dynamic elf

I forgot about livejournal for a while there. I still love this place. If you've written sometihng interesting, recently, please link me to it in comments; catching up is hard and seems impossible.

So, N is 9. Very 9. 9 all over the place. She has crushes. Her body is starting to change. She's still full of ideas and plans and jokes, but I can see her adult self beginning to poke out here and there; I can't quite say why it makes me teary-eyed, but it does. It's sort of like staring the beauty of the universe straight in the face - I flinch.

It's not that she herself is beautiful (though she is), or that I am nostalgic for when she was littler and I could scoop her up and make the world stop (though I am) - it's that I am beginning to see so clearly the passage of time and the cycles in it. I see that this is who I will be ceding the world to, just as my parents did to me.

She commented recently that she didn't understand "happy tears". Tears, yes! Happiness, of course. Emotions too big to contain, all the time. But she does not get why an excess of happiness makes adults cry. And I'm thinking - when are the times that happiness makes me cry? I think they're all inflection points and times of transition. It's change. Change makes me cry: weddings, divorces, coming-of-age narratives, funerals. Watching someone step into their own power. A child growing up. A friend, drifted away.

And maybe change makes me cry as an adult, but didn't as a kid, because every change has a bit of loss in it, even good ones. And loss changes shape as you get older.

So I don't know. Sometimes, when she asks me a complicated question, I'm able to knock it out of the park. And sometimes I flounder. I'm quite certain I did not manage to convey in any way why adults cry when they're happy sometimes. But I haven't been able to shake the question, either. And I keep coming back to: I don't know, kid, but some day maybe you can figure it out and tell me.

I love wildfire!

I should have a lot to say right now but I don't.

I made new horns for my helmet last night. They're sparkly. One pair is sparkly AND it glows in the dark. Take that, patriarchy.

OK, look. There's a lot of rape culture. We all grew up in it and we live in it, and I like to think that we do what we can to help shift our collective course in a less rapey direction, but that's a tall order and it's not easy to shift something so large. It's not easy to be 'mean'.

What I'd like us to do instead of worrying about being mean: be supportive. Figure out how to earn, deserve, and keep the trust of the people we love. Figure out how to build supportive environments full of consent and a network of support and affection. Don't tolerate mean and abusive bullshit. Have hard conversations, but also go for picnics and go skinny-dipping at Walden in the middle of the night just because it's summer and it's hot and we're alive.

We all have power, people. Let's use it to keep building this awesome world we're in.

When I was growing up, whenever I gave my (last) name to a stranger, there was a great chance that they would say, "Oh! Dr Tomlinson is my doctor" (or my mom's doctor, or etc etc), and then tell me some wonderful awesome story about him that would of course both charm and mortify me because I was 17 and I didn't really want to hear about how sweet my dad was when you had that hernia, or how he stayed for hours when your uncle was dying.

But actually this still happens. I just called a plumber to come fix a shower pipe at the cabin we still own in Maine, and the guy I was talking to on the phone said, Tomlinson? I used to have a doctor by that name, nicest guy in the world.

Usually when we're in Maine I don't hang out in Bangor - I think it's because I'm afraid of interactions like this. Afraid of what, I'm not sure - that I'll cry in public, maybe, or that I'll feel 17 again and not in that good way, or maybe just even that I don't want to confront how very much time has actually passed. But today, even though I'm now a little teary, I'm thankful that I had a big goofy dorky sweet loving dad who people still remember because all he ever really wanted to be was a comfort to people in need.

This weekend was my first time visiting Open Studios, ever. I never wandered around it before trying to exhibit, and then later I got caught up in my crazy portrait experiment. But I needed a year off. I flirted with this last year, taking an hour to go visit Vernon Street with longueur, and this year I just took the whole damn weekend. And it was great! I finally saw the Museum of Modern Renaissance, and Hilary Scott's house, and miss_chance's studio. I got ideas upon ideas, which is (oddly) what I've been missing. I'm trying to hit my art reset button. I still love portraits - but I need to do something deeper, or bigger, than what I have been doing. What? I don't know.

I'm needing to hit a lot of reset buttons, recently. I'm closer to the edge than I like to be: less generous, less flexible, less crazy. It feels like being on the cusp of a Big Change. It feels like a growth spurt looks like, when my kid goes through them. Suddenly everything is huge; tomorrow, maybe I'll be someone else. I worry, of course, that in the meantime I'm shortchanging everyone and everything: I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Thank you for being here, and listening, even when I'm hiding under a blanket, even when I'm crying in the cleaning-supplies aisle of Rite-Aid for no reason.

I went on a solo bike ride Saturday morning. This is the first time in years that I've set out on a ride just for the sake of riding. I had a course planned - just a simple 50-55 miles - and I thought, this'll be great. I can be back by noon, and I'll feel super accomplished. But after only about 10 miles, my traitorous ankles started acting up. I had to stop by the side of the road and stretch, and massage, and snack, and stretch some more, and set my sights lower. After about 14 miles, I had to stop again. More stretching, more snacking, more scaling back. In the end, it was just under 30 miles. I should be proud - a healthy ride! Hours of biking! I iced my ankles afterward and then took a nap. It was good for me - a good start. But I guess I can't ride 60 miles cold, anymore. No matter; I'll do what I can. I'll try again. I'll be good to myself, and keep trying, because I had forgotten how quiet and meditative hours-long rides can be. But: why can't I hold everything at once? There is so much, and really hardly any me at all.

What is a thing that you see as a fundamental character trait of yours that you wouldn't ever want to be without?

For me, I think it's a sense of play. No matter how much craziness there is in the world, I basically always have time for a little ridiculousness.

What's yours?

Natalie's always been a shockingly physical kid. As a baby, she wanted to be swaddled to sleep much longer than the other kids. She loves snuggles, and still would sleep on top of me like a mattress if I let her. She points and gestures, and tells stories with her body in a way I don't often see. She loves running and climbing and biking and swimming and picking up heavy things. She loves hitting the punching bag and jumping on the trampoline and being hugged so hard it hurts.

A few years ago-probably embarrassing early- I bought her some fraction blocks. You know, the kind with one block that says "1", one in two halves that says "1/2", and so on. I showed them to her, but it never took. In fact, I thought she didn't know where the blocks were anymore. But tonight, at dinner, but she wanted to make a point about math, she ran to the sewing closet, got out the fraction blocks, came back to the table, and made her point. With objects.

(I didn't know they were still in the house. She knew right where they were.)

She loves to diagram things. She loves to make mockups. She loves to build crazy shit out of the recycling.

I don't have a grand point here. I'm sure that I don't quite know how to engage with this style of learning in a perfect way, but it's pretty fun to try sometimes. Also frustrating sometimes, too- like when I want to scream AAAAGH PLEASE JUST USE SOME WORDS FOR PETE'S SAKE. But I am curious: was this you? Is it your kids? It wasn't me. I'm all words and numbers, and grew up a brain in a jar.

[edited to add: out of curiosity, I lay face down next to her at bedtime tonight, very still, and she half crawled on top of me, used my head as a pillow, and almost instantly started snoring.]

Lucid sex dreams: recommended. I'm just saying.

Natalie is in our bed, asleep. I just crawled in and she said, "Mom?... Mom? This is a cheese over banana... Zzzsnrrrksnumb *SNORE*"

A literal snore, right at the end of her sentence.

Today she and Sylvana built a time machine out of the recycling. It runs on tokens, which they also made. Except, as she explained to me, normal time machines don't work so this is an AGE machine. It changes your age, but only for an hour. It was easier to build. Alas, only kids fit inside, so it doesn't change your outside body. Just your inside one. For an hour.

Things she loves: manga, biking, going across the street to run errands at Rite-Aid, her new pierced ears, jokes about butts, snuggles, and inventing. Her comic timing is flawless. It's a problem. Today, apparently she and dilletante spent a while discussing twins, triplets, clones, and the nature of identity. She always asks the good questions.

Seven years old: I'm a big fan, I think. Best yet.

this article from mzrowan got me thinking about homework -- one of my favorite things to hate. The article details one father's attempts to do his 8th-grade daughter's homework every night for a week, and it gave me chills. 3 hours! a day!

Natalie has nightly homework, and she's in a phase of being interested in completing it, but when she stops being interested? I don't know what will happen.

Parents of older kids - how do you deal with homework? Is it too much? Everyone: WTF HOMEWORK?