I don’t know how the month went by so quickly! Our March was very full with cookie booths, house meetings, after-school activities, Spring Break, and some mother/daughter baking. I am frustrated to report that not much happened at the house this month. An update is coming soon, as soon as we get some sheetrock up.
Nearly every book has the same architecture — cover, spine, pages — but you open them onto worlds and gifts far beyond what paper and ink are, and on the inside they are every shape and power.
– Rebecca Solnit –
The Minimalist Home: A Room-by-Room Guide to a Decluttered, Refocused Life by Joshua Becker
Joshua Becker is half of the team behind becomingminimalist.com. He also wrote Simplify and Clutterfree with Kids, which I’ve read, as well as The More of Less. Please see my full review here.
The Orchid and the Dandelion: Why Some Children Struggle and How All Can Thrive by W. Thomas Boyce
I listened to Maureen Corrigan interview pediatrician Thomas Boyce on NPR’s Fresh Air and was intrigued. In his new book, Boyce gives some reassurance and advice on how to parent “orchid children.” Boyce explores the “dandelion” child (hardy, resilient, healthy), able to survive and flourish under most circumstances, and the “orchid” child (sensitive, susceptible, fragile), who, given the right support, can thrive as much as, if not more than, other children. Truly, the same conditions that may be good for one child won’t be ideal for another.
Interestingly, he writes of the stress response on the Central Nervous System, exactly what led me to read The Out-of-Sync Child. Stressful experiences have a profound physical effect, which of course affects the mental state. There were many similarities in the science behind SPD and “orchid” children.
Orchid kids are characterized by: 1) their sensitivity to the new and unexpected and their reliance on routine; 2) their special need of parental affection and time; 3) their perceptive read of acceptance and affirmation of the child’s true, tenderhearted, and creative self.
Then there is the dichotomy that is frequently discussed at my house: “The families of orchid children must also seek and achieve a well-tempered balance between measured protection and emboldened exposure. On the one hand, because orchid kids are prone to an easily triggered physiological reactivity, a certain level of parental insulation from the world’s abundant challenges is often a needed and helpful protection.
“On the other hand, the parenting of an orchid child must never be solely about protection and sheltering; parents must also know when to push, when to nudge, when to encourage a child’s venturing into unknown and even uncomfortable psychological or physical territory. For it is the successes in such terra incognita that will foster the child’s growth, revealing her capacity for mastering situations that seem at first impossible to abide. All parents of orchid children walk this fine, constantly shifting line between sheltering and provoking.”
Is that not a blog post in itself???
Boyce writes from personal and professional experience on child developmental differences in such a way that I hope will cause others to become more sensitive to the needs of the orchid child. Boyce encourages the reader to focus on an orchid’s hidden strengths and uncommon sensibilities, thus helping them to blossom into their own resilience and possibilities.“
“Orchids are not broken dandelions but a different, more subtle kind of flower. Within the struggles and frailties of orchids lies an unimagined strength and redemptive beauty.”
The Out-of-Sync Child: Recognizing and Coping with Sensory Processing Disorder by Carol Kranowitz and Lucy Jane Miller
Sweet Girl has some sensory issues and this book helped explain exactly where the behaviors come from, how to seek out help, and includes support and other resources.
“SPD can cause a bewildering variety of symptoms. When their central nervous systems are ineffective in processing sensory information, children have a hard time functioning in daily life. They may look fine and have superior intelligence, but may be awkward and clumsy, fearful and withdrawn, or hostile and aggressive. SPD can affect not only how they move and learn, but also how they behave, how they play and make friends, and especially how they feel about themselves.”
Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother’s Will to Survive by Stephanie Land
This is a truth-telling memoir about poverty and how frustrating it can be to rise out of it, especially as a single mother. Land is a great writer, evoking much of the helplessness of her situation, and her resolute fight to improve her circumstances. She writes to tell her story and to fight stereotypes about food stamps, subsidies, and welfare.
I became a witness. Even odder was my invisibility and anonymity, though I spent several hours a month in their homes. My job was to wipe away dust and dirt and make lines in carpets, to remain invisible. I almost felt like I had the opportunity to get to know my clients better than any of their relatives did. I’d learn what they ate for breakfast, what shows they watched, if they’d been sick and for how long. I’d see them, even if they weren’t home, by the imprints left in their beds and tissues on the nightstand. I’d know them in a way few people did, or maybe ever would.
The floor had dropped out from under me too many times already, and I still walked carefully on it, knowing one upset could bring me tumbling back to where we began, in a homeless shelter. I had to keep it together. Above all else, despite uncertainties in things I couldn’t control, I should remain calm. Dependable. I’d go to work and do the job that needed to be done. “You must not let yourself fall apart!” I repeated to myself. It became my mantra that I repeated in my mind, sometimes even saying it out loud.
On Being 40(ish) edited by Lindsey Mead
“This book is full of reflections from individual women that also reveal and revel in the universal. From women of myriad backgrounds, a chorus rings true: the forties are a decade of reckoning and awareness, of gratitude and loss, and they are limned with emotions as divergent and powerful as the individual voices that speak to them. These women, in their forties and beyond, are in the prime of their lives. These are not reflections on the dying of the light, but rather a full-throated celebration of what it means to be an adult woman at this moment in history.” ~ Lindsey Mead
I follow Lindsey’s blog and have long enjoyed her reflections on family life. In publishing this collection, she has fulfilled one of her goals of putting a new book out into the world, and I’m so thrilled for her that the collection is so diverse and on point.
“When you are, say, twenty-five, the adult world is a simple binary construct divided between the young and the old. The young is anyone under forty. The old is anyone over sixty. There is no in-between. The forties and fifties don’t exist. The forties and fifties are just a couple of lost decades in which the only goal is to try to maintain whatever operation (child rearing, career building) you got started in your twenties and thirties. And because maintenance is so easily overlooked, so unsexy, so perennially under the radar, it is entirely possible for a twenty-five-year-old graduate student to look at her forty-seven-year-old instructor and unconsciously assume her to be a senior citizen.” Meghan Daum
“Time flies, races, or crawls depending on our emotional state. The more charged our feelings, the more our perception of time slows, and when these emotionally charged moments are happening with a person we care about or can identify with, time slows even further.” Jessica Lahey
“The horizon line simply rearranges itself as we approach.” Lee Woodruff
“You should only care about getting older if you aren’t moving every day toward the maximal expression of the life you were hoping for. So take a minute. Forty is a rest stop in which you can pause to hold something in your hand and examine it from all sides, but just as quickly, because it’s all suddenly moving so fast, you let it go. Which is a good thing, because the modern woman, at least the kind who is reading a book of essays about turning forty, is faced with a conundrum at forty: How can you be this dissatisfied when you have so much? How can you be this satisfied when you have so little? Ask yourself this, and then know you won’t find an answer. Decide that it is okay to not have an answer. It is also okay to forget the question.” Taffy Brodesser-Akner
A Place for Us: A Novel by Fatima Farheen Mirza
This is the first book from Sarah Jessica Parker’s new imprint about a Muslim Indian American family caught between cultures. Mirza’s characters easily become people we care deeply about… somehow her writing reaches places that most books simply do not. I was stunned by the powerful way this novel grabbed me.
We learn, along with the characters themselves, that our perspective matters the most in our lives, that we can shift our experience just in how we look at things, and that those we think we know best we might not know at all. It’s about belonging, growing up and knowing ourself, regret, and trying to maintain old beliefs and cultures. Thought-provoking, beautiful, nostalgic, and very real… I recommend this book wholeheartedly.
“If only he could remember now what the hurt was about… Maybe just that everyone is good except for him, everyone has a lock in them that they have found a key to, and he is all shut up and closed with no key so he looks to each of them when they are listening intently… thinking either there is no key or that he was created without one. And maybe he does not really believe in angels but maybe the ones on his shoulders look at each other and they shake their heads and shrug, saying, well, we don’t know what to do with this one, even if God were to show him signs he would not listen because that is the way it is with some kids, when their hearts are just stained black.”
Daisy Jones and The Six: A Novel by Taylor Jenkins Reid
It’s been a while since I had to ration pages because I did not want the book to end, but that’s exactly what happened with this engrossing “rock and roll” adventure. This novel reads like a transcript of a rockumentary. The way Taylor Jenkins Reid allows the story and complex characters to unfold just works on so many levels. They are so real, truly authentic versions of what I’d guess to be the enigmatic musicians in most bands. I am impressed with how she touched on so many topics in such a swiftly told piece. It’s raw and real and human.
“I used to think soul mates were two of the same… I don’t believe in soul mates anymore and I’m not looking for anything. But if I did believe in them, I’d believe your soul mate was somebody who had all the things you didn’t, that needed all the things you had. Not somebody who’s suffering from the same stuff you are.”
I loved following along as a fly on the wall of the song-writing process. The way words or verses come forward and Billy and Daisy work off each other was brilliant. I can hardly believe these characters don’t actually exist. I think Daisy and Billy and the band are supposed to evoke Fleetwood Mac. Female strength, tender love, addiction, family and friendship, fame,
“Loving somebody isn’t perfection and good times and laughing and making love. Love is forgiveness and patience and faith and every once in a while, it’s a gut punch. That’s why it’s a dangerous thing, when you go loving the wrong person. When you love somebody who doesn’t deserve it. You have to be with someone that deserves your faith and you have to be deserving of someone else’s. It’s sacred.”
Now I’m going to have to go read all the other Taylor Jenkins Reid books out there…
“I had absolutely no interest in being somebody else’s muse. I am not a muse. I am the somebody.” – Surprisingly similar to the character Lee Miller’s voice in…
The Age of Light: A Novel by Whitney Scharer
This is sort of a historical novel about photographer Lee Miller during her Paris years, some of which she spent with Surrealist Man Ray. I found it engaging for two reasons: 1) I love reading about photography and so the descriptions of Lee viewing complex compositions in her mind and capturing them with her new camera, as well as the many experiences and discoveries in the darkroom, truly conjures a true giddiness in me; 2) I usually enjoy watching a character evolve and come into her own identity and this story puts the reader directly into Lee’s thoughts. OK 3 reasons: I also love reading about Paris in the 30s!
“When Man is silent, sometimes Lee thinks about nothing, or just lets her mind wander. Other times, if she lies there long enough, she starts to think about her life as one long string, all the things she’s done interconnected and stretched out from the past into the future. She finally feels she is here at the prow of herself.”
A relationship between 2 artists is bound to be complicated, and Miller’s romance with Man Ray seems to disintegrate as Lee begins to find her own voice. I imagine that it’s relatively rare for a woman of that time to show such tenacity. As comfortable as her life with Man is, Lee finds that she’d rather not share her discoveries, her talent, or so much of herself.
Scharer’s writing flows with descriptive elegance: “Lee approaches her. ‘Kiki?’ she asks. With a feeling of elation, Lee starts dialing the settings into her camera. But as the woman looks up, her face dissolute, her makeup blurry, Lee realizes it’s not Kiki. Of course not. Up close this woman looks nothing like her. As the woman puts her hand out to stop Lee from taking her picture, Lee puts the camera to her eye and releases the shutter. When she sees what Lee is doing, the woman starts yelling, a stream of French invectives. After she gets the shot, Lee leaves quickly, looking back only once to make sure the woman isn’t following her. As she turns the corner, Lee feels a rush of clarity and power. The photo – Lee does not need to develop the film to know what she has gotten – will show the woman with her mouth twisted into an angry circle, her hand outstretched like a beggar, the fabric of her dress straining as she leans forward. There will be in it a feeling of surprise, of unexpected juxtaposition, as if in taking the picture at the exact moment when the woman’s anger flared, Lee has shown her honestly, both supplicant and whore.”
One Day in December: A Novel by Josie Silver
There was a time long ago when I would have loved this book. Alas, that time has passed. I had to skim through the last 100 pages. It was just… predictable.
Cozy Minimalist Home: More Style, Less Stuff by Myquilyn Smith
Cozy Minimalism is a mindset where you find your own style with the fewest possible possessions. Smith harkens the Danish idea of Hygge, where you create a warm, inviting home using candles, blankets, etc. This is a step-by-step guide with many tools for how to make decisions in line with your priorities, budget, and style. Practical, fun, and full of great ideas. See my full review here.
A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit
I saw this book on display at New York City’s Strand Bookstore and was intrigued. Writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit is the author of seventeen books about environment, landscape, community, art, politics, hope, and memory. She is also a contributing editor to Harper’s.
This is a series of essays that explore trust, loss, and desire, in a volume that focuses on a central theme of losing oneself in the pleasures of experience.
“How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?” ~ Meno
“Lost… was mostly a state of mind, and this applies as much to all the metaphysical and metaphorical states of being lost as to blundering around in the backcountry. The question then is how to get lost. Never to get lost is not to live, not to know how to get lost brings you to destruction, and somewhere in the terra incognita in between lies a life of discovery.”
Is it synchronicity that I read this brainpickings article on hope in troubled times soon after reading this?
Juliet’s School of Possibilities: A Little Story About the Power of Priorities by Laura Vanderkam
“We always have time for what matters to us” is the message of this sweet little parable. The main character is racing as fast as she possibly can to keep up with an out-of-control life that she doesn’t even really want. It was surprisingly engaging and I was sorry for it to come to an end.
This is a guide for envisioning a life that is personally meaningful and purposeful and making the everyday choices to get you there. The exercises in the guide afterwards will help you think about how you spend your time, and how you’d like to spend your time.
I watched Vanderkam’s 2016 TED talk, “How to Gain Control of Your Free Time” after reading just to get a little more of her message. I also subscribed to her podcast, “Best of Both Worlds,” not that I have time to listen to it (wink wink).
