A day late, and a bad joke too many, but for labor day... I was thinking about fictional depictions of childbirth. Not motherhood, mind you, but proper labor. I think this is something most of us mothers would rather leave out of our fiction, but I'm curious if there are brave folks out there that I'm missing.

If there are, tell me who! What are they writing about labor?

The only in-depth labor scene I can think of is at the beginning of The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields. (Irrelevant note: I tried to read this once, at eighteen, and couldn't get into it. Then about a decade passed and I moved to Bloomington, Indiana--where part of the novel is set, albeit in an earlier time--and I moved closer to mommyhood myself. The second time I finished it.)

Anyway, here's a bit from the opening of The Stone Diaries:

"What she feels is more like a shift in the floor of her chest, rising at first, and then an abrupt drop, a squeezing like an accordion held sideways... She breathes rapidly, blinking as the pain wraps a series of heavy bands around her abdomen. Down there, buried in the lapped folds of flesh, she feels herself invaded. A tidal wade, a flood."

Happy Labor Day!

For me, death is the hardest chapter to bear in the story of a life.

Recently, my brother asked me to share some good memories about my grandmother, who passed on the fourth of July after a long struggle with cancer that clouded the end of a life of caring and connectedness. I told him I wasn't ready yet. And I'm not; I still feel too raw to skip back to the joyful parts.

I know that time will come, a time when I can celebrate and remember without the bitter bite of loss. It's happened with each important death in my life, and I anticipated it as I sat in the funeral. I kept my eyes open and looking up, up. Partly because I was trying to cry less and some liar told me this might help. Partly because upward is, for me, the direction of gratitude.

Even if I don't feel grateful, I can still put myself in position for it. I can remind myself that I will, eventually, appreciateher peaceful death, a death with my grandfather and father at hand. She opened her one good eye to the world, blinked, and turned her head toward the man she lived with and loved for more than sixty years.

There were no more breaths.

I wish I had let that be my last image of my grandmother. There was so much to hold onto: her awareness of the moment of passing, her connection to two men she loved, her release to the heaven everyone in the room anticipated for her.

Instead, at the funeral, I looked into the coffin.

I'm always sorry. I always tell myself, "This time around, I'm really, really not going to look." And I always, always look.

I don't know what we expect from the open coffin. What closure can denying decay for the duration of a funeral service really give us? Maybe it is part of what some people need. For me, it's an obstacle to closure. That frozen, flattened look--the features pressed into place by someone who never saw the person in life--it lodges in me, a dark seed that tells a story that competes with the one I want to tell for my loved one, the one that will let me remember the real life.

The look into the coffin begins a story of deception, of denial, of delay. A lie: I'm just sleeping here for a while. The truth of death is less eloquent: gone, gone, gone. A stuttering that finally resolves into silence.

For far more eloquent thoughts on death than mine, click here.

The husband and I just finished reading Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto, and it has sparked lots of good conversation about our priorities for the food we put onto our--and our son's--plate. That's a conversation that started before we left for Paris and evolved as we witnessed how a different culture can have a very dramatically different relationship to foods, which is something that Pollan talks about quite a bit.

(You can click through my "What the French Know about Food" posts here, here, and here.)

In Defense of Food isn't doctine-y at all, although in a few places Pollan waxes a bit too poetical for my taste about his garden and being part of an ecosystem (for me, my garden = cheap, clean veggies, pure and simple). And it taught me things about how food policy gets made in the U.S. that I'm really glad to know as a consumer and a parent. At the end of the day, now I know that we need to trust our own sense of what's right with food over anything the FDA or the American Heart Association says. 

Pollan brings home the need for common sense over "expert" recommendations through his strangely moving chronicle of the rise of the low-fat movement in official dietary recommendations. Or maybe it was just moving for me because it made me think back to my childhood. My parents--striving to "do right" and follow the best recommendations--always bought low-fat everything. At the time, I don't think it ever occurred to any of us that (a) we were eating a lot more artificial or modified foods because of this or that (b) we were eating a lot more sugar and carbohydrates in products from which fat had been subtracted. 

And that brings us to the main point of Pollan's book, which probably should have been the first thing I mentioned: what is meant by the title. When Pollan writes about defending "food," what he means is the notion that the food we buy and eat should be comprised of a combination of recognizable ingredients, not engineered "food products" (Read: convenience foods, chain restaurant menu items, and anything that has ingredients you can't pronounce).

Another great food book, The End of Overeating, illustrates in detail how these food products are different from actual food. The main difference is that, rather than being designed to satisfy, food products are designed to lead to more cravings. Whereas The End of Overeating focuses more on the engineering of specific foods, In Defense of Food looks a bit more at industry trends like marketing different foods to different members of the family and encouraging the notion that even at home, everyone should cook (read: microwave pre-package food substance) their own thing.

In our home, as we try to teach Liam to be a diverse eater while still giving him opportunities to enjoy the occasional treat, I am realizing that parenting a healthy eater really means learning to be a healthier eater myself. 

I'm in the middle of living something new: writing hungry.

I've always seen the idea of the starving artist as an unnecessary cliché, but I'm as close as I will likely ever be to living it. (I certainly hope this isn't our new normal!) We are paying half of our income to cover childcare this summer so that I can have time to finish my draft of novel #3.

Okay, so I'm not exactly hungry. We live in America, after all. But I am painfully aware of the economic price of my creative efforts right now, of the sacrifices my family is making for this work to be possible. All this, without any certainty about when novel #3 will sell--or how much we might expect for it. 

I'm not far enough into the experience to know how things will turn out. On a Writing Excuses podcast, one of the hosts said, "I find feeding my family to be a powerful motivator," when asked about how it feels to be a "career" writer as opposed to having a day job.

On the other hand, though, here's what one of my favorite misbehaving characters, the nephew from Diderot's Le Neveu de Rameau, says about poverty and art: 

Oh, Mister Philosopher, poverty is a terrible thing. I see her crouching there, with her mouth gaping open to receive a few drops of icy cold water dripping from the barrel of the Danaids. I don’t know if she sharpens the mind of the philosopher, but she has a devilish way of cooling off the head of a poet. People don’t sing well under this barrel.

Will writing hungry be a powerful motivator or a chilling force? I'll keep you posted.

A while ago I wrote about how Scrivener was the perfect tool for drafting a novel. I need to revise that statement. Scrivener is the best electronic tool. Why the qualification? Because ordinary paper always, always calls me back. 

Scrivener is a dream for drafting, especially for someone (ahem...) who likes to make heaps of lists and obsessively subdivide her material into reorganizable chunks. I also love the cleanness of being able to move through hundreds of files in a single pane without those pesky Word windows piling up and misbehaving.

But... After all my elaborate folders, character files, and color-coded classifications and comments, in the end, I need paper. For the current revision, I am working between Scrivener and a paper draft that I have manually cut and paste onto colored construction paper to sort out the development of different plot threads. With paper, I can surround myself with something material·and feel the power to move the pieces around and assess the changes.

I think there is a touch of fetishism in this method. I get an actual thrill from laying things out on paper--especially paper filched from one of our Texas host's amazing scrapbooking stash. Our two-year-old Liam knows what I am talking about. Recently he learned to open doors and, while we were playing hide-and-seek, let himself into the strictly off-limits scrapbook room. (Anyone who has ever SEEN the quantity of scissors and sharp things involved in making a scrapbook will understand the prohibition.) His words upon entering the room?

"Whooa, papel!"

I feel much the same way. Paper is, quite simply, this writer's best friend.