14 Kinds of Awesome

I forced myself out of bed at 5:45 this morning, 30 minutes after our various alarms started buzzing and rocking out some kind of digital samba. It's the new reality of our lives with a high schooler. And it's undermining my longtime claim that I am a morning person.

High schooler and hubby out the door, I tried to revive myself with a few chapters of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. My middle schooler -- the more self-efficient of our two kids -- was getting herself dressed for Picture Day.

My 11-year-old having an Awesome moment.

"Why don't you wear your new jeans skirt, instead of those soccer shorts?" I started.

Which quickly evolved into, "Look at all the things in this closet that still have tags on. I bought you those blue pants six months ago!"

I admit to being a veteran of The Mother-Daughter Closet Wars. But mostly from the other side of the hamper. The memory of my mother and me battling over my favorite old sweatpants (too thin to wear to school), too-dark nail polish and lipstick, and jeans (I'd just gotten the holes perfect when Mom threw them out) are usually enough for me to shut my  mouth and leave my kid and her closet alone.

My girl was about to walk out the door: tears in eyes, shoulders slumped, hair hanging over face. I thought about a blog post a friend (and HS girl-mom) shared with me this weekend.

The name of the blog is "Redefine Girly: Let's Change the Way We Think about Our Girls." The post is titled, "Waking Up Full of Awesome."

Not only did I not wake up full of awesome, I un-awesomed my daughter today. Here's an excerpt from the "Redefine Girly" blog post:

There was a time when you were five years old,

and you woke up full of awesome.

You knew you were awesome.

You loved yourself.

You thought you were beautiful,

even with missing teeth and messy hair and mismatched socks inside your grubby sneakers.

You loved your body, and the things it could do.

You thought you were strong.

You knew you were smart.

  

Do you still have it?

The awesome.

Did someone take it from you?

Ouch.

I had to change my thinking to fix it. On the way to the bus stop, I pointed out some of the awesome things my daughter did this morning:

#1 Awesome -- You made your bed.

#2, #3, #4 Awesome -- You brushed your teeth, washed your face and brushed your hair.

She was starting to get into it already. I wasn't getting eye-rolls. I detected a smile.

#5 Awesome -- Did you remember to pack your gym clothes? You did? Awesome.

#6 Awesome -- "I packed my lunch." No, I packed your lunch. "Mom, that's your #1 Awesome. But I packed my lunch in my backpack. That counts."

#7 Awesome -- You remembered your clarinet.

Soon, the kid was laughing at the every-day stuff that "counted," and trying to think of ways to bolster my awesome-list (since teeth,  hair and face counted as three for her, she reasoned, it should count for three on my list too) so I could also be Full of Awesome. We both made it to 14 Kinds of Awesome before the bus came.

Feeling a lot more Awesome -- even in the rain.

I even got credit for wearing pants (because not wearing any pants to the middle school bus stop would be the opposite of awesome).

Have an Awesome Day.

5 Questions for Jeannine Atkins (Part 2)

More of my interview with author Jeannine Atkins about her book Borrowed Names: Poems about Laura Ingalls Wilder, Madam C.J. Walker, Marie Curie and Their Daughters. Part 1 is here.

Jeannine and I have discussed the first two sections of the book, poems about Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder, and Madam C.J. Walker and her daughter A'Lelia. The third portion explores the relationship between Marie Curie and her daughter Irene.

4. In the Marie Curie and Irene Joliot-Curie section, there is a poem called “Between Gardens.” Irene is both fascinated by “the pale blue glow from bowls of crystals” and jealous of the attention her parents give their experiments.

How did you plan this series of poems to show Irene’s shift from resentment of her parents’ work, to becoming a Nobel Laureate for her own scientific work? I’m wondering about plotting with poetry.

The plotting with poetry was fun, as I began with that structure – here’s a daughter who won the same amazing award bestowed upon her mother – and wondered how she got there.

In Irène’s letters to her absent mother, her need for her reads like a scientific fact that she expresses clearly and directly. It’s a different tactic than the more typically feminine one her younger sister chooses, hoping to bring loved ones closer not by stating facts but through charm, clothing, music, and kindness bordering on self-sacrifice. As a child, Irène did resent her mother’s distance, but she never blamed her work. 

In “Without School Bells,” I wrote about how Irène needs “to comprehend the laws of radiance, reflection, refraction./Every question and answer binds her/ to the one world her mother loves.”

So she became closer to, or maybe sought to understand, her mother through the science. Irene is the only daughter in your book with a sister. It's interesting how Curie's daughters (pictured with Curie below) used different coping skills to handle their mother's focus on her work.

5. How has working on this book – and now, seeing how readers respond to it – enriched you as a poet and writer? What did you learn in the process?

It’s opened up a world to me, and I’m grateful for every reader who’s found something in my words. I still tend to think of myself as more of a story-teller than a poet, and of course these poems are held together with narrative arcs. 

The imagery and pace of poetry, the way I could choose over and over where to begin and end a section, and let that hold some power, seemed the best way to tell the stories of these women’s lives, leaving small clues about how they connected while taking their own particular courses. I like the process of building up, then taking away. Sorting through all the details of a life to find ones that seem to truly speak. Looking for, and making, patterns from the small things that might be found on a kitchen table or a porch.

Now I’m working hard – trimming, trimming, trimming, looking for the essential words that will show an era when writing began. I’m showing the surfaces of a different language, clothing, vehicles, religion, and politics, and drawing connections through the same sky and similar hearts.


It's quite an achievement. I also appreciate that you did not force comparisons between the three mother-daughter pairings. Instead, the reader creates his or her own threads of understanding among these three distinct stories.


Jeannine, thanks again for visiting. It's been great talking poetry with you!
 

Poetry Friday: 5 Questions for Jeannine Atkins (Part 1)

Have you adjusted to summer yet? My kids have been off school for just over a week. Our little annoyances with one another (like my 13-year-old constantly pestering for more XBox time) seem more annoying at the beginning of summer. Then we learn to cope with the shift in our relationships and settle into summer-normal.

I'm thinking about parent-child relationships today because author and Poetry Friday blogger Jeannine Atkins is visiting. Hi, Jeannine!

Jeannine's book, Borrowed Names: Poems about Laura Ingalls Wilder, Madam C.J. Walker, Marie Curie and Their Daughters is a trio of historical relationship studies -- all in verse. Look at the *display bling* Borrowed Names had at ALA last weekend.

That's a rainbow of stars!

Jeannine discovered that all three famous women she profiles were born in the same year -- and all three had daughters who influenced their own professional lives. So Jeannine began a journey of research, writing and finally a wonderful book (2010, Henry Holt). I can't wait until my daughter (now 10) is old enough to read and discuss Borrowed Names.

1. You wrote a blog post for the journal Hunger Mountain  about beginning this book project in prose, then shifting to poetry. How did poetic form open up these mother-daughter stories for you?

I love the way that line breaks in poetry can emphasize words in the cutting way we’ve practiced as half-grown daughters, letting phrases turn sharp as an angle of an eyebrow, the spin of a turning back. And as a mother of a teen, I grew practiced in editing, thinking: Is this a thought I need to say? Moving the stories to poetry added some of silence’s tension, the way it does in a conversation, especially one between people who love each other, but also often crave a space away.

Believe me, this is also true for mothers and half-grown sons. I like the point about the tensions poetry can create with the silence of line breaks and spaces between stanzas. It's a way of listening to the poem's voice.

2. When you went back to Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books, what did you find there that felt poetic? How did her (and daughter Rose’s) writing style inform your poems about them?

I love the Little House books, but they feel more sturdy to me than spare as they move through the premise that people can and do go on… and on. Which has its own thrill, but it’s not so poetic. The connections and distance between the novels and the lives they were based on most inspired me, just as the difference between Louisa May Alcott’s real life and the somewhat idealized Little Women moved me to write a novel for middle readers called Becoming Little Women.

I was surprised to learn from your book how involved Rose was in the writing of her mother's books. There must be some interesting surprises for Alcott fans in Becoming Little Women.

3. One of my favorite poems in the book is “Pieces” – about Madam C.J. Walker and her daughter A’Lelia. The poem asks how A’Lelia can “bear to be the girl/ who demands so much giving up” from her mother. The adolescent daughter seems to be criticizing how she treats her mother, but is unable to stop herself. That feels very modern.

Can you talk about blending historical facts with moments like this – where we could be talking about a mother and daughter of 2010? How did writing poems help you weave together history and the rawness of these women’s relationships?

It’s always a question about how much of the present to bring to the past, but I tend to believe that while people may have dressed differently, read differently, and sat on different furniture, there’s more that remains the same than has changed.

Reading books written in the nineteenth century, we find more sentimentality about the mother- daughter relationship, as well, of course, about much else, such as the true labor of child-bearing or the difficulties of marriage. Good manners are more present in depictions of family life, and some habits must have gone deep. Daughters probably did feel a keener sense of dependency on mothers who might be their midwives or at least likelier to be neighbors.

But the daughters in this book came of age on the cusp of modern period. Virginia Woolf wrote, “On or about December 1910 human character changed.” Of course her tone is slightly arch, but the daughters in Borrowed Names lived through a time when the first world war brought enormous fear and tragedy, the suffrage movement and fights for civil rights were strengthened, definitions of what makes good art and music widened, and science was becoming increasingly rooted in worlds visible only to specialists. These daughters were going to live in quite different worlds than the ones their mothers had grown up in, and there were bound to be struggles as they found their places alone and together.

That's a good point about the daughters being aware they would inhabit different worlds than their mothers. A'Lelia Walker and Irene Joliot-Curie must have been particularly attuned to this, because they saw their mothers creating some of the changes you mention -- civil and women's rights, entrepreneurship, scientific progress.

More of my interview with Jeannine later today. While you're waiting for Part 2, check out more Poetry Friday offerings at Amy's blog, The Poem Farm. Or , go directly to Jeannine's awesome blog.