Glass Half Full
Me, tonight, to B: “You know, if I got offered some editing work in the next few weeks, I think I’d take it. It would be nice to make some extra dough. It might be stressy for a bit around here if I was working a lot more, but no big deal.”
B, wryly: “Yeah, how much more stressy could it really get?”
I had a good belly laugh about that one.
Sure, life could get a lot more stressy (have I mentioned I love slang? That I adore words like “spendy” and “janky” and “stressy”?), but resolved am I to be more positive.
Some people are very clearly optimists. My mother in law, for example, can look down the face of climate change, recession, and world tragedy and declare it a really exciting time to be alive, because the world is in great turmoil and it will be fascinating to see what happens in the next twenty years (!). My dad, on the other hand, can order the wrong thing at lunch and be bummed out about it for the rest of the day (!). I find that I waffle pretty reliably between optimism and pessimism. Small things tend to really get me down (I have a lot of my dad in me), and on the other hand, I am sometimes capable of impressive grace and positivity. When my brother’s wife left him, for example, my mom told me I was a “rock.” I felt like one. I took my brother out to get drunk and wander around North Beach, then I called my parents and assured them he was going to be alright. (Then I let him sleep on my couch for three weeks, and phoned my parents with updates until everyone felt a little better.) The whole rotten experience made me really grow. It was nice to be needed in that way by my family, especially as, a), I come from one of those families where, knock on wood, things don’t fall apart too spectacularly that much; and, b), my parents tend to really be the rocks for their kids and sometime, you just gotta repay that favor.
Over the weekend my mom sent me a video by a guy we know who has cancer. This man has always been one of those extremely full-of-life, happy-go-lucky guys, and he got hit with a real doozie: metastasized esophageal cancer. Man, this video was uplifting. He details all the treatments he’s undergoing, traditional ones like chemo and non-traditional ones like acupuncture, Chinese herbs, qigong, and a macrobiotic diet. He’s talking about everything very cheerfully and calmly–much more calm than I knew him to be–but with this wisdom, just this wisdom. And then he says, “you know, this is really a spiritual journey.” His grace moved me so much. To look at your own possible death and see a spiritual journey? That’s extreme optimism. I hope I would have the strength.
I think sometimes, lately, I have been falling too heavily in the pessimist camp. It’s not that I’m ungrateful for what I have, or that I don’t see my extreme luckiness in the scheme of things. I do. I am grateful for so many things: my health, my family, my job, my home, being a mother–and having an incredible community of friends, good childcare, Netflix, a hook-up for some great wine at low prices, a bike with a seat for L, good books, good food, a future wonderful sister-in-law for my wonderful brother, oh and a brand new nephew–not their kid!–but I also think I feel things deeply. I always have, and since having a child I’ve felt in some ways opened right up, to more joy and to more heartache. I find myself crying when I listen to NPR or B looks at me the wrong way, or the right way. Then two second later I’m laughing. I’m a maniac. And like this blog post–what the hell is it really even about? Oh right, it’s about how I’ve been worrying, dear readers, that I sound like sour grapes all the time.
And it’s about this. A very small thing. About eight feet long by three feet wide. It’s not, yet, very fecund or impressive. It does not make me weep or shout with joy. But it has made me want to get up in the morning to see what’s new. And when we get off the bike after daycare or coming home from the playground, L and I go to see what we’ve missed, which creatures have come to threaten it, which ones we’ve staved off, and which tiny little sprouts are starting to push their way up.
Two weekends ago we took an old flower bed and excavated it. B handily sawed some boards and dug them in. We added compost and fertilizer and tilled it all, and planted cooking greens (collards and Chinese broccoli, to go with the chard and dino kale already there); lettuces (mache, red leaf, baby romaine); and seeds for green onions, two kinds of carrots, and some beets. This adds to our volunteer parsley, the huge bush of rosemary and oregano, some arugula, some thyme, and some mint.
It’s my garden.
Cookin' greens.
The lettuces.
My sweet ranunculus.
I'm working from the premise that motherhood is not just all diapers, tantrums, and setting limits. It's interesting. Okay, sometimes. 