The Tunnel

I’ve been wanting to revamp the blog for a while now. Something about COVID-19, raising an infant-turned-toddler, and all of the associated isolation that comes with both of those has made me crave connection with the world outside our home. I slapped up a title for my post, “Two Years Later,” and was about to get started when I realized that it had actually been five years since my last post. That about sums things up: I’ve been in the tunnel.

That’s how I’ve been thinking lately about the experience of trying to remain human while mothering a small child. Recently, on a short train ride through Alaska’s Chugach National Forest with my husband, son, and in-laws (visiting for the first time since the pandemic began), we chugged through a series of short tunnels. I instinctively looked ahead for the light, while my son marveled in the short bursts of darkness.

Then, back on the Kenai Peninsula, I received snippets of news from a busy friend whose youngest child just started school. She’s taking on more work, renewing her artistic practice, getting involved in community efforts geared towards adults. In other words – as I explained it to myself – she’s coming out of the tunnel. It’s been a long one, but even from a distance I can hear her breaths deepen, her exhales lengthen.

To be clear, this tunnel I’m describing is not all doom and gloom. The past two years have introduced me to a joy so intense it feels a little like pain. The smallest of outdoor adventures feels like discovery. My son verbalizes his demand for yogurt one morning, and I’m walking around the clouds for the next three days in awe of him.

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  Tsalteshi trails

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  Dolly Varden cabin

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  Swan Lake Canoe Route

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  Spencer Glacier

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  Kenai Wildlife Refuge

I’m told that women often experience bizarre bursts of energy just before going into labor, embodied as frenzied cleaning or redecorating the nursery. In the final weeks before my son was born, I applied to a graduate program designed to funnel students into leadership positions in language teaching and research. I felt an urgent need to have concrete plans for myself once he was in the world. I was determined not to ever resent my child for the limitations he placed on my life, and I wanted him to grow up with a mother who loved her work, not one who grumbled daily about the injustices of being an adjunct writing instructor.

So the journey of the last two years began. I’ve been juggling full-time grad school in an intensive, three-semester program, a busy student job in Russian Studies, a marriage, childcare, dog care, and for the first semester, breastfeeding or pumping while attending Zoom class. During the second semester – because, as my mother says, I don’t do things the easy way – I got pregnant again. Unlike my first pregnancy, where morning sickness generally happened in the morning, I was sick all day, every day. For months. And people still had the audacity to tell me, “You should be focusing on self care.”

I don’t regret my choices, and I do believe in the power of self care, though I mostly fail at it. I’m fortunate to have a partner who cooks and cleans and has been willing to work part time and stay home with our son for a year to support my ambitions. I was not raised on the premise that women can “have it all” – I’ve spent my adult years thus far puzzling out all the mixed messages – but I want it to be possible to be an engaged mother and to have a rewarding career, albeit one I’m trying to jumpstart at age 35.

Enter the years of wandering, working disconnected jobs, going on long adventures, trying to write, and remaining generally skeptical of the career types. I don’t regret those choices, either, but they do make for a resume that some people would call “interesting,” and not in an entirely good way.

I’ve waited close to two years to write about motherhood specifically to avoid this touchy conversation, but here it is. I certainly do not intend to speak for all women. Right now I’m staring down the birth of my second child and the final semester of my (second) graduate program, and I feel isolated and confused. Though I know women who continued working during early motherhood and women who decided to take on full-time childrearing, I don’t actually know any who tried to build a career while in the tunnel.

To be honest, the women in my life right now are (a) too busy to even talk; (b) only interested in hearing about my kid and/or my pregnancy; or (c) already made their choices regarding kids and work and don’t want to revisit them. I’m terrified to admit how torn I feel about my future, about the emotional and damn-near-physical pull I feel to be present with my son, about the fear of being overcome by bitter regret if I don’t pursue work that will challenge me and allow me to share my talents with the world. (But hey, at least I’ve gotten to a point in life where I can admit that I have talents, right?)

Maybe motherhood is not all that different than a lot of things in life: an endless run-on sentence with incongruous statements connected by the conjunction “and.” And I love my kids and I would give my life for them and I want a life of my own and I have important work to do and there’s a reason I’m driven to pursue all these threads at once and no one is going to give me the answer and these are hard years and I will probably miss them one day. And I will screw it all up and that’s okay, too.

Waving goodbye to the train

A Christmas Ski Tour: Notes to Self

Magnolia considers the trail ahead..or is it?

Note to self: Never set out on a trek through a mountain pass while reading a book about seeking a mountain that no longer exists. Mountains in mountain passes do exist. They are snow-covered, wind-swept, and real. To read about a surreal, internalized mountain quest tempts one to imagine that one’s own mountain quest can be similarly non-real (meaning: not painful; challenging in the mind-places only).

Clarification: Gao Xingjian’s Soul Mountain, which prompted him to win a Nobel Prize for Literature, is complex and mind-boggling enough for any gung-ho lit major. John claims it is a powerful political commentary on China’s cultural revolution. If my current rate toward completion of this novel is any indication, the world is probably a better place for my never having pursued politics. Finishing this book seems as likely as its author ever finding the elusive mountain, Lingshan. I must say, though, that the writing is beautiful.

Further Clarification: John was reading Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Need I say more about our collective headspace as we embarked on a Christmas ski trip to Upper and Lower Russian Lakes and over Resurrection Pass?

“Sure, I’ll pull the 70-lb., malfunctioning sled for a while.”

“Maybe if I hurl myself downhill, the sled will follow…”

Note to Self: When the homemade sled doesn’t slide through the 18″ of new snow on the Russian Lakes trail (Day 1), don’t give in to the temptation to equate the weight of the sled with the unbearable burden of your life. Don’t strip down to your long underwear in an effort to relieve yourself of said burden. And once you have given in to both of the above, don’t threaten to burn the sled and everything in it. Like your life, the sled will still have useful purposes once it is through trudging through snowy woods for “fun”.

Clarification: John pulled the sled three miles uphill to the trailhead from our car before these pictures were taken.

Further Clarification: Ok, John pulled the sled pretty much all the time, except in the two pictures above.

Sunset at the Barber Cabin

Warm…sleepy…

View skiing out

Note to Self: Wood stoves in public use cabins are great. Love wood stoves; kindle fires in them, feed them, take naps by them. They make beautiful winter scenes much easier to enjoy. They make going outside to pee at 6AM and seeing the northern lights dancing above you all the more pleasant. They take away the chill of winter camping the night before. They dry clothes. They thaw ski bindings just enough that you can pry your 1980s neon ski boots out of them. They transform snow into boiled water. They heat breakfast burritos. They melt all the trials and triumphs of the day into deep, sleepy snoozes…

Junction of Bean Creek Trail and Resurrection Pass Trail

en route to Swan Lake

Juneau Lake Cabin

Note to Self: Take water breaks before the water bottles freeze, even if breaks annoy the dog. She will get you back later by claiming every piece of insulated gear as her bed. Also, hot water in the thermos. Always.

Clarification: When John suggests powdered Apple Cider packets, say yes. Make several of them daily. Mix the powder with hot water and whiskey, and be grateful for the little things in life.

Further Clarification: In fact, there are lots of wonderful little things in life. Like arriving at the next cabin after a beautiful ski. Like melting snow for more hot drinks. Like being miles from anyone OCD enough to tell you that your gloves don’t match.

View of the pass from Swan Lake

Note to Self: When life gives you frozen lakes, you should ski on them. Drop your packs at the cabin and ski two miles down the lake just to see what’s on the other end. Delight in the speed of skiing in your own tracks on the two miles back. Don’t worry too much about what lies ahead. You never know when you’ll wake up the next morning to ominous skies, warming temperatures, and blowing snow.

Above Swan Lake, the next day

Note to Self: When your husband says it’s time to turn back, listen to him. Don’t fool yourself into thinking that 30+mph winds, rapidly warming weather, and blowing snow make for a pleasant ski through avalanche country. Support each other in your disappointment at not making it through the pass. Retreat, and enjoy a warm Christmas Eve down below the storm. After all, it’s Christmas.

Clarification: You can’t take pictures in 30+mph winds and blowing snow. If you try to, the picture will come out all white. Come to think of it, white is all you can see anywhere you look. Time to turn around!

Further Clarification: Many a disappointed (yet wise) traveler has come before us. John says that good decisions are made before the emergency happens. As it turns out, we made a pretty good decision. Now we have to let go of the what-ifs. Think of Sherry Simpson’s essay, “Turning Back”.  While hiking the Fairbanks-Circle Trail with her aging dog, Simpson decides to retreat and must face the reality of loss:

This was my only discovery: that I had reached the place where middle age tips into loss, when everything worth caring about begins to disappear – not just my beloved dog, but relatives, friends, my husband, time itself and all its possibilities. For two days I had walked just to arrive at this place, just so I could recognize that in life there is no turning back. (The Accidental Explorer, 94)

In the clear and taut writing that I so appreciate in Simpson’s work, she captures the essence of our experience as well: “But even as I turned back, I could feel the sorrow and beauty of the world sinking through me, settling into my flesh, as firm and necessary as the bones that would have to carry me along this trail” (96).

So, we let our bones – and our sore muscles – carry us back down the trail. The next day, Christmas morning, we skied out of the mountains on sticky snow that clogged up our skis. Lower still, we skied across ice-coated snow that made an awful raspy noise. We arrived at the car in the rain.

Maybe this trip was about learning our limits, or a reminder of what’s really important when we go adventuring. Life isn’t all success and sunshine, after all. But for us – still – it is warm and full of possibility. For that – and for each other – we’re grateful. And we’ll be back someday to seek the elusive mountain pass…

Books and Islands: Louise Erdrich in Ojibwe Country

Books and islands.

If there is a valid reason for my falling so hopelessly behind in this year’s reading challenge, it is my love of libraries. I once heard the editor-at-large (whatever that means) of a prominent literary journal speak about his reading habit. He urged the small group of ambitious college students around him to read widely and randomly, to let curiosity drive the reading.

Though I didn’t like this man – or the dinner at his home that was conducted as if we were meeting the President – I very much agree with his comments on the reading life. And since most curiosity-driven readers don’t have access to enough books to satiate themselves (and is it even possible?), we turn (with joy, with trepidation) to libraries.

So giving myself over to Louise Erdrich’s Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country this past week was a guilty pleasure. This book doesn’t count toward my goal of 60 owned books read by December 31st, but I really can’t be bothered with such trifles. I had this book in my hands! In hardcover! And then I opened it…

This little volume, first published in 2003 as part of a National Geographic Literary Travel Series, gives lovers of Erdrich’s novels a welcome insight into who she is as a reader, as a mother, lover, traveler, and bookstore owner. It explores Ojibwe culture – past and present continuous – as someone who has one foot in and one foot out. This insider/outsider perspective is one I cherish in writers.

Image from lakeofthewoodslodge.com; interesting enough, most of the map images I found were through fishing lodge websites.

Erdrich travels through Lake of the Woods and Rainy Lake (lower right in the above map). In Lake of the Woods, she travels with her partner and their daughter through islands containing sacred rock paintings, some of which are thousands of years old. Then, in Rainy Lake, our author and her infant daughter visit an island where one Ernest Oberholtzer collected and stored thousands of books in his cabins.

Finally, Erdrich returns home to Minneapolis, where she considers how her independent bookstore, Birchbark Books, is also a sort of island filled with books.

And I’m off again. I’ve just discovered that attached to the Birchbark Books page there’s a wonderful little blog, where Erdrich has recently posted about the election.

Today I’m thankful for the many travels of my life thus far: by land, by river, by air, and yes, by book.

Satrapi’s Persepolis: Another View of Childhood

I’ve been putting off this post for a few days now, unsure of what to write about Marjane Satrapi’s bestselling graphic novel, Persepolis. That’s not because I didn’t like the book; in fact, I liked it so much that I had to check out Persepolis 2 from the library before I had even finished the first book. I literally closed the first book’s back cover and opened the next book’s front cover within minutes, too entranced to stop reading.

I guess I’ve been stalling because I feel like I should know more about Iran’s history, that I should be able to write an intelligent, insightful response that sets Satrapi’s work into a literary, historical, and cultural context. After all, this is what I’ve been teaching my students to do: research!

I’ll get there eventually. Recently, though, my class had a powerful discussion about the nature of stories. We talked about how some stories are best digested slowly, over time, and without too much poking and prodding. I think about my favorite Billy Collins poem, “Introduction to Poetry,” in which the author asks students to experience the poem in various ways, from different angles.

“But all they want to do,” the poem continues, “is tie the poem to a chair with rope / and torture a confession out of it.”

Irish travel writer Dervla Murphy gave me another frank view at what over-analyzing a story can do. John and I have been reading her travelogue, Full Tilt, out loud to one another. She bicycled alone from Dunkirk to Delhi, passing right through Tehran, in 1963. Full Tilt is primarily made up of journal entries:

Apart from burnishing the spelling and syntax, which are apt to suffer when one makes nightly entries whether half asleep or not, I have left the diary virtually unchanged. A few very personal or very topical comments or allusions have be excised, but the temptation to make myself sound more learned than I am, by gleaning facts and figures from an encyclopaedia and inserting them in appropriate places, has been resisted. For this reason the narrative which follows will be seen to suffer from statistic-deficiency; it only contains such information as any traveller might happen to pick up from day to day along my route. (Full Tilt, 3-4)

In the spirit of Murphy’s unabashed travelogue, I will write of my reader’s experience with Satrapi’s book. It is not my intent to support ignorance regarding other cultures, but instead to suggest that reading personal stories such as Satrapi’s (and especially such wonderfully illustrated stories) is a fine way to encounter the Other. And in many ways, I encountered myself in this book: a strong, intelligent, and hopelessly stubborn little girl.
I’ve never been an enthusiastic student of history. The way Persepolis combines personal and national history, however, enthralled me. Satrapi’s books are reminiscent of Art Spiegelman’s Maus in that they use the platform of graphic novel to make war personal. Where Spiegelman makes personal a topic familiar to most westerners, however, Satrapi opens a door to the east.

This open door is increasingly valuable as conflict ravages the Middle East and the western world makes a mindless connection between groups like IS and the entire population of a country (or religion). Instead of diving into my own analysis, I’ll give you Satrapi’s:

Since then [1979], this old and great civilization has been discussed mostly in connection with fundamentalism, fanaticism, and terrorism. As an Iranian who has lived more than half of my life in Iran, I know that this image is far from the truth. This is why writing Persepolis was so important to me. I believe that an entire nation should not be judged by the wrongdoings of a few extremists. (Introduction)

I want to return to the little girl, though. Satrapi invites readers into the mind of a little girl who distinguishes between human dignity and injustice at an incredibly early age. In Persepolis 2, this girl becomes an adult away from home – in Austria – and grapples with maintaining her dignity in a place where no one else values her culture.

When she returns to Iran, Satrapi encounters a regime more oppressive than when she left, and she struggles to fit in. Ultimately, though Satrapi settles in France, she maintains close emotional ties with the country of her childhood.

It’s no surprise to me that such a successful culture-straddler as Satrapi has become a writer. Her story was a joy to read, one that will stay with me for a long time.

As for me, the reader, I’m looking for recommendations on graphic novels. I’m hooked. Add Satrapi to the work of Alison Bechdel (I devoured Fun Home and Are You My Mother? last year) and Spiegelman, and this genre obviously has something powerful going for it. If only I could draw!