What’s Missing, What’s Here: On The Eve of My Book’s Birth Day

I seem to be living in a spiral-shaped sea shell these days. Harper turned four on Monday. Ollie will be two in a few weeks. And this Tuesday, April 2nd, a few days after the kids’ birthday party with all its balloons and frosting, my book officially comes out. The Mermaid of Brooklyn is about a mother with two kids, two years apart, like mine, but I started writing it when Harper was just a few months old, one day after a visit to the swingset, with her asleep in the carrier on my chest. I was thinking about my great-grandmother and rusalkis and the weird culture of Brooklyn parenting more than my actual parenting experiences, although of course it all gets mixed in together. And on Tuesday, my book launch will be at Powerhouse on 8th, the new bookstore in the building I lived in when I wrote the book. 2 kids, 4 years, and a move later: the book.

Of course I’m so excited and thankful. But also: confused.

Thanks to Jenna Blum for my very own milk carton!

Due to ongoing contract disputes between my publishers and Barnes & Noble, it’s very unlikely anyone will be able to find my book at a B&N store. In many parts of the country, that’s the only place to go and stroll about and discover a new book. I know my suburban Chicago B&N outlet was where I went on weeknights as a teenager to drink cinnamon-plum tea and read philosophy texts and women’s magazines (yes, at the same time) with my best friend and browse around in the quiet store at 8 pm and happen upon some book on a table I never would have heard of otherwise — and I feel like B&N should remember this, and care. I guess what I’m saying is, I really love B&N. I love my indies, and always support them, but when I was growing up in the suburbs, B&N was a sanctuary of sorts for me. And I have been so happy with Simon & Schuster and everyone at my division, Touchstone, and all their support of my book, and I get that both sides have their reasons. I know. It’s not personal.

What replaced my neighborhood Barnes & Noble.

But then, also, an unexpectedly nice thing has happened, because of all this B&N business: S&S authors, all (coincidence?) female novelists, have banded together to try to get our books on the radar.  M.J. Rose, Jenna Blum, Randy Susan Meyers – these are authors I have only known from afar, who are doing what I aspire to — writing smart books about women’s lives that readers obsessively love — and yet suddenly we’re all tweeting each other all the time. I feel this solidarity with other writers whose books are coming out into this mess, like we are all book-sisters (and not just competing for the seven spots for reviews left in the country). And there’s something really, really nice about that. I would post all their book covers here but I still have a lot of laundry to fold. So go here, and check out these wonderful books!

I once read an interview with an author whose debut novel had been largely ignored. When asked how he felt about the book’s reception he said something like, “You know, my wife and I just had our first baby, and that is a very good distraction, and puts everything else into perspective.” I loved this. I’ve found balancing writerhood and mothership to be challenging. It’s hard to find the time and focus and energy to write, even if, maybe especially if, you’re writing ABOUT motherhood. But I’ve also the combination to be a nourishing one.

Take today: I could have spent the day obsessing about my book and what will or won’t happen with it, but I was too busy having an adventure on the subway and a raucous playdate and making Charlie & Lola decorations for the birthday party. Ollie played in an afternoon sunbeam, swiping his hand at the glowing dust motes, laughing hysterically. Harper told me she was having a hard time deciding whether to be a doctor or a teacher. At bedtime, the kids cuddled up and Harper read Ollie his favorite books, and he propped his fat little cheek in his fat little hand to listen intently, and I almost cried, and that was all that really mattered about today. I’m lucky, lucky, lucky and I know it. I would of course like to be a lucky, lucky, lucky author with books in B&N but whatever, I’ll take what I can get.

And so:

If you live in New York City, please join me at one of my readings! Wine and bunny crackers, obviously, will be served.

If you don’t, please go into your local Barnes & Noble and with a very puzzled look on your face, ask where oh where is that great Mermaid of Brooklyn book you’ve been hearing so much about could be.

And finally, if you can identify the provenance of the bookstore pictured above, feel a moment of in-on-the-joke pride. Go on, really enjoy it. Then, tell me in the comments (but don’t Google it, you dirty cheater)and if you’re the first one to do so (and you are not my husband) I’ll send you a book!

The Black Apple, always awesome.

The Next Big Thing Book Blog Meme!

Write like a motherfucker.

I have dropped so many balls lately, that with every step I take I’m essentially wading through one of those ball pits that children like to contract smallpox in at overachieving birthday parties. But here was a fun thing I was supposed to do that got lost in the wild week of kids, more work than usual, a freelance article, book business, playschool drama, and even a co-op building meeting: THE NEXT BIG THING MEME, yay! Thanks to the lovely Kate Hopper for tagging me!

What is the title of your book?

The Mermaid of Brooklyn

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

A stressed-out Park Slope mother recovers her sense of purpose in life with the help of a mermaid.

What genre does your book fall under?

Fiction. (I almost wrote Women’s Fiction, but then I was like, nah, fuck that.)

Where did the idea come from for the book?

The inspiration was threefold: 1) a bit of family lore about how a pair of shoes saved my great-grandmother’s life, which I heard at a time when 2) I was reading about the powerful, seductive, mysterious rusalkas (aka mermaids)of Slavic folklore. The connection between these aspects marinated for a bit and then 3) I found myself becoming a stay-at-home mother to a baby, in the ever-fascinating parenting culture of Park Slope, Brooklyn. And voila: The Mermaid of Brooklyn was born.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

About two years.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

A mother at the playground had read some books pitched toward young urban mothers that she found annoying, and she said, “I just want someone to write a book for moms like me.”

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

I have a literary agent who did the businessy magic of selling the book to Touchstone/Simon & Schuster (US) and Pan Macmillan (UK).

What other works would you compare this book to within your genre?

It’s possible that comparisons with Amy Sohn, the grand mistress of Park Slope parent fiction, are forthcoming, but I’ve actually never read her books so I’m not sure how alike we really are. Our names sure are similar though! But I’d say readers who liked Peter Hedges’ Brooklyn-y The Heights, Lorrie Moore’s funny-sad mediation on motherhood The Gate at the Top of the Stairs, Maria Semple’s funny-sad mediation on motherhood Where’d You Go, Bernadette?  and/or stories with a hint of the surreal in them, like The Time-Traveler’s Wife, or Alice Hoffman’s novels, will, I’d hope, like my book too.

What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?

Oh man. I hate to boss around my readers, who should cast their own MofB movie however they like. But since you asked, my main character, Jenny, I see as a 2010 Zooey Deschanel. (She’s gotten a little too glamorous lately, but you get what I mean.) And my husband will definitely give me shit for this, but I always thought of Cute Dad as being played by Paul Schneider, on whom I have an undignified crush.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

Reading it will make you instantly happier, richer, ambidextrous, and able to do 20 sit-ups.

Just in case it doesn’t, an acquaintance of mine read the book and wrote me, unbidden: “Basically: your book made me forget my own troubles while simultaneously soothing them; it made me feel better about life.” Isn’t that so nice?

AND The next thing I was supposed to do was to tag five authors who have exciting projects coming out now or soon or eventually. But I just wrote them today. (Doing!) (That was a ball dropping.) (And then bouncing again.) (Like how I carried that image through? Professional writer here!) So I will repost if they are able to participate. But just know that you should be very excited about new works forthcoming from Siobhan Adcock, Julia Fierro, Leigh Newman, Shana Youngdahl, and Sara Barron!

Happy Sibling Propaganda

The Adventures of Harper and Ollie in Prospect Park

A dear friend of mine just had her second child, and, as is already family lore, her older son gazed upon his new brother and welcomed him with a “No. No. No. No.” The mysteries of sibling relationships have been of particular interest to me, obviously, for the past, ohhhh almost 2 years I’d say. I recently met a grown brother and sister who were hanging out together, as they do every weekend, and I asked them their secret. They shrugged and said that their parents always told them it was important for them to be friends. Could it be that simple? Can you make your kids get along with each other?

Now, my children could not be more different in temperament. Every morning Ollie grabs his shoes and stands by the door and points and pleads, “Down!” The great loves of his life are going places, running, yelling, smashing things, kicking things, and trains and also trains. Harper’s favorite thing is to stay in her nightgown all day and to cry, when anyone goes near the door “I’m not going outside!” Left to her own devices, she prefers: sitting quietly and looking at books, sitting quietly and playing with paper dolls, sitting quietly and doing art projects. They do have some common ground in their shared love of jumping up and down, which I’m sure our downstairs neighbors find incredibly charming.

Just in case we have some say in the matter, ever since Ollie was born nary a fortnight after Harper’s second birthday, we have been waging a full-on assault of sibling-relationship information warfare. The thought is, if kids become what they are told, or even if any of it rubs off a tiny bit, might as well tell them over and over: “You are best friends. Brothers and sisters stick together. You are a team. Not only that, you are psyched to share a room. GO FAMILY!”

In this vein, we bombard them with the ruthlessness of communist USSR propogandists. I’m not talking about “there’s a new baby in the house” type books, most of which take a “and that’s a bummer” tack. I mean just nice models of nice siblings.

Books:

Harper still loves everything Charlie and Lola. (Saw the cartoon once, wasn’t terribly interested. But the books! Oh the books!) Siblings who share a room and are nice to each other. Check.  Big sibling looks after little sibling. Check check. So we assign Charlie and Lola studies at least once a day.

The Magic Treehouse books, which I mentioned in my roundup of chapter books, features a non-squabbling brother/sister pair who goes on great adventures together. Perfect. I like to throw a little notebook in a backpack and tell Harper she and Ollie are Jack and Annie and goodbye, have fun with the dinosaurs.

Runners-up: Max and Ruby, though Ruby is a bit bossy if you ask me. But Max, with his non-verbal, grinning mischeviousness, is a pretty good stand in for our own baby brother character.

Multi-media:

We’ve just discovered the Olive Us video series and are all pretty obsessed. These lovely, under-5-minute videos show an adorable family of 6 (!) siblings having sweet, wholesome fun together while wearing really cute clothes. Mountain picnics. Making cookies. Washing the car. The best.

Learning by Rote:

Adam brilliantly instituted a program called “The Adventures of Harper and Ollie on Earth.” This started off as a simple homemade binder to hold drawings we collaborate on, of adventures Harper and Ollie had, have, or may someday have, and has really taken off. Harper always wants to draw Harper and Ollie stories (sample quote: “Ollie! Get away! I want to draw a Harper and Ollie story!”), about, say, when they are grownups and live together in Manhattan, where it is fancy, and ride their scooters together to the café. Or else, when they go skydiving together, holding on to a rope that is taped to the sky. Now that she is starting to draw figures and faces herself this is even less work for us, and the result is a cuter-than-cute scrapbook of hypothetical sibling adventures dreamed up while one sibling was napping.

Any other happy sibling propaganda we should check out? We’re committed to making this life-long psychological experiment work. I’m pretty excited to meet them in Manhattan for lunch circa 2033.

 

When The Tragedy Isn’t Yours

Jane’s Carousel, beacon of light in the storm. Harper has vowed to try a horse that goes up and down next summer and by gum those horses better be ready.

A little ago Harper asked me “Are there mean people in real life?” I debated for an instant before admitting, “Yes. Yes there are.” There was a long pause and then she said, “But not in New York.” “That’s right,” I told her.

When you think about having kids you say things like “Oh, how can people bring an innocent little baby into this world,” but it’s usually just something you’re saying because you think you should at least entertain the thought, when really your mind is whirring with tiny chub-thighs and screen-printed onesies and that intoxicating baby smell. Then you have the kids and then you know what that statement means, you know your crazy love for them, you know the chilling dread of something bad ever happening to them. Because it probably will.

In the past two weeks, the world, the news, and my brain have been churning with terribleness. First there was the horrifying, haunting Krim family tragedy, which was none of my business, none of anyone’s business but that poor broken family, that mother who lived through every mother’s nightmare – the very story seemed custom-made to torture every parent who has ever had to leave their child with someone and felt uneasy — the senselessness, the horrible imagery.

Then a few days later came Hurricane Sandy (excuse me, Super-Storm Sandy), which hit the city worse than I think any of us really believed possible. Yes, we heard on the news about the evacuation zones and the potential for floods and all that, but we also heard a lot of that last year circa Irene and nothing much happened, and besides, hurricane damage just isn’t the kind of story we’re used to around here. And even here in good old KWT it feels abstract. It was windy and ominous feeling the days before the storm, but in our big tank of an apartment building we scarcely heard a thing. I slept soundly the night of the storm (I always do, the benefit of exhaustion). The kids hardly noticed anything. On Halloween, playschool had a party, we trick-or-treated. I worried that Ollie had too much sugar. And yet here, just miles away, in our own city, in our own borough, people are suffering. People have suffered unimaginable losses. Their homes, everything. A friend’s friend was killed by a falling tree. In another specially-designed-mother-torture story, a woman in Staten Island saw her two young sons swept out of her arms by flood waters. It’s a cliche to say you don’t have words but…I don’t have words.

So, probably because stories are too much for me to really comprehend, I find myself fixating on the aquarium, Coney Island, ruined books, the trees in the park – these losses are significant, but on a scale I understand. These things make me really, really sad – but not despairing.

Then today I found out a dear friend’s brother was murdered – senselessly, narrativelessly. She is drowning in sorrow and shock. I just never thought murder had anything to do with my family, she said, and I knew exactly what she meant. That’s why all three of these horror stories (one encompassing so many others, an anthology of destruction and mess and sorrow) have me feeling adrift – none of them makes any sense. This one aches particularly, because one of my best friends in the world — a bright, creative, compassionate, completely unique and hilarious and kind person — has had her life blown apart.

But I also feel like I don’t actually have any right to be shaken up, to feel sorrow. None of these stories is actually mine. In each instant I think, selfishly, awfully, I’m so glad that wasn’t my family, my kid, and then I feel disgusting, like that’s exactly what I would think people were thinking and hate them for if it really were happening to me. In each case, there is an initial thought to be fought, that urge to prove to yourself that it couldn’t actually happen to you, because of… because of nothing, there is no protecting your own family by somehow finding a way to blame others for the blameless act of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

How do you deal with tragedies that aren’t really yours? It’s a privileged question to ask, and possibly a silly one. But I still feel so sad. I guess I should just feel lucky that I have the luxury of a dull, thick-headed sympathy pain. I’m going to go help make food for an evacuation shelter tomorrow morning. I feel like this is a lame effort, a bandaid flung into a river of blood. And I know it’s mostly for me to feel a little better, but okay, I’ll take it. I want to be around New Yorkers who are trying to help, to feel like I’m a part of something, I guess, or trying to be anyway. That’s probably not the right reason, I realize this.I want to live in Harper’s world, where mean people seem imaginary. Where nothing bad B-A-D bad happens to us, or people we know, because it’s just not part of the story we know, so how could it?

Sorry to be such a bummer. Everything else seems lame to write about right now. And it’s daylight savings time, FML, which means the kids will be up at 4 am, and they are my cherished loves-of-my-lives but fuck if I love anything at 4 am. File under non-problem problems, I know.

PS: The week before the storm, Adam happened to take the kids to the Aquarium:

Guest Post: The Perfect Mommy Steps In

Hi all! So, Amy has been totally neglecting this blog, and today she’s all distracted by the HUGE SCARY FRANKENSTORM that she thinks she’s prepared for because she bought some water and snack bars – she’s so funny! Anyway, so she asked me (hi! It’s me, of The Perfect Mommy Blog!) to step in. Don’t let my blog’s silly name fool you, though. I’m soooo not perfect! Oh that reminds me, I wanted to show you the cutest picture:

Lunchtime! We do a different classical composer everyday. So silly, I know, but it’s just fun! Man, do my kids love their veggies — and their Mozart. Those goofs!

Poor Amy has been so overwhelmed lately. Every night I text her to see why she hasn’t posted anything – I just think those Brooklyn moms are a hoot – and she’s like, “So tired. Stop texting me.” I get it – I update my blog every day, so I know it’s no joke time-wise, plus I have 9 children under the age of 10 (4 sets of twins, what are the chances?? Lol) who I homeschool in a carefully researched Waldorf-inspired style. Amy’s always like, “You seem so productive and super-happy, Perfect Mom, what’s your secret?” I tell her, there’s no secret, silly, just good graphic design, dreamy photo filters, and some careful planning.

Just a candid shot of us lazing around the house. Excuse the mess! So embarrassing!

For one thing, as my husband, my best friend who I am madly in love with, will tell you, I’m a little bit of a neat freak. But I stay organized with a simple chore chart — the little ones LOVE pitching in! I don’t know what it is, but my kids just adore chores.

I make mealtime super-duper easy by growing all my own organic fruits and vegetables in our garden – the kids love to help, and outdo each other by eating the most vegetables. Whatever works, you know? This allows me to keep my monthly grocery shopping budget under $150. Really, all it takes is some planning – here’s my PDF of all the essentials you need for a month of feeding 11 hungry people on a budget – so easy!  Then one weekend a month my girlfriends and I get together and cook 90 meals – breakfast, lunch, and dinner – from scratch to freeze. It’s so easy and fun! Here’s one of our favorites – my kids all love it. 

Homeschooling is really such a snap, too – I keep the younger ones busy with a cardboard box and some lids, which they will play with quietly for hours and hours, I promise you. I keep costs down by making all our books out of handmade paper from our own mulched logs. You see what I mean? Easy! I’m just lucky that my older girls teach the younger kids Latin while I make everyone’s clothes from scratch every morning. And they are so not perfect! Just look at this messy little romper I threw together in two seconds — sorry for the bad cellphone pic!

The suitcase is full of toys she insists she’s ready to donate to poor children in Africa. Where does she get these ideas? Haha

Sure, with so many little ones it’s hard to stay sane. We keep things simple by naming all the girls Kendra and all the boys Wyatt. Then we can reuse the letterpressed birthday party invites and personalized bunting. And you can’t forget about “me” time, so one night a week I make my hubby’s favorite dinner, set the table with fresh flowers and candles, get all dressed up, and put the kids to bed early, so that I can focus on my sweet guy. I know what you’re thinking – look out, or soon we’ll be seeing numbers 10 and 11! Lol! Really, those kids hardly even let me create a downloadable PDF of my favorite recipes or jam jar labels or paper dolls. Maybe I’ll get a TV one of these days.

I made this fully-functioning space ship in like two seconds with some old boxes and tin foil. Seriously, so easy!

Anyway, I’m just saying, moms out there, I totally get it. I don’t judge moms like Amy for their love of yoga pants, frozen chicken nuggets, and toddler iPad apps. It’s not easy being a Perfect Mommy Blogger ™! Just ask, well, me! Lol!

OMG, so embarrassing – my hubby snapped these candid pics of me just shlubbing around on a Saturday morning on the way home from the farmer’s market. Eek! Sorry about that. Ok, time to go make some Eggs Benedict for the little monsters!

The Read Balloon: Winnie-the-Pooh, The House at Pooh Corner, and Harper’s first serious crush

A Map of Prospect Park.

Tonight at dinner-time I read the kids the last installment of The House at Pooh Corner, Chapter 10, in which “Christopher Robin and Pooh Come to an Enchanted Place, and We Leave Them There,” which really ought to be subtitled, “Fuck You, Mama’s Mascara.” Ollie has not been privy to most of the Pooh-readings (for this concludes our first reading of the entire series) but for some reason I felt he should be there for this story, snortling into his macaroni, maybe to protect me, the way Harper always squeezes his hand and tells him she’s helping him to be brave when she’s afraid of something. “Christopher Robin was going away,” the story begins. That was about when I started crying.

This all started because of a bookmark. Harper and I were whiling away an Ollie-nap by going crazy on Mr. Printables, an amazing site full of adorable (free!) paper dolls, coloring pages, and lo, bookmarks. Harper wanted to know what they were, these mysterious bookmarks, and what kind of book you would need to keep a place in, and I explained, and she asked if we had any chapter books, and I said that we did, and that we could read a chapter of one if she wanted and then hold our place with the bookmark, and she felt extreme enthusiasm about this concept. She’s very into accessories.

So that night at bedtime we began reading the first Winnie-the-Pooh story. I approached the familiar stories with some cautious optimism, not quite sure she was ready to listen to so very many pages with so very few little scratchy pictures. But man, was she. She is now obsessed, with the wonderful, all-consuming Harper-passion that has previously been directed toward The Ballerinas, Charlie and Lola, Special Baby, Murray, and other luminaries. I do believe she is in love with Christopher Robin.

I’m so glad she wants to read the stories all again, as she has announced, but there was something really special, like Special Baby special, about that first time, about hearing her crack up at the funny parts, and furrow her brow and ask for clarification regarding all the spelling jokes, and exclaim, “Oh, Christopher Robin!” when he’d do something terribly kind and wise, as he tends to. I keep catching her poring over the illustrations, studying Christopher Robin in particular. In the middle of nowhere she’ll say, “I think Christopher Robin might be a tiny bit older than me,” or, “Wasn’t that so funny when Christopher Robin said x?” She’s been wandering around the apartment or community garden or park or wherever we are, whispering to Christopher Robin about this or that, and singing Pooh-inspired “Tiddly-Pom”s as she goes.

Look, the real, original Pooh, Piglet, Kanga, Tigger, and Eeyore! Guess where they live? THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY! Even though this is, as Harper says, “very far away in Manhattan,” I’m thinking field trip.

First we read through Winnie-The-Pooh, and then one day last week I got The House at Pooh Corner from the library when Harper was at school. She walked into the living room, saw the book lying on the couch, screamed, clapped her hands, and did a somersault. I’m not kidding. We’ve since gone on Winnie the Pooh-themed picnics in the park. (I asked Harper if she could find the Hundred Acre Wood and she assured me it would be easy, and it turned out it was.) Actually, everything has been Winnie the Pooh-themed.

My point is, this child lives in an enchanted world, in which she is most happy when play-acting some private story. So this last Pooh story, about Christopher Robin leaving the forest, seems custom-built for stabbing me in the heart. How long do we have? How long can she play, completely unself-consciously, in these elaborate worlds, populated by imaginary people and her “cubbies”?

Christopher Robin, according to Ernest Shepard

Toward the end of the last story, Christopher Robin and Pooh are lazing about in the enchanted place when Christopher Robin says, “’I’m not going to do Nothing any more.’

‘Never again?’

‘Well, not so much. They won’t let you.’”

Directly beneath this is an illustration of Christopher Robin lying on his stomach, kicking his legs in the air, studying something on the grass in front of him: that pose of relaxed, busy, focused nothing that is I think the essence of childhood. It’s just such a heartbreaker. And even though Harper’s not setting off for English boarding school anytime soon, it’s inevitable, the Growing Up.

Ugh, so what I’m saying is, read these stories to your magical little preschooler. Read them on a day when you’re so tired from all the early waking and tantrums about shoes and sticky floors and more tantrums about other shoes that you have been praying for the era of Full Day Kindergarten or even fantasizing about English boarding school, when the drudgery of all the work that comes along with them has momentarily clouded the sheer ridiculous shiny glory of their mysterious, curious beings. Read them to your children while they eat dinner so that you can get all weepy and when they both refuse to eat the macaroni and cheese they demanded and request little cups of applesauce instead you won’t even care and you’ll uncharacteristically let them have them and it will seem suddenly beautiful and not maddening the way they shriek with excitement and set about smearing the applesauce across the table like adorable monsters, and you’ll think, Yes, cups of applesauce are totally completely the most thrilling things on earth! Read them before they’ve seen the cartoon versions. Read them in an enchanted place, if you can find one. And then read them again.

Christopher Robin, according to Harper.

 

Kitchen Table Math Drop-Outs

Another rigorous day of G&T test-prep!

In the process of creating and maintaining our amazing, spectacular, splendiferous playschool co-op, the mothers of Greenwood Playschool (nee Tomb Tots) and I have had the good fortune to have several meetings with Peggy Reimann, an education consultant with a passel of brilliant ideas about nurturing a love of reading and even encouraging an understanding and sense of friendliness with – gasp – math. She urged us to quit cold turkey anything like flash cards, and the strange but common process of quizzing little kids about books, i.e.: “DO YOU SEE THE COW? WHERE IS THE COW? WHAT DOES A COW SAY? GOOOOOOD A COW SAYS MOO!” Rather, she urged us in her gentle and wise manner to look at pictures with our kids, to move our fingers across the page, to talk about what we see together — and this process seriously changed completely the way Harper and I experience books and images and was utterly amazing.
So, now that Harper is a sage 3.5, I figured it was time to dive into Peggy’s math curriculum.

All summer I tried to introduce pattern sorting. I’d put Ollie down for a nap, make us some milky tea, and set the scene for something VERY SPECIAL. There – the paper with the circles on it. There – the colored pieces, in our case buttons. The idea is that you make it a kind of a game to make patterns together, to sort out the colors, and eventually start talking about quantities. “So!” I’d say brightly, like Peggy instructed, “I’m going to put the blue button here.” “Okay,” Harper would respond. And then, having found the thimble among the buttons, she’d switch into a high-pitched fairy-voice and offer a button some tea out of the thimble, and then the button would squeak, “Oh, yes please!”

And so on.  Pasta-shape-sorting turned into an elaborate story-play of Jack and the Magic Pasta-Seeds-Beanstalk. Absolutely everything becomes a game of pretend with this kid, even bath time turns into a 3-hour-long sessions of making bath-rice-pudding for bath-Foofa’s birthday. Of course I find this to be wonderful, and in my sick writer’s mind can’t think of anything better than an almost-absolute break with reality. But still, I really like the idea of appealing to some other corners of her busy, buzzing mind. And in classic parenting “it’s actually my issue not yours” fashion, I am eager for her to avoid the gut-wrenching math anxiety that to this day has me reacting to the words “fraction” and “division” with an outbreak of hives.

So today I tried an activity that looked so cute on Pinterest (I could probably just copy-and-paste this every night “It looked so cute on Pinterest but didn’t quite work out as well for me…”) : writing numbers (or I also tried dots) on craft sticks, and then sticking the numbers in order into a big snake of playdough.

First: excitement. “What’s this? A project?” My explanation was met with a “talk-to-the-hand” type gesture. “Nah, let’s make these sticks into people!”

“But, it’s a cool project!” I tried changing my tactics. “It’s a really fun big-girl activity. Um, it’s a game. It’s a puzzle.” Nothing. “You know what this is? It’s math!”

“I DON’T LIKE MATH! I ONLY LIKE DRAWING PEOPLE!”

And that, folks, is genetics at work. So much for instilling an early love of numbers. One thing I really feel that I have succeeded at, though, is encouraging an early love of tea parties, fairies,and flitting around singing little nonsense songs, all of which are sure to be very helpful in really any field Harper chooses to pursue.

What To Read While Ignoring Your Children

As Amy Fusselman writes in her beautiful memoir 8, “People can read books and watch children at the same time…Of course, both the reading of the books and the watching of the children will be performed in a way best described as half-assed.”

Since reading books, watching my children, and doing things half-assed are sort of my specialties, this statement really rings true. And just now are both of my kiddos finally big enough that they can be ignored for up to, say, three minutes at a time.

Here’s something about parenting –maybe you think you want to have children because you like spending time with children. What you don’t realize until you actually have children is that the ne plus ultra of parenting is in fact ignoring them. At first you can, since newborn babies are usually cool with hanging out in a sling or stroller and blinking at shadows for a few months, and then they start moving and for many many months you can’t look away even for a second, and when you do, it’s for something really really important, like cleaning up poop, or staring at your phone. I really shouldn’t ever even blink now, because this 1-and-a-half-year-old boy of mine is basically chaos incarnate, but there are, suddenly, occasionally, moments when they are both absorbed in looking at books, or hammering on the floor with a spoon or something, and I can steal a moment to read a page of something. (It’s not neglect, it’s modeling literacy!)

The challenge is finding the right books, books that can be read a page at a time, dipped in and out of. Right now I have three good ones scattered around the apartment, but quoting the above Fusselman bit reminds me that 8 is a lovely, heartbreaking book written in quickly-readable, petite bits of crystalline prose. It has the added benefits of being very short (i.e. you might actually finish it, moms!) and full of life-affirming parenting wisdom. So you could try that. I should warn you that it’s also about the author’s experience with a pedophile, a little, which is maybe not the best match for overseeing a game of “knock down each other’s block towers until someone cries,” but the book is beautiful, I swear.

I’m also misting my way through Cheryl Strayed’s Tiny Beautiful Things, a collection of her “Dear Sugar” advice column from the Rumpus. Again, totally heartbreaking, and strangely life-affirming. Like, you read one sad letter and Sugar’s wise and gentle and heart-swelling advice, and then you look at your children as they attempt to draw on their milk with blue markers and they look like life and goodness incarnate. (My Slow-Reader’s-Book-Group just read Strayed’s equally-heartbreaking novel Torch and man, can that woman write with compassion. Shew!)

Another good one: The Collected Works of Fran Lebowitz. Her pieces are short (this is crucial, you see), brutally funny, hilariously (and purposefully) solipsistic and generally misanthropic. A perfect fit for a day with 2 children under the age of 4.

And one I just started (I’ve been “reading” the Fran Lebowitz since probably February) and am loving is Dan Wilbur’s funny funny funny How Not To Read: Harnessing a Literature-Free Life. This is one of those books that reminds me that I am not a funny writer in the way that some people are able to be funny writers, and I stand in awe of them (Dan Wilbur, Sara Barron, etc). The only problem with this smart, hilarious, book-lover-nudging book is that it makes me snicker out loud until Harper suspiciously asks what’s up, and then I am caught and have to once again interact with my humans. Oh well.

Some day I will again read brain-scalders like Joyce and Plato or whatever it is I used to read. But, as Fusselman writes, “If you want to read your book in a non-half-assed way, you have to wait until you child is in kindergarten.” And that’s only like 4 years away! Maybe then I can reread the books I’m currently baby-ignoring-reading and get everything I’m missing this time. I can’t wait!

The Novel, The Shore

First, bookishness: There is finally a cover for The Mermaid of Brooklyn, née The Double Life of Jenny Lipkin, and I love it and you will love it too. OR ELSE. No, trust me, you’ll love it. I can’t share it yet…but I will. Oh, you bet I will. And the UK rights for the book have sold which is obviously mega-exciting. I can’t wait to go through the manuscript and add “u”s to all the “color”s and “favorites”! JK. Though I totally would if they wanted me to.

I think I’m finally done with the revisions too. Though it gets to the point where it’s hard to stop. Every word seems to beg for a bit of jostling about! But at a certain point you’re also just so sick of the thing you can’t imagine ever even talking about it, let alone trying to tell people to read it. (Aren’t they all so sick of it?)

I’m of course so excited and thankful for the book’s impending release. But I have to admit to some nerves too. The book is after all about a Brooklyn mother of 2. She struggles with depression and a crappy husband, and her story is not mine (rather, it’s loosely based on the life of my great-grandmother — very loosely! — and superimposed onto my own setting, oh right and there’s a mermaid). Also, she doesn’t wear glasses, so how could she possibly be me? But already the comments have begun. Oy! Poor Adam. He took my author photo over the weekend and I stood there in the bedroom trying to form a smile that would project: “EVERYTHING IS OK. I’M OK!  I ADORE MY KIDS! MY HUSBAND WOULD NEVER LEAVE HIS WIFE AND KIDS! HE’S GREAT! I MADE IT UP! I DON’T WANT TO HAVE AN AFFAIR WITH A CUTE STAY-AT-HOME-DAD! I LOVE MY FAMILY AND BEING A MOM AND NEVER FEEL LIKE JUMPING OFF A BRIDGE, PROMISE! ALSO I’VE NEVER MET A MERMAID.” I hope it worked. What do you think?

I’m okay! I just like to make up stories, that’s all! Promsies!

And So:

Next week we are going on vacation to the glamorous Jersey Shore. Just like the show! Okay, I don’t really know anything about the show, I just know that it’s a little funny to joke about it. Snooki! Right? I’m really looking forward to the family time, the 30-minutes-at-a-time-before-we-all-get-hot-and-sick-of-sand beach days, the little house we’re renting. And I’m hoping to score some naptimes to pound out a draft of a short story I’ve had twitching around my brain (that’s an inside joke with myself, related to the story! ha ha, me!).

And after that I’m think I’m going to try to make this a place for a weekly Read Balloon post about books and that’s it for a while. I know I haven’t been blogging much here anyway, but I think it will help my brain to decide this. I’m going to try to set aside scraps of writing time for the aforementioned short story and then a new novel I’m outlining. And for some crazy reason I’m a juror for a Canadian book prize! So I will soon have a stack of books to read. I’m scared about that. But you just can’t say no to Canadians. They’ll kill you in your sleep.

Which is too bad because I want to tell you about the awesome Slow Reader’s Book Group I’m now a part of, and all the very terribly amusing things my children do, and the very terribly amusing ways I invent to make life messy and difficult (jell-o finger painting anyone?), but, as our beloved babysitter says… Whateveseleves.

To the shore!

Girls’ Night

Sometimes on the days when I work Harper and I have a girls’ night dinner. I put Ollie to bed and then Harper and I eat dinner together, complete with a candle, and ice waters for toasting. She’s a pretty good date, at least until she has a tantrum about hair-brushing. So anyway, tonight she asked me what I wrote about at the coffee shop (she is the only one who ever asks me this, by the way) and I was explaining a post I wrote about Martha Gellhorn’s favorite getaways.

Me: “She loved to travel all over the world, and then she’d write about it. So I wrote about some of her favorite place to go. She was a very cool lady who had lots of adventures.”

Harper: “…and children?”

Me: “Well actually no.”

Harper: “Oh, that’s good.”

Me: “Why?”

Harper: “I’m worried if she had lots of children they would grab her glasses. Did she wear glasses?”

Me: “No, I don’t think so.”

Harper: “Oh, ok. Well I’m still glad she didn’t have children because then I’m worried they might try to come with on all her adventures and think they were writers too.”

Me: !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!