jocelyn’s stories

Photo by Billy

-”Please, Mama, eat something!” William says.
-”Okay, honey. Of course. How about some yogurt with blueberries?”
-”No blueberries, Mama!”
-”Okay, how about toast with butter?
-”No, only butter!”
-”Butter alone is not okay. How about toast and butter with eggs and cheese.
-”No eggs-and-cheese! I no like eggs-and-cheese!”
-”Okay, then. How about fresh fruit?
-”Okay, Mama: fruit. What fruit?”
-”Well, let’s see. We have blueberries…”
-”Okay blueberries…” a pause. “No! Blueberries and yogurt, mama! Okay?”
-”Okay.”

Reading books like Kingsolver’s, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and authors like Michael Pollan, has got me thinking about what’s for dinner. Whole Food, Fresh Food, Organic Food, Seasonal Food, Local Food, Home-cooked food? Fifty years ago these categories would all fall more or less under the umbrella of regular food. Now, in America at least, they are specialty items. I’m inspired to tip back the other way a bit; at least I think our family is going to hit the farmer’s market a little more this year…

What are you eating this summer?

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William and I on the mini train at Short Pump mall, in Richmond

Photos by Billy

Summer is here, school is out, and I have William in the midday now; I am charged with getting him to sleep after lunch, which has proved a challenge.

William sleeps swimmingly at night, but he resists his nap, even as he yawns and rubs his eyes. “No sleeping,” he says emphatically, “No Mamma singing ‘Twinkle, Twinkle.” I move on to “The ABC song”, or “Baa, Baa Black Sheep”, but he is unimpressed.

Like with an newborn, I’ve resorted to driving down winding country roads, trying to coax sleep, because I need William’s nap too. A pause in our morning of play. I wish I could close my eyes. In the rearview mirror, William’s eyelids grow heavy, but then, catch on something by the road. “Tractor, Momma!” he says, blinking back sleep.

I slow and pull into an old church, loose gravel for a parking lot. Our wheels spin. The tractor is rusted, a relic abandoned in the grass. We both look for a moment, then I pull back on the road.

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William making bubbles at the birthday party
Photo by Billy

Could William be more in love with his dad’s band, Straight Punch to the Crotch? The name aside, William finds their music sweet and salty in just the right proportion. They practice most weeks in “the unicorn palace” a run down mother-in-law suite behind our proper house. The band happily, generously plays “Robot baby” or “Summer Sun” just for William; he is still humming these tunes as I put his head to pillow.

Join us for the CD release party this Saturday evening (June 21st), 9pm at Zinc, here in Charlottesville, check out this review, or listen at the band’s myspace page.

CDs take a ton of time and work to complete…What art projects are you finishing up (or starting) these long summer days?

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Photo by ‘Papa’ Johnson

William recently turned two and I thought about the day he was born. I had a planned C-section at 39 weeks: a necessity, the doctors said, because of a previous surgery to remove several fibroid tumors.

When I’d initial decided to try to have a baby, I had leaned toward midwifery, not surgery. I’d had a girlfriend in college–half English–who’d given birth at home with a midwife; and in the years afterward, several friends had chosen some variation on this theme.

But when my doctors said, you have to have a c-section, dear, there was not so much disappointment as relief. Who was I to mess with the immeasurable pain and challenge of childbirth?

But I recently got a small pang for the initial desire to experience natural childbirth after Billy and I watched The Business of Being Born, a documentary by Ricki Lake on the child birthing trends in the USA.

Watching, I wondered again: why are women in our country having pharmaceutical and surgical interventions at an alarmingly higher rate than anywhere else in the world? Watching, I wondered, why is it that our rate of success at birthing still worse than most developed countries?

Watching, I wondered again:
what might have been lost after all?

How was it for you mothers and fathers out there?

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Photo by Stephanie Gross
Billy and I got married six years ago this month.
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Photo by Billy

Billy’s photographs documenting our local female arm wrestling phenomenon will be on display for the month of June at Cafe Cubano, in Downtown Charlottesville, during Festival of the Photograph. Check them out if you get a chance. Or learn more about CLAW here.

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Photo by Billy

This is the thing: I cannot write another single short story.
It’s hard and all the good stories have already been taken, or they reside in other peoples’ heads.

When I try, suddenly the dishwasher needs filling,
the dryer needs emptying,
the dog needs to be petted, her graying mug wet and heavy on my lap.

Or maybe I manage a few words here,
a few pages there,
but then they thin to a trickle:
A dry river bed.

The yard is full of dandelions gone to seed.
What I mean is, everything seems overfull already.
What more is there for me to say?

A friend from Tinhouse, who is her own powerhouse, is managing this lovely blog for fans of short stories, The Short Review. All these talented folks seem to be managing to find the right sequence of words. See for yourself here.

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Photos by Papa Johnson

This week, everything is broken.

The land-line hisses, refuses to ring, and in tandem, my cellphone mutes whenever I try to pick up a call.

The washing machine has broken, too, two times in seven days, leaving our clothes suspending in pools of soapy water.
The man who came to fix it (twice) produces, from the pump, the large bobby pins I use to twist my hair.

Did I mention, someone backed into my car on Mother’s day? The third dent this year; the insurance adjusters keep calling, but I can’t pick up….

Mid week, in the middle of the night, I woke to a acidic, acrid smell of smoke filling the house. And me, a zombie, opening and closing doors, trying to find the source. Turns out, it was the dishwasher: an ice cream scoop melted onto the heating element at the bottom. Eyes burning, I tried to usher out the chemical-air while the boys slept. Days later the smell still clings to the plastic interior, every dish ruined. The machine leaks now.

We will have to replace it after all.

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Photo by Billy

Despite countless hours and many sleepless nights, I’m still new enough to mothering that I am surprised by cards in my mailbox leading up to Mother’s day. These are things I’m supposed to remember to send, in honor of her birth-day, and all the days after that connect me to her.

The truth is, I am still half-shocked by plain fact of my motherhood.

A friend sent me a poem selected in the Post in honor of the day. Listen here, click this link, or enjoy it below, if you’d like.

Dead
By Sarah Harwell

The way my daughter sleeps it’s as if she’s talking
to the dead. Now she is one. I watch her eyes roll
backwards in her head, her senses fold

one by one, and then her breathing quiets to a beat.
Every night she fights this silent way of being
with all the whining ammunition she has.

She wins a tired story, a smothered song, the small
and willful links to life that carry her away.
Welcome to the Egyptian burial. She’s gone to Hades

with her stuffed animals. When she wakes,
the sad circles disappeared, she blinks
before she knows me. I have listened

to one million breaths of her. And every night
my body seizes when she leaves to go
where I am not, and yet every night I urge her, go.

William and his friend, Louie

Photo by Billy

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