Author Archives: Anna Sims Bartel

On ventriloquism

Huh?  you say.  But YES.  YAH, DAHLING (to quote that hilarious guy from Love Actually).

Ventriloquism.

Here’s why:

I’m a curser.  A big-time, all-out, catastrophic-scale potty-mouth.  It’s not my fault; it’s how I was raised.  My mother swore conversationally, peppering her stories and questions with a truly impressive level of profanity.  I am generally less extreme, thanks to my years working as an educator, but staying home with the babes has brought it all back.  I mean, of course it has, right?  What better opportunity for a good “thirty-minute cuss” (Wendell Berry, A Place on Earth) than when you’re sleep-deprived, starving, on the edge of round three of mastitis, and the person you’re holding has just puked all down your front?  Plus, you figure, they don’t say much yet, so they probably don’t understand much, so it’s pretty much free and clear.  Right?  Right?

Sure.  Until they turn verbal.  And then it all comes flooding back at you (though in lilting, lisping baby-tones that make it actually kind of adorable) and you begin to worry about social services or at least the in-laws stepping in.

These were my reflections on the plane today as I sat wedged into the aisle seat, nursing Chi nonstop while the flight attendant attempted to pass his dangling feet (or skull) which flopped into the aisle.  Ezra, of course, was too wired to sleep — has been ever since his 5-am excursion into the well-lit, third-floor-of-a-grand-staircase-at-his-aunt’s-house hallway to hunt for us, as we lay six feet away.  It’s been a long day.  But more than tired, I found myself enraged.  By anything: the rough poky spot on my airplane ginger-ale cup; the absurd commitment of the Delta desk agent to NOT give in and help us (he’s no enabler!  No sirree!); the fact that the toys we had carefully bought and hidden from the kids for airplane emergencies were in the WRONG BAG, the only one that had actually fit into the overhead compartment.  For chrissake, people, THIS is how it’s all going to be?  And then Ezra starts swatting Chi on the head and laughing loudly, obnoxiously, when I ask him to stop; and then Len tries to discipline Ezra for something else, thereby waking Chi who had finally fallen asleep on his shoulder…you know what I mean.  There was a BLUE STREAK coming out of me.  Under my breath, hopefully too low for even E to hear (especially given his demonic cackling), but WOW.

The third time all my buttons got pushed (this was all on a 1.5-hour second-leg flight, by the way), I happened to be holding a small fleecy sewn finger puppet of a parrot.  As I gritted my teeth and cursed fluently, I found myself staring through hard, unseeing eyes at the damn parrot.  Its wide-open wings gave it the air of someone making a proclamation, and just then, I thought maybe it was cursing at me.  No, I thought: maybe IT’S doing the cursing.  Maybe all this ranting is coming from the PARROT.

You see where I’m going with this?  (And no, I’m not certifiable; I’m aware I was the angry, cursing one.  But who’s going to pass up an opportunity to displace that kind of rage and verbal abuse?)  As the idea formed, I just started to laugh.  For the first time, I was external to my anger and irritation, and the cursing actually had a chance of being merely one response among many.  Not mine, of course, but the parrot’s.

So now when something ridiculous happens that makes me want to cuss intensely, I ask Len, “where’s that parrot?”  Or one of us announces: “the parrot would say: that’s a totally unacceptable crock of @&*$”.  See how well that works?  And then when you lose it anyway and holler something atrocious, you can add sheepishly, “or, that’s what the parrot said, anyway.”

The longer I run with this post, the weirder it becomes.  So I’m going to stop.  But seriously.  Consider it.  Ventriloquism has never been so fun.

On adoration

I have only a moment before I’m supposed to step onto the treadmill of this day.

But I found myself engrossed in each member of my family as we hurried them into shoes and jackets and car seats, and as I waved them down the road and turned back into the living room, I found I leapt — actually physically leapt — toward the computer to write.  The treadmill can wait.  This moment, pregnant with human beauty and the fullness of falling rain, asks for something else.

It’s been a rough two weeks of no daycare and much family time, so much, in fact, that it has become easier to lose patience and harder to find it again.  There has been a mappable increase in hollering and sarcasm as we’ve worked our way through to today.  But here we are, and the boys are off to daycare.  It feels like total freedom, though I’m entirely booked already, and therefore it feels like heavy relief to finally be able to dig into what needs work.  But these are the images I carry with me into this day:

1. Malachi, at breakfast, carefully feeding me each of his enormous blueberries with his soft, carroty, fumbling fingers.

2. Ezra, after finding his moose rain jack ALL BY HIMSELF, informing me that it has a hood, and insisting I look as he solemnly puts it up to frame his smooth elfin face and glowing hazel almond eyes.

3. Len’s pants and jacket soaked in the downpour as he brings each child in his turn to the car, hurrying against the inevitable drenching but gentle in his haste and hugeness.

It feels strange to be so thrilled at their departure and yet so reluctant to let them go.  Malachi in particular, at this sweet stage of last-babyhood, feels like a precious gift I cannot release; I want to keep him home with me alone, snuggled under the covers, nursing and playing and gazing and singing and watching his world unfold.

It seems, sometimes, this is what it all boils down to, on its best days: the whole world condenses into a mother and a child, a father and an infant, any pair of people who open themselves up to light, to rain, to each other, to adoration.

On carnage

(And for those of you from war-torn parts of the world, please understand I mean no disrespect when I use the term “carnage” in the context of these very first-world problems…but carnage it is.)

So today I learned that squirrels are nest predators.  They eat (and by eat, I mean kill, disembowel, distribute widely, and eat very little of) baby robins.  Who might be, say, nesting on my pergola under the grapevines.  Right near my deck.  Where I’m finding their dismembered bodies.  The greatest mercy here (to me) is that my sons neither found any of the carnage nor know of it; the greatest mercy I hope for (for the robins) is that they were all killed at once.  I will stop that train of thought right there.  I want you to sleep tonight.

These are the same squirrels, I might add, who in previous years would dig up tulip bulbs in order to take single bite and then leave the damaged, useless remainder right on the bench where I like to sit.  Len was once actually mooned by a squirrel (I confess, he had just been throwing walnuts at it), but that was in Iowa.  These East Coast squirrels just give you the finger and eat everything you care about.  And they all seem to have gone beserk at once: we coexist peacefully for most of the year, and then all of a sudden they kill all the baby birds AND remove a full third of the peaches, still green on the tree.  The pits are now littered across the swing set.

In other news, we have another groundhog.

Son of a #%*(^@#?!.  For real.  Those $&%#&*@$?!!s.

You want to know the really neat thing, though?  I recently turned down two adjunct teaching jobs because it’s increasingly clear that I need room to build my work.  And that’s amazing and freeing and terrifying and beautiful.  More on that later…but I’ll add here that I’ll be starting a support group for the people who are crazy enough to step off the beaten path and believe they can make their own way.  There may be drinking; there will certainly be chocolate.  Join us (online or in person) if you can.

On teaching and learning, part 2

I may have mentioned that I’m teaching a “blended” course this summer.  It meets for fifteen weeks, with seven face-to-face sessions broken up by an array of online weeks (not even online synchronous class sessions; just online assignments).

I’m pretty unhappy about this.

You see, I believe that good teaching can happen in all kinds of ways.  And I believe that there is much good to be gained from online teaching and learning, in some forms, for some people.  But the folks I know who are really gung-ho about online learning believe that the problems of education are, at bottom, problems of access, whereas I believe that they are, at bottom, problems of motivation.

I’ll use myself as an example, though it’s totally not just me.  I’ve set up assignments that are clear as day, and at least a third of the class doesn’t do them.  Not the SAME third all the time — so I know people can access the assignments and understand how to do them — but lacking (I posit) the motivation of feeling ashamed in class, they are simply willing to eat the lower grade.  That disappoints me mightily.

There are any number of factors that make the proverbial horse thirsty: desire for good grades; tendency toward people-pleasing; intellectual curiosity; fascination with the subject matter; desire to make a difference through the work; ambition for mastery; avoidance of embarrassment; refusal to rock the boat…but most of these depend in some way upon a present community of peers and authority.  If the space of the course shrinks to a faceless, mediated exchange of edited sentences, we’ve lost a great deal of the human drama that constitutes and contrives learning.  Online learning SOUNDS like it expands the dimensions of our classroom, but for me, when you take the course away from the seminar table and toss it into the ether, you’re actually shrinking the possibilities for meaningful interaction.  (With some exceptions, I’m sure…but this is a senior thesis seminar, which is a deeply traditional, scholarly exercise, and I’m just not seeing good methods for meeting these goals with these tools.)

Embedded in this complaint is another: teaching, at its best, invites transformational learning.  In a “traditional” classroom, a conversation can be pushed and pulled, ideas can be stretched and shaped, students can be challenged, comforted, confronted as need be.  They learn from each other through the whole range of interactions they participate in and witness.  I had a student nearly break down once in class because he finally realized that an argument didn’t have to mean winning and losing or shouting someone down: it could mean quietly and logically framing a position of justice and reason.  He was so relieved his whole body dropped back into his chair at the end of his tirade, and he picked up his pen, a little ashamed of his passion but eager to get back to the work that would now be transformed.  HE was transformed, as a scholar and a person. I’m just not seeing that, nor seeing how that might happen, in the online environment.

But what do you think?  What are your stories?

On unswerving support

As I may have mentioned, we’ve been having a hard time lately.  Some of that is related to the course I’m teaching (new institution; new course; new online-ness); some of that is related to giving up all my baby-free time to teaching said course; some of that is the persistent rain or the groundhog in my garden.  Some of it is entirely self-imposed, like our goofy decision to try and spruce up the kitchen, which has necessitated hours and hours of research, inquiry, decision-making.  Now I’m trying to make bigger decisions about whether and what to teach in the fall and what it would mean for my life to keep doing this adjunct thing (which, let’s face it, is not only grossly underpaid but also kind of demoralizing for the minimal engagement it offers with students and the institution).  Basically, I’m running around a headless bird.  It’s not pretty.

So here’s an email exchange I had with my beloved partner today.  I feel it illustrates some of why I’m the luckiest person in the world.

-----Original Message----- 
Sent: Tuesday, July 02, 2013 1:58 PM
To: Len Bartel
Subject: more kitchen questions

Backsplash: skip indepth backsplash and just tile all the way 
down to the counter?  By stove as well as sink wall?  will that 
show the window-height-differential less?  If we do backsplash, 
should we include sides on sink wall and stove and microwave 
wall?
These are some of today's questions.
Also: what should I do with my life?
And: why does Blackboard suck so very much?
And perhaps: will you still love me despite my having eaten 
ALL the garlic in the house for lunch?
Love,
me
PS Yes, Jessica [the countertop salesperson] has come and gone.

He replies: 

"Where to start...

I think tile down to the counter, but only on the sink 
wall (not the others, I think it might look a bit odd) - 
carrying the same line from flush with the cabinet above 
the toaster oven across to under the chicken.  It's hard 
to get a sense of what it would look like with the indepth 
backsplash in addition to the tile.  

What should you do with your life?  Write.  Blog.  Maybe 
consult. Be the fabulous mama that you are.  You're a 
fabulous writer, and schedule hasn't allowed you to give 
it the appropriate focus.  Of late, when you are most [you] 
[I had to remove a pet-name-adjective] it's when you write 
and have the mental space to be creative with the boys 
when you have them...  

I have no idea why Blackboard sucks so very much, but I'll 
support you in the accusation.

Yes, I will still love you despite eating all the garlic.

Presents [this is where he really goes bananas, since I 
forgot to even ASK what we were giving the family members 
who need birthday gifts this week]:  iTunes for AJ ($15).  
Big Allagash (need to procure - can do tomorrow before we 
go over), and maybe a small e-card to Amazon (need to procure 
will do so tonight) for BB.  Done.  And done.

You're my love"

And since I'm in an email-quoting kind of mood, here's more 
unswerving support from that quarter.

My dad writes: 
"Yes, quite right adjunct professor sucks...
only slightly better than being out on the street."  

To which I can only reply: 
"Well, there are huge variations in adjunct experiences, 
and for some of us, at some institutions, it may be much 
worse than being out on the street.  That's what I'm 
working to ascertain right now.  Seth Godin 
(marketing/strategy author I like) had a good blog post 
recently on money, reminding us that not spending is the 
same as earning, and not earning is the same as spending.  
There are many things I could do to build ways to earn 
more (but they take time) and a few things I could still 
do to spend less (those, also, take time).  The bottom line
discovery here is that teaching used to feed me, so it was 
worth various aggravations.  But the ways I'm able to do 
it these days, it's feeding me a lot less.  And that's 
worth listening to, I think."

Support in complexity.  That's about as good as it gets, folks.

On the trivialities

Lately it seems like everything is a mess.  Cases in point:

  1. Groundhog eating my garden.  Trapped; transported; released five miles from home with great exuberance (let me tell you, two small boys and a pooping groundhog in one car does not for serenity make — and have you SMELLED those things?  The groundhogs, I mean?  Phew!).  Today: I see a new groundhog over at the neighbors.  He must be new, or he’d look more road-weary.
  2. Kitchen.  It’s a disaster, but mostly in small ways.  So we figure, hey, we’ll paint the cabinets.  But then: how do you paint cabinets when you have wee folk living in the house?  You don’t.  So maybe we can hire someone to do it.  But our awesome contractor feels compelled to point out the crappy state of our counters, and that we could replace them with a nicer laminate for cheap.  She’s right.  And then, of course, we have to consider the sink, because it’s dented and buckled and you don’t pass up a chance to replace that when you replace the counters.  But then, we love a farmer’s sink, and that seems hard to do with laminate…so…granite?  No no no no. How does it come to this?  How does it always come to this?  The sense that in trying to make some small improvement, you’re opening the doors to such an impressive range of expenses, missed opportunities, and regrets?
  3. Class I’m teaching.  I was recently called “archaic” for arguing that scholarly research and thesis-writing are best taught face-to-face rather than online.  Well, okay.  Archaic it is.  But as much as I love new technologies, they cannot solve everything and sometimes they make things worse by kidding us into believing they can.  More on that in an upcoming post on teaching and learning.
  4. The strawberry fiasco.  The ONGOING strawberry fiasco.  We love the strawberries and are thrilled that they are now coming on in such volume that they occasionally make it into the house.  However, apparently they should never be allowed in the house anyway.  They are simply too ripe and too luscious for small hands to manage, especially when those small hands are trying to simultaneously push a plastic “lawn mower” around the house AND consume a very large berry.  Looks like a crime scene around here.  The kind with a victim who died slowly and managed to tour much of the house in the process.

It’s not even worth cataloguing the array of lesser offenses (potty-related; 4-am-waking related; isolation-related).  But my feelings were summed up nicely when I tried to check out books at the library and the computer told me, as gently as possible, that I had unresolved issues.  And would I please see the librarian. Honey, I wanted to say, I may need more than a librarian.  A bartender, for instance.

 

On upcycling, or whathaveyou

I’m one of those people who has a hard time getting rid of things most of the time, because I’m inclined to imagine other uses for it.  T-shirts, for example, are CERTAIN to become t-shirt yarn and then fabulous folksy rugs, except that they are all different weights and textures and none of them is a color I’m crazy about.  But I have to store them for a couple of years before I can arrive at this conclusion and give them away.  It’s an imperfect system, but I really excel at it.

So imagine my husband’s surprise when he entered the kitchen yesterday afternoon to find me packing Bonne Maman jars into a big cardboard box.  It’s our preferred jam, and we eat a lot of jam, and when we realized a few years ago that the jars were useful for everything from packing kids’ lunches to serving gin and tonic, well, we kept a few.  Ah-hem.  They overflowed the glass-cabinet, and then we started storing them on the windowsill by the food-prep area, because it was so convenient for lunch-packing.  At first it was one row, then a second on top, and then a third, in a truly precarious and often artistic display.  A few weeks ago, our boys decided to stop eating our packed lunches on the two days a week they go to daycare, preferring to eat what everyone else eats (daycare makes fresh lunches for the kids every day).  And here we are with seven thousand jars and no concrete use for them.  But then I remembered some friends who may want to borrow them for glasses at their August wedding on the coast, and then I got to thinking about everything else you can do with them.  So here’s my list.  Pinterest style.  Be inspired.  Or entirely turned off this blog.  It’s up to you.

A whole bunch of things you can do with Bonne Maman jam jars:

  1. Drink out of them (preferably clear, icy drinks with lemon twists or olives).
  2. Store smoothies in them (remove cap; drink).
  3. Put frozen veg or fruit in them to thaw for kid-sized snacks at home or on the go.
  4. Pack lunches in them (pesto-pasta in one; cut-up chicken in another; peas in another).
  5. Use as votive-holders with glass beads, pebbles, or sand in the bottom.
  6. Use for terrarium: add moss, sticks, wee ferns.  Occasional plastic animals may find their way in as well.
  7. Use for aquarium: add rocks, water, and a small plastic sea-turtle.
  8. Catch spiders or fireflies or other cool creatures.  Examine at leisure and then release.
  9. Fill partway with soapy water and use as receptacle for Japanese Beetles, Tomato Hornworms, or other interesting-to-look-at but utterly unwanted garden guests.
  10. Use for vases, especially for simple, short, matching arrangements of daisies, for example.
  11. Use as centerpieces filled with small fruits.
  12. Fill partway with glass beads and water; rest an avocado seed halfway in the water.  Wait a few months and it’ll sprout.
  13. Use to organize office supplies; craft materials; small children’s toys; crayons; hair clips; coins.
  14. Wire them around the edges and hang them as vases or candle-holders.
  15. Use to store dried herbs or other non-perishable household items.
  16. Use to freeze pesto, if you make it in large batches; one jar, 2/3 full, is just right for our standard box of pasta.
  17. Use to freeze breastmilk.  I kid you not.  Those Medela bottles are pricey and this works just as well.
  18. Use in place of Tupperware for storing leftovers, making more room in your fridge.
  19. Make a sewing kit for a gift or for your own house.
  20. Make cocoa-mix gifts.  Or small Halloween candy jars.  Or layered soup mixes.

Or, as my husband points out, you could conceivably just recycle them.  If you were cold of heart and dead of spirit.

On the challenge of being yourself

If you’ve never watched the movie “Center Stage,” you should.  It’s cheesy and beautiful and uplifting and all the right people get what they deserve.  It’s a dance movie that functions perfectly as a metaphor for life: dance the dance you have inside you, with all the effort and discipline you can muster.  And recognize when you’re trying to dance a dance that’s not your own.  And of course, roses and standing ovations follow immediately when you have the wisdom to be yourself.

But here’s where I’d add a few things: it’s not just about wisdom.  It’s just as much about opportunity, and foresight, and connections, and plain old good luck.  It’s about having sufficient freedom from constraints that you can actually DO the kinds of movement your own self demands.  And for most of us, absent full-time child-care and a perennially healthy bank balance, we just don’t get that freedom.  So what do we do?

I hate that all the best answers seem to revolve around “patience” and “self-love” and being “mindful.”  We need an Action Plan.  A Career-Planning Mom action figure.  She’d be a myth, like all the other super-heroes, but she’d have her s*#t together.  Perhaps I need a costume.

On survival, of a sort

I’ve been tired a lot today, and I was trying to decide why.  Was it:

a) the three days I’ve been solo-parenting two sick kids?

b) the inordinate amounts of prep I’m trying to squeeze in for this new course I’m teaching?

c) the fact that I, too, am probably coming down with this obnoxious cold?

d) my anxiety about my elder son’s imminent surgery finally coming home to roost?

or e) the fact that Len is back in the state and therefore my systemic adrenaline levels are dropping as I anticipate succor and rest?

Yeah, all of the above.  Nothing dramatic here, just ordinary life, but boy can it wail on you when it wants to.

Today featured some fabulous new snot-stains on the couch; a respectable number of poops in the potty, much admired by all and handled by none; an over-the-shoulder broccoli-tossing event at dinner; two miserable, overtired boys who refused to sit in the tub and were instead rinsed as they stood sobbing, huddled together.  There was one hearty shove onto the tiled floor; one mighty swat to the face (resulting in glasses needing repair before future wearing); a wide range of kicking-type strategies implemented with varying degrees of subtlety.  There was a whole lot of nursing; some experimentation with cheap plastic lacrosse sets; one illicit sprint across a newly-refinished deck.  There were many conversations with a contractor: why does yellow, even a yellow I love, make me feel oppressed in my kitchen?  It’s like forced cheerfulness.  Screw that.  There was one conversation with a pre-school teacher: it’s not just at home that E sets EVERY ANIMAL IN

Animals on the move. As usual.

Animals on the move. As usual.

THE ROOM in a massive herd, facing the same direction, like some kind of exodus.  We all chuckle and reflect upon the fine line between obsessive tendency and full-blown neurosis.  There was one article proposal accepted; one complex childcare-during-brother’s-surgery strategy worked out; many bills paid.  Non-stop nose-wiping.  It was, in short, a day.

And how was yours?

On (not) seeing ourselves

A friend of mine who is six months pregnant just posted on Facebook that after days of running around in sweats and not showering, she kind of forgot she was pregnant.  But once she got glammed up again, and into regular maternity clothes, she was reminded.  (I know, I know; she’s CLEARLY in the blissful second-trimester-so-not-everything-hurts-yet stage.  We honor her by not pointing this out in reply.)

And I was just thinking today, while strolling down the lawn with a son’s hand in each of mine, that my favorite thing about having kids (at least my kids, at least on a happy sunny afternoon) is how totally ME they make me feel.  With them, I am funny; I am loved; I am wanted — regardless of how I might actually look. In fact, I am often surprised to emerge from some enjoyable interaction with my family, where I’m feeling smart and engaging and magnetic, and wander past a mirror.  Good heavens — who is that wrinkled frump with the atrocious bedhead?

I suppose there’s a pretty obvious down-side to this phenomenon, but mostly I just love it.  I mean, as an American woman, I’ve spent most of my life a little unhappy about how I look.  (I say “a little” because I’m one of the lucky ones — my genes tend toward slimness, in what I hope is a decent tradeoff for the cancer and alcoholism that they also seem eager to share.)  Forgetting how we look to others is one of the great pleasures of life AND one of the great signs we’re living well.

The all-girls summer camp I went to and worked at had very few mirrors, and I remember being startled, sometimes, that I HAD a face and a body.  My time was spent making friends, making things, learning skills; my body was always running and swimming, canoeing and hiking, singing and dancing.  I was an energy, a personality embedded in a physical competence that was always stretching; I relied on that body for what it could DO for me, not for what it looked like.  I still love watching women athletes at their sport, because it’s one of the only times we get to see female bodies in peak form, carried with a sense of expertise and comfort rather than self-consciousness.

And of course all this shifts somewhat once we have babies (IF we have babies; the same argument applies to the general process of living on the planet, too) — the sags and the bags, the wrinkles, the stretch marks.  But it’s like that meme I saw one time: these aren’t stretch marks.  You’re a tiger, baby, and you’ve earned your stripes.  (Yes, I’d copy the meme here except I’m unclear about meme copyright AND the belly pictured doesn’t look quite like mine…)  There are myriad reasons our bodies are even more amazing now that they’ve grown and nourished little lives.  But what’s even cooler to me is this: forget about how our bodies look.  Just forget about it.  They do the hard and constant work of feeding, cleaning, sharing, amusing, and teaching our people.  They are where we need to be, and let’s hope it’s comfortable there.  We do what we can to take care of our bodies, but our focus is on our intelligence, our compassion, our creativity, our patience.  The joy of building.  The sacredness of what we’ve built.  And it’s absolutely delightful that we are often invisible to ourselves precisely because we’re too busy living all that beauty.