This morning, on Day 5 of my so-called post-summer break freedom, it dawned on me that the span of hours I supposedly have are quite often not spent doing those things that are best done while the kids are being schooled. No; instead, I’m frequently being called upon to do damage control, help out, or handle some sort of issue related to the kids that I had not anticipated.

 
Today I was asked to come in to help with Bookmobile at my preschooler’s Montessori school. How could I say no? My youngest daughter has been struggling to adjust to school (she is, by nature, a homebody), and went to school with a much better demeanor knowing she would see me when she boarded the bus to pick out her books today.

My high-achieving high school senior, in the throes of senior-year stress, had broken down last night under the weight of it, claiming life was “just not worth living”—words no parent should take lightly—and so this morning’s emergency phone call with the assistant principal was in order, arrangements made after hours last night by email.

 
Now, it’s 11:45 a.m., just after that phone call and that stint on the Bookmobile, and the few words I’ve just put down are the only evidence today of my life outside of mothering. And yet, ironically, I find myself writing about that very thing: the “job” that I’ve come to accept fully as most important, most consuming, and most likely to trump all other intended goals and aspirations.

 
The funny thing is, I write these words with not even a hint of frustration. After several years of this balancing act, I’ve come to expect these intrusions: in fact, I not only expect them, I respond to them now without hesitation, and without regret. But getting to this place was not easy.

 
Here’s what finally tipped the balance. When I stopped to consider what it might be like to reflect at the end of a long life, if I am blessed enough to have such a one, I’ve thought quite a lot about whether or not it would be more rewarding to have given the bulk of my energy to a writing career that may or may not result in literary notoriety, or if I would be content, or feel my life was well lived, with not achieving these things—whether or not it was because I didn’t work hard enough or just didn’t have what it takes, talent-wise. The conclusion I came to is that if it comes down to success as a parent vs. success as a writer, I choose the parenting variety. If I am lucky enough to land a bit of the literary variety, I’ll consider it icing on the proverbial cake.

 
You can’t take it with you, as the saying goes; and the only thing I don’t want to leave as my legacy is the regret of not being there for my children, of not nurturing them towards their own greatest successes: as human beings in relationships with other human beings (be they partners, spouses, and/or children), first and foremost; and as professionals, or “workers,” in whatever careers they choose. In other words, I wish for them a sense of emotional security and existential happiness that will allow them to meet their own aspirations, whatever they may be.

 
They may become rocket scientists, Peace Corp workers, pop stars, environmental activists, or dental hygienists; and they may become parents. Whatever they end up becoming, if they choose to parent, my hope is they will be privileged enough to have the kind of “job” that allows for parenting to come first.

 
This isn’t to say I don’t have ambition, because I do. I have indeed felt the frustration of the umpteenth interruption while in the midst of writing a chapter in my latest novel; I have experienced exasperation having to stay up past midnight to meet a magazine deadline because I spent the day nursing a sick child. But after so many years of this, the exasperation and the frustration have become tempered by acceptance.

 
As I realized today, after my phone conference with the high school principal, I am like a fireman (or firewoman), or a doctor on call: my responsibility lies first with my children, and if I am called to attention, attention I will give—and without regret. And I do it willingly and with love. It’s my job. And isn’t it nice to love one’s job?

Plath, it turns out, is more than a shadow, an image that gets stirred up on days I feel overwhelmed by the surge of creative energy that drives me to pen and paper or the keyboard, thwarted, so often, by the needs of family—especially on snow days. She’s a strange sort of muse: one that reminds me, ironically, what’s important, and how hard I need to work to muster my own powers of resilience against my own odds of circumstance.

In Plath’s case, there was more to the tension between the needs of her children and her own need to write: she was estranged from her husband, trying to support her children on her own, and she suffered from depression. One can’t help but wonder if there was a causal relationship between circumstances and mental state; on the other hand, it’s common knowledge that Plath had an earlier breakdown as a college student, one that she fictionalized in her novel The Bell Jar.

You could say, then, that Plath was predisposed to coping problems: or that she wasn’t equipped with the kind of resilience that would have allowed her to manage the breakdown of a marriage (her husband left her for another woman, adding the bitter flavor of betrayal), the need to make ends meet, and give rise to the powerful creative energy that had already resulted in so much brilliant writing, even at her relatively young age. Who could manage all of these things—mental illness notwithstanding?

On days like today, when I, too, am holed up with my children for yet another day, watching the snow fall, as lovely as it is, and as much as I love my children, I recall Plath and her dramatic, tragic ending all too clearly. No, I wasn’t there: I’ve only read about it, of course. But as an artist myself, my imagination takes over: I see her turned into the expressionless person she must have become, so depressed by her circumstances and frustrated in her creative desires; I see her disheveled, unwashed, taking her kids down the hall to the babysitter in a neighboring apartment, shuffling back to her own, turning on the gas inside the oven and laying her head down inside of it. And going to sleep. Forever.

On my own darker days, whether or not I’m homebound with the kids, I’ve wondered if I have the resilience to hold my own creative self and my care-giving self in balance on either side of the teeter-totter: inevitably weighted towards the care-giving. The difference, though, is that I have never crossed into that even darker space of wanting to end it all by my own hands. Suicide is a terrible gesture—one that is irrevocable and reverberates into future generations: and something deep inside me serves as a sort of automatic braking system.

At worst, I imagine giving up the writing life—giving in to the domestic undertow once and for all. As a friend of mine has reminded me though, more than once, each mental state is temporary: and no matter where we are, in time and space or in our minds, we will not be there forever. I’ve begun to think of it as a wave. It comes in; it goes out, as inevitable as the tide.

As I look out the window on this particular snow day, instead of snow, I see ice: it came down over the past two days in two large swaths, like a two-headed monster, each head exhaling freezing rain. While the sleet has stopped, winds are now gusting up to 45 miles per hour, so there are no snow angels to be made, no promise of a snowball fight. We are making the best of it indoors. I am not a single mother; I have a supportive spouse who is at work—so I am not desperate to make our sustenance singly, although I am always trying to do my part, such as it is.

Today, at home with my three children, I know that even this, a seemingly rock-solid sheet of ice, will pass. In the meantime, as my children miraculously entertain themselves, I steal these few minutes to get these few words down, and then, after sending them out into the world, I can turn back to my children, satisfied that I have said my piece. And perhaps, if we’re lucky, instead of frustration we’ll find joy in one another’s presence, the teeter-totter at center.

Stars are forming in Henize 2-10, a dwarf starburst galaxy located about 30 million light years from Earth, I learned recently, calling into question everything I thought I knew about dwarf starburst galaxies. Which is to say, virtually nothing.

But that didn’t stop me from reading further, even though my head was filled to distraction with images of dwarfs and shooting stars being flung about the heavens.

Adding further chaos to my addled brainwaves, I learned that these stars were forming at a prodigious rate, begging the question of context. Prodigious compared to what? If these stars are 30 million light years away, then the power of the telescope that spied them is so great that I can’t even conceive of it. I would have stopped there, my mind already overwhelmed with the sheer largeness of such numbers and the sheer greatness of such distance, but for this next bit: This combination of a burst of star formation and a massive black hole is analogous to conditions in the early Universe. Aha! Now we’re getting somewhere, if not very fast.

I’ve always been fascinated with existential questions: “Why are we here, how did we get here” and the like, tending to be skeptical of both Biblical and Big Bang theories as both leave too many questions unanswered. But if this latest NASA missive is to be believed, we are closer to understanding our origins than we thought possible.

Could it be, then, that both the Bible people and the astrophysicists are right? All this biblical banter about seven days and such could be a metaphor for what actually happened: take one dwarf starburst galaxy, add a black hole, and voila! Universe! Seven days, seven million light years; it’s really all the same in the grand scheme of things.

And if that’s true, what is there left for believers and nonbelievers to argue about? If the bang was instantaneous and resulted in flying dwarfs bursting from black holes, what does it matter if one of them was the Son of God or one of Snow White’s companions? We are all cut from the same cloth—er, black hole—a bit of stardust giving us the right chemical make-up to result in life as we know it.

I’m all for a greater understanding of our origins—but rather than arguing about one belief system or another, I’m sticking with these e-blasts from NASA: the photos are beautiful, otherworldly, and quite frankly, just as ethereal as a bunch of angels floating on puffy white clouds. Dwarfs notwithstanding.

NOTE: To view related photo and read the full NASA story, click on the following link: http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_1848.html



Three stacks of books line my nightstand. The cradle next to my bed is filled with more, replacing the baby who has long since moved on to a bed down the hall. Yet even more books spill over onto the floor, spawning new stacks, while shelves of other past and potential reads line our upstairs hallway, the shelves in my office, the living room.

It may seem precious to say I’m addicted to books—but the truth is, I am. I borrow them from the library, I buy them from Amazon, or if I’m feeling altruistic and frugal, I find them used at Better World Books (www.betterworld.com)—knowing that a portion of the price I pay will go towards literacy programs around the world, appeasing, if only slightly, my guilty, addicted conscience. These days, I don’t dare step foot in a non-virtual bookstore if I have any notion of coming out empty-handed—I simply can’t resist the allure of a new book, its crisp, untarnished pages beneath my fingers, my greedy scan of the table of contents taking in its possibilities.

I’d be a liar if I said I could quit anytime.

As is the case with most addictions, finding out the “why” doesn’t necessarily solve the problem. In my case, it’s easy to connect my book love to my intellectual curiosity, my love of literary adventure and aesthetic beauty, truth, and just plain old good writing. Add to this the fact that I am a writer myself, aspiring to move my words from short form to long form. (I’ve published as a journalist and a critic for a number of years, but have yet to publish a book-length work. The two novels I’ve written await serious tweaking. Other non-fiction, go-the-distance ideas are merely on the drawing board.)

Far beyond a healthy armchair enthusiasm for literary leapfrogging, this reach into books is, at a more subterranean level, a form of deep sea diving, an intellectual escape hatch only made worse since my transformation into the cautious and protective mother of three that I am today. It is almost as if books have become a vicarious form of experience to replace the “lived” variety that I once so enthusiastically enjoyed—before children, that is.

In my younger, pre-parenting days, I had no qualms about real-time-and-place adventure or traveling; no fear of airborne disaster, terrorism-inspired or otherwise; no aversion to waiting in airports or standing in security lines. (I always had a book I was eager to imbibe if ever I found myself waiting.) As a child and later a teenager I had no difficulty boarding a plane solo to visit relatives on the West Coast or Minnesota, trusting, perhaps naively, that I was safe wherever I went. As a young adult I traveled to Italy to visit long-lost relatives, later venturing to Israel, England, Scotland, Australia and New Zealand for work, pleasure, or both—all of it in my 20s, before children.

I am now the mother of three children—ages 3, 5, and 15. Yes, there have been trips, real-life adventures—mostly visits to see family, and more recently, trips to Vermont where I completed a low-residency MFA, necessitating eight-day stays on campus at the start of each semester. But the tenor of adventure has changed. I haven’t boarded a plane since 9/11, for instance; admittedly, this has a lot to do with circumstance—the cost of five plane tickets is simply out of reach—and yet the thought of flying sends me into a tailspin of dread. These days, our adventures more often consist of trips to the children’s museum, walks to the library, dance and music lessons, a backyard garden, the occasional family-trip-by-car, and books—piles and piles of books.

Two significant moments suggest an even deeper layer to my literary addiction. When my daughter was admitted to the ER for pneumonia this winter after what seemed to be a common cold took a potentially deadly turn, the trauma of this was exacerbated for my husband and me by the loss of a baby seven years ago, six months into my pregnancy. Witnessing my 5-year-old daughter on an IV for three days, mainlining fluids and antibiotics to return her to vitality, brought that earlier loss back—the crucial difference being that this time, there was a happy ending.

And yet I know—because I have experienced it—that it could have been so much worse. Grief, though, has its own geography for each of us: for me, losing a baby signaled a definitive loss of parental innocence, a suspension of the belief that things always turn out okay in the end… that old business of happy endings.  Instead, I continue to sit in a psychological waiting room, at the juncture between loss and healing, as if waiting to board an airplane for an adventure I’m still not sure about. So I’m reading books—scads and scads of them—as I wait for some inner signal to let me know that it’s safe to board; or at least, since there are no guarantees—ever—of safety, I will be ready to stomach the risk.

So I have traveled to Africa, Iran, Afghanistan, South America, and the wilds of Montana through the pages of books. I’ve sailed around the world, escaped wildfires, climbed the Himalayas, and had out-of-body experiences—all without leaving my easy chair.

As the shock of where we are in this day and age begins to wear off, as the impermanence of all things takes hold—not just in my head, but also in my heart—I imagine I will begin to let go of that obsessive caution. I’m not a religious person, but I do believe in grace, in a loving energy. Some call it God. For now, I’m finding that grace, that embrace, in a book, in the warmth of family—and in time, perhaps those pages will open up and the real world will beckon more fully once again.

Fast forward two years and Gilbert still has the guy—the charming Felipe, an older (by 17 years) Brazilian man who is somewhat of a globetrotter himself, if not a searcher, too, although not in the overtly spiritual sense. We’re on page one of Gilbert’s latest, and decidedly toned down, memoir—Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage—and Gilbert confesses, “Marriage was not something we had ever planned with each other, nor was it something either of us wanted. Yet providence had interfered with our plans, which was why we were now wandering haphazardly across Vietnam, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Indonesia, all the while making urgent—even desperate—efforts to return to America and wed.”

Felipe, it turns out, had unwittingly worn out his American visa, and was busted by the Department of Homeland Security at the Dallas-Ft. Worth airport on his way to see Gilbert. Felipe was then arrested, interrogated, made to do time and jail, and then sent packing. Alas: the only way the couple (both of whom had been “gutted,” as Gilbert put it, by divorce) could continue their relationship in the States was for them to wed.

And thus ensues Gilbert’s more sanguine and yet even more uplifting page-turner in which, over the course of 279 pages, she makes peace with what she had initially so heartily rejected—the institution of marriage. After scrutinizing marriage through a number of cultural, social, historical and of course personal lenses, the premise at which she arrives in the end, sort of a thesis in reverse, is that marriage at its best represents the oh-so-human, ever-enduring desire for life partnership—a spiritual quest at its heart. But she goes a step further. For all its conventional baggage, marriage is also, Gilbert comes to believe (or at least convinces herself), a subversive act: one that governments or religious sects have used at certain historical junctures to quash or at least control the populace as a means of ensuring allegiance to the state or religious authority (or both, as the case may be).  Even Christianity is guilty, Gilbert reminds us—it was founded, in fact, on its celebration of celibacy and rejection of marriage as an only grudgingly acceptable choice for those who just could not resist the carnal temptations of the flesh.

What I loved most about this book, though—other than Gilbert’s easy humor and loveliness with words—was her understanding that marriage, for all its difficulty and tragedy for so many, can be a means of empowerment as well: for same-sex couples, bi-racial couples, and everyone else who chooses a life-long partnership for love rather than obligation, convenience, or some other socially-sanctioned motive.

As Gilbert puts it, “You cannot stop people from wanting what they want, and a lot of people, as it turns out, want intimacy with one special person.” To be able to claim for oneself (or selves) that intimacy, Gilbert suggests, and the ultimate privacy marriage sanctions, is, by extension, a sort of act of individuation. It is the government that “hops along behind its people,” Gilbert goes so far to say, “struggling to keep up, desperately and belatedly (and often ineffectually and even comically) creating rules and mores around something we were always going to do anyhow, like it or not.”

Like it or not, indeed: despite the statistics on this or that divorce rate, the tenuousness of a marriage chosen for love rather than strategic alliance or class dictates, marriage is ultimately a choice—and that can be a hard-won freedom indeed.

The story takes place in northwestern Montana, an armchair adventurer’s nirvana if ever there was one. Let me plead guilty at the outset: I was drawn to this book for its promise of deliverance to a place so remote you can’t find it on Google maps: a place so nameless that, merely by visiting it fictionally, I felt I had invaded it somehow.

Bass’s conceit, that such remote places are not immune to the mundane personal dramas that are so universal–love, betrayal, greed, obsession, and the like–is somehow softened by such arresting beauty. Even scenes of carnage, the so-called natural order of things, are diffused and made beautiful by Bass’s descriptive dancing: as a for instance, coyotes “gnawing on the frozen carcasses of deer, their faces masked red, with vapor clouds rifting from their clouds as if they were speaking” (14). Bass reveals his poet’s vision for the landscape as he describes an autumn morning, foreshadowing winter: “…one morning there was a sheet of white cast over the world—not snow yet, but frost; and as the sun rose the frost turned from silver to fractured diamonds: the world melting back into the birthing colors of autumn: red, gold, yellow, blood brown” (394).

For such descriptions alone I easily fell in love with the book: and yet the layers of story added muscle. The drama formed a vortex around the character of Old Dudley, a Texas oil prospector who had already made billions by his discovery of crude but was driven by an unceasing lust to find more, particularly in this more or less unspoiled corner of Montana where his daughter, Mel, now lived a hermit’s existence, tracking wolves and documenting their comings, goings, and doings for nearly 20 years.

Dudley’s protege, Matthew, had been born and raised in this unofficially named valley, called “the other Swan” by the inhabitants of the nearest town over, and had been snatched up by Dudley and groomed to the same obsession for oil. Matthew had been Mel’s lover since they were teenagers, but his prospecting for Dudley took him to Texas, where he lived year-round except for two annual pilgrimages to the valley. Not exactly a recipe for sustained intimacy.

Enter Wallis, Dudley’s latest casualty–a young oil geologist sent up to Montana to take up where Matthew had left off–in more ways than one, as it turns out–to find oil after Matthew had failed, and in the attempt, also taking up with Mel, an inevitability that was feared and predicted by many: even Dudley. To speak more about this romance would spoil it for any would-be readers out there; but suffice it to say, such raw wilderness can be quite an aphrodisiac.

These and other characters follow both unlikely and predicted trajectories, all flavored with a subtle, almost magical realist tinge of near-impossibility. From Matthew and Wallis’s days-long hunting expedition through sub-zero temperatures to the character Amy’s nearly immaculate conception by Dudley, the novel was not a reflection of reality as we (or at least I) know it: but rather, a story told as a metaphor for another impossible but intoxicating vision: nature as victor.

I applauded the unlikely unions and reunions, the hazy happy endings and portentous beginnings–if only because I decided to do so: if I had taken this story as a representation of reality, a work of realist fiction, I would have been skeptical, even disappointed. I realize, though, after reading Where the Sea Used to Be, something I’d only vaguely sensed for some time about myself: that I prefer the magic of a good story. I believe more fully in the truths I find there than in the gritty despair of an Alice Munro short story, say, or the hapless idiocy of a T. C. Boyle protogonist, as brilliant as these writers are, and as much as I continue to learn from them about the craft of writing fiction.

I guess you could say I’m a sucker for hope.