Monday, April 30, 2018

Motherhood: It's An Asskicker Every Time

These are the People I Love Best
 

Today, I realized what I've been mourning the last eight years is my motherhood. I understand that I am still a mother, but for me, the best parts of motherhood are over. I look at these younger mothers running around to little league and soccer and music, and I hate them. I hate them because I want to be them. We hate most what we don't understand, but in a crazy, only-human-way, we also hate what we want to be but can't. I know these women in a way they don't even know themselves. I know sometimes they hate what they are doing. I know some days they live for 30 minutes alone at night. I also know they have no idea what they have right now.

Often at my age, women take up "nannying" someone else's kids. While I now understand this inclination, it won't work for me. It's not kids I want. I don't even like kids. What I want is my kids back. I want my kids when their breath at night woke me up, when I was the reason their faces lit up when I walked into a room (is there anything else on earth like that?), when they would wake up and ask me what's for breakfast, and I would say, fix your own breakfast and pack your lunch while you're at it, yet still I felt safe in this world because I knew that no matter how much of a clusterfuck I was, motherhood was something I could do right every day, and I knew that here were two people who, no matter what I ever did, worshipped the ground I walked on. I know how they feel, because every day of their lives, I've felt the same way about them, even when I was mad enough to throw things (Sorry, B. I may have over-reacted. When you have your own kids, you can tell me. I love you). When I look at my kids these days, I feel content just to dial it in from here on out. Even if I never do one other good thing, I've done what I was sent here for.  I hope you've had that in your life. It's the best I can wish for us all.

Me in the Sweet Spot and Not Even Knowing It

Friday, April 27, 2018

We Are All Migrants

 
"The news in those days was full of war and migrants and nativists, and it was full of fracturing too, of regions pulling away from nations, and cities pulling away from hinterlands, and it seemed that as everyone was coming together everyone was also moving apart." from Exit West by Mohsin Hamid
 
Last year when I read the review of Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West in the New York Times Book Review, I decided against reading it for two reasons:  I couldn’t imagine how a story about the refugee crisis in our world wouldn’t be depressing; and I found the idea of the magic exit doors to be a little off-putting. Sometimes I enjoy magical realism, but I was skeptical about combining it with the serious, sobering issue of the refugee crisis. When the book showed back up recently in The Morning News Tournament of Books, I decided to give it a try, and I am so glad that I did.
 
I can understand why this book isn’t for everyone. It is not a deep, heavy treatise on the refugee crisis, but I don’t think it’s any less serious for its lack of depth. I found it to be a quick read, but one that nonetheless made me think deeply. The use of the doors worked well to reinforce the important point of how vastly different standards of living are with just a change in geography, but also of how nearly the same people are everywhere.  People in Britain and America might have reliable access to electricity, clean water, cars, food, and safety, but they are not immune to the xenophobic herd mentality that plagues people everywhere. In fact, easy access to comfort and riches seems to make one more susceptible to isolationism. When you choose to look askance at the young men who join any kind of gang or militia, look around at how much this kind of assimilation happens everywhere (only the details are different), especially when family and society break down and leave people feeling alone and unsupported. Saeed and Nadia have fled a broken society where a militia has taken over and wreaked havoc, only to end up in London where “nativist provocateurs” threaten violence, and refugees under threat then retreat into factions of “their own kind.” Safety in numbers; comfort in sameness….this is common to us all. Whether you believe in a god or not, I think a lot of us would benefit from being more aware of the sentiment behind the phrase, “There but for the grace of god go I.”




 

 

Exit West Notes


P4 “...one moment we are pottering about our errands as usual and the next we are dying, and our eternally impending ending does not put a stop to our transient beginnings and middles until the instant when it does.”

P11 war escalates time (in this example due to the deteriorating of a bldg’s facade)

P 28 Ironic that Sadeed uses a burqa to sneak into Nadia’s apartment to date. When everything is hidden, everything is hidden…

P42: virtual world that is available to people in undeveloped nations stands in stark contrast to their own reality:  “...children who went to sleep unfed but could see on some small screen people in foreign lands preparing and consuming and even conducting food fights with feasts of such opulence that the very fact of their existence boggled the mind.”

pp46-47 description of psychodelic mushrooms on consciousness

pp87-88 I like the idea of the exit doors...desperate people searching for a way out, but the theme is embedded in a somewhat clunky, jarring manner. I liked it better when he just used the vignettes instead of explaining anything. It is an interesting concept though, that you could just step through a door anywhere and get somewhere else, especially given how difficult it is to enter and exit some countries now.  Maybe he’s making a point about the pointlessness of all the borders and patrols and “safeguards?”

P94 Nadia is more comfortable with change and progress and variations of movement in her life than Saeed, in whom “the impulse of nostalgia” was stronger, perhaps because his childhood had been more idyllic?  Same idea as people who have more fearing loss more

P96 parents have to let go of children in order to save them

P98 “...for when we migrate, we murder from our lives those we leave behind…” so many people here for instance not being able to see their parents any more…

P106 Doors west are heavily guarded; doors east are not

P109 “ ...the militants had perhaps hoped to provoke a reaction against migrants from their own part of the world...and if that had been their hope then they had succeeded”

[Violence as a vicious cycle:  Militants kill citizens and in return “nativist provocateurs” attack anyone who looks like the militants.  What’s the difference in these two violent groups? Any violence:  physical, verbal, mental, emotional, is equally wrong.  People’s motives are easier to grasp:  revenge or maybe just sadism, but regardless of motive, violence is wrong. And I know we think smugly to ourselves that we would never, but we do.  We do every time we lash out at each other, it’s just a matter of degrees. Violence starts with ideas, moves to words, and so on, and violence always breeds violence, so it can never be an answer. I don’t have the answer.  I just know it isn’t violence.]

P138: build up to conflict, waiting:  “the calm that is called the calm before the storm, but is in reality the foundation of a human life, waiting there for us between the steps of our march to our mortality, when we are compelled to pause and not act but be.”

P139:  “people are monkeys who have forgotten that they are monkeys, and so have lost respect for what they are born of, for the natural world around them…”

P140:  If Nadia broke her promise to keep Saeed safe, would that “mean she stood for nothing whatsoever.”

[The areas where the refugees have squatted become known as “Dark London” because of power cuts and also I assume due to skin color?]

Pp146-7:   Refugees under threat retreat into factions of their own kind: safety in numbers, comfort in sameness

[This story makes me grateful for everyday things like the ability to shower and wash clothes and to work and earn an income, for blankets and soap and towels…]

P158:  everyone both converging and diverging...the migration, mixing and unsettling and so, frightening...people become isolationist (see Brexti and MAGA)  
“The news in those days was full of war and migrants and nativists, and it was full of fracturing too, of regions pulling away from nations, and cities pulling away from hinterlands, and it seemed that as everyone was coming together everyone was also moving apart.”

P 159:  “The fury of those nativist advocating wholesale slaughter...so much like the fury of the militants in her own city. She wondered whether she and Saeed had done anything by moving, whether the faces and the buildings had changed but the basic reality of their predicament had not.”

...but then she grasps her freedom outside her homeland and grins “with a wildness.”

[Interesting that the Londoners are referred to as “Natives,” which usually connotes “uncivilized” peoples.]

Pp163-4:  “Saeed wondered aloud once again if the natives would really kill them, and Nadia said once again that the natives were so frightened that they could do anything.”

P164  “Our country was poor.  We didn’t feel we had as much to lose.”

P165 “...to love is to enter into the inevitability of one day not being able to protect what is most valuable to you”

P197:  point of there being no natives left in the USA begs the question...then of where am I a native?

P 209  “We are all migrants through time.”

A Kind of Healing

  "...to live the slow quiet rhythm of a day as a kind of healing" Several years ago, I discovered May Sarton’s journals. What a b...