Mother's Day

OMG, I’m almost finished with a piece of writing that has been dogging me--DOGGING me, I tell you--for weeks, and it’s quite a relief. Watch this space! Coming soon! Don’t miss it!

But every silver lining has a heavy gray cloud because just when I thought that we were close to a resolution to the impasse that I mentioned last week, it turns out that not only do we not have a resolution but that some people appear to have dug in more firmly. I’m looking across no-man’s-land right now and I see sandbags. I see barbed wire. I see gun turrets. 

*****

It’s Friday now. We appear once again to have achieved a peace settlement or at least a cease-fire, so I can go about my business without a flak jacket or whatever the fuck else. 

I’m still very close to finishing the essay I’ve been writing; so close, in fact, that I can sit around her writing about writing it rather than actually writing it. It’s all part of the process. 

What I’m writing is an essay about Caitlin Flanagan’s Girl Land. Flanagan just published an essay on The Atlantic, about “Nomadland” (the movie) and she picked up something that I missed entirely because she’s Caitlin Flanagan and I’m not. Or rather, I did pick it up, but I didn’t quite get what I was seeing. Frances McDormand’s Fern and Linda May (played by herself) are living a very particular part of every young girl’s dream life; the part where we play house and pretend that we are mistresses of all we survey. The makeshift nature of a little girl’s playhouse is part of its charm, a feature and not a bug. Fern and Linda get to run their tiny mobile households all for themselves, just as they like them, with no demands from husbands or children and no neighborhood standards to live up to. As they sit together in their lawn chairs, Flanagan observes, Fern and Linda May are no longer beaten-down, overworked elderly blue-collar women. They are girls; little girls with their whole lives ahead of them, mistresses of all they survey.  

*****

Do you see why it takes me so damn long to finish anything? Last night, I re-read what I have so far, and I found a few easy edits that will make it all flow so much better. But why not write about revising rather than actually revising? 

*****

Now it's Sunday. Yesterday, we went to a cookout. I don’t really know the couple who hosted the party; they’re acquaintances rather than friends. They have a magazine-perfect house and deck and yard that I just slightly envied. So much room, I thought, and such nice outdoor furniture. It was unseasonably cold yesterday, but propane heaters threw warmth in every direction, and colorful flowers bloomed from planters and flower beds.

I don’t generally envy other people’s material wealth and possessions. I have enough. And later as I read Lauren Hough’s Leaving Isn’t the Hardest Thing, I remembered that I have enough, even if I’d forgotten it for five minutes while I basked in the propane-generated outdoor warmth. 

Later, I did go back and revise my essay, and I’m this close. This close, I tell you. It’s 9:45 on Sunday morning and I just ate some eggs and fruit salad that I didn’t have to make, and I’m sitting on the couch, half-watching a “Hunger Games” marathon while reading and writing. I don’t know how appropriate “The Hunger Games” is as Mother’s Day programming, but I happen to love the movies (and the books) so I’m quite content. I have a whole day ahead of me when I don’t have to work or cook or clean or fight the power or adhere to anyone’s timetable. That’s all I want for Mother’s Day.