April Come She Will

April in Atlanta is, perhaps, the most beautiful month. It would take an aesthete of depression or an allergy sufferer (Out out vile dust!) to find it the cruellest month here. Although I did recently attend a funeral featuring the Anglican Liturgy for the Burial of the Dead. As they interred the ashes in the church garden, I had to restrain my young daughter who wanted to catch a caterpillar. Such intrusion of life and the chrysalid reference did cheer me. The azaleas and dogwoods are in bloom, the weather is still temperate, the mosquitoes, fortified since my childhood with the introduction of Daybiters, are not yet out.

I do not get to think about April, T.S. Eliot, or daybiters for long. "Mommy, Mommy come quick. One of the boys is launching himself from the armrest of the chair into the playpen." If I were a good American mother, that is the kind willing to see nascent brilliance in every random action of her progeny, it would occur to me that this might show some future promise of an astronautical career. At the moment, all I can think is that that if he plays his cards right he could be the next Johnny Knoxville . Maybe the Classics got parenting right; all I need now is to find is a sympathetic she-wolf to help me raise those twin boys.

Could I be the only parent demented enough to blast out the Rolling Stones "Mother's Little Helper" to get through the five o'clock witching hour of the children's dinner? Or, "No, we are not listening to Wee Sing Fun and Games "Who stole the cookies from the cookie jar" again; it's time for some Tina Turner, babies. My children are good sports, they really are. My four year old daughter now asks for Tina Turner. I figure if you don't take the pep pills, you're at least entitled to some really loud music to get through the anti-aircraft siren-strength screams, background whines and the twins' food launch missile strikes without going into a catatonic trance. This job doesn't offer combat pay.

Ironically, it's the girl who sends me to the emergency room on an evening when my husband is out of town. She puts a gash in her forehead while jumping on the brick steps on the back terrace. The nice thing about living in a big city is that (barring traffic) you can be at a specialized children's hospital in about twenty minutes. The bad thing about living in a big city is that at the same point in time there will be about twenty other kids ahead of yours in the emergency room of that same hospital. At Children's Healthcare they give you a vibrating thingy to let you know when it's your child's turn to be seen. They have the same thing in trendy no-reservation policy restaurants. Unless your child is having a seizure or a hemophiliac bleeding episode, you can definitely be seated quicker in the trendiest restaurant in town than you'll be seen at Children's Healthcare. Nobody is particularly impressed with the bloody washrag my daughter is holding to her forehead. The friendly college-age girl, probably a junior version of what is now known as a "patient advocate," circulates. Several coloring books and plastic mini-toys later, the question of what she can do to help definitely seems rhetorical since she can't help most of us with what we want, which is to have our child seen by a doctor in less than ninety minutes. It's nine thirty in the evening by the time the doctor takes a look at my daughter. She's doing fine (she'd been fed and bathed before her jumping episode at 6:30 in the evening); however, the fact that I haven't had dinner, the permafatigue and the fact that my husband isn't there is taking its toll on me. I remember the mother of a child in my daughter's ballet class last year proudly telling us how they made the hospital call a plastic surgeon and waited six hours for him to come and sew up her daugher's cut forehead and that it was so worth the effort and the wait because "you know, it's your little girl and you'd hate for her to go through life with some unsightly scar." The doctor is talking about glueing and deflecting my best efforts to protest and make noises to the effect that I have keloid scars, I'm afraid she scars badly too, her cuts don't seem to heal that well. The doctor looks at one of her scars and is not impressed. I'm alone, tired and hungry. It's going to take being a real bitch and waiting several more hours to get a plastic surgeon in, and, frankly, I don't know a thing about facial scarring. I'm caught between two disquieting images--my daughter at fourteen being self-conscious over this scar or the fact that maybe I'm being completely neurotic. After all, when I was a child nobody would have thought twice about having some emergency room hack stitch up their child...that is if they even bothered to go to the hospital at all, as opposed to slapping on a bandaid at home. My daughter gets glued. She does far better than her mother who is nauseous and barely escapes fainting.

What is wrong with American women of my generation that so many of us are so traumatized about whether we are good mothers? We read too many books on parenting and child development. I think we are rather isolated, compared to earlier generations of women who may not have worked, but did enjoy stronger networks of fellow mothers who could share stories and experiences that child-rearing into perspective. Comparatively, women are waiting until later in life to have children. Some may have given up a promising career to stay home with children. Those mothers often seem to have higher expecations than earlier generations, as though the child's achievements must justify the mother's sacrifice.

I do not think I shall have this problem, not being aware that anyone ever awaited a mutual fund shareholder annual report with breathless anticipation, or if they did, the reasons for that had little to do with the writing. As for my current job in charge of PR in a "nepotistic little family"/nobody in their right mind, outside of family, would have joined us when we started out company, opinions are divided. Some say we have the worst PR in the entire Java industry. Conversely, those who somewhat begrudingly see in our efforts a ruthless talent for self-promotion attribute this to no less than a pact with the Devil, so I can't claim much credit there. No, I'm feeling quite at peace with my own temporal nature and existential irrelevance today. In no way qualifying as a Mother Superior...I know exactly how she does it, it's all about lowering your standards and choosing your priorities, darling...I think I shall submit myself for membership in a less exclusive and far more entertaining club.

The Decadent Mothers' Club--For every woman who didn't give up coffee while pregnant, forgot when it was her turn to handle snack week at preschool, talked about setting up a cocktail playdate with the parents of her childrens' friends, who "supports" her child's education by offering the school live auction high-bid on box seats for the Prince Musicology concert at Phillips Arena, who struggles with the thought that she has about ten more years to start acting like a grown-up, and then decides to take Liz Phair's advice, who when asked if her son might not be a bit freaked out by having her as a mother when he's fifteen said "Well I figure that by the time he's fifteen he'll be pretty freaked out, anyway. I'm just helping him put this into a concrete context."

Through a Glass Darkly--Part II

Through a Glass Darkly, Part I

Translation of CORRESPONDENCES, Charles Baudelaire

Nature is a temple where living pillars
Let sometimes emerge confused words;
Man crosses it through forests of symbols
Which watch him with intimate eyes.

Like those deep echoes that meet from afar
In a dark and profound harmony,
As vast as night and clarity,
So perfumes, colours, tones answer each other.

There are perfumes fresh as children's flesh,
Soft as oboes, green as meadows,
And others, corrupted, rich, triumphant,

Possessing the diffusion of infinite things,

Like amber, musk, incense and aromatic resin,
Chanting the ecstasies of spirit and senses.

The Chalice of Blood

Mademoiselle de Sombreuil was a painting by Puvis de Chavannes, a reference in Balzac's Vicar of Tours, a poem by Victor Hugo and a riddle of my childhood.

I first came across her among the paintings in my grandparents' house: an oil depicting a fair girl with long blond hair and blue eyes, her countenance a mixture of fear and resolve. She stands solitary and sacrificial against the backdrop of the guillotine, arm extended to reach for a goblet lifted up by the angry, ruddy figures in the Revolutionary mob.

Years later in Paris, seeking any possible distraction from my thesis research in the Bibliotheque Nationale (National Library), I took the opportunity to look further into her story. What light would dusty historical tomes shed on a family oral tradition where magic realism featured so prominently? The only online narrative I could find of Mademoiselle de Sombreuil's actions during the Revolution, Charlotte Yonge's The Second of September 1792, tells a story similar to the accounts in the Bibliotheque Nationale. The main difference lies in the tone that strives less for historical objectivity than a dramatization of events in the service of a moral lesson. One can just imagine the Ms. Yonge as a maiden aunt with scholarly leanings. In its moral objective and tone, The Second of September recalls the illustrated Lives of the Saints that children were encouraged to read during my brief sojourn in Catholic school. The hope that these stories would inspire us to lead saintly lives did not take into account the perspective of a ten year old girl. In the saintly life, it seemed one had a choice between youth, beauty and an early death in the throes of the most creative forms of torture known to man, or maturity and long life...lived out in a nunnery. Needless to say, neither was appealing.

Charlotte Yonge's account

"About twenty-two ladies were together, and were called to leave the prison, but the two who went first were at once butchered, and the sentry called out to the others, "It is a snare, go back, do not show yourselves." They retreated; but Marie de Sombreuil had made her way to her father, and when he was called down into the court, she came with him. She hung round him, beseeching the murderers to have pity on his grey hairs, and declaring that they must strike him only through her. One of the ruffians, touched by her resolution, called out that they should be allowed to pass if the girl would drink to the health of the nation. The whole court was swimming with blood, and the glass he held out to her was full of something red. Marie would not shudder. She drank, and with the applause of the assassins ringing in her ears, she passed with her father over the threshold of the fatal gates, into such freedom and safety as Paris could then afford. Never again could she see a glass of red wine without a shudder, and it was generally believed that it was actually a glass of blood that she had swallowed, though she always averred that this was an exaggeration, and that it had been only her impression before tasting it that so horrible a draught was offered to her....

M. Cazotte was imprisoned again on the 12th of September, and all his daughter's efforts failed to save him. She was taken from him, and he died on the guillotine, exclaiming, "I die as I have lived, faithful to my God and to my King." And the same winter, M. de Sombreuil was also imprisoned again. When he entered the prison with his daughter, all the inmates rose to do her honour. In the ensuing June, after a mock trial, her father and brother were put to death, and she remained for many years alone with only the memory of her past days."

As a child, I interpreted this story as a moral test. Given the opportunity, would I sacrifice my own life to save another? Looking at the painting of Mademoiselle de Sombreuil, I feared that I had been measured and found lacking.

Worse yet, the gesture was useless. Mademoiselle de Sombreuil later lost her father and brother anyway. What did it mean to face death to remain faithful to one's God and one's King? While the gratitude of God is not for this world, it would appear that the gratitude of kings leaves much to be desired. In one of the accounts of Mlle. de Sombreuil's life in the Bibliotheque Nationale, it told of Mademoiselle, now Madame in later years, petitioning the Restoration king for some pension with which to educate and raise her son. While the exact details of her later life and reduced circumstances escape me, the suggestion of a less heroic and penurious middle and old age lend perspective to the second painting of Mlle. de Sombreuil

Who is that old woman?

To my ten year old self, the idea of my own aging seemed distant and unreal, thus I experienced great difficulty in reconciling the earlier and later portraits of Mademoiselle de Sombreuil. While I was not particularly interested in the imagery of self-sacrifice, I did appreciate that certain standards of beauty had been respected in young Mademoiselle's portrait. The same could not have been said of "Mademoiselle" de Sombreuil, the twilight years. The earlier portrait memorializes one moment that came to define her life for others, frozen in time, romanticized, a small paintstroke in the larger tableau of Nineteenth century French literary and artistic fascination with the Revolution and the phase known as La Terreur...a tendency to seek solace for impersonal and senseless acts of violence in individual acts of faith, courage and devotion. The latter portrait presents the older woman, independent of any dramatic context, montage or romanticization...a pinched expression on her face, wrinkles, wart on her chin, dark hair that sits unnaturally on her head (did I read that she lost her hair, was it a wig?). The face in the portrait of young Mademoiselle Sombreuil reflects the instantly recognizable archetype of the girl martyr. In the later portrait, the old woman's facial expression represents no archetype, no solace, no resolution.

From The Vicar of Tours, Honore de Balzac

"In the "citta dolente" of spinsterhood we often meet, especially in France, with women whose lives are a sacrifice nobly and daily offered to noble sentiments. Some remain proudly faithful to a heart which death tore from them; martyrs of love, they learn the secrets of womanhood only though their souls. Others obey some family pride (which in our days, and to our shame, decreases steadily); these devote themselves to the welfare of a brother, or to orphan nephews; they are mothers while remaining virgins. Such old maids attain to the highest heroism of their sex by consecrating all feminine feelings to the help of sorrow. They idealize womanhood by renouncing the rewards of woman's destiny, accepting its pains. They live surrounded by the splendour of their devotion, and men respectfully bow the head before their faded features. Mademoiselle de Sombreuil was neither wife nor maid; she was and ever will be a living poem."

Translated stanza from The Death of Mademoiselle de Sombreuil, Victor Hugo

Her life was a pure mystery
Of innoncence and saintly remorse;
This soul that passed along the earth

In between the living and the dead.
Often, alas, the unfortunate one,
As though, from her destiny
Death broke the bond,
Felt with vain terrors
The icy passage in her pale veins

A blood that was not her own!

The Rose

My parents' rose garden was a true labor of love in the American South. The bushes would initially flourish in the early temperate months of spring. However, when the air took on the moist shimmer that gives way to the crashing violence of afternoon thundershowers, which punctuate the heat of summer, the roses began to look a little beleagured. They required constant watering (on the roots only in the early morning), fertilizing and spraying, lest they be consumed by aphids, parch and dry or fall victim to an outbreak of black spot. They had whimsical names: Mr. Lincoln frequented Queen Elizabeth in a court composed of Peace, Double Delight and Voodoo, staid reds and pinks gave way to a veritable Mardi Gras of color--flouncy whites, swirls of hot pink on white, canary yellow blending to deep orange.

As they tried out different varieties, they learned that modern, hybrid tea roses, bred for hardiness and a longer blooming season, display a sort of uniform and regular beauty that, alas, leaves much to be desired in the perfume category. To get a rose that smelled like a rose often meant going back to the older varieties, notably antique tea roses. In researching those varietals, I discovered that "Mademoiselle de Sombreuil," in addition to being a vampire of virtue, was also a rosa rugosa.

From The Lady of the House of Love, Angela Carter

"When he returned from the mess that evening, the heavy fragrance of Count Nosferatu's rose drifted down the stone corridor of the barracks to greet him, and his spartan quarters brimmed with the reeling odour of a glowing velvet, monstrous flower whose petals had regained all their former bloom and elaticity, their corrupt, brilliant, baleful splendor.

The next day, his regiment embarked for France."

Measuring Life With Coffee Spoons

A rainy Saturday, my husband and daughter are out of the country. I have a babysitter for the twins. There is no excuse to put it off any longer. Time for an intimate Saturday preparing the past year's tax returns. Time to re-acquaint myself with depressing amounts of minutiae...medical expenses, charitable deductions, 1099-Divs, 1099-Ints, property tax, mortgage deductions, figuring cost basis on employee stock investment plan stock that was purchased in intervals over a two year period at a previous job... the little cramps start to develop in the muscles of my neck and shoulders. I despise this sort of activity. Not that I am, in general, offended by the idea of paying taxes or that our tax returns require any great amount of sophistication. I resent having to spend a day concentrating on things that should not be important. The sun comes out in the afternoon and I want to see how far the daffodils my daughter and I planted in the fall have come up; I want to watch my boys playing in the yard; I want to read some more of Marcus Aurelius' Meditations. I do not want to be going through sheafs of financial statements, listing, summing and dividing purchase prices. The reductive nature of these forms repels me. I do not want to be squeezing the past year into blanks, where my identity is my social security number, name, address and birthdate, and my relevance is relegated to financial transactions. There is a morbidity to the detached perspective of this ritual, like falling asleep and dreaming of coming back as the executor of one's own estate. And realizing that nothing itemized on those sheets of paper has much to do with what we care to bequeath.

Going Native--Entrepreneur Notes

Every now and then, a small jolt may bring us to some awareness of an outside perspective on one's own small, limited community or profession. In the tarantella danced by entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, one catches glimpses of such a perspective in a term, that if not generalized in that industry, likely conveys some common sentiment therein. The situation involved a VC partner sitting on a board of a company that lost an impressive amount of money in an improbably short period of time. In vain, the other partners tried to get Jones to rein in the situation that had got out of hand and give them an objective account of what was going on. To their surprise, Jones repeated the party line of the company's managers, optimistic that recent unpleasant circumstances were nearly a a temporary glitch along the way to the company's inevitable and imminent prosperity. Jones had "gone native."

Lacking any particular skypish allure--no profits, company operates out of a secretive location in Estonia, the founders (also founders of Kazaa) cannot set foot in the US because they will be served with a subpoena=irresistible attraction, and having once lost our own money in a negative experience we vowed never to repeat, I was sympathetic. I could not imagine nonchalantly losing other people's money. We're in boring old infrastructure software. It may be the end of middleware as we know it, but we feel fine. Then, my bemusement took a reflective, tangential turn. How might one know what circumstances would cause a person to "go native" without spending some more-than-touristy time in the jungle? What skills might one need to survive that jungle? What does building a company without money and patronage have in common with a sojourn in the jungle?

The first negative has some advantages. Comparatively, the "native" has no money or professional standing to lose. This may enable some clarity of vision and foster the ability to take risks. Should the would-be entrepreneur have a strong belief in themselves and strong convictions about what they are doing? It undoubtedly helps. It is no surprise that the classic gentleman, at least in a sort of English, Jane Austen, 18th century perspective, was not expected to be involved in "trade." The business of building a business has the quality of putting one into contact with various people and experiences outside the normal pale. Some prove to be an inspiration, people it is a pleasure to know, experiences one is fortunate to have; some people and experiences leave no lasting impression; and there's the non-negligible portion you learn to survive, recognize and avoid, in a nowhere land aglow with the slow-burning after-haze of paranoia, beyond the timid lying morality of those who would cast stones.

I would not call being an entrepreneur a glamorous career. There are perhaps two types of entrepreneurs--those who love the challenge of and being involved with every aspect of building a company and then, there are those for whom building a company is the only way to do the kind of work they truly enjoy. The latter commit themselves to building the representation of a vision because that's what they have to do. Then, maybe after a while, they get better at that than everything else. Maybe it doesn't exist.

And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped tow'rs, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind...
Shakespeare, The Tempest

And then again, maybe it's like the Cheshire Cat, who disappears and leaves behind his grin.

Profile

Total Geek Moment--Playing Scrabble with a good friend in Middle English. And laughing at off-color words that haven't been off-color in a few centuries.

Education: Wellesley College, BA in English Lit. Mona Lisa Smile it was not; although, I did belong to a "society" while I was there. The Shakespeare Society was not terribly exclusive. If you liked Shakespeare and theater, you had a good chance of being accepted. The fact that women played all the roles was a twist on Elizabethan theater since boys played the women's roles in Shakespeare's time.

Universite de Paris VII, Ecole Charles V--DEA in Etudes Anglophones/Comparative Literature. Loved teaching, but never found a research topic about which I was passionate. The trick is to find a topic about which nobody else has written. Came to the conclusion that there are good reasons nobody has touched some of these topics.

Adolescence--Survived. Empathize with quote by Angela Carter along the lines of "My adolescent rebellion is a period I now remember with intense embarassment, the chief problem being the absence of other people with whom to rebel."

Unusual thing to find sexy--String Theory, probably because I don't understand any of it and can't do the math....but I've got to say, all those colliding branes, open and closed loops, gravitons, super-symmetry, excited-state subatomic particles, parallel universes and thirteen dimensions. What's not to love.

Favorite writers- incomplete and in no particular order--Charles Baudelaire, Blaise Pascal, Honore de Balzac, Marguerite Duras, T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Edgar Allen Poe, Michel de Montaigne, Maya Angelou, Angela Carter, A.S. Byatt, Roland Barthes, Paul de Man, Walter Benjamin, LeoTolstoy.

Worst employment moment ever: being fired after three months from my first job ever out of college-- marketing assistant at a fund-raising consultancy for 1) improperly duplicating the color-coding scheme on meeting packets 2) forgetting to send an enclosure with a mailing 3) talking while stuffing envelopes.

Not very--Mechanical, could write a treatise on stupid things I've done in cars. Got drivers license at seventeen, only because humiliation of being in a carpool with younger kids became unbearable. Learned to drive stick shift at nineteen. At some moment in the process, my father suggested that maybe drinking a beer might help me relax and do a better job behind the weel.

Sort of known for--Being Communications Director for a company that has many, er PR moments, is known for its modesty, professionalism, and employing some of the bad boys in the J2EE industry, among whom my husband is one of the most outspoken.

Humiliating social moment--Mr. Bogey, my Bull terrier, was totally snubbed at a French dog show where we took him in hopes of establishing his pedigree. Ok we bought him from the gypsies on the Quais de Paris, but he does have all the neurotic bull terrier traits--occasionally chases his tail, loyal but dense, has sensitive skin, and has a shoe fetish (all shoes must be picked up around the house or he drags them off to his lair). Picture of General Patton and his bull terrier, Willie.

Lives in--Atlanta. It took me almost ten years and living in a lot of more cosmopolitan places to decide to return to my hometown. Places I sort of like to go to in Atlanta--Cafe Intermezzo, Jolie Kobe (now Azure) in Sandy Springs for best pastry in the city, Alon's Bakery (Virginia Highland) a good runner up, Doc Chey's Noodle House in Virginia Highlands, Chez Philippe In Peachtree Hills (love the Sunday brunch), hairdresser "Pascal" at Studio Pascal in Buckhead. Technically he's Pascal Bis (the second) because I used to go to another Pacal who moved to Aspen and became a celebrity hairdresser. Have heard the Supper Club and Cafe d'Alsace in Decatur are good, but haven't been there yet. Heck anybody who moved to this town six months ago, probably knows more of the happening places than I do--I've got three kids.

Strange fact--Had pet rats as a child. These were "fancy domestic" rats, not the common wharf varmint variety. My rat was caramel and white and called Turkish Delight; my sister's was black and white and named Daddy Boze. It used to provoke some curiosity among the neighborhood mothers when we would stroll our pet rats in a doll parambulator--but not much, we had the good fortune to grow up in the South where you have to be really eccentric to stand out.

Used to--Run marathons: Boston (twice but not officially since you have to have a competitive time), NYC (my favorite) and Washington DC Marine Corps. Average time--4 1/2 hours, finishing was the main accomplishment. Definitely would recommend the NYC marathon for someone who's never run one before--great way to see the city, especially parts where you might not feel comfortable going under normal circumstances, loved the bridges and the enthusiastic crowds.

"Etat Civil"--Married with three children.

Aging Gracefully with Children

I find it exhausting raising 15 month-old boys when they are rampaging through the house throwing everything out of cabinets and drawers, stealing each other's toys and barking indignantly at each other like seal pups. However, a recent car ride, with a friend, our daughters and her thirteen year old son, made me consider the daunting possibility that a couple of years down the road I would be the parent of adolescents. The scene brought back memories. "Charlie" as we'll call him was upset because his mother wasn't listening to the "cool" radio station. Rather than sit back in his seat and deal with it, he kept lurching forward and trying to switch the channel, which only made my friend more insistent. Finally, the Four Seasons December '63 (Oh what a night) came on and we couldn't resist and started singing along "Oh, what a night, late December back in '63, what a very special time for me, as I remember what a night!"

There's something so ridiculous about adolescence, teenagers and how seriously they take themselves, as highlighted by that cheesy song. Maybe it was being around a thirteen year old and not feeling so far removed from that stage ourselves (granted I was born in '72 and my friend is a little older), but it seemed very hilarious and she and I decided to be equally immature and continue singing out loud.
"Mom stop singing now, you've got a terrible voice."
"You don't like it, well now you're going to have to listen to the entire song..."
Even I couldn't resist, "Chill out Charlie, you'll be old some day yourself. Oh and what's with calling your mother homey, you know they were saying that back in the eighties when I was your age. Are you so sure you're with it?"

The upside with thirteen year olds is that they move on, so twenty minutes later Charlie was happily showing off some hockey moves at the ice skating rink and acting like a sweet kid again, not yet old enough to be totally embarassed about being seen with his Mom and her "homey."

It did make me think about the parenting thing. I only had a younger sister. I guess my reference on mother of boys would have been a family friend who had five sons. Two of them were my sister's and my ages and we hung out with them a bit in junior high and high school. You couldn't get anything past Mrs. X. I remember one of the boys describing their brothers coming home late one night and sheepishly hugging their mother good night. "Hmmh," she said "It smells like you boys have been drinking beer, smoking pot and then eaten some peanut butter to cover it up."

A Hazy Shade of Winter

Might-have-been's become never-to-be's;
Possibilities unforeseen
Bloom and fade.
The growth of an idea, a question, a phoneme.
Sound waves bounce images black and white,
Growth truncated by blight.
Count to sleep under the surgeon's knife,
Wake up to emptiness.

Lie weak and weary.
Drink soursop tea,
Creole sensibilities,
Radiance, resonance and revenants.
Natal day shared with Poe.

Six paperwhite bulbs,
Winter forcing in Deco glass.
Holly tree outside the window.

Roman shades, color of creme brulee.
Lustre of raw silk,
Baby's sigh and rumble of passing train.
Prismatic water droplets shatter
Mosaic tile of celadon and bleached bone,
Shifting patterns of light.