Is It Really True That It Took Me Two Months To Finish A Fantastic Book That I Love? Yep.

Do you have someone you look up to? That you think of when you make mothering decisions, that you hope to emulate when decorating your house? That you choose the same favorite color as, just because she's adorable when she talks about red?

Hi Sarah! It's nice to be your sister-in-law.

Now first off, I'm surrounded with amazing people, namely each and every one of my sisters and sisters-in-law, my mother and mother-in-law, my cousins, all my friends. I'm blessed like that. No buts about it.

But Sarah somehow crams her day full of all the things I hope to accomplish, and I'm not sure how she does it, and that kind of balance just kind of floors me. I'm not jealous, and I promise I don't feel inadequate, and I'm sure Sarah struggles, too, but I would like to refinish my front room table, read Anna Karenina, raise beautiful (seriously beautiful) children, weed around my hastas, and kiss my doctor husband goodbye as he spends days (and nights)at the hospital, all in the same 24-hour period. Okay, that's an exaggeration. Sometimes it takes her 48 hours.

Sigh.

I'm not there yet.

So I've done a MUCH better job at housekeeping in the past few months than is typical. I'm very proud of myself and I'm pleased at the homey feel it brings to the Howe home life. But I don't read all that much anymore. Maybe when Tyler finishes this program. Maybe.

My cousin-in-law Cheree has a mother who raised something like 12 children. And that kind of mothering required serious cleaning, so much so that in her older life when she wanted to take a vacation and needed a passport, she had no fingerprints to speak of. SHE HAD NO FINGERPRINTS. Scrubbing her children's smudges and marks and smears, wiping the grimy prints off her walls and tables and chairs, she washed off her own, losing her identity, her self in her great sacrifice to her home. Okay that's my more poetic rendering of it, but doesn't a small part of you want to be the fingerprintless woman? To make such a home?

I looked forward to reading An American Childhood at the end of everyday, caught up in the words and images. I loved keeping company with Annie Dillard, nervous that at some point her mother was going to die, or her sister was going to get cancer. And they didn't. She had a beautiful childhood. And she wrote a beautiful memoir. I mentally highlighted several passages, but the following quotation seemed to strike a chord in my 12-year-old heart, my reading-on-Saturday-morning-(or afternoon, or evening)-when-I-should-be-cleaning-my-room heart. (And it made me proud and grown-up that even while 29-year-old me longed to still be reading instead of vacuuming the rug, I was, instead, vacuuming the rug.)

Parents have no idea what the children are up to in their bedrooms [...]. They are reading the same paragraphs over and over, dizzy with gratification as the young lovers find each other in the French fort, as the boy avenges his father, as the sound of muskets in the woods signals the end of the siege. They could not move if the house caught fire. They hate the actual world. The actual world is a kind of tedious plane where dwells, and goes to school, the body, the boring body which houses the eyes to read the books and houses the heart the books enflame. The very boring body seems to require and inordinately big, very boring world to keep it up, a world where you have to spend far too much time, have to do time like a prisoner, always looking for a chance to slip away, to escape back home to books, or escape back home to any concentration--fanciful, mental, or physical--where you can lose your self at last. Although I was hungry all the time, I could not bear to hold still and eat; it was too dull a thing to do, and had no appeal either to courage or to imagination. The blinding sway of their inner lives makes children immoral. They find things good insofar as they are thrilling, inso far as they render them ever more feverish and breathless, ever more limp and senseless on the bed.

On a side note, how on earth do you write like that?



So again, due to my beautiful friend Hana who regularly leaves me books on my doorstep, I've been reading a lot of fantasy. I remember reading Robin McKinley as a child (I'm pretty sure I read The Hero and the Crown (a Newberry winner) and Beauty) and I liked reading this book because it felt straight out of my childhood. You know, juvenile fantasy before Twilight. A little slower, a little less sexual tension.

I liked it.