Take a load off

I took my two youngest children to have their pictures made today. Caroline wore a little crocheted dress made by my grandmother, and James wore the christening gown I made when Colin was born. (To see Colin's photo in the gown, click here. Enter the site, then click on "families and children." He's in the second photo). I had been feeling guilty for nearly a year over not having these photos taken, and even though it's been that long (longer?) since James was baptized, I figured it's better to have the pictures late than not at all. Miraculously, we got a few good shots, though Caroline still refuses to smile for pictures. I told her she didn't have to smile, but promised her the moon--or at least a Polly Pocket and some M&Ms--if she could just manage not to look sullen.

Later I enjoyed one of my daily chats with my sister, and we talked about feeling guilty for not having more professional photos made when the kids were tiny. It started me thinking of how many things we feel guilty about when it comes to our children. Collectively, she and I feel guilty for a host of things: not spending more time "enriching" them with various games or learning activities, losing our tempers from time to time; having more pictures of one than another, not being able to afford primo private school, kids having to share a room, feeding them non-organic food, having a messy house, not sewing all the daughter's dresses, giving up on cloth diapering, the fact that one has two cavities, you name it. After generations of our foremothers struggling for women's rights, we fret over not exhausting and martying our lives to provide a questionably perfect and idyllic existence for our offspring.

I can't help but reflect on the time when the little dress Caroline wore today was made--sometime in the early forties, by a woman struggling against the stark ignorance and poverty of coal-mining Kentucky, for whom adequate medical care or higher education, for herself or her family, was a fantasy. She died at 41 after delivering a stillborn boy, leaving behind 3 grown children, a teenager, and two preschool children (one of whom was my mother) whose remaining childhood became a horror story for another day. Somehow I doubt that against this backdrop anyone had time to feel guilty about the way she was raising her children. Getting food on the table and keeping a fire in the stove was worry enough.

Our kids have vaccinations, preschool, car seats, "Back to Sleep," crayons, paper, gratuitous amounts of toys, Leap Pads, flouride, water and heat that don't have to be brought in from outside, more photos already than my parents had made in a lifetime, combined, Flintstones vitamins, well checks, and a distinct lack of intestinal parasites and head lice, yet we neurotically worry that we're not providing some self-imposed standard of perfection in their young lives. My grandmother would think my children live like royalty.

Admittedly, I feel like a significantly better mother for having documented my little ones wearing these past and future heirlooms, but I think I'll counter that virtuous feeling by firing up the stove to prepare some Kraft Mac and Cheese for dinner, and I might not even serve a salad. I might even let them watch a little extra television since their Daddy is working late. To all other mothers, I suggest you take a load off too. We're doing better than we think.

Houses in the Fields (apologies to John Gorka)

Sat on the back porch today, waiting while my newly adopted dog sniffed at everything and did her biological business, reflecting on the landscape around me. The air filled with the sound of migrating Canadian geese; in the distance was the sound of a woodpecker and a distant neighbor's barking dogs. Our home is recently constructed in the middle of a cow pasture on the old family farm, with rolling hills around as far as you can see and a huge, open, star studded sky at night, but as I waited for Chloe to finish her explorations, I couldn't help but wonder, how long can it stay this way?

Yesterday I drove near my old neighborhood in Charlotte (incidentally, on the way to and from Judy Chicago, which my sister sums up beautifully in her blog) which itself was once open farmland. Now there are rows and rows of treeless, mind-numbingly similar subdivisions, disorientingly and dispiritingly alike, punctuated by the same mega-corporate chain stores one can find from Detroit to Decatur. It is the America John Steinbeck predicted nearly fifty years ago in Travels with Charley. I moved only 4 years ago and barely recognize the landscape.

We live in a thriving region, which has many advantages, but one of the disadvantages is that the South I have come to love, the rolling countryside, the sleepy small towns, the family ties to land and place, is being overwhelmed by growth. Not orderly, measured growth, natural and desired, but a rampant and malignant excrescence that disfigures and blights its host. Hastily constructed neighborhoods spring up and spread like kudsu, with no time to plan for the type of design or construction that might feed the spirit or foster community.

Now I have enough red-blooded hillbilly in me to believe if you want to sell your land for profit, that's your business. But my heart sinks each time I see a parcel for sale, and the signs creep nearer and nearer to my own cherished open space. It's not that I dislike density--I love real cities, with their history and the energy that springs from the wonderful stew of diverse people and cultures bubbling in the same pot--or that I don't understand that the influx of new people needs a place to live. It's just that what I love most about any place is its sense of place, whether that be the outrageous chaos of Rome or the quiet melancholy of the Appalachians.

Growth seems like a giant amoeba, mindlessly absorbing everthing around it into one insentient, amorphous whole. The larger cities have their identities; I worry about all the smaller places in between. I worry about what becomes of individuality, creativity, when the experience of living in one place blurs into the next with no distinctions. I fret at the thought that we have to travel farther and farther to find something different from our own landscape. Will individuality flounder, or will it manage to simmer up from the bland stew of contrived lifestyle neighborhoods and homeowners' association restrictions?

It's a good problem we have, to live in a place where we can debate growth; where, poorly designed and executed or not, at least it's housing, but then, are stewardship and conservation of the land really a luxury?

I will go out with the dog once more tonight, and drink in the night sky while I can. And, with a nod to my former homeowners' association, when the dog poops, I will leave it to become a part of the landscape.