Author: Bethany

12May

Giggling Over Spilled Milk

(Yesterday morning)
Natalie, marching into my room with a gift bag: “Here’s your surprise, Mommy! It’s a necklace! A really pretty necklace! I got it for you, Mommy! Here!”

(This morning)
Me: “Natalie! WHY did you just spit out that mouthful of milk?!?!”
Natalie: …
Me: “WHY?!?!?!?!”
Natalie: …
Me: “Answer me, Natalie!”
Natalie: “Well… I’m kinda cute!”
Me: …
Natalie: “AND I love you!!!”

My three-year-old has two life purposes: 1) To create unnatural disasters, especially in rooms I just finished cleaning, and 2) To remind us how fabulous she is. She sings and skips and spills and strews, and just when I start to think that Jim Carrey would make a less frustrating child than mine, she charms me into giggles.

Dance party 3

Because, of course, she is kinda cute.

My scrumptious sugar-topped babyroll of a six-month-old has developed the following opinions:
– Milk is for wusses
– Crawling is for wusses
– Being little? Is for wusses

So she runs around the house in her walker, dribbling cereal on her 18-month outfits and shrieking for joy. Sophie already flaunts a mischievous streak and shares snickering secrets with her big sister, and I’m learning every day to relinquish her babyness in lieu of her adorable personness.

Mommy, Sophie, and spit-uppy leg

And also to snack on those luscious cheeks whenever possible.

I celebrate Mother’s Day not for the recognition or for the jewelry (though the necklace is superb) but for the two beautiful, loving, vivacious little girls who make mommyhood worth every drop of spilled milk.

Shoes!

7May

Pulitzer by December

Last year, whenever a new acquaintance asked what I did, I would reply, “Oh, nothing right now.” Or, if I felt the need to impress, “I used to teach English; I’m just on a break.” The truth, however, was that I was writing whenever I could–an hour here, two there, an illicit midday rendezvous with Starbucks–but I didn’t want anyone to know. I didn’t feel like I could call myself a writer before getting published. Plus, if people knew I was working on a story, they would expect me to… you know, finish it.

Right after we moved to Italy, however, we were invited to a dinner party where Dan let it slip that I love to write. “Oh, wow!” everyone exclaimed (in Italian, of course). “That’s wonderful! What have you written? Who are you writing for? What kinds of things do you like to write?”

“Uhhhhhhh…” I replied eloquently.

The moral of that charming anecdote is this: If you want to be motivated to finish those stories gathering megabytes of dust in your “Unfinished” folder, tell a group of Italians that you’re a writer. They will 1) cheer you on with infectious enthusiasm, and 2) ask you about your projects so often that you end up finishing if only to feel less like an international loser.

This afternoon, I finally submitted a story for possible publication. Initially, I freaked out a little, but once I calmed down, I was able to FREAK OUT A LOT. Sending that manuscript felt like packing my snackable little Sophie into a basket with a red bow on top and leaving her in the middle of Cannibals ‘R’ Us.

(See?
Delicious toes Definitely edible.)

However, I’m completely enthralled by the fact that I took my first step into a world I want to inhabit. My story may not be accepted, but I’m okay with that (stop laughing, Dan); I’ll send it somewhere else. What makes the most difference to me right now is that I, a notorious procrastinator and fraidy-cat, finished something. I didn’t know I had that final “oomph” in me, and now that I do, I’m seeing possibilities pop out of the woodwork on all sides. My next story goes out a week from tomorrow (I finished the rough draft today, ::happy dance::), and then, who knows? A Pulitzer by December?*

I’ll be spending the rest of my day scattered in giddy pieces all over the rug. Please feel free to join me!


* Of 2052?

5May

Two-Minute Increment

Announcement: I’m still here.

I’ve been busy lately for reasons that still elude me, rifling through each day for the scraps of what’s most important. Uneventful busyness, I guess you could say. Every single minute has been an exercise in prioritization, and the mental weighing and justifying and second-guessing gets exhausting after awhile.

I adore writing, but it’s hard work–writing for publication, that is–and requires rich, intense blocks of my day. I also adore my girls, but they are both at ages brimming with needs: milk, structure, emergency bubble baths, story time, conversation, potty training, undivided attention, tickle attacks. Housework… well, I don’t adore, but a clean, welcoming home is essential to our survival around here. I love my husband like crazy, but it’s difficult finding our connection through all the pesky details of work and parenting, entertaining guests and early-onset bedtime. I have paints waiting in a giant pink bin under my bed and brand new music recording software I’m itching to try out and winterbaby flab to burn off and an entire language to finish learning already and always more and more wonderful, prismatic bits of life I want to hold onto with all my might… but I come in two-minute increments these days, and assorted parts do not equal a whole.

Do you ever find yourself hopelessly scattered and thinking that maybe the best present in the whole wide world would be a multi-pack of undivided time?

28Apr

Shouting in a Meadow

Writing publicly about religion makes me cringe. And hit delete buttons. And back s-l-o-w-l-y away from the computer as if the Inquisition itself were making a digital comeback with online dudgeons and high resolution torture devices and glinty-eyed execution-bloggers.

So I can be a tad dramatic. However, I’m starting to realize how much I still censor my thoughts to stay away from explosive topics like U.S. economy and home schooling and Ashlee Simpson and, of course, religion. I know that whatever my thoughts on the subject, I am sure to offend someone, and the prospect makes my insides wilt.

The thing is, though–I still don’t really know my thoughts on religion. I wrote a while back about the immense loneliness and confusion of finding I don’t like God. Now that I’ve had some time to marinate in that concept, I realize that what I actually dislike is my view of him. The portrait of God in my head is painted primarily in crap, and I was exhausted of sifting through it for the occasional fleck of real color.

Back in January, I indulged my inner heathen and scribbled the following during church (because that’s how I roll, yo), but didn’t show it the light of day for fear of Inquisition, etc. Now, though, I find it incredibly important:

 I can’t hide nearly as well in a tiny church. In this child-sized room, loosely populated by friends and hardly anyone else, I find I’ve lost my invisibility. I can’t fade comfortably into the woodwork. I can’t ignore the voice of reality in my head: “You’re a fraud, you’re a fraud, you’re a fraud”–sing-song, like those infuriatingly perfect Disney princesses.

I feel so out of place sitting in church with my overflowing suitcases of questions. Baggage doesn’t belong here. I don’t belong here. I know where I want to be though: an enormous open meadow, fiercely guarded on all sides by mountains, muffled by waterfalls and wind and the complete absence of other humans. I would SHOUT! my questions, all of them, as loudly as my lungs would let me. And God would be right there. He would answer and put my heart back in place and be real to me again.

Where am I supposed to find God in my claustrophobic world where life is whatever fits between walls and ceilings and floors? My questions are too big for home, for church. They are certainly too big for other people, and I’m floundering under the belief that they’re too big for me.

And then I filled pages with those questions–deep, aching ones that I had to rip out and lay bleeding on the paper.

Since then, not a single question has been answered. However, I’ve been able to step back and see the dung-smeared portrait and survey the multitudes* of people with their widely differing ideas that they call “doctrine” and “truth” even though they’re really just interpretations.

When I first read Brian McLaren’s A New Kind of Christian several years ago, I remember feeling like a huge weight was lifted–that weight being the dogmatic rightness of traditional American churches. McLaren proposed that the church’s tactics were outdated and irrelevant to today’s people. Duh, I know. But it was a revolutionary idea to me at the time, and I lost approximately 300 pounds the moment I accepted that church was not the same thing as religion.

Then I read Donald Miller and John & Stasi Eldredge and Eugene Peterson and went down 15 emotional dress sizes and started smiling when I thought about Christianity… the real thing, not the big-haired pastor kind. But I still have a LOT of pre-conceptions to sort through. I mean, I was practically brainwashed into a certain brand of religion as a kid, and it’s not easy figuring out which of those teachings–if any–have merit.

(Note: Here comes the part with the cringing and the wilting and the slowly dislocating of very important limbs on an html rack.)

Maybe this is common knowledge to most people, but I was in college before I learned that the Bible–militantly defended as a sacred text–is just a compendium of stories and letters and historical records compiled by various groups of men, copied, lost, translated, retranslated, reretranslated, and printed off for people to make of it what they will. The Bible covers thousands of years and many different cultures, yet religious leaders pull out certain lines and call them “precepts.” Mennonites with head coverings? Christians who won’t eat pork? Churches that don’t allow female teachers? All bits and pieces pulled from ancient cultural laws and applied to now.

I’m not saying the Bible isn’t important, though its history does raise a lot of difficult questions for me. I just wonder when church-goers stopped reading the book of Matthew: “You all have a single Teacher, and you are all classmates. Don’t set people up as experts over your life, letting them tell you what to do. Save that authority for God; let him tell you what to do.”(23:8-10, The Message) Self-proclaimed religious experts threaten dire consequences for veering from their explanations of “truth.” They warn against any spiritual search outside of the Bible (just mention yoga to a group of Southern Baptists, and watch the paranoia about “New Age” practices; seriously, you’d think yoga involved slaughtering kittens at midnight over a bubbling cauldron of fermented demon juice). They loudly condemn people with different beliefs to a future more horrifying than death. They set up a hierarchy of sins (homosexuality! abortion!) and prescribe rituals for holding onto salvation (morning devotionals! prayer before meals!).

I feel the wind knocked out of me just typing this paltry list. The aggressive application of “doctrine” does nothing to alleviate my soul-thirst. What does refresh me is art. Creativity. Beautiful movies, beautiful music, beautiful books. The great outdoors. Talking to people with giant hearts. Random acts of kindness. Intimate discussions with small groups of friends. Quiet. Sometimes the deliberate peace of Buddhism, sometimes the grandeur of Catholicism, sometimes the passionate worship of Pentacostals, but usually no organized religion at all.

Sometime, I hope to be able to add the Bible to the list of things that fulfill me spiritually. I just need to get further away from the cultural classification of God so I can read each “book” as it was meant to be read at the time and take my own truth from the words.

I just deleted that last line and retyped it a thousand times, by the way, because I’m a scaredy-pants. I know the pastors of my childhood would accuse me of “relativity” and “denying the truth,” and my pants are most definitely scared. But I’m trying to stay real and honest because those rusty hinges in my head are creaking open, and I want others to see the wide, untamed meadows beyond the gates of traditional Christianity–meadows with room for dancing wind and wildflowers and the hard
est questions coiled inside.


* Bonus point for using a Biblical term!!

23Apr

Afghan of Exhaustion

It’s 9:55 a.m., and I’m sitting at the breakfast table alone with a poorly-made cappuccino. I was too tired this morning to go for a walk before The Hubby left for work, too tired even to have breakfast with my family. It’s a mystery, this tiredness, sneaking around like a cat burglar and stealing a moment here, a good intention there. I eat, I sleep, I exercise, I take ridiculously expensive vitamins, and I’m. still. exhausted. all. the. time. I mean, I’m thisclose to narcolepsy. Really.

Days like this, I feel a bit like a science experiment gone wrong. Some absent-minded professor mixed the blue potion with the red potion, and now I’m fizzing over and shooting purple smoke and growing limbs and speaking in tongues when all I really want to do is bubble quietly in my beaker.

I have a writing deadline coming up (oo, so official am I!) that would be making me spasm with giddy excitement were I not draped over the furniture like an afghan of exhaustion.* I have a lovely start and a lovely end and lots of lovely intentions for the middle, but I’m having trouble peeling my face off the pillow long enough to write a complete sentence these days. Maybe I should just scrap the lovely intentions and write, “At this point, Mr. and Mrs. Sneeth took a nap. A very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, long nap.”**

The tiredness is also presenting problems with the girls. Have you ever tried to make a three-year-old female comply with your No Talking Before Ten Policy? See, when I wake up in the morning, I need an adrenaline shot, a second adrenaline shot, and a team of coffee-buzzed weight lifters with crowbars just to help pry my eyes open. You could say I’m not a morning person. Natalie, on the other hand, wakes up exploding from all the exciting things she didn’t get to tell us during the night. Like, “Mommy! Hey, MOMMY! Good MORNING! Get up! HI! I have something to TELL YOU! I have EARS! And EYES! And… something else! Ummmmmm? Oh, a MOUTH! AND IT’S TALKING! See my buttylunten? [lifting up her shirt] It’s still GROWING! Hey, wanna play with me? I want Fruit Lips for breakfast! I mean Fruit LOOPS! Fruit Loops have all the colors! See? SEE? See all the really, really, really colors? That one is ORANGE! The orange Fruit Loop is a really, really COLOR! SEE? And see all the other colors? Oh my goodness. I really, REALLY like Fruit Loops! AAAAAA!!!!” I, meanwhile, am writhing in pain and groping around the bed for a mute button and begging Sophie to bring me an espresso IV stat.

Any suggestions on how to get my energy back? Because right now, I’m as productive as a dead fish. (Well, maybe not quite dead, but definitely in critical condition.) Natalie would appreciate being allowed to talk again, and the baby would like to be taken off housecleaning duty, and more than anything, I would love to feel like a normal person again. You know, awake.


* I really, sincerely apologize for all these similes and metaphors and metaphoric similes and phrases like “afghan of exhaustion.” I can’t help it. I’ve been limiting descriptive comparisons in the Very Official Thing I’m Writing, and the similes have to come out SOMEWHERE.

** The piece doesn’t actually have anything to do with Mr. or Mrs. Sneeth, but! I can see a future for this idea–maybe a short story called “The Grotesquely Long Nap: A Bedtime Story Guaranteed to Put You to Sleep.” Enticing, no?***

*** No.

21Apr

Public Service Announcement

This is a public service announcement:
Mortification Monday is on temporary hiatus while I hook up to a coffee IV and pound out meaningful and inspired art 24/7 finish A Project. Blogging may be sparse for the next few weeks, but don’t worry; I’ll still be lurking in the fringes of the internet, popping in from time to time to shake off the coffee jitters. In the meantime…

What we Bassetts do when dinner guests are late:

PARTY!

18Apr

The Importance of Disastercake

Have you ever dipped your hands into a bag of cake flour? (It is impossibly soft, like fluffed air.) Have you listened to the crackle of fresh bread crust? Smelled a spicy fruitcake bubbling in the oven? Seen the rich gloss of a half-melted chocolate chip? Tasted raw brownie batter? (Of course you’ve done that, with brownie batter being its own FDA-recommended food group and all.)

This is why I love baking: It provides unexpected treasures for all the senses. It is a whole-body experience, with love and delicacy and intuition being every bit as important as the baking powder*. I’m still learning the ins and outs, of course. In all my years of baking, I’ve only recently discovered that you can’t leave cream of tartar out of a recipe just because you don’t know what it is (though I’m not sure anyone really does). After 6,729 burnt candy bars, I’ve finally found the secret to melting chocolate**. And since moving to Italy, I’ve learned about baking’s greatest aphrodisiac: parchment paper. As long as your pan is lined with a buttered layer of paper, not even your Aunt Millie’s notorious Caramelized Rubber Cement Bars would stick.

Like any skill, the ability to bake comes through trial and error. (And error, and error.) For me, this little domestic pleasure has been worth every lumpy biscuit and soupy disastercake; however, I have trouble explaining why baking means so much to me. Maybe it’s because sending a plate of lemon bars to The Hubby’s office can brighten his coworkers’ entire day. Maybe it’s because I subconsciously want to be a Colonial housewife***, with my kitchen the warm and lively center of my home. Maybe it’s because baking is a tangibly creative endeavor, as if I were a composer and these were my masterpieces. Rhapsody in apple-cinnamon. Vanilla bean minuet. Opus n. 87 with a dark chocolate ganache.

Or maybe it’s just because a bag of flour costs 40 times less than a manicure.

*Which, just for reference, is rather important.

** It’s called a microwave.

***Hoopskirts! Embroidery! Taxation without representation!

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