in a moist cake which uses ground almonds in place of most of the flour.Labels: cooking
The Easter Bunny brings books to our house along with chocolate, and this year I got a sweet Margaret Wise Brown story, , for Eli and then finally remembered to get one of my childhood favorites for Ben, .Labels: family life, holidays, reading
I'm delighted to be hosting another MotherTalk at my home on April 22nd, this time with bestselling British writer Santa Montefiore, author of The Gypsy Madonna.Elegant Anouk, a dealer in American antiques, dies leaving the Metropolitan museum an uncatalogued, multi-million dollar painting by Titian. Her son, Mischa, never even knew she owned it. This mystery sends him on the trail of his own history, back to that French village of his childhood. He expects to uncover the origins of the Gypsy Madonna; he never expects to find himself.
Labels: reading
This month's Literary Reflections essay first came to me as a submission for the book I'm co-editing, Mama, Ph.D. I was torn when I read the essay: the writing knocked me out, but it didn't particularly address the writer's academic career. Happily, Julia co-wrote another essay for the book, and I got to use this for Literary Reflections. Here's a long blurb:
When people asked me when I planned to get pregnant, I used to say, "After my first book." I’d chosen to put my energies elsewhere, and I figured publication was such a long shot that I’d have plenty of time to live and write in peace. When a book came and a few people remembered that promise, I had to think fast. "After a second book," I replied, ridiculous. I know Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote at the kitchen table after her children were tucked in bed, and I imagine that people learn much about life as their children grow. Somehow, though, I still carry the old notion that negotiation is impossible, that a woman must be completely given over to one or another kind of work, and that if her attention ever wavers, terrible things happen.
This message comes from as far back as my first memory, which is little more than a few frozen images. I’m three years old, out behind a farmhouse in Turbotville, Pennsylvania, under a fir tree. The boughs are so thick that the grass is stunted, and long cones like corn cobs clutter the ground. Wandering between them, I see my oxblood, buckle shoes with little cut-out daisies on the toes. I don’t know what I’m doing out here after supper; my dad and older brother are elsewhere; Mom is at work. As I wander toward the place where the lawn drops down a steep bank to the road, I see fields and the next farm’s corn crib on the other side. Something over there rustles the tall grass: Sally Ann, my cat, stalking a field mouse? Suddenly she darts down the bank and, without looking, without thinking, I dash toward her.
Then I see the rounded front of a 1950s sedan, hear a loud screech, and see sky, although I cannot say in what order. Mostly I recall the sky and one red shoe flying against it for a long, long breath.
My eyes open. Stretched out on the grass beneath the branches, I see my father’s face, feel him touch my cheek, my shoulder, "Jules, Jules..." He is more distressed than I have ever seen him. Is he angry with me for crossing the road alone or for losing my shoe? Another strange man stands nearby; later I will learn that he is rushing to the hospital, where his wife is giving birth. The man and my father say "Geisinger" and "ambulance," but I know I am fine. At the emergency room, I obey the white-coated men who ask me to follow their fingers with my eyes, and I hold still while they take X-rays, but all the while I know it is pointless. I can’t understand why the adults keep saying I am such a brave girl. What this first memory means, I now believe, is that even though enormous things may hit me sometimes, I’ll be OK in the end, and mercifully I’ve always known this in some small, strange way.
But when my mother tells this story, she starts by saying, "The first night I went back to nursing..." For her, it is a story about neglect and what happens when a mother isn’t there to watch her children.
Read the rest of "Fine: On Maternity and Mortality" here at Literary Mama.
Labels: literary mama, reading, writing
I'm the editor-in-chief of Literary Mama, a site I've been involved with since 2004; I write a monthly column for Literary Mama called Mama at the Movies (http://www.literarymama.com/columns/mamaatthemovies/). I'm also the coeditor of Mama, PhD: Women Write about Motherhood and Academic Life (Rutgers University Press, 2008). Visit the book's website at http://www.mamaphd.com
