How I Balance Books and Babies

 

  

While I pored over the second galley proof of the literary magazine I edit with one of my nearest and dearest colleague-friends and a too-strong cup of caramel coffee, I received the following text from my husband: “Evangeline just took her first step!” He and our three kids had been at Grammy’s house for the afternoon while I slipped away during naptime to take care of some emergency editing (there is actually such a thing, and it, as you might guess, falls squarely and surely under the heading of “first world problems”).

I’d just gotten settled into an empty house by clearing the dining room table, adorned with half a bouquet of flowers I’d stolen from my mother-in-law after she’d performed a flirty flapper’s rendition of “Button Up Your Overcoat” at a continuing education showcase program and asked me to put them in water for a while since I’d be going straight home.

I’d even prepared my apology in advance for the rest of the house. It’s briefer than ever these days: “You’ll have to forgive the house with the exception of this dining room table. I’m not gifted in housekeeping.” I sometimes work in the word “knack.” I find it charming and use it in hopes that it distracts from the dust. The idea that people dust and vacuum weekly really is so foreign to me. I applaud those of you who do it, and I’ll work the word aplomb into my language massage if it makes you forgive me for the dirt and dog-hair tumbleweeds lining the hallway in the meantime.

E apologizes sometimes. This is her right after she ripped a page from one of my books. Is it just me, or do her eyebrows slightly raise as if to say, “You know I’m only eight months old, right? You didn’t think I was just going to turn the page like an Oxford grad, did you?” She has a gift for the “shame on you” look. If she chooses motherhood someday, she’ll be brilliant at it. I could learn so much from this little (n.).

And this little, this eight-month, nearly nine-month wonder, walks as if it’s a brief wish in a line of longer, loftier ones. My son was dragging his legs military-crawl-style with two eager and determined elbows for months before pulling up. This is him.*

            He didn’t walk until he was fourteen months old, so the text was not only telling me our daughter had walked her first steps but also that she was some kind of superhero. The papers should have been notified that moment, actually. I’m not sure what I’m doing just putting it on a blog. This is actual news. Someone with a camera not in their phone should have been on call to photograph it.

            My colleague’s response, when I read the text, was one of regret, like “Oh, you missed it!”

I shrugged it off, “Oh, she’s the third. And she’ll never know.” We both agreed the story should go that I was there, and it was amazing. No one needed to know anything but that.

But the more the missed first step settles in, the more my heart goes in two directions. Half of me says that she should get ready for me to miss many more things. It’s just not possible for me to be two places at once, and I’m needed so many places at once sometimes. The other half of me remembers winning a spelling bee, among many events, my dad could not attend because of work, and knew that because it even came to mind, it mattered much more than I wanted it to.

My son calls me out on it often. He is nearly three, and he is incredibly bright. That fourteen-month-walking jig was up really quick when we realized that was his giving us a head start because he hasn’t stopped since. His brain doesn’t stop. Like my oldest, he is intuitively wise. He knows that the front yard is no place for a laptop when the weather is good, and we’ve got a bucket of sidewalk chalk calling our names.  

           

I thought I was killing it as Mom last week. Papers had to be graded; kids had to be raised. One beach chair on the front walk later, and boom—WorkingMamaPalooza. Lies. All lies. He walks up, presses a few keys, closes the laptop, and says, “No laptop, Mommy. You done.” Smart kid.

I have enough Working Mother’s Guilt for all of us, and I’m done being distracted with questions of semantics, like why there isn’t anything like Working Father’s Guilt, or speculating about the answers some churchly friends would say in response to my bringing up Working Father’s Guilt—questions I get all the time anyway, like “Are you still working?” and “Are you a liberal?”

            Guilty or not, I’ll say I feel being caught in the gap between books and babies some days. I am fully present and all in with whatever’s in front of me, but some days, it’s a revolving door.  In the past three weeks, we’ve had five sinus infections, an allergic reaction to medication, four trips to the pediatrician, three trips to the pharmacy, two days of missed work, a couple hundred dollars bet on recouping, and a thousand loads of laundry. Seriously, it probably would have been easier to just move or buy new children. But, we’re very nearly well, so things are looking up. This was E before she broke out in hives. The calm before the storm really only means a storm is coming. It’s nothing to relax or take a cocky selfie about. Yet, here we are.

          

            Sickness is a monkey wrench thrown into the Swiss clock of our household constitution. We cannot be sick. The whole thing goes to hell.

            I’ve been consumed lately with the notion of “breathing room,” or “adding margin to my life,” but the trouble is I’ve been living with time credit cards, and the debt piles up until we get sick, and it’s a feeling very similar to playing Level 10 in Tetris on no sleep while someone is kicking you in the face. I’ve been so consumed with these notions that my study of breathing room, margin, and recreational reading have begun eating into that margin that would have been there, so I’m maxed out again.

            When someone shakes a pity noggin or points a finger of shame in my direction, I want to tell them that it could be worse. I could be doing drugs. But honestly, I’d never waste money or time on drugs while hummus and Downton Abbey still exist, and they’d call my bluff. Everyone knows what I’m about: Jonathan and Jesus. Anything else is window dressing.

Still, how do I do it? I’ve never known how to explain it before, that sense that I’m busy but managing just fine, that I’m tired but not broken, that I’ll keep doing what I’m doing because I’m called to be here and there, that heavy hope that this is okay and we are fine, but the words came today, as they always do.

I focus on the honey, not the hive.

*(It should be he, not him, because it’s a subject complement, but honestly, who’s doing that these days. If I would have put in he, half of you would have thought I were wrong and roughly the other half would have thought I were pompous. It would be only that sweet spot of 1% that championed me and my whole grammar fight, and with my slack-jawed and mostly intentional word mangling [I call them letter butterflies sometimes], I doubt you all read these things. Thanks to those who hang in there despite me.)

Education and the Cost of Being Weird

             So the word on the street is that the Prices are a little weird. Perhaps folks have always thought that about us—certainly, they’ve always thought it about me, and they should; I am a little weird. But when they started saying it about my family, I wasn’t quite sure how to feel.

            I field a lot of questions from people about how I get my daughter to read as much as she does. She can inhale novels like my mother can inhale a box of hot Krispy Kreme donuts; both occur as if by magic, my Daina nearly wiping sloughed words like dry glaze from her lips when each jacketed cover closes.

            I answer the questions that come although I’m not sure I should be credited as the reason. She was born reading the same way that my elementary school friend Octavia was born to run. I would invariably get a side cramp ten yards in, so sure I must be dying; meanwhile, she ran with a gait as wide as her height, nearly flying through the air and would lap everyone again just because she enjoyed the wind on her arms. This is Daina.

Once she got over the phonics hump of letter blends in kindergarten, she began lapping all of us, finishing her “required thirty minutes of reading” for all five days of the week by bedtime on Monday—and why they do this mandatory scheduled reading still baffles me. This is not how you teach someone to love. This is not how you get them to negotiate with the librarian to let them take “just one more” home. You’ll never catch them smuggling flashlights in their pillowcases by treating books this way. I digress, as I tend to do on this subject.

I answer the questions about her reading because I know how much joy, empathy, and character she gets from books, and if there is something to teach to this regard, I want them to have it. I want them desperately to have it like she has it.

But the conversation doesn’t always go well. You see, we have a mild book-hoarding situation in our house. Her closet is filled with paper-ream boxes packed with hand-me-down books for Atticus and Evangeline who will grow up in her good-enough library. Her rooms have utility shelves that are lined and piled with paperbacks, adorned with towering stacks of treasured hardcovers and box sets. She never leaves the house without at least three books, a book light, and a set of backup batteries, which she says are “in case of an emergency.” She reads in the car, under restaurant tables, in waiting rooms, and anytime her mind and her hands aren’t occupied otherwise.

Yet even from those who shove their children into books hoping that they fall in love despite the arranged marriage, I’ve been told “That’s not normal” when it comes to my daughter’s reading habits as though she’s gone off some deep end, expressing more concern for her being lost in Emma than the others who text their brains out from the earbud-wearing people they sit across from because, and I quote, “It’s just easier.”

Yes, we are the sort of family who runs out for books like others go for milk and bread. We’re also the sort of family who volleys jokes to one another in ordinary situations as though in lit culture code. Sometimes my jokes are just for me, and that’s okay. I’ve said “War Eagle,” “Roll Tide,” “Go Noles,” and “Go Gators” to end plenty of awkward football conversations I couldn’t follow. It may be okay if I, too, talk freely about the games I care about.

Some of these fans tear their clothes off and paint their bodies. I have never done either at the public library.* And you’re welcome for that.

I show my enthusiasm in other ways, ways like Daina does, noting book releases as though they were big game days and being loyal to a favorite writer and believing they’ll pull through this slump because you saw what they did last season and you know what they’re made of.

But someone recently called Jonathan and me the “educated ones,” and I’m not sure it was meant to be a compliment at the time. I might have even heard it as “freaks,” or worse than that, “you freaks.”

I understand more than I want to the cost and distance that accompany the decision to pursue higher education and lots of it. Degrees come prepackaged with assumptions other people will make about you because they believe those degrees come with assumptions you will make about them.

I know stories and have some of my own about family who encouraged college until they realized what it cost. And this cost has nothing to do with money. What the family wanted was the paper on the wall. They didn’t want the discomfort of awareness and the burden that comes with it, the responsibility to act on what you now know, to say uncomfortable things at the dinner table. It’s when they say “educated” but mean “uppity” and substitute generic “college boy” in place of your name that you know you can’t go back. College isn’t the only place this happens, but it’s the closest comparison I have to convey the cost of being bookish, the cost of being weird.

A short while after I finished my doctorate and noticed that some people started treating me differently, and not in good ways, I had dreams where I would try to give it back. At the risk of sounding like a complete Princeton princess**, I’ll admit the moment is most aptly compared to Eddie Murphy’s scene in Coming to America when he says to the girl who does not want to marry a rich prince, “I renounce my throne!” because he wants to be with her more than he wants to be king. And it’s just not that simple. It’s nothing you should wish away, and it’s nothing you can wish away.

The trouble is that we cannot unknow a thing, and a degree is supposed to be an outward sign that you know some things. But once we hear those things and they stick, they are ours. The whole thing has to fade and wear off, fleck by fleck, like a cheap and temporary tattoo, and some just won’t wear.

So, too, is the love of books. This love becomes an imprint, an identity. It’s the mark of the weird. And books didn’t make us this way. We were weird before they got here.

And maybe that identity is the cost of it all, the necessary othering from those who don’t buy into the hype that books make you better.

And they don’t make you better than anyone, but they do make you feel better—I know they make us Prices feel better—especially when it comes to being weird.

*I would tailgate at a library if invited. Friends, make a note.

**I did not go to Princeton. I just liked the alliteration. I went to FSU. Go Noles.

What You Do When Everything Is Fine

I have wondered more than once whether, if a bank teller drew on my hands with one of those counterfeit bill detector markers and forced them under the light for examination, I’d have tells like those of a fake twenty.

The word fraud crosses my mind sometimes as I work stage right and stage left in the classroom talking big about reading and how the best way to become a good writer is to read lots and often.

It crosses my mind as students will ask, as they often do, whether I’ve read fill in the blank off the bestseller list, and I say something about not preferring contemporary lit or something about having been too busy with student essays. A good mood will get you a “That sounds great! I’ll put it on my list for between semesters,” and that may, now that I think about it, register as the emptiest promise I make, very nearly a borderline lie. I just don’t have the heart to break yours.

I cannot tell you the jaws I’ve dropped because I haven’t read any Stephanie Meyer, have gotten only halfway through the first book in The Hunger Games series, and finished exactly one Nicholas Sparks book before throwing it as hard as I could across the room. It was The Notebook, and I’m still not sorry.

I manage still, believe it or not, to classify myself as a literate person despite this. I have read books before. Yes, complete books, start to finish. I have marked them up. I have passed them along. I have bought multiple copies because I wasn’t sure (multiple times) whether I still had my own. To illustrate, note that I can locate four copies of Eat, Pray, Love by moving my head left to right without even trying hard to spot them, and Liz Gilbert, although she is grand, is not counted among my favorites. Let’s just say I felt convicted while watching Mel Gibson’s character in Conspiracy Theory as he compulsively bought copies of The Catcher in the Rye although he’d never read it. 

What gets me is when people ask what I’m reading these days. I want to make something up. I do. I want to say I’ve just read Salman Rushdie’s latest and tell them an anecdote from a Sherman Alexie book. I want to go all gaga about Anne Lamott’s newest one, which I know I’ll love if I ever have a moment to myself. I want more on my tongue and my mind than article snippets about the demise of public schools and higher ed and Julianna Baggott’s brilliant Facebook status updates I peruse while rocking the smallest lovenugget in the house—or maybe her and her brother at the same time if he’s jealous or recovering from a tantrum.

People see me in Barnes and Noble wearing a baby, carrying another nearly upside down under my armpit, juggling a stack of books, and calling the first child to come along with her own tallish stack. They probably think I read. I’m sure the family friend who brings our Amazon Prime packages with super-rushed delivery because I need those unread books now believes I read, too, and read fast because she’ll be back tomorrow as well. My homeschooling friends I bump into at the public library during weekday story hours probably think I read. I’m in all the right places that one should be if one were to read someday.

Babywearer Jr.

Even online I look like a reader. Every social media photograph has a mess of books behind a baby. These pictures aren’t strategically taken; it’s just that the books are everywhere, much like the laundry, so it is rather impossible to take a baby picture without White Noise, White Teeth, or White Oleander in the background. I’ve given up trying to be private about what we’re reading (or planning on reading) nearly as much as I’ve given up trying to hide my son’s Toy Story underwear.

I want to tell them that this literature professor is reading. The truth is I’m not—not entire books, not in long sittings, not for pleasure. And what does that even mean to someone in my season of life? Reading for pleasure. As opposed to what? Reading for torture? Reading for edification? Reading, to me, means your eyes are awake enough to be open and your situation is relaxed enough where your eyes aren’t already committed to watching someone jump off a couch arm or scale a stove. 

Reading means you must be holding a book, which means you haven’t lost complete feeling in the arm that’s holding the baby you cannot put down because she has a runny nose and can’t breathe while lying horizontally. Reading means there must be clean forks in the drawer and cups in the cabinet. It means the dog isn’t whining to be let out or let in. It means you’re not hungry, you’re not cold, and you don’t have to pee or work or yell at someone to do either of these things.

You cannot read for pleasure when the act itself is pleasure. To correct the redundancy, I would say it’s just reading, but I cannot leave that alone on the page. Nothing is just reading, and if it is, you’re doing it wrong.

After a full day in the kitchen trying to bake, puree, and freeze some semblance of stay-at-home motherhood while I am not Dr. Price for a few more days until the semester starts, I crawled under the covers, ignoring the piles of work on the floor, a veritable obstacle course of envelopes, grade sheets, receipts, binders, and oversized books that don’t fit onto shelves. I broke the spine of Tina Fey’s Bossypants, and read fifty pages, my eyes not yet burning from the day, the kitchen cleaned and hallway cleared of Lego traps, tiny plastic horses, and things with wheels, and all the Price babies in bed. And words of comfort I’ve offered to students over the past eleven years circled back around and came to me this time.

This is what we do when everything is fine.

I’ve said that line to students going through divorces, hospitalizations, miscarriages, deaths in the family, job losses and changes—the things that wear us into different people, that make us want to mess with time, to speed it up or slow it down, and make us want to mess with space, to get more of it or less of it—to be at any other pace or place than that which we are.

This is what we do when everything is fine.

I say this to illuminate the comparative lightness of academics when looked at alongside the stuff of life. They hear me preaching, preaching, preaching about syntax and style. They hear plagiarism warnings that conjure eschatological imagery. It matters, but it doesn’t matter. “There is no such thing as an English emergency,” I tell them. 

This is what we do when everything is fine.

I spent the better part of thirty years reading what others gave to me, bought for me, or assigned to me. I recall a small window in my late teens where I camped out on bookstore floors and stayed out late in coffee shops reading everything in sight. I recall switching books with my best friend Kim, having marked up key passages we loved with circles and stars everywhere, playing poems on repeat in the car from Fort Walton Beach to Pensacola to memorize tracks on audiobooks. I remember moments of resurgence between semesters in grad school #1 and grad school #2 after my daughter had entered school where reading happened.

Good reading like that doesn’t happen often anymore. I used to have a series of lengthy, monogamous and semi-monogamous relationships with authors. Whitman was mine all of from 1996-1998. I rebounded with Bukowski all of 1999, then Anne Sexton moved in and brought all her friends. They camped out until…hmm. Okay, so maybe they’re still here, hiding in the walls and under the floorboards. 

Now my desk, bedside table, and the backseat of my car are overflowing with student work and lit anthologies. I pick up the same toys twelve times a day, probably more, and put them with the Where's Waldo? and I Spy books we use as a hard surface for coloring and Play-Doh molds. I reach blindly into backseats to toss my son a book from the floorboard because he sees my older daughter reading. Half the time, I don't know what I've thrown him. It's entirely possible that he's held David Sedaris, The Vagina Monologues, or a Chuck Palahniuk. I'm not even supposed to text and drive; how on earth can I be responsible for monitoring a miniature book club in the backseat during the ballet carpool? 

And a breath here.

As I ended the day with a book in my hands and quiet in the space between me and midnight, the most beautiful thought occurred to hint that I might be emerging from the dark tunnel to at least a sliver of light on the other side.

How am I doing this? How is it possible that I am in a room alone, holding my own book in my hands, with no one sitting on either of my legs? I am reading this sentence, and I can hear myself in my own head. 

There is only one way I could be doing this. I know exactly what this means.

Everything is fine.  

The Cost of Being Bookish

According to the Facebook fish flow, I am supposed to write an assigned number of true things about myself and be thankful for a unique thing each day of the month. 

Me: Daina, how many? 

Daina: How many what? Kids? How many animals? 

Me: Just a number.

Daina: Okay, fifty chickens.

Me: What? That's too many.

Daina: All right. Five chickens. 

So, five is my number, but I don't follow arbitrary instructions well, so here are five lies instead. 

1. I am originally from Kansas, which explains my penchant for red shoes, root cellars, and twirly things. 

2. I collect antique German thermometers, but always tell people they're French because I don't want to sound cocky. 

3. I am certified as a baton instructor, the kind that sparkle, not the kind British bobbies beat you with for sport.

4. When too much recyclable Tupperware collects in my cabinets, I melt it all down and make yard flamingos to decorate my eggplant garden.

5. Every time I've broken into someone's home and found their bed unmade, I've made the bed with hospital corners and left two Andes mints on the left pillow. 

Okay, here's one true thing:

1. The thanks I'll dole out this year won't fit on Facebook. It's too heavy, too deep, too wide. I'm writing thirty letters--private ones that strangers will carry from town to town and hand-deliver to mailboxes, where they'll settle and wait for fingers braced only for bills and eyes that will open, electric, at the sight of handwriting--a sign of life in an otherwise dead and ordinary pile of paper automatons. 

Okay, another true thing:

2. If I were to say what I'm busy being thankful for, I would, as you might imagine, breathe the word books. Those letters would fall right out of my mouth, as if readied from my birth, the B stepped up to the ledge of my lip first, followed by the O's linked arm in arm, inseparable. The K would follow, hooked to the swoosh of the S, and my mouth would close, as if putting two palms forward to shove off a you're welcome I didn't believe I deserved. 

With every love, there is a loss, or at least a sacrifice. We push some parts of life away to pull some others closer. Every day we choose something, and in that choice, we don't choose something else. We can't choose everything. We just choose some things instead of others. We can choose those other things, but not at the same time as the first things. 

Books are one of those sacrifices for me. They are on what I call "life layaway" indefinitely at this point. Students, friends, and colleagues constantly recommend books. I nod. I say I'll put them on the list. I take them. I stack them up, one alongside another, alongside another. I want to reward them with orange Tic Tacs like I give my son when he's waiting patiently in the carline at the bank. I'm busy living the things I might put into books one day. 

My well-intentioned life has become a bit of a joke around my house. I work hard to keep the jealousy at bay when I read about friends who have already finished their Christmas shopping (although I'll admit to being a bit of a pre-Thanksgiving Christmas crab) and others who make everything from scratch--especially those who post public reprimands to those of us who don't. I have a host of friends who sew clothes, paint Mason jars, give people "just because" gifts, take their kids to Disney four times a year and make scavenger hunt riddles for weeks beforehand, which they send to school in homemade bento boxes with "I love you" origami in the shape of owls and Hello Kitty.

I can Pinterest with the best of them, but it's a digital fantasyland more than a real, live plan that will ever get executed. More and more of my friends have begun designing these elaborate wreaths to decorate their doors for each season, birthday, and holiday of the year. As with most mom projects, I can make it about halfway, so I made a wreath that reflects it--my too busy life, full of books and words and paper and children and praying and diaper rash cream and formula and algebra and nail polish remover and tangles and library visits and coffee creamers and frozen P.F. Chang dinners and writing and reading and grading and telling and washing, folding, sterilizing, stain-treating, drying and toothbrushing and refilling and buying and returning and committee meetings and dressing and changing and closing my eyes and pretending to sleep from two until about four. 

Choices were made. Other choices weren't. This is how it goes.

Advice comes my way often. I listen but seldom take it. I lean in. I nod. But I know they don't really know, and so I hum in my head--any ditty will do.

I'm many things to many people. Many days I feel like the circus performer with the sticks and the plates spinning overhead, only in my case there are a couple dozen plates, and every one of them is over another person's head. I'm more of the facilitator, your happy host.

Some people know the cost of being bookish--and not just bookish in the sense that there's a love of literature (although that's addiction enough sometimes)--but bookish in terms of immersion and devotion, of being a writer or being an academic, the compulsion to spend so much of oneself on what seems to be an individual, maybe even selfish, pursuit.

Because that's just the thing--it's anything but an individual pursuit. Engaging through the written word and poring over language is a key way that we connect with others and begin to comprehend the connections between others. It just looks lonely for a while, like the contents of a cocoon. Then, at once, the fuzzy worm blossoms, then flies.

The cost of being bookish ends up being the inability to communicate with those who don't ever climb into cocoons, those who don't understand that, for literati, the release comes only from periods of temporary retreat.

Harper Lee's Jem Finch comes to mind when he says, "Turtles don't feel, stupid" and Dill replies, "Were you ever a turtle, huh?"

But every once in a while there's a kindred one that comes, like a friend who picks books off your shelves as though your home were a library--and keeps them because it's like an insurance policy on your friendship--or the husband who goes to bed before you because, when the sentences are perfect, you'll come to bed and wake him up to tell him how well the story turned out.

Or it's the mother-in-law who already keeps your children on Mondays so that you can do the thing you were born to do for a few hours and then, because you've spent the best of yourself doing it, makes the family dinner and even sends home poundcake with you because, sometimes, mamas need some sugar, too.