Allow Me to (Re)Introduce Myself

The last several months have meant big changes for our family, for me personally and consequently for this space. As I consider how to re-enter this whole blogging business, I am realizing that my current life and self are rather different from what you have all come to know. Well, I am the same I suppose (more on that in an upcoming identity crisis post, months in the making), but the details are different.

Today I thought I would acquaint you with those changed details, orient you to my new/old place. My posts are bound to change a little up here in Cordova, not their spirit or intent, just their ingredients, and it would be best if you kind of knew your way around.

So, allow me to (re)introduce myself. I am Calamity Jane. I live in the big gray house at the top of the hill with the willow fence and that long row of raspberries, the totally overgrown garden beds and trashy scattering of buckets. Careful not to trip over the kids’ bikes.

This yard was almost all gravel and weeds when we moved in, in 2004. Little token patch of lawn in front, which I busted up practically on arrival. Built up dirt by hand, with river silt and peat hauled in buckets from actual bogs. There’s no topsoil here, none at all. Can’t buy it for any price. This land just barely crept out from under the glaciers.

I had a few years to throw my unbounded energy into garden building before our first babe came along in 2007. I’ve got a long way to go towards my dream of an edible Eden, but the basic framework has been laid, now it just needs to be reclaimed from three years of neglect.

Those hard won beds are now choked with buttercup and the scavenged boards I used to build them are finally rotting. I only had time to clear and plant one small bed this summer, put my energy into the perennials instead. That beautiful raspberry hedge didn’t trellis, weed and mulch itself, you know?

Speaking of perennials, there’s my prized rhubarb. It looks humble enough, straggly to be frank, but those crowns we brought back on a bush plane from some old homesteaders down the coast in Yakataga. We were there to do reforestation work, with our little girl just a babe in a wrap.

This big shed in the backyard is supposed to be my pottery studio some day, when we have an extra several thousand dollars to fix it up. And, if I can talk myself down from converting it to a barn and getting two Nigerian dwarf milking goats.

There’s the old chicken coop, it looks like a witch’s hut under all those drooping hemlock boughs. I am so excited to finally spread around my own aged chicken shit– we left just as my first “crop” was maturing. I also have a giant pile of well-aged compost, having duly done my good work years ago, before even the second baby. I feel rich. This is the stuff of dreams by my standard. When I do finally get those annual beds cleared and rebuilt– boy howdy, they are gonna grow some goodness.

Come on inside I’ll make some coffee. I make a fine cup, if I do say so myself.

Our house is nearly always a wreck, but I’ve learned not to be too embarrassed about it. Occasionally I keep it really clean, and I’m not embarrassed about that either. Sit right here at our wobbly almost-antique kitchen table, it’s the best seat in the house.

If you get a break in the clouds you’ll have a fine view of Mt. Eccles. I climbed that mountain once, alone, without really meaning to. Got stuck right at that last rocky hump, afraid to go any further but damned if I was going to stop so close to the top. Finally got my gumption up just as a thick blanket of mist rolled in, obscuring what would have been a phenomenal view. But, that’s life in a coastal temperate rainforest….

Over here’s my pride and joy– my jar shelf. Built to the exact specifications of a year’s worth of quarts, pints and half-pints. Just a token number of jars now. I’m not gonna show you the bottom five shelves which are just full of cluttery junk. I look forward to crowding that junk out with more local bounties.

“Local food” looks quite a bit different up here. Cordova is a tiny town stuck between ocean and mountains, with no farmable land whatsoever. There is not a single hoofed farm animal for hundreds of miles, there’s no place to grow hay, what would you feed them? I am one of maybe ten people who grows any kind of vegetable garden, and it is meager by anywhere else’s standard. Cabbage is a big stretch here, kale the mainstay.

Instead I fill (or used to, and hope to again!) our larder with sockeye and silver salmon; bear, deer and moose; salmonberries, blueberries, cranberries; chantrelle and hedgehog mushrooms; wild plant pesto and pickles. Not to mention the dumpster, the most productive form of subsistence by exponential degree. (Back where I feel comfortable going out at night, I have been dipping into The Big D again. Last week an entire case of eggs– 30 dozen. Not a single crushed or drippy edge. One day past date, and eggs last practically forever. I would rather be eating eggs from our own chickens obviously, but short of that, I will gladly accept a $90 savings on our grocery bill.)

Cordova has a year round population of 2,500 people. Stop and read that again– 2,500 people. True that in summer it swells to 4,000, but nevertheless, there are no stop lights in this town. There are no fast food joints, no box stores. We leave the keys to our car in the ignition. Kids can walk to school by themselves just like the old days. The small town feeling of it is doubled by the fact that there is no highway connecting us to somewhere else, you cannot drive in or out– you have to fly or take the ferry.

Cordova is a genuine fishing town, home the Copper River fleet. The harbor and canneries dominate the town physically, fishing dominates mentally. Coming back from New Orleans, I’ve been relishing a place so ruled by actual physical, productive work. There are some profoundly ass-backwards things about Alaska (as exemplified on an international scale by Miss Palin, thank you ma’am) but on the flip side are many truly wonderful old fashioned values. In New Orleans, particularly from our ‘safe’ mostly white upperclass neighborhood, I was beginning to wonder if these values were just gone from our country. It made me feel sad and lonely. But here I am again, among kindred! Not to say that this town is all of one mind, not at all, but generally people here place strong value on hard physical work, on practical use over aesthetics (and a consequent acceptance of dirtiness), on trust in our fellow humans, strong community, and an honestly slow pace of life.

Plenty of people here live just as they would live in any city in the US, they drive their car everywhere they go, buy all their groceries at the store, watch cable TV on the weekends and don’t think twice about the world outside their window. But a very good sized portion of people are here because they love this place and they love the rural Alaskan lifestyle. I would say most Cordovans “recreate” in the out-of-doors, if only because that’s just about all there is to do. Hiking, hunting and berry picking are all very popular and, at the very least, everyone drives out the road now and again just to lay eyes on some wilderness. Most folks in this town put up something, usually fish in the chest freezer, if not home canned jars of smoked goodness. Homemade jam is practically pedestrian. There is a salmon festival, a wild berry festival and a mushroom festival. During deer season, the attention turns to hunting. Not everyone in this town participates or even cares about this stuff, but enough people do that it is normal. In July folks on the street are talking fish and boat engines, in September they’re talking deer and firewood.

Having just said all that, it bothers me that I put a “regular American lifestyle” at odds with my supposed Cordovan one, because that is the real genius of this place– People span the whole distance. We spend the day hunting then come home and watch TV, we eat fish from the freezer with potatoes from the store, we drive our car when it rains and walk when it’s sunny. Some people are all on one end, and others are all on the other end, most of us are somewhere in the middle, but there seems to be an unusual amount of mutual respect. It’s no utopia, by any stretch of the imagination, but I’ve lived in a number of small Alaskan towns and chose this one partly because the feeling of community and togetherness and acceptance is, I think, truly unique.

But this is not an unabashed love song to Cordova. Being back in this place after the extreme urban charm of New Orleans is not all peaches and cream. We do miss that steamy press of humanity, the bright garish clang of it all. Architecture, history, music, festivals, amazing restaurants, balmy weather; people in all kinds and colors. Coming here was a surreal spatial shift. Everything is just exactly the same as when we left, and I popped right back in like a puzzle piece…. But having led such a different life for three years I find it mind-bendingly weird to just ‘pop right back in.’ As an old friend said in the comments on that Where to Now post, the culture shock is much greater coming back home because I wasn’t expecting it.

The first few months were wacky, mentally. As soon as we stepped off the ferry, New Orleans felt like a black hole which couldn’t possibly have been real. But Cordova didn’t feel real yet either. I was floating in some kind of numb limbo which I am just now starting to ground out of. I’ve still got all kinds of twisty stuff going on in my mind, as you know, but at least I think that I am finally starting to feel physically here. Which is doubtlessly why I was finally able to finish this post, started over a month ago.

It’s seems a bit vain-glorious to explain my homeplace at such length, but context is everything for a girl like me. At some point in the near future, once I get a foothold on it, I am hoping to write about the emotional and psychological process of moving home. I figured you ought to understand where and what home is first. It certainly is a unique place in the world.

Salmon Burgers, Ceviche and Other Delights

Rather than dwell on the unnamable ball of twisty angst in my gut, today, let’s talk fish. This post is one of those that lay foundering in my draft box, and it’s really not fair to you to keep it locked up. Silver season is upon us.

Now that we are back in Cordova, you are going to be hearing a lot about fish. Namely sockeye  and silver salmon. I know this is a cruel taunt for most my readers, but some fair number of you live in Alaska or the PNW and might appreciate a recipe here and there. Not to mention that most fish recipes are adaptable to whatever species you can lay hands on….

Sockeye season is over here, we are fully in to silvers. For those of you buying from the market, silvers are considerably cheaper and still a great fish. There are other species of pacific salmon sometimes in stores too. Pink salmon has gotten a bad rap from years of shitty canning practices, but can be perfectly fine food. Chum salmon, called “dogs” here, are also entirely edible by humans. I ate them and canned them and enjoyed them before Cordova turned me into a hopeless fish snob. Folks here can get snitchy about these “lesser” species, and it’s true they don’t have near so much flavor and luscious fat as sockeye and king salmon. But that doesn’t mean they can’t spell dinner.

I can’t help it, as a devout Alaskan, I have to preach for just a minute here. Please don’t buy farmed salmon. It’s bad. Bad for fishermen, bad for the environment, and certainly not as amazingly good for you as it’s wild counterpart. Be aware that stores will often label farmed salmon, misleadingly, “Atlantic salmon” as if it came from the Atlantic ocean. Atlantic is in fact the species name, and although there are wild runs of Atlantic salmon, it is the species of choice for farming and that is what you will be looking at in the grocery store. You can be pretty sure unless it is labeled wild salmon, it’s farmed, probably in Chile.

Someone commented awhile back on the conundrum of too much salmon and what to do with it. I have never personally gotten sick of good sockeye salmon, though I have at times eaten it about as much as person possibly can. I think the trick, as for using up any bountiful food item, is two-fold.

1. Take excessive care to preserve it in the highest possible quality. I have most certainly not always done this. In fact, I’m quite sure I have made all the mistakes available to the novice. For example, it’s not at all hard to get tired of frost-bitten, fishy tasting salmon that was packed into zip-locks for reasons of thrift. This is what I believe they call “penny wise, pound foolish.” Ahem. Over smoking is another way to make yourself sorry, as I can also attest. My ex and I once smoked a batch of jerky so much that it made our mouths numb to eat (yes, we ate it anyway).

2. Don’t think about recipes for salmon, per se. Just cook the way you usually cook, but forgo your internal food rules and substitute salmon for every other flesh you might have used (bear in mind that it must never be overcooked!) I love a plain sockeye fillet baked or fried with nothing more than salt, if the quality is very high. But when you are tired of that, or using up a cheaper lesser flavorful fish, just use it in everything you ordinarily cook. Soup, casserole, pot pie, tacos, spaghetti, stir fry. If your fish is getting a little “fishy” use lemon, tomato or a tiny splash of white wine to cut the fishiness back out.

That said, here are my favorite ways to cook salmon, after the thrill is gone.

Ceviche

The only hard part of making unbelievable salmon ceviche is removing the skin and pin bones. Those bones run in a single line down the length of the fillet, and if you are careful you can cut out the whole strip of ‘em without losing much meat. Bear in mind as you cut down that they angle toward the belly. Or, you can use pliers to remove each one individually. To remove the skin of any fish, lay it on the cutting board skin side down and run your sharp (essential!) knife right under the flesh. Ceviche is a good time to practice these techniques because you’re going to be chopping up all the fish anyway, so mistakes don’t matter.

Mix 1 lb chopped up fish with 1/2 red onion, 1 red pepper, 1 bunch of cilantro, 1/2 cup fresh lime juice and 1/2 teaspoon salt or more to taste. Let the mix sit at least 1 hour, 3 or 4 is even better. Serve with a pile of warm corn tortillas (fried in a lightly oiled pan) and black beans. So, so good, with any species of fish.

Fish Sticks

Everyone loves homemade fish sticks. They convert people who think they don’t like fish, and blow the minds of fish snobs who think they are too good for something that usually classes with TV dinners. They’re just as good with silvers as reds. De-bone and remove the skin as described above. Cut into stick sizes. Use a “bound breading” with Panko and cornmeal, and pan fry in half an inch of olive oil for a phenomenal stick.

Bound breading is a good trick to know, if you don’t already. It makes a perfect, crispy crust. Get three bowls. Put flour in one, an egg or two whisked smooth in another, and Panko, breadcrumbs and/or cornmeal in the last (Panko is a secret to itself, just some incredible kind of  Japanese breadcrumb stuff that blows everything else out of the water.) Dip the fish pieces first in flour, then egg, then Panko. It’s messy, but worth it. Panko is meant for deep frying, but pan frying (just a half inch of oil) works fine for these fish sticks.

To complete the experience, mayo + pickle juice + dill weed=tartar sauce.

Gravlox

Do you know this stuff? It’s “cured” salmon, meaning you salt it heavily and let it sit (in the fridge) for a few days, then eat it uncooked, sliced thin on crackers. Sounds very unpromising, right? I was incredibly skeptical the first time I had it. But I could hardly stop eating it! If you like salmon sushi, you will like Gravlox. This isn’t exactly a using it up recipe, you need absolutely prime perfect salmon to make it, and a little goes a long way. But it is soooooo good, and so easy, I just have to share it. Silvers make equally wonderful Gravlox. Just take a fillet which has been frozen for several days at least (to kill any potential parasites since you won’t be cooking it), lay it into a glass baking dish and cover with 2 teaspoons salt, 1 1/2 teaspoons sugar and 2 teaspoons freshly dried dill (not ancient tasteless dill from the bottom of your spice drawer that you’ve had longer than your children, throw that shit away right now!) Cover and leave in the fridge for at least one, preferably 2 or 3 days.

Now, this is the hardest part, slice the cold Gravlox paper thin (a 15-30 minute stay in the freezer will help, but don’t forget about it!!!!) and serve with crackers, cream cheese, finely sliced red onion and lemon wedges. I assume you will do this for a special occasion, but don’t pre-assemble them, or the crackers get soggy. Let folks make up their own, squeezing just a few drips of lemon onto each bite. Oh glory! It is a show stopper. Absolutely mind blowing.

An entire fillet makes a huge crowd’s worth of Gravlox. Too much for all but the most enormous party really. This year, I made up a fillet and then cut it into four chunks, vac-packed and froze each separately. I think it will slice up even better when it’s still mostly frozen, making it a relatively quick, totally fabulous treat to share with unexpected guests.

The Best Salmon Burgers Ever

Here is the requested recipe that started me on this post in the first place. It makes the best salmon cakes or burgers you’ve ever had. I have at times in my past nearly lived on very humble canned salmon patties– a jar of salmon with just enough flour mixed in to hold things together, shaped and fried. Very spare, very emblemic of a particular period in my life.

These are not they. These are made with fresh (or thawed) fish, a bit of old bread and that coy magic– mayonnaise. Nothing makes good like mayonnaise.

The original recipe is from Cooks Illustrated, crown glory of annal retentive perfection in the kitchen. I discovered it via a friend, who explained that rather than take a perfectly good fillet and mince it up into tiny bits as the recipe instructs, she scrapes down her filleted carcasses with a spoon and uses all that residual goodness. Having done both, I can say that the latter actually makes for a better texture, and certainly a more profound frugal housewife righteousness. It is an especially useful trick if you are still learning how to fillet and leave lots of good fish of the carcass. Myself– not to toot my own horn, I am incredibly slow– I have gotten to be pretty good at removing all the flesh intact to the fillet. So good that I am actually a bit disappointed how much is left to scrape up for burgers.

But, when I did up those 20 sockeyes in July, I did get a giant bowlful of scrappy bits. I made a whole big batch of these and popped most of them into the freezer. You can cook them straight from frozen, and you will really feel like a rockstar.

Note: I think these would work with any kind of fish, though they might be a tad dry with a less fatty kind. Maybe add more mayo…?

The Best Salmon Burgers Ever

• 1 1/4 pounds salmon, or a pint sized mason jar packed full and heaped up high
• 1 slice stale (but not dried out) bread, ground up in the food processor or very finely minced
• 2 Tablespoons mayonnaise
• 2 Tablespoons grated onion, don’t be tempted to just mince it, grating is important
• 3/4 teaspoon salt
• 1 1/2 Tablespoons fresh lemon juice
• a bit of fresh parsley or dill if you have it, minced super fine

for the breading:

• 2 eggs
• 1/2 cup flour
• 3/4 cup Panko or regular breadcrumbs

If you are using a fillet of fish, use a sharp knife to finely slice/chop/shred the flesh, you want it to look like ground meat. Do not be tempted to put it into a food processor, which will turn it into a disgusting paste. I have however had great luck running fish through my Kitchen Aide’s grinder attachment using the coarsest blade.

Once you’ve got the fish looking right, just mix it with the rest of the ingredients up top. It will be very sticky. Form patties as best you can and lay onto a baking sheet dusted heavily with flour. Put the sheet into the freezer for 15-30 minutes (don’t forget!) until they are very firm.

Now get set up for a bound breading experience as described in the fish sticks section. Bread each patty and set back onto the sheet pan. Obviously you can skip this step, they will still be very good, but this is what really what blows them out of the water. So to speak.

Fry the patties in a half inch of oil, till nicely browned on each side. Serve hot, on buns with full garnish, or just plain jane on a plate with some fresh steamed rice and a salad. Yum!

Where to Next

It’s not that I’m not thinking about writing. I’m thinking plenty, and even writing some. I have three unfinished posts in my inbox. But, aside from the fact that I have no time whatsoever to put toward this blog right now, I’m also having some pretty serious identity issues.

To be honest, I am having something of an identity crisis. A murky kind I have never before experienced. I am accustomed to understanding my own self. I almost always can find words for my various emotional malaise; they might not come easy, but if I sit down earnestly, I can pick them out. This time around I am at a loss. People ask, ‘Are you glad to be home? Do you miss New Orleans? Do you feel torn?’ The truth is all of the above, and none of it, at the same time. It’s the none of it that troubles me.

It seems that the more I try to put words to my cloudy emotion, the more I undo the truth of it. Like explaining a dream. I am glad to be home. But is it still home when I am not the same person who left? I don’t feel out of place, it doesn’t feel wrong, or disappointing. I could say any of those things and they would be almost right, but completely wrong.

And thus, I am at an impasse. Both personally and writing-wise. Being the honest-to-death type, I cannot seem to just carry on as if everything is usual. Though a part of me would like to, I can’t just write about laundry and jam making and the disappointments of plugging my kids into the iPad so I can fillet 20 salmon.

Coupling with, not coincidentally, the identity confusion is a kind of ‘place disorientation.’ I am so incredibly tied psychologically to where I live that, even though I was coming home, this move has entirely thrown me. I don’t know where to stand, or who to be.

I just recently realized that this accounts for at least some of my absence here. I don’t know what to write. I feel like I have to reconstruct myself first, reconstruct this space and then begin anew. I might even have to re-open somewhere else. Start fresh.

This probably seems drastic to you. A good more than half the posts will still be the same– making bread, keeping house, growing a garden, raising ruffians, psychoanalyzing myself. But it’s all about context for me. I really cannot explain the profound difference in physical and psychological environment here. Or maybe what I cannot explain adequately is the profound effect that change has on me.

Either way, I love words because they help me to make sense of things, to unravel a few syllables at a time the tangly confusions that clog my mind. Apron Stringz gave me a place and a way to make sense of a few years of my life. This new phase might just take different words.

The idea of starting up a whole new blog is incredibly daunting to me right now. I don’t know when I might get the time for that sort of endeavor. Let alone that I need to sort myself out a bit more first. Our life is in all kinds of upheaval, not just the move, and I feel like it has to settle out some before I can hope to make any sense.

Will you wait for me?

Uncharted Territory

Friends. I’ve wanted to tell you this, but the time just wasn’t right. Err, the time just wasn’t there. Like, I had none. Anyway now it’s upon us.

Ahem.

Tomorrow, after five years of nearly continuous stay-at-home mothering,  I start full time work. Away from the home. Shlepping tacos out of a bus for $13/hour, plus tips.

My Man will be home with the kiddos. Full time.

This will go on for two months, wherein I will get to retire from taco-shlepping to do pottery in my home studio.

(What? I never told you I was a potter?

I see there are quite a few topics left uncovered.)

Many forces have converged to create this upcoming change. One is my constant bitching about how hard it is to be a full time parent and how desperately I need a break to do anything at all that involves grown-ups, as well as the overdosed state of My Man’s brain after three years of such intensive study and his great desire to stay home and “just play with the kids” for awhile; the most obvious and logical reason however is the excruciating three month gap between taking the Bar and finding out if you have passed the Bar and are therefore allowed to begin attempting to work as a lawyer and even dream of paying off your loans.

We need dough, and taco shlepping is a quick and straightforward way to get it.

After the summer season winds down, and the bus closes, I’ll switch to the slower income of my pottery business. I actually make more per hour at that, but it’s all investment at first, followed two months later by a big pay off. I make functional kitchen and tableware, by the way. In case you couldn’t have guessed. And I have a real, grown-up studio, not big or fancy but serviceable for a small scale home business.

At any rate. Working mum. That’s me as of tomorrow. Will you still respect me? Will I find any time at all to write the many posts that have been swirling in my brain? Most importantly, do you have any advice? I’ve never done this before.

Don’t tell me to cook ahead. And don’t tell me to make a little time for myself every day. C’mon. Give me a little credit. Any other less obvious ideas though?

Today, after I was bemoaning all the house projects, and when we will find the time to do them, My Man said something about how he would be able to rebuild the broken woodshed roof while he was home with the kids. I snapped back,

“Yeah, If you are a better person than me, you might be able to manage it.”

As my shithead comment sat with me I realized that, given the fact that I do many things while I am mothering that My Man won’t do (like grow a garden, cook everything under the sun homemade, etc) it is only logical that he will manage to do things that I didn’t get done.

I had already accepted that the kids would not eat as healthily under his watch, that our food bill would be higher, that the house probably would not be as clean, our home generally not as efficient by my standards. But I had (predictably) failed to turn the equation around and realize that he would excel at other things, surpass me. And that’s okay. Or at least it had better be.

We are approaching the big blank hole on the map. Yonder lie dragons.

 

 

 

Order From Chaos

Despite my absence here for the last month and a half, I have not been master goddess of my domestic realm. I am always surprised when I take a break from blogging, I mean you’d think that the extra 1-2 hours per day would get me something. And of course it does, it gets me a slower pace of life, a calm that I do appreciate when I can manage to acknowledge it. But it does not get me a cleaner house or happier children. At this very moment (and most others) the kitchen is a mess, the table is stacked with four loads of clean laundry waiting to be put away, the floors are disgusting, and I have no idea what I’m cooking for dinner. I feel that depthless falling feeling lately. The list, by which I mean The List, is miles long and filled with projects like “replace linoleum in the kitchen,” “put up the year’s worth of salmon,” “rebuild collapsed woodshed roof,” and subsequently “cut and stack five cords of firewood for the winter.”

And I can’t even get the fucking laundry put away.

The disappointment of times like this always starts me to grasping for a cure, and lately my obsession has been the Waldorf concept of Rhythm. The idea is that a flexible but regular schedule is essential for children; that knowing, generally, how their days will unfold gives them a sense of peace and stability.

Duh.

One of the things I hate about parenting dogmas is how impervious they are to differences in personality. Although I think a predictable schedule is generally agreed to be good for kids, I suspect there are kids who will never adapt to a schedule and furthermore don’t need to, as well as kids who’s lives could be turned around by a strong rhythm. Those are the kids who thrive on Waldorf, and “prove” the success of the ideology.

What I am realizing lately is that I was one of those kids, who’s need for a predictable, peaceful and quiet daily routine was never satisfied as a child. And as happens in a developing brain when a need is unmet, I am consequently malformed.

I have always had a near obsession with routine and yet an inability to actually execute it to any satisfying degree. I need it because I didn’t get it as a child, but I don’t know how to do it, because I didn’t get it as a child. My journals are always studded with multiple attempts to corral the chaos of my days. Literally,

“Summer Schedule
6:00 wake up, coffee
7:00 breakfast
7:30 walk
9:00 outside chores”
etc, etc.

I write it all out, earnestly believing every time that the mere act of writing will create the calm rhythm and self disciplined schedule I crave. Later I am convinced that it hasn’t worked because I just haven’t gotten it right, haven’t divined the Perfect Schedule. Inviting yet another attempt.

That’s me– forever believing that there is a formula for perfection. Not universal, but personal to me. If only I could figure it out.

Having kids of my own I have only stepped up this madness. Desperate for a handle on life, I feel sure that I am just missing something. If I could just get the kids to eat right, they wouldn’t have these stubborn screaming fits. If I could just get the house clean and stay on top of it, we would all feel so much more calm and relaxed. If the 2yo would just consistently sleep enough at night. If I got the kids enough exercise and peer play every day. If… If….

And then the kingpin– If only I could get us on a schedule, then I would (magically) have time to fit all this in to every single day.

Then, then! Life would be all soft watercolors and silk scarves. Hallelujah.

Looking around online for Waldorf rhythm is excessively discouraging. The blogshine that I always rail against is rampant in the Waldorf crowd. One that I read this morning went on for an entire post about their morning ritual of waking softly, lighting candles and singing morning songs and how sweet and perfect it all was. Well, perfect pink wool felting mothers of the world, damn you if you’re lying, and damn you more if you’re not.

I started this post weeks ago, in the midst of an obsession. Now as I come back to finish what seems worth finishing, I am trying to divine the lesson. Did I learn something? I do in fact feel like in the last few weeks I created some kind of order in my universe– the house is clean, the laundry is caught up, the kids are happy. But as usual, in retrospect, I find myself wondering if I created that order and peace, or if it created itself.

Do I follow a pattern of sinking to the bottom and then pulling myself up by the bootstraps? Or does life follow a pattern of chaos and hard times, which lead inevitably to a relative peace and better times? Or is it (more likely) both? Do we feed off of each other, me and life, and oh– don’t forget the kids, in their own two separate cycles.

Waldorf appeals to my depressed self because it is based on the premise that if you do everything “right” (and they’ll tell you how) your life and your children will be sweet and quiet. It taps directly into my innate compulsion to believe that there is a Perfect Way, I just have to figure out what it is. It feeds heavily on my propensity for mama-guilt, because if my life is not so perfectly sweet and quiet, it is my own fault. I have failed myself and my family.

Like any religion, it takes a human being in their weakened state of sad, disappointed confusion, and props them up on the idea that there is a prescribed way out. Just follow the master plan, and it will all be taken care of. The idea that there is in fact an underlying order, a secret to life, is so incredibly seductive to us. We want so desperately to believe, to be Believers.

For whatever cosmic reason, me and the kids were at a real low. I was desperate, I was vulnerable. I delved into the ‘rhythm as panacea’ concept, even started doing a Waldorf circle time with the kids every afternoon. I summoned my will and attempted to implement a stronger routine than what we already had. I checked out Over the Rainbow Bridge from the library. I berated myself appropriately over their movie watching, the overflow of plastic toys and my own yelling mad self. (This last one works wonders– beat yourself up about being a mean mom. Just see how sweet it makes you. Wow. It was from this place of yelling at myself for yelling at the kids that I told them I wanted to chain them up so I could just please fucking carry the fucking groceries the two blocks up the fucking hill to our house.)

The problem, for me at least, is that feeding the belief in achievable order interferes with the work I really need to be doing. Accepting the chaos.

Submitting.

Shit, there it is again. Not submitting to motherhood this time. But submitting to life. The universe. Everything. The greater-than-me. The things I can never know, and never understand. The mystery. Submitting to the fact that I am not ruler of this world, or even my world. There is no plan so perfect that it will tame my wild children. Thank god! My life is not reducible to a calm, clean, quiet procession of handcrafts. It is an uproarious mess of bewilderment and kitchen projects. My kids are LOUD because they are full of piss and vinegar, they run around the house breaking shit because they are full of nearly explosive curiosity for how the world works.

We are movers and shakers, a whole fam damily of them. Our life together is bound to be complex.

I’m not altogether done with the rhythm concept, or Waldorf in general. Of course, just because they have not created The Master Plan doesn’t mean there isn’t some valuable takeaway. Just because a solid rhythm would not singlehandedly create peace on earth, doesn’t mean it wouldn’t help create a bit more peace in our own household. Or at the very least, in my own brain.

As usual, I walk a weird line between wholesome organic crafty mama and ranting punk bitch, and it’s sometimes hard to know quite where to set my bags down. I guess my real work in this life is to just be without need to label, to search without need to find, to try without need to master, to take what comes as it comes. Chaos, order, chaos.

That’s not too much to ask, right?

Renegade Sister

That last post was partially just to have written a post, so that I could share with you yet another link. This one is very exciting for me. In fact, I’m a little bit pissed off that none of you ever told me about this. Is it really possible that we do not share any readers?

My new blog crush is titled Renegade Mothering. Yeah. Obviously we are sisters. I stumbled upon Janelle’s blog while doing an internet search for “Waldorf circle time” (more on that later). Which is hilarious, as you will understand after you read her work.

Renegade Mothering is not for the Waldorf set. It is not for those of you who tolerate my swearing and sarcasm for the sake of my generally wholesome content. This woman makes me look like a nun. She doesn’t write about cooking or homesteading or housewifery or fighting The Man, nor does she delve deep into the emotional pysche of motherhood. Nope, instead Renegade Mothering is a ranty bitch. If you enjoy the juxtaposition of foul mouthed mama writing, an extremely heavy dose of sarcasm and laughing like a hyena, check it out.

I simply could not choose a single post to direct you toward. You should probably start with Playdate in My Trailer and 19 Things You Must Know About Me. Are You Ready for Parenthood? A Helpful Checklist is hilarious and Parenting in the Gray Area will make you spit your coffee all over the computer.

But, if the idea of a post entitled I Wonder Which One of My Kids Will Grow up to Be a Crackhead offends you, Renegade Mothering may not be for you.

Not Lost, Just Fell Behind the Couch

After thinking it over for some time, I’m certain that I will come back to writing here, someday soon. I miss it too much, enjoy it too much to stop. I have posts composing in my head every day. But as always happens when I take a break from blogging, I seriously cannot figure out where I found the time. An extra hour or two a day? Nrrr…?

Granted, life has been on high around here. Studying for the Bar is like finals x 100. And occurred directly following finals. Oh yeah, except for the part where we moved our family of four across the continent right in between.

So I have been doing time-and-a-half parenting for some four straight months. Refer to the early January posts to see how I feel about parenting without a break.

Nevertheless, when I stop to tally it, I realize how much else I have managed to do in this time period. Day by day it feels like I barely manage to keep the house from inexcusable filth and my children from clawing each other’s eyes out, but looking back I have lots of good stuff to report– garden work, canning projects, a re-entry to knitting, and lots of afternoons wandering around in the rainy woods with my kiddos, contemplating life, the universe and everything. I guess that’s what I get for my extra non-blogging 1-2 hours/day.

My most recent activity was 20 fat sockeye salmon bought from a friend who commercial fishes. I got them at a great price straight off her boat, which meant days of processing to follow. Gutting, filleting, vacuum packing for the freezer, smoking and canning, and because I’m a fucking freak, don’t forget making fish stock out of those precious carcasses even though all this was done while My Man was out of town and I was/am solo parenting.

Because you have all (whoever of you are left, keeping my stats at over 100 a day, even though I personally haven’t written a damn thing for months!) been so patient, I took pictures of the fish project to share.

I wish we could have a big badass-mama potluck, and I could share some of this red gold goodness with you, and tell you my months’ worth of stories. In leui of that, here’s some pretty pictures…

And yes, that is flagrant tattoo narcissism.

Yum! Dinner!