Years ago — I don’t remember where, unfortunately — I read an old Chinese Proverb: “Nobody’s family can hang out the sign, ‘NOTHING THE MATTER HERE.’” I immediately set Owen, who was only 3 at the time, to the task of hand-lettering us a sign that said just that. (I found it in a box and hung it up in my office yesterday.)
Happy Mother’s Day. Here are 5 of my favorite books about making art and being a mother:
1. Sarah Ruhl, 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time To Write
Short essays about making art and raising children, and the interesting ways that one influences and provides insight into the other. Ruhl is a playwright and a mother of three and writes beautifully about art’s need for solitude and quiet vs. the constant interruption of mothering:
There were times when it felt as though my children were annihilating me… and finally I came to the thought, All right, then, annihilate me; that other self was a fiction anyhow. And then I could breathe. I could investigate the pauses.
2. Sally Mann, Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs
Mann is that rare master of both pictures and words, and her memoir shows off that mastery: the visual images are perfectly woven into the text to tell her story. The book covers her long, interesting life and career, but a portion of it reads as a cautionary tale about using your children in your art.
Not only was the distinction between the real children and the images difficult for people, but so also was the distinction between the images and their creator, whom some found immoral.
3. Jenny Offill, Dept. Of Speculation
A wonderful short novel about art, marriage, and motherhood that you can read in one sitting. The way the text is fragmented replicates the way you think when you’re a new parent.
About the book she has said:
New parents, but especially new mothers like the [main character], have a set of alarms going off in their heads during the early, high stakes period of trying to keep a baby alive, while dealing with the pleasant lull of housebound boredom. The transcendence is undercut by the tedium. I wanted to get that feeling on the page. The solution I came up with was to describe her thoughts and actions in fragments, so that one would always be dislocating the other.
4. Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts
While all these books are in some way about women coming to terms with being both an artist and a mother, there’s the added complexity of Nelson being a queer-mother-artist, and an older one at that:
I’m an old mom. I had nearly four decades to become myself before experimenting with my obliteration.
Another very good (and fragmented) short read with a really smart system of quotation, and an excellent ending.
5. Sylvia Fein, Heidi’s Horse
Fein, a surrealist painter who celebrated her 100th birthday last year with a 70-year retrospective exhibition in Berkeley, took a break in her painting career to write this book and its followup, First Drawings. The book collects her daughter Heidi’s drawings of horses from the age of 2 to 17. (Fein raised her daughter on a horse ranch.)
I don’t know of any other book like this. A weird, remarkable work showing the development of a child’s drawings with a single subject. (More about the book in my post: What pictures of horses can teach us about art.)
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Filed under: parenting
I’m finally reading Tom Hodgkinson’s excellent book, How To Be Idle. We’ve had his parenting manifesto hanging on the fridge for many years.
Here’s an updated version, from his book, The Idle Parent:
We reject the idea that parenting requires hard work.
We pledge to leave our children alone.
We reject the rampant consumerism that invades children’s lives from the moment they are born.
We read them poetry and fantastic stories without morals.
We drink alcohol without guilt.
We reject the inner Puritan.
We don’t waste money on family days out and holidays.
An idle parent is a thrifty parent.
An idle parent is a creative parent.
We lie in bed for as long as possible.
We try not to interfere.
We play in the fields and forests.
We push them into the garden and shut the door so we can clean the house.
We both work as little as possible, particularly when the kids are small.
Time is more important than money.
Happy mess is better than miserable tidiness.
Down with school.
We fill the house with music and merriment.
We reject health and safety guidelines.
We embrace responsibility.
There are many paths.
Filed under: parenting
I love this story Ron Perlman tells about his father’s early encouragement and how much it meant to him:
https://twitter.com/coenesqued/status/1249578783444594697?s=20
Perlman’s father tells him what he needs to tell him while driving around. It makes me think about the power of the car in our emotional lives.
The automobile, for all of the evil and danger and destruction it’s brought to our culture and the planet, also provides an emotional space in which parents can talk more easily to their children and men can open up to other men about their feelings. (Kerouac knew all about that, and as goofy as it can be, I’m also thinking of Jerry Seinfeld’s Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee.)
Here’s an excerpt from a Psychology Today on the benefits of talking to your kids in the car:
- You have a captive audience-your passenger cannot leave at any time (at least safely).
- It’s less threatening-sitting beside or better yet, behind a parent, can feel less intimidating or less threatening to a child or adolescent.
- Car rides are limited in time-unless you are on a longer drive, you have only a limited time to get your point across and engage in a dialogue.
- Distractions can be minimized-although you may still have to compete with a phone or music player, your child will have fewer other distractions.
A week ago I wrote about how much I miss that brief 10 minutes my son and I got together driving him home from school. Gas is so (horrifyingly) cheap right now, I keep thinking about just throwing him in the car and going on a drive to nowhere, letting him DJ along the way…
“Maps are of two kinds. Some seek to represent the location of things in space. That is the first kid — the geography of space. But others represent the location of things in time — or perhaps their progression through time. These maps tell stories, which is to say they are the geography of time… But these days I have begun to feel that stories, too, are basically concerned with spatial relationships. The proximity of bodies. Time is simply what interferes with that, yes?”
—Dylan Horrocks, Hicksville
Twelve years ago, when my wife and I bought our first house, I wrote this:
In the five years that we’ve known each other, we’ve never lived in anything bigger than a one-bedroom apartment. Now we both have offices, a washer/dryer, a two-car garage…it’s very surreal.
When you live with someone in a tiny apartment, you’re always in close proximity. You never see that person more than 10 or 20 feet away, because there isn’t 10 or 20 feet to gain between you. You get used to seeing them from a particular distance.
Meg and I often meet each other for lunch on campus. When I see her from far away, walking towards me, she looks like a different person—she looks like a stranger, or someone I just met. It’s like a visual refresh. (I wonder if this visual element isn’t part of the hidden magic of what self-help couples books tell you to do: meet for dinner, but take separate cars…)
Twelve years later, present day, my wife and I have been home with our kids for almost four weeks now, in a townhouse not too much bigger than that first house we shared, and I see them all now, only in close-up. There’s very little stepping back, getting perspective.
Before this, I would stand outside my first grader’s school, waiting, and when he would walk outside when the bell rang, for a minute, I got to see him in his own world, for a brief few steps, until he saw me and entered our shared world again. My wife and I would pull up to my pre-schooler’s school early, and see him waiting with the other kids, and it was the same thing: eavesdropping on him in his own world, before he was back to ours.
I’m keeping everyone else in the world at a distance, but the people in my house have never been closer. It’s hard to get any kind of perspective. (This is the only time in my life I’ve envied people I know with ranches and lots of property — a “spread,” as in, “Why don’t we spread out?”)
Here is my friend Alan Jacobs on why he’s reading ghost stories right now:
“Tell the truth but tell it slant,” Emily Dickinson counseled writers; and fifty years later W.H. Auden spoke of readers like me: “When have we not preferred some going round / To going straight to where we are?” People often cry out for writing that, as we say, “speaks to our condition,” but more often than we might wish to acknowledge we are not prepared to have our condition spoken to directly. Another poet, T.S. Eliot this time: “Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind / Cannot bear very much reality.”
When you’re looking at a painting in a gallery, you sometimes find that you need to step back a bit in order to see it whole, to grasp its structure and proportions. You don’t get too far away; just far enough. Perhaps that’s what these stories have been for me: A step or two back from the details of our current predicament gives me the critical distance to process what’s happening with less stress, less mind-warping anxiety.
We were at the kitchen table the other night and my first grader picked up his little binoculars, turned them the wrong way around, and looked at me. “You’re so far away!” he said.
I wish, sometimes, that I had a similar way of zooming out, and getting some more perspective on him. It’s like how one of my camera apps alerts me, when I’m trying to take a picture, “You’re too close!” I need to step back to really see.
I’m typing this now in my front office. The boys are outside with my wife, looking for the slugs and caterpillars eating her plants.
Amazingly, I can’t hear them, but I can see them in my mind.
And I miss them!
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