…The sound of a robin splashing around in my birdbath.
Usually this sound would make me smile, but in this case it only made me mad; as in angry but also as in a little crazy. “Why aren’t you keeping your eggs warm?” I shouted through the closed window. All day I had watched and waited for that bird to get back on her nest…. I had only seen her there in passing over the last couple of days and more often I found her hopping around on my grass, sitting on the fence or playing in the birdbath. What kind of mommy bird was this? I wondered. Aren’t they supposed to stay stationed on their eggs till they hatch? She had certainly seemed attentive for the first few days. But then, as the weather changed to typical May rain, it seemed she gave up on them and now only sits on them when convenient. Apparently nobody warned Mrs. Robin that mommyhood is difficult. Sometimes we have to deal with awful weather (metaphorically and literally). My daughter has an unreasonable fear that the rain means our house will flood. Since we are located on a hill, I know this is entirely unlikely. Still, every time it rains, we have to have this same discussion. This I want to tell the bird, is mommyhood. In my blog on Monday I wrote about how last weekend our Girl Scout troop took a trip to the beach. After a late night on Saturday, my daughter’s week started out rocky, so that by Tuesday I was on the phone with her teacher talking about how to build her flexibility and resiliency (two buzz words moms do not want to hear from a teacher)… This is mommyhood. No one would describe my daughter as a cuddler, but as the end of the school year approaches, for some reason she has become extra clingy. She wants me with her all the time and has started having trouble going to school, having a babysitter, or letting me go to the bathroom by myself… This is mommyhood. Every mother knows that we sign up for the bad weather along with the good. At the same time I know that my daughter’s childhood is short and more important than anything I will ever do. We don’t get to pick and choose what we deal with… certainly we can’t just go off and play around in a pool when things get rough. Thankfully, though, the good times often see us through the bad. If I could, I would go outside and sit on those eggs myself. But I know nature has its own way, and though confused, I will wait and watch how this plays out. In the meantime, however, I’m moving the birdbath to the garage.
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“It’s a fluff book.”
Hmmmmm, as a commercial fiction author something about that overhear rubbed me the wrong way. A patient was reading a book and had been asked by the check-in person what it was about. But that’s not what it’s about, I wanted to tell her; That’s just society’s hierarchical placement of Genre fiction. Somehow I think she may have moved to the far side of the room from me though, so I kept quiet. I, for one, think all books have more value than to be presented as ‘fluff’. The FreeDictionary defines fluff as:Something having a very light, soft, or frothy consistency or appearance. It’s true… romance books often take a light, meaning either gentle or humorous, approach to emotional topics. And certainly there are many descriptions of soft things in them; soft fabric, soft spots, soft breasts. And frothy sounds so delicious I would actually like for my books to be described using that term. So, taken apart, the word fluff isn’t entirely out of place. It is the idea that fluff is of so little importance that she didn’t even want to describe the storyline that bothers me. Isn’t love the most important thing in the world? And isn’t it beautiful when it is soft and gentle (or better yet, frothy). This debate is interesting in that it comes on the heels of a few articles lately debating the hierarchical difference between Genre and Literary Fiction. Lev Grossman has discussed it in far greater detail than I have room for here (see Literary Revolution in the Supermarket Aisle: Genre Fiction Is Disruptive Technology). But one idea which stood out for me in his article was this – “There’s more than escapism going on here. Why do we seek out these hard places for our fantasy vacations? Because on some level, we recognize and claim those disasters as our own. We seek out hard places precisely because our lives are hard. When you read genre fiction, you leave behind the problems of reality — but only to re-encounter those problems in transfigured form, in an unfamiliar guise, one that helps you understand them more completely, and feel them more deeply. Genre fiction isn’t just generic pap. You don’t read it to escape your problems, you read it to find a new way to come to terms with them.” It reminded me of another great article I read recently describing why we cry: Why We Cry: The Fascinating Psychology of Emotional Release. The very idea of escapism takes us to a place where it is safe to explore our own feelings about our life issues like fear or rejection or love or isolation. When we can’t find that ‘safe’ place in our own daily world perhaps we look to books for it. After all, the best definition of fluff takes us directly there… A covering of soft feathers, like down. To me that sounds like the perfect haven for emotional release. |
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June 2020
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