Author Archives: Jennifer Butler Basile

Living, Writing

Amen

How long until the shine wears off? At what point does your blog stop being viable and become a chore? Or does it go through cycles, prone to the whims of your life just as you are?

I remember being upset, maybe even angry, when bloggers I loved decided to throw in the towel because posting and maintaining the blog was taking away from their real writing, their real life. Knowing full well it was what the bloggers needed at the time, I still selfishly didn’t want to let them go.

Then in a post I wrote two weeks ago, the last time I posted on a Thursday, I lamented the pull of personal writing vs. blog writing. That I was tapped out once I attended to one, with no inspiration left for the other. I could feel the burn. I understood the reasoning of those others I hadn’t wanted to take a hiatus.

Plus, with life being life – where the living of it gets in the way of, you know, living it – uninterrupted time to sit and think and create is at a premium. Usually I don’t get past ‘sit’ without wanting to close my eyes.

I know, lots of whining, when I could have been actually creating – and no, this is not my blosignation. I am nothing if not a stubborn mule. I have set my mind to a blog schedule and I will get back on it, come hell or high stress levels.

As always, it’s a matter of finding that sweet spot, that slice of solitude and peace – where words come easily and self-expression is crystal clear and empowering. Can I get an AMEN?

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Art, Living, Writing

Where Art and Storytelling Intersect

It all started with a tag, upon which was typed, a title.

‘A Pear of Pants’ Rick Devin

About a month ago, my aunt and I visited various artist studios as part of HopArts, an open house festival day.  One artist’s bio captured my attention because of his whimsical, surrealistic images. I thought it would be a fun spot to scope out for my children. My aunt and I didn’t need the kids to enjoy Rick Devin’s studio.  The bold, comical animals leapt off the canvases. His fabric sculptures oozed character.  And then we noticed the titles of the pieces. We made a second pass of each piece, pointing out the titles, and laughing once more and more heartily. My aunt asked Devin whether he created the titles or the pieces first. He said it worked both ways. The depth of humor each title added struck me, but I don’t think I knew exactly why.

Then, this past weekend, I took my two oldest girls to Charlestown Gallery. My seven year-old is working on a painting badge for Girl Scouts and was scheduled to visit and talk to the curator/artists at the gallery. I brought my nine year-old along because she is blossoming with artistic talent and enthusiasm. I may have had as much, if not more, fun as they did.

I don’t know why I sometimes separate the visual and written arts. The creative process is much the same, only presented in a different medium. Each piece there was making a statement, telling a story, looking to evoke a feeling. And each was so varied – from artist to artist, even from work to work within one artist’s body. It wasn’t simply an image etched into being, any more than a story is words written on a page.

My girls and I talked about what some of the pieces might mean, what the artist may have intended. When they each gave a different interpretation of the same piece, we discussed how what the viewer brings to the image is as important as the original intent of the artist. My mind whirled on to the reader response school of literary critique. When I peered at another painting, analyzing it as I would a piece of literature, trying to understand its meaning, I formed a vague notion – when I looked at that tag naming its title and an unexpected door opened, leading me into a richer, more detailed room.

'Heading Out' by David Witbeck

                                                                                                                                             “Heading Out’ by David Witbeck

All art is storytelling. The thought processes involved in the creative process bend and stretch the parameters of meaning; forcing the close study of the object right in front of us and how it fits into the bigger picture. Even the ‘simple’ experience of viewing the outcome of the creative process – without engaging in its creation – pays many of the same dividends. One is still engaged. Though my daughters hadn’t made the art, they made their own meaning. The hand of the artist reached through the canvas and provoked a thought process in them that made them view the world through different eyes.

The creative arts help us to interpret and synthesize our world in a way our practical, procedural lives won’t let us. The value of that can be seen no matter which way one looks at it.

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Writing

Soy un Escritor (o Perdedor)

Do you find your muse is very specific? And stingy? She will not grant amazing blog entries and inspired chapters simultaneously. It is one or the other my friend. The imagination, brain, stamina is easily overtaxed. One cannot expect too much out of any one or all. Pick your battles. Pin one on your shirt; shove the other in the drawer. Either write for obscurity or build a platform for a work that won’t exist. Ah, but there’s the rub. Where are the benefactors? The sponsors? The insanely rich and generous who will pay me to sit at home and write the great American novel? It’s so much easier to whine about it than actually go write. . .

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anxiety, Mental Health, motherhood

Mental Intervention

What was I thinking having three kids?

I mean, I love them, but who went and told them they could have their own social lives?

My life has turned into a maelstrom of meetings and play dates, educational outings and activities, birthday parties and sleepovers. Add that to my own [limited] social calendar and my outta-mind anxiety is over the top.

A dear friend once commented that a fellow mother reentered the real world more smoothly and earlier than I, perhaps because she came from a large family and was better equipped to juggle multiple responsibilities at once. She was busting my beans for being incommunicado for most of my child’s infancy, but it stung. Because I was an only child, I sucked at balancing the many demands of life? More so, I think it hurt because it hinted at my inability to cope. In a subconscious effort at self-preservation, I had compartmentalized my life to its limit. The new job of mothering was so all-consuming, I shut out all other demands like the airlock of a submarine to prevent an all-out deluge.

Nine years later, I feel myself pulling back, anticipating catastrophe as life – mine in relation to the swirling schedules around me – ramps up big time. Can I truly not handle all we’ve taken on? Or is my anxiety creating a problem before it’s even – or will – begun/in? I think my struggle is a direct result of my anxiety and not from a need to learn to say no.

It could also be the stubborn mule in me that hates change putting on the brakes. My family no longer exclusively rolls as one unit. The oldest is here, the middle is there, the youngest is home with Daddy while I run errands. Going to the grocery store by myself and buying Christmas gifts without acting like an art smuggler to keep them away from prying eyes is a luxury – but our family life feels so disjointed lately. Times of transition are not my friend.

Another friend once left me a message – somewhere between the two points on today’s timeline – that I couldn’t just stop answering the phone because I was stressed out. It amazed me that she could see me more clearly than I could see myself. When I finally did talk to her, she made me laugh and at least temporarily forget my troubles.

I need some sort of mental intervention now. If only I could enact one myself.

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Living

Impossibly Easy

Last night for dinner, we had ‘Impossibly Easy Cheeseburger Pie’ – which would have been impossibly easy to prepare had I not flipped the dish upside down into the oven.

Just as the oven timer beeped, my husband’s gastrointestinal juices gearing up, I gripped the glass pie plate on either side with my ove-gloved hands and proceeded to do a spastic ground beef ballet. Time slowed down as it only can during inevitable and unavoidable catastrophe. I watched helplessly as the plate tilted at an ever-alarmingly steep angle and poured the eggy, cheesy, beefy crumbles down into the multifaceted cavity between the open oven door and hot oven floor.

My husband, on the phone with his parents, ran into the room to see what was the matter, alerted by my cries. I still can’t recall if what I said was appropriate for his parents, hanging in midair on the phone in his hand, to overhear. When he’d hung up and reentered the room, he asked how it happened – to which I do remember answering quite snippily that if I knew how it happened, I wouldn’t have let it happen. I said that I meant to do it, to spite him, to ruin the family dinner, that it was my intent all along. Yes, it was my grandest moment.

Impossibly Easy, my ass

Impossibly Easy, my ass

You see, it never really was about the impossibly irritating cheeseburger pie. I knew when I gripped it, my hold was tenuous at best. I was already floating off on some negative tangent as we’d traipsed the troop into the school gymnasium to vote. The kids flitting about on the periphery, drawing the dirty looks of the board of canvassers representative, didn’t help. My rotors, failing brakes, something squeaking all day as I drove down the road didn’t help. Money troubles and a possible looming lay-off didn’t help. The greasy mess congealed to the bottom of my stove was just the icing on an already slimy cake.

After I winged a plastic spatula just to the right of him, he thumped a couple of walls, I lied down on the bathroom floor for a good cry (all while the kids played doorbell ditch on their own home) – I set to cleaning the stove. I’m not sure I’ll ever want to prepare or eat this dish again. I discovered places in my stove I never knew existed – just wide enough to allow a chunk of mangled food in and just small enough to prevent my fingers to take it out.

The good thing about this all-around disgusting evolution is that my oven is now clean! It is ready for the onslaught of Thanksgiving like it never would have been had I not spilled food all over its-hotter-than-a-spilled-pie-plate-of-ooze insides. And that’s about the only good thing. I’m not proud of my behavior. None of the issues precipitating the great pie-plate debate of ’14 were resolved. I still feel pretty mushy about the whole thing.

If only it was as impossibly easy to wipe away the grime of our lives.

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Identity, Living, motherhood

One Big Blob

The past few weeks have been a little trying. Our family seems to be on the cusp of something big. I can only say that now after these last few weeks. In the midst of running, running, running, it was all I could do to put one foot in the front of the other – or shuffle them along. I knew things were crazy, and was reacting accordingly, but I didn’t know why.

Now I wonder if my elevated stress levels and difficulty in calming them were not a direct result: my subconscious reaction to what my conscious self wasn’t ready to admit was a huge deal.

My five year-old, in her last year of preschool, more and more frequently laments the fact that she cannot ride the bus to big-kid school like the others. She wants to stay at preschool and eat lunch with her friends. She’s ‘reading’ books to me and asking how to spell different words.

My seven year-old is coming into her own, blossoming with independent applications of math reasoning she’s learned at school. She reads books aloud with an expression well beyond her years and worthy of an audio recording. She’s requesting and engaging in social interactions and activities – on her own.

My nine year-old has joined two after school activities, doubling her previous involvement. She is in her last year of elementary school; her last year of recess; her last year of riding the bus with her sisters. She is looking longer and leaner every day.

And me? I am nearing the destination of days full of adult time. All three of them will be in school full-day next year. I will be free to . . . earn the money we’ve sorely been missing since I’ve been at home? Write my way into posterity? Query until they can no longer say no?

I haven’t been gazing longingly at this point in time as the end all and be all. But it hovered like some kind of talisman – a time when, my life would go back to normal? When adult life (ie working, I guess) would resume? When I’d be able to exhale that breath I’ve been holding since the first labor pain of the first child?

And though my mind has set up the first day of the next academic year as the first day of this new life, I’ve finally realized that we’re all in the transition to it now. My five year-old is prepping to be the big girl – already a little too cool for preschool. My seven year-old is branching out in social groups – excited and a little less apprehensive to do so on her own. My nine year-old is claiming activities and beliefs as her own – independent from her parents and sisters.

Friends, acquaintances, and other parents always asked what activities my kids were in. I always thought I saw some semblance of shock when I answered, “None.” We didn’t do adorable dance classes at three years-old. We didn’t do t-ball, and soccer, and gymnastics, oh my. They never expressed an dire interest in any of these things and my husband and I never pushed it. There was plenty of time for that – and they would determine the time.

The time is now.

We may have avoided the cost and inconvenient schedules of such activities up to this point, but now it’s on. I’ve started the taxi-driver lifestyle I’ve avoided thus far.

It hit me like a ton of bricks last week when I rushed to finish an on-line Girl Scout leader training, compile fund raising monies, feed the kids dinner before we rushed to a Girl Scout meeting, dress them in Halloween costumes for a Girl Scout Halloween party, babysit one of their classmates, see my husband, help (nag) the kids to finish their homework, steal Halloween candy they’d acquired before even Trick-or-Treating, talk to my husband, smear their faces and hair with foul chemicals to turn them into unrecognizable ghouls for Halloween and rush late to another party after peeling countless tangelos to make festive pumpkin snacks – all while suffering from a compound case of sleep deprivation and PMS.

Unbelievably, it took me awhile to realize why last week was so hard for me to handle. Any week has the potential to be miserable. But when the everyday congeals into one big blob of ‘life is about to get a whole lot more complicated’, sometimes the blob is so frickin’ big it takes awhile to digest.

My girls are growing up! As wistful as I was watching them walk away from me for the first time, leaving them in the classroom alone for the first time, hearing ‘Mom’ instead of ‘Mama’ for the first time, those were mere speed bumps compared to this swift elevation. I have entered the ‘Mom, could you drop me off at so-and-so’s’ part of motherhood; the ‘Mom, pick me up after school’ part; the ‘We’ll be done at 4:15, Ma’ part; the ‘But I want to eat lunch with my friends, Mom’ part.

In addition to my ambivalent mom underbelly, I also have my own personal fears to fight. I’ve been home exclusively since 2008. The thought of returning to my previous job, even if I could even secure it, makes me want to vomit. Launching the totally exciting, yet daunting new idea I have for employment makes me want to seize. Not only am I being forced out of my old ‘job’ with all these developments, but forced into a totally new one.

All of our times, they are a-changin’. No wonder the woman, mom, worker in me is revolting.

from Blue-Cat00

from Blue-Cat00

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Living, motherhood, parenting

Collectively Conscious

It all started innocently enough.

Moved by an evocative poem by Dennis Ference, I shared it here.

A friend liked it.  She had just lamented on FaceBook that her son participated in his last grandparent day at school since he’ll be entering middle school in the fall.

My aunt emailed a link to a video she’d watched meditating on the fact that it is the everyday moments that make up life with our children – just minutes before reading my reblog.

That afternoon I watched my children ride their bikes to the neighbors’ house – only four doors down – but far enough that they pedaled out of sight.  I fought hard against the pressure building in my chest.  I fought against the desire to reel them back in on an invisible thread to my heart.

I watched the birds alight from treetops across the street and glide across the sky.

We will all honor every moment.

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