Read chapter 1.
2 Rumors • How Will We Eat?
Today my younger daughter Sonia is in need of direction, and despite wanting to be alone with my thoughts and my writing, I remind myself: I signed on for this when we decided to home educate our girls. I signed on for the questions, the need for suggestions, the challenges to my own creativity that have just now made me think to put my daughter on the porch with Julia Kasdorf.
Sonia’s cursive book is nowhere to be found. Where do these things go when I’m not looking? It could make me crazy if I let it. Maybe that’s why, in the absence of the cursive book, I give her a pencil, a notebook, and Kasdorf’s poem, “When Our Women Go Crazy.”
“Copy this in cursive,” I say.
“I can’t do z’s,” she says back.
My heart-rate quickens, and I blink hard. I signed on for this. I signed on for this. I take her pencil and write the whole alphabet in cursive.
“Your f and your b look the same,” she observes.
When our women go crazy, says Julia’s poem, they keep asking… how will we eat? Who will cook? Will there be enough? The refrigerators of these crazy women are always immaculate and full, just as when these women are sane.
Who are these women? I am not like them. Sane or crazy, my refrigerator is always doing science experiments that involve organic vegetables trying to go back to their roots. Some of these vegetables even sprout roots before they become primordial soup fit for the compost pile.
I am not like these women. Or maybe I am. How will I write? Who will cook up fresh ideas? Will there be enough? I try to stack the day in my direction, make it immaculate and full.
“Do you like my poem?” Sonia comes in the back door and presses her notebook into my hands. “I’m hungry,” she says, then frowns about the frying pan being dirty, because she wants to make an egg. I do not remind her that the pan is dirty because she made an egg yesterday and neglected to clean up.
In the hands of my younger daughter, Julia’s poem has taken on a new shape. Most of the original line breaks are gone. Now the poem breaks where the page ends and it takes up a lot more space. Plurals have become singular. There are crossouts and inverted “add this here” carats where words were forgotten then later added in. Sane has become something like rain, spelled “sain.”
Every piece of writing tries to go back to its roots. I should know this by now— so many essays under the bridge; three books, each of which I eventually fought the same identity battle with. A piece of writing knows what it wants and needs to be, but we get in the way. We want something serious to be funny, because we notice that funny writers are popular. We can write funny, we want to be popular, so we try to foist humor upon the work. It refuses. We want to be urbane; our writing wants to live in the country. We want a three-hundred page treatise; our words want to be a brief offering on the subject. We want to write sophistication; the work reminds us, “You are currently living a life of dirty frying pans and letter f’s that look like b’s.”
Sonia reshaped the Kasdorf poem without thinking. Her essential self bubbled up to the top. I don’t think she struggled with this.
So now I am musing. I should spell sane like sain too. Let the unrestrained rain imbue my writing. Let the me-I-am-right-now simply be.
As always,
L.L.
This is resonating so deeply with me! I am currently wrestling with the blessings and frustrations of education my children at home. So many questions and good conversations. So many dishes!
I LOVE THIS roadmap!
To daily be this ardent and real—fluent in our reportage, brave enough to engage the pain-laced questions, stubborn enough (or is it, yielded enough?) to write toward a deeper patience, mustering hunger and hope, grit and charm . . .