A Slacker Writes A Poem, Sort Of

In this new life of 3 kids and even more busy schedule, I lost a day. Sorry folks.

I'd love to say it won't happen again, but, it will.

Nothing much for today. Another day that makes buys an understatement.

A half captured poem.

spun silk snow
God's own gossamer
glistens
glides down through brilliant
sapphire skies
sunlight
pure
piercing
searing through my blinded eye
I hear a memory
in the laughter of my child


I'm reading a book that thrills me. Confessions of a Slacker Mom by Muffy Mead-Ferro. Oh this book. It speaks my language. And with the right amount of sass too. I'm loving it.

Here's a taste.

pg.3
An early indication that I might end up a slacker mom was a tendency toward sarcasm. "Like I need a smart baby,"I muttered, when hearing about the latest device for stimulating her intellect in-vitro.

This negative attitude was accompanied by recurring fits of laziness. "When pigs fly," I thought , as I evaluated the odds of my carving out time to engage in such dreary activities as charting her fluid intake and bowel movements.

pg.31
Wow, this violin plays music all by itself! Hey, this book reads the words for me! Gosh, this paper magically doesn't let me color outside the lines! I really wonder if this is good. It might be unthinkably bad. It might be turning our children into dimwits, dolts, and dullards. Not geniuses.

Pg.44
I knelt there and cried as I thought about how she'd stashed these flimsy reminders of her children in her bathroom drawer. I pictured her calloused rancher's fingers touching them as she rummaged around for a pair of nail clippers.

I realized then that my pragmatic rancher of a mother was as sentimental as any mom. I know these things wouldn't have been any dearer to her if she'd been more methodical about collecting them.

But no one has enough time to commemorate every meaningful occasion in their child's life. Especially when you include all the things that might be defined as meaningful. That's the difficulty, I suppose.

What's meaningful in a kid's life? Every moment, potentially. But I suspect that every moment is potentially trivial, too, once we start pasting them all up.

Let's say Joe wins the Pulitzer Prize. I don't want a photo of that mounted in some album alongside the first time he hit a hockey puck. I realize that could just be my way of letting myself off the hook, as I tend to do.

Of course, if he does win the Pulitzer, I'll probably have forgotten the camera. And I'll just end up with some nonsensical scraps in my bathroom drawer for Belle and Joe to puzzle over after I'm gone.

Oh, well, at least they won't ever have to think their eating strained peas qualifies as an accomplishment in my mind.

Slacker Mom seems to sum it up nicely for me. A good book, an easy read if you're already this sort of mom. It's confirming and comforting. If you're not a fellow Slacker, this might be a challenge, a stretch to see where she's coming from and why.

Either way. Try it on for size.

jen