At the closing keynote session at the Mom 2.0 Summit the other week they showed a promotional clip for Oprah’s new network. In it, Oprah made a few remarks about why she never had children. “I realized that I didn’t want to make the sacrifice,” she said, “and motherhood is about sacrifice.”
Ugh, I thought. Sacrifice. I like the word sacrifice about as much as I like the word ‘goatspit’, which is to say, not at all. The word ‘sacrifice’ makes me think of ancient Spartan war rituals and that one Indiana Jones movie where that they tore out people’s hearts and flung them into pits of fire, which, sure, is maybe an appropriate analogy for parenthood some days, but still.
Emilia likes to make cards. She has a basket filled with stickers and glue and ribbon and glitter and discarded Hallmark product and she draws upon the contents of that basket frequently to craft fancifully illustrated and elaborately decorated cartes de voeux for every occasion, including but not limited to birthdays, holidays, dinnertime, bedtime, breakfast and the weekend, and expressing sentiments ranging from thanks for the pancakes, congratulations on picking me up from school, condolences on having your Macbook scribbled upon with crayon, I’m sorry that I scribbled on your Macbook with crayon, I love you even though you got mad that I scribbled on your Macbook with crayon, to my favorite, ‘RJOV‘, which you might think is some obscure Latin acronym but actually means ‘I love you’ in the code of the five year old who lacks sufficient vowels in her alphabet sticker supply (‘the J looks like an L Mommy if you look at it backwards and also I didn’t have an E’. She didn’t say what the ‘R’ represents. I’m choosing to go with ROCKSTAR.)
I almost never do this, pull narrative from the comment section of this site and present it alongside my own narrative, because that just seems so meta, although maybe I should, because it’s not like I don’t get meta – that whole last post was about as meta as it gets – and anyway so much of the commentary that you all contribute here is just so ridiculously smart, so I really should just get over myself and my conviction that I’m the lone storyteller here and that it’s not a good blog week if I don’t post a picture of my babies and just let you guys do more of the talking. Because, seriously:
A few weeks ago at SXSW in Austin, Texas, the lovely Karen Walrond sat me down and asked me a few questions about heartbreak. Not about the sad and the terrible and the woe-is-me of heartbreak, but about the beauty of heartbreak. And it was a wonderful and, I think, important conversation, because there is beauty in heartbreak, such that it’s actually misleading to call that exercising of the heart a break. The heart never really breaks. It pulls and stretches and moves and expands, and that movement can hurt terribly, but it’s not a movement toward breaking. The heart is not bone or ceramic or glass, Debbie Harry’s assertions notwithstanding. The heart, as I’ve said before, is a muscle. Its movements are extraordinary, even when they hurt. I needed to remind myself of that.
I’m on my way to New Orleans today, to speak at the Mom 2.0 Summit. That’s awesome and all – I’ve never been to New Orleans, so that’s exciting, and Mom 2.0 is always fantastic – but honestly, I’m getting a little tired of airplanes.
Anyway. Random whatevers:
We spent a lot of time, last week, talking about science. Which is maybe not what you would expect children to talk about during a week at Disney World, but there it is. Much of the initial discussion was provoked, of course, by Emilia’s very interesting hypothesis concerning the function and character of wishes in the Disney universe – a hypothesis that Tanner appreciated deeply, but that he felt raised further questions about wishes and about the nature of all things existing within that universe. Would all wishes come true at Disney World? A quick test – a declared wish to have ice cream for all meals – quickly confirmed that hypothesis false. And if that hypothesis was false, what did that mean for other Disney hypotheses?