Mommy Brain

My two month old is screaming. For... no apparent reason. She’s been fed, changed, and when I pick her up, her screaming changes to a “How dare you disturb me!” tone. I’m sure it’s just complaining left over from before I changed her diaper, like people at a restaurant complaining about the bad service as they walk out the door.

The sounds my children make are very distracting. It makes it very hard for me to concentrate on anything else (such as cleaning up a huge mess made by my two year old that will become even bigger if I don’t take care of it immediately) when my children are crying.

This is referred to in certain parenting circles as “Mommy Brain.” I can be sitting deep in thought, pondering the nature of the universe, but one squeak from my child makes my brain go squish.

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Sorry for the delay, I had to administer kisses to a bonked head.

Another symptom of Mommy Brain is the frequent forgetfulness of words or concepts that we know perfectly well and have no reason to forget. It’s a very interesting sensation, standing staring at the kitchen counter for five minutes, thinking of every synonym you can possibly use while your husband stands there looking at you like you’re crazy and finally offering help: “...cucumber?"

My theory for the cause of Mommy Brain is, in one part, parental instinct. It’s part of my wiring to get distracted when my children cry out in need. The other cause for Mommy Brain, in my opinion, is that the vast amount of stuff you have to remember as a parent starts to crowd out the other things in your brain. Like the playground song Ten in the Bed: “There were ten in the bed and the little one said, ‘roll over, roll over,’” so they all rolled over and general knowledge of Science fell out.

Mommy Brain is vexing, but at the same time something that I feel it is very important to have. It’s a metaphor for the entire experience of being a parent.

I’d like to end with something snappy, but I have unfortunately momentarly forgotten how: the baby is fussing again.

Musical Ambivalence

Don’t ask me who (or what) Lady Gaga is, because I do not know. I am not a fan of popular music. I’m also not one of those people who must have the radio on at all times. And this might sound like blasphemy, but I do not own an mp3 player.

It’s not that I don’t like music in general. In the car, I will rock out to whatever Classic Rock station is in the area (around here, it’s 99.5 The Mountain, in Lincoln it’s 92.9 The Eagle). And if I happen to hear a song that I like enough (regardless of age or genre), I will occasionally buy an album. I then proceed to listen to the album over and over and over again, until I get tired of it. I am sure this behavior drives my husband crazy, although he’s never gotten annoyed enough to chuck the computer out the window.

Yes, the computer. I don’t have a stereo, and even when I did, I didn’t quite know what to do with it. I remember the Christmas of 1996 or 1997, when my parents handed me a great big box all wrapped up and asked me to guess what it was. I had no idea, so I took a stab in the dark: “Uh... a CD player!” I can remember the bewildered look that passed between the two of them as I started to rip the package open, though I didn’t understand the significance of it at the time. The reason it was such a wild guess was because I never thought my parents would get one for me. They were kind of expensive at the time, and it wasn’t like I had been begging for one (unlike a lot of the kids my age were at the time); in fact, I didn’t particularly want one. “It is a CD player?!” I exclaimed when the wrapping fell away. I’m pretty sure that machine is still around somewhere, splattered with paint from various home improvement ventures, with its tape deck broken and the CD player on the fritz; the radio probably still works, though.

I am not able to enjoy one of my favorite artists properly because of my disinclination for popular music. Weird Al Yankovic stays up to date with popular music, and because of that, I often hear music for the first time in parodied form. Almost all of his albums have a medley of popular music of the day, sped up and done in polka style. Because of my popular music deficiency, the first time that I listen to many of the songs is in these medlies, so when I hear the originals, they sound strange to me. (There is a movement online that is trying to get the NFL to ask Al to perform at the next Superbowl Halftime Show. If you are like me and think that this would be one of the awesomest ideas ever, please sign the petition.)

Because of my tendency to listen to albums over and over, I associate certain things with certain music. The year I got the CD player, I spent holiday break rereading The Chronicles of Narnia. Since my parents had gotten me a Manheim Steamroller CD to go with the new player, I listened to it while I was reading. Since then, when I walk through a mall during the holiday season, I will inevitably think of a scene from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and if I read The Horse and His Boy, electronic Christmas music comes unbidden into my mind. One summer, my brother and I hung out at my apartment playing Baldur’s Gate on the PS2 that I had stolen from him, listening to the Coldplay album Parachutes. I can’t play that game now without turning on that album; it just doesn’t seem right without it playing in the background.

I’m not particularly bothered by my lack of ipod or pitiful knowledge of who the hottest new musical group is. I don’t mind taking recommendations from friends, and I enjoy going to listen to live music (even the Justin Timberlake concert I was dragged to several years ago). It’s just the way I am: I like what I like when I decide to like it. My musical ambivalence suits me just fine.

Rainy Day Reading

Today it is raining, and the wind is chilly. Normally I would have all (four) of the windows in the house thrown open, but I don’t want any toes getting cold today. So instead, when my daughter realizes that she hasn’t been outside yet and starts to get upset about it, I will distract her in the best way I know how.

We will read books. We will cuddle up on the couch or a bed and read through a huge pile of books. My younger daughter will devote herself to trying her hardest to wiggle out of her socks, and the older one will do what she always does: shove a book at me, saying, “This one, Mommy! This one now,” regardless of where I am in the current book.

My daughter’s bookshelf is a mix of the childhoods of my husband and I. His mother spent time reading him the works of Sandra Boynton (But Not the Hippopotamus, Hippos Go Beserk, etc.), my mother taught my brothers and I to love Maurice Sendak (Chicken Soup with Rice, Where the Wild Things Are, etc.).

We were both exposed to the writings of the good Doctor (Seuss, that is). My mother-in-law likes to tell the story of why she had to memorize One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish: because when he was little, my husband turned the pages too fast for her to finish reading what was on them. Before we had ever seen the book, my brothers and I had our own ideas of what The Lorax looked like, because my aunt, who had prepared it for her high school Speech club, used to tell it to us. I know it so well today that I can start reading along with my husband as he reads it to our daughter, even if I’m across the room. “And deep in the grickle grass, some people say, if you look deep enough, you can still see today: where the Lorax once stood, just as long as it could, before somebody lifted the Lorax away."

Our Seussian library is not complete by any means, but we do have many of the more famous ones: Green Eggs and Ham, The Cat in the Hat, and of course, The Grinch who Stole Christmas. I’ve been looking for the Bartholemew books (The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins and Bartholomew and the Oobleck), but I haven’t been able to find them yet.

The reason that my daughter’s collection of Dr. Seuss’ works will continue to grow is that I love to read them to her. They are so interesting, both because of the stories he dreamed up and because of the words that he uses that I am never bored when I read them to my daughter.

Unfortunately there are a couple of books on her bookshelf that I don’t like to read to her. “Let’s read something else instead,” I say to her when she shoves one of the boring ones at me. My husband is much better about this than I am and will read whatever my daughter hands him. “She wants me to read it to her, so I will,” he tells me when I ask him why he doesn’t choose another book that’s more fun.

There are also a few big, thick, hardcover books on my daughter’s bookshelf. Two are books that my husband had when he was a kid: one full of nursery rhymes, and another collection of Brothers Grimm stories and a few by Hans Christian Andersen (the originals, not the disneyfied versions). Another is The Complete Tales of Beatrix Potter. It may be a brand new book, but the stories inside are ones I know well from when I was a kid. “‘My friends will arrive in a minute, and you are not fit to be seen; I am affronted,’ said Mrs. Tabitha Twitchit."

I would love to go on, remembering the wonderful books which graced my childhood and my husband’s as they are now influencing my daughters’, but I need to stop writing for now. My daughter is calling, “Please read books, Mommy? Please read books?"

There’s nothing I’d love more.

Days of the Week

“It must be Thursday,” said Arthur to himself, sinking low over his beer. “I could never get the hang of Thursdays.” - Douglas Adams; Chapter 2, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

There are times these days when I lose track of the day of the week. I’m not living in a hole with no access to the sun or anything, it’s just that the days that are in the middle of the week tend to blur together, so on Tuesday I’m already thinking about what I want to do on Friday, and I can’t remember whether it’s Wednesday or, wait, was yesterday just Monday?

In college it was easier to keep track of what day it was, because I’d have certain classes on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and different classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I also had a very vigorous work schedule which might see me racing from class on Wednesday to work for two short hours at the local fast food place and then bolt down some food as I zoomed off to my next class, then back to work after a couple of hours of downtime (which were meant to be used for studying but were usually spent reading webcomics) for the rest of the night and into the early hours of the morning.

Thursday has always been my favorite day. It’s close to the end of the week, but not too close, so you can still get a table at a restaurant without having to wait for forty-five minutes. Thursday was also one of the days in college that I had the history of Germany until 1919, which was the one class that semester that I got an A (and the rest were Fs).

These days, I get to hang out with my daughters (and write while they’re napping) all week and wait for the weekend, when we get to enjoy my husband’s company. I never had to experience Sunday Evening Sadness this way before, knowing that tomorrow was Monday and that means back to work. The reason was because I usually worked on Saturday, all day and all night, and so there was just enough time to appreciate Sunday that I didn’t have any time to be sad that tomorrow was Monday. The weekends go by so fast now that the day I really get to rest is usually Monday, when all the weekend craziness is over.

Even though I might lose track of which one is which in the middle of the week, I appreciate every day. Even Mondays, and especially Fridays.

Have a good weekend.

Louisville Lakes

Other towns had swimming pools, but the one we lived in when I was a kid didn’t. Instead we would pile into the car and drive the ten miles to Louisville. I’m not sure whether Louisville had a city pool, but what it does have is “Louisville State Recreation Area,” known to the locals as Louisville Lakes.

All that you need to get in is a park entry permit, either a day pass (which today will cost you five dollars) or an annual pass (at $26). These will get you into any state park or recreation area in Nebraska. After the pass is obtained, it goes in the bottom corner the windshield on the passenger’s side. The day passes can be peeled off easily, but an annual pass will stay on a car’s windshield until the ending of the world. Many of my father’s vehicles had the added character of three or four passes lined up in a row, still on the windshield from previous years.

There isn’t anything glitzy about Louisville Lakes. In fact, I know some people in the area who would rather take their kids to one of the nearby State Parks and pay extra to use the fancy pool there. While there is a pretty sweet waterslide at Mahoney State Park, I still prefer Louisville Lakes. There is only one beach there that allows swimmers, so every time we went it would be packed with people.

My mother hates the water for what I am sure is an irrational reason, but my brothers and I would frolic into the water with my father, going back and forth from deep to shallow, tossing a ball around, playing “alligator,” or taking turns to be tossed into the air by my father. Those were some awesome times, and now that my brothers and I are older, we like to go to the Lakes as a family for a swim and a picnic, usually around Father’s Day.

Today, I can glance out my front door at the swimming pool at our apartment complex, knowing that anytime I want to I can toss on my suit and go play in the water or sit in the hot tub. My two year old daughter gets very excited when we get ready to go swim, and squeals and giggles when we splash together in the pool.

The pool is practically outside our front door. It definitely doesn’t have the drawback of having to sit on a wet towel in the car on the way home while trying to flick sand off of your toes. It also doesn’t have the same excitement and anticipation, jumping into your swimsuit and grabbing a towel, rushing down to the car to bounce up and down in the seat, urging Mom to hurry up.

And anyway, pools are expensive and a pain to maintain. If I had a choice, I’d rather go to Louisville Lakes.

Some Non-fiction About Fiction

One of my favorite things to do as a teenager was write stories. They were not adventures and not science fiction. Instead they would probably be categorized as “youth literature, romance.” Not that I would ever try to get any of them published.

Looking back, they were pretty silly. All of them were about the main character, a girl similar to myself but in slightly different circumstances. Tori was a middle child with two sisters, all daughters of a single mom. Dawn one of a set of quadruplets, but the only girl; their family was well off and her parents didn’t mind that her friends came over every day, no matter how many of them there were. Catrina was an only child whose mother had died when she was younger and whose father was the most important man in the small town where they lived.

Each of those three stories had a different fate. I actually finished Tori’s story, in which she reformed the ‘date em and dump em’ guy at her school by refusing to be his girlfriend until he realized what a jerk he was. I had Dawn’s story planned out from beginning to end, but I lost the plot when I was almost halfway through, and my attention wandered off. I never finished Catrina’s story, and never knew really how I wanted it to turn out. The last time I worked on it, the hero to her heroine was about to leave town; with that ominous happening, things would probably not have ended well.

Somewhere between Tori and Catrina I had become a writer who allowed her characters to determine the plot. The best example of this was Kasey’s story, which began with her excitement in introducing her best friend Seth to the rest of her good friends at school. My plan was to have all of her friends point out what a good boyfriend Seth would make and to have her deny it vehemently until finally giving in. Instead, her friend Jaden hijacked the plot and decided that he would be a better boyfriend for Kasey. He made such a convincing argument that even I couldn’t stop him.

Something that is a part of every high school writing class is the introduction of free writing. Free writing is when a writer puts pencil to page (or fingers to keys) and just lets words flow out, whether they’re coherent or not. My high school English teacher would announce that we were going to free write for a certain amount of time, and I would frown. I didn’t see how free writing was productive, since pretty much everyone started with something like, “This is stupid.” Not only that, but the teacher was going to look at what we’d written, and I didn’t want to annoy her with my true feelings about free writing.

I would stare at the page for the first three or four minutes, and then, concerned that the teacher would notice that I wasn’t doing anything, I would start writing dialogue. It was usually just a conversation between two people. I didn’t know who they were, but that became clearer as they spoke to one another. Sometimes it was two friends discussing relationship gossip. Occasionally it would be siblings talking about what they would do after school. I didn’t often continue with these scenes beyond free writing time, but they were interesting to think about. They got me through the ten or so minutes of mandatory free writing, and usually made me wish the free writing time would go longer to allow me to meet my characters.

One of the things my friends and I enjoyed doing was to write together. We did all of the normal things high school girls did: talk on the phone, write notes to each other in class (though I suppose now high schoolers text each other), and gossip about boys. Another thing we enjoyed, though, was playing writing games.

During study hall, hanging out after school, or in the downtime between playing in pep band at basketball games, my friends and I would pass a notebook around. We would take turns advancing the story, writing a sentence apiece. Sometimes we would play the “and” game (write until you get to the word ‘and,’ then pass the notebook on), and other times the challenge was in beginning the sentence with the same letter with which the last person had ended their sentence. Bored basketball spectators could look across the gym to see us sitting on the stage, cackling crazily at something one of us had written, or rolling on the floor giggling at one another.

I once used one of these games to complete a very late assignment for an English class. I was bored and didn’t want to write it, but the following day was the last I had to turn it in or I would recieve a zero. My mother suggested that I use one of the writing games I was so fond of, and a couple of hours later I was finished.

Every sentence (except those during dialogue) began with the letter that the last one had ended with. To accomplish this, every character’s name ended with a vowel and started with an often-used consonant. Despite these restraints, I had tons of fun writing it, and there was no awkwardness in it; it still reads like a normal story: the characters walk in the rain and dark from their broken down car to an aunt’s house, where they meet some new friends. There’s even a bit with a musical number. I’d have to dig around in some boxes, but I’m pretty sure I still have a copy of it somewhere.

In addition to the amount of pages exceeding those that were assigned, my teacher was impressed with the story. She gave me an A, then apologized for having to downgrade it to a D+. “If only you’d turned it in on time,” she told me sadly.

One semester during my sophomore year of college (the word “year” being the only one that fits, in reality it was more like three or four years) I took an English class which focused on the writing of memoirs. We read them; we wrote them. Before that class I would not have thought I could enjoy writing non-fiction since my first love was fiction. Now, non-fiction is all I do.

I’m kind of afraid to try fiction again. I don’t want to fall back into the silly stories I wrote when I was a teenager, and I’m not confident that if I do write something that anyone will like it.

Maybe someday I’ll try again. But for now, I like to write what I like to write; though I’ll never forget my silly teenage days, or the characters I brought to life.

Keep Calm and Carry On

A couple of weeks ago I was riding my mother’s bicycle alongside my father as he ran down Capitol Parkway. On the way I told him about my blog project, my plans to update every day and to write everyday. I said to him, “It doesn’t matter what I write as long as I’m writing. And nobody has to be satisfied with it but me."

While that was true, I forget all about it on a daily basis. Not that I forget about writing; I forget that I’m the only one who has to be happy with what I write. I sit around and fret for half the day about what I’m going to post on my blog. Occasionally I can chill out enough to get a really good idea for a piece, but often I distract myself by going off in a direction I didn’t mean to and find it hard to get back to where I was headed. In those instances I usually abandon the project, meaning to come back to it later.

On days when I’m really desperate for something to post, I open each one of the files I had ditched earlier, thinking I will finish them or at least write a bit more or stare at them awhile, trying to inspire myself. Sometimes that works. Sometimes all I’m missing on a half finished project is a snappy ending.

Right now I’ve got about ten projects just sitting in my folder, waiting for attention. Some of these meandered away from me. Some of them need more research. And some of them I started so long ago that the inspiration I originally had while writing them has atrophied. Some of them are too personal to ever post on my blog, but I might share them with family members; others are too personal even for that.

There are days when I’ve looked at the clock and thought, “maybe I won’t update my blog today,” and then sat down to write something and turned out 3 pieces all at the same time.

My biggest problem is forgetting that the only one who has to be happy with my writing is me. The reason I forget it all the time is because I’m posting it up on the internet for anyone who wanders by to see. And I don’t want anyone to think I’m not good at it.

I feel like if I don’t post something every day that it will be that much easier for me not to post something the next time I’m not in the mood to, and that eventually I will just quit altogether. Keeping the blog updated keeps me motivated to keep writing. If I didn’t have the urgency of needing to post something, I wouldn’t have any motivation to write. Before I started the blog, I would get a good idea and consider maybe posting it as a status on Facebook or texting it to someone, like my husband or my mom, but I wouldn’t sit down and type it out, and the idea would be lost forever.

On days when I finish early, I feel so much freedom. It doesn’t matter if I’m putting up something I wrote six years ago or that day; I don’t have to sit around all day thinking, “What am I going to post? What am I going to post? It’s so late! I wish I had something to post!"

In my fervor to turn out something readable for the blog, I forget the feeling I get when I’m perched on the couch, balancing the laptop on my knees and giggling to myself as I write, pausing to tab over to an instant messenger program to send my husband a note: “Thank you for inspiring me to do this. I love it."

I just need to chill out and write. And the only person who needs to be satisfied with it is me.