Category Archives: Motherhood

Motherhood, Zeitgeist

Loss

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I watched the news move in waves through Twitter and blog feeds last night and this morning, that this spirited little girl with wide, silent movie star eyes didn’t make it through yesterday. And with every word of condolence, every prayer, every request for a donation in her name, I can’t escape the feeling that nothing can possibly be enough.

Rest in peace Madeline Alice Spohr. Although, like so many of us, connected through cyberspace, I only knew you in pixels as a visitor of your mother’s blog, your short life was clearly celebrated tenderly, daily by your loving family.

The family is asking for donations to the March of Dimes in her name. There is also a Paypal account set up for the family for any further expenses. Visit here to find out more.


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Copyright Tracy Zollinger Turner, Tinymantras.com, 2009.

Motherhood, Zeitgeist

Awesome thing my son said, #11,987

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A few weeks ago, he met a little girl named Lucy on the playground. He looked at her wide-eyed, then leaned over to me and asked:

“Mommy… she’s not the one in the sky with diamonds, is she?”

(He loves Sgt. Pepper. He used to ask me to sit and cuddle him while he listened to “She’s Leaving Home.” He’d hang his head sadly and say “Mommy, the baby is gone!”)

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Copyright Tracy Zollinger Turner, Tinymantras.com, 2009.

Motherhood, Oh My Ohio

Eye sees you

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Had a fabulous time at a creativity workshop with Amy yesterday, and met her two beautiful boys along with a handful of other local bloggers (though I didn’t get much chance to visit because Dec was feeling uncharacteristically shy). We came home with a poem, a cool art smock, two bags of green slime, a garbage bag crab and a belly full of Starburst candies. He kept the third eye she had him make to help him peer into his own imagination for about an hour after we’d left. He said he could see Jupiter with it in the late daylight. He told lots of his friends about her at preschool today. About her and art and poetry. And candy.

The workshop was the focal point of a mother-son day. He and I ate lunch together and laughed at squeaky straws and talked about solar flares and prominences. After the workshop, we had some time to kill before we went to see his dad and Megan Palmer play a set at Lost Weekend Records, so we went out and visited a few satellite dishes. We drove past a big cluster on campus, then found this inactive one that we could take a closer look at. He was thrilled to touch something that communicates with space.

He was quite the photojournalist at Lost Weekend. I’ll post some of those pictures another day.

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Copyright Tracy Zollinger Turner, Tinymantras.com, 2009.

Motherhood

An interview with the 3-year-old

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Spotted this kid meme on Dawn and Abby‘s blogs and decided to snag it.

Here are Declan’s answers:

1.What is something mom always says to you?
Yes.

2. What makes mom happy?
Not having an argument.

3. What makes mom sad?
Having an argument.

4. How does your mom make you laugh?
Makes funny faces.

5. What was your mom like as a child?
She would have liked this shirt (He’s wearing a bright green shirt with Tigger kicking a soccer ball on it).

6. How old is your mom?
I don’t know.

7. How tall is your mom?
Big.

8. What is her favorite thing to do?
Play and dance.

9. What does your mom do when you’re not around?
Loves me all day long.

10. If your mom becomes famous, what will it be for?
Tickling.

11. What is your mom really good at?
T’ai Chi (For the record, I don’t know much of anything about T’ai Chi, but his dad took a class last fall. I guess I sometimes remind Dec of a couple of moves that his bearded sensei – also known as our friend Ro-Z – taught him, but… hmm).

12. What is your mom not very good at?
Jumping on an eye. (No idea what this means, but we’re going for the raw, unedited answers, so be it.)

13. What does your mom do for a job?
Typing and being busy and having homework.

14.What is your mom’s favorite food?
Avocado.

15. What makes you proud of your mom?
When she ties her shoes.

16. If your mom were a cartoon character, who would she be?
A lion and roaring, like Madacargascar (sic).

17. What do you and your mom do together?
Play and tickle and play and tickle and play and tickle.

18. How are you and your mom the same?
I’m your size when you’re short.

19. How are you and your mom different?
I’m small and you’re tall.

20. How do you know your mom loves you?
Smooches and nomming (i.e. nibbling his cheeks) and hugging.

21. What does your mom like most about your dad?
When he takes a walk.

22. Where is your mom’s favorite place to go?
The bathroom!

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Copyright Tracy Zollinger Turner, Tinymantras.com, 2009.

Motherhood, Zeitgeist

The possibilities of a painting

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painting

My brother and I grew up looking at this painting. I remember laying on the shag carpet in the family room when I was a kid, staring up at it. It informed the ways that we each made our first pieces of art. I remember sculpting and drawing people that looked like these for as long as I could draw. My brother has, at different points, asked if we could share it, if it could live with him for a while. His wife has told me she’d rather we didn’t. She’s very content to see at my house and not hers. My husband wouldn’t mind if we saw it at theirs. I guess having an affinity for it must be genetic.

Declan was looking at it this morning. He decided the pink circle must be the moon. I asked him what else he saw in the painting.

“I don’t know, what is it?” he asked.

“Well, this a painting. A painting can have whatever you see in it,” I said. “There’s no right or wrong.”

My son, who has a touch of perfectionism that makes him want the right answer most of the time, seemed freed by this. He started pointing at different things, explaining what they could be. (I put several of his comments in notes of the image on flickr. If you click through, you can see how he describes it.)

In fact, this painting was made by a nun. It depicts her survival of sexual abuse. I never saw this in it. It never felt that menacing or sad to me. I was much older when I learned its origin, and still, I find a sense of strength and joy in it.

I’ve got to make sure I get my son to look at art more often. It’s liberating.

Copyright Tracy Zollinger Turner, Tinymantras.com, 2009.

Armchair Astrophysics, Motherhood

Beginnings of a solar system magnum opus

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We’ve had a concert here all morning yesterday. It featured extended thoughts about all the planets in our solar system, but we had to listen to it through the bedroom door. Somebody gets self-conscious while performing in front of his parents.

I did manage to get him to tell me some of the words, which I wrote down:

“Song about Jupiter with Clouds… about Jupiter”*

One little place with a Halloween cloud
It’s a place with the place with a birth it’s Jupiter
Boing ba ba boing ba ba boing boing boing

It’s the place with the clouds that will make you look scary
Make you look scary make you look like a berry
Boing ba ba boing ba ba boing boing boing

“Earth Song”
http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=3231678&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=1&color=00ADEF&fullscreen=1
Earth song from Tracy on Vimeo.

(He’s been singing this for days, although I had no idea until today that it was supposed to be about Earth. How unsettling.)

*Copyright Declan 2009

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Copyright Tracy Zollinger Turner, Tinymantras.com, 2009.

Motherhood

Sappy post #1 for 2009

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Declan has a friend – a little girl who he’s friends with largely because we are friends with her parents. She was born about three months after he was, and they played side-by-side before they played together. Now that he’s been able to make new friends of his own choosing, I’ve wondered how they’ll continue to get along.

We haven’t seen as much of their family in recent months, we’ve been busy, and they’ve been getting acclimated to life with a three-year-old and a new baby boy. But they came over on Sunday for a visit, and it was the first time Declan and his friend played mostly without supervision.

They were frantically making things up in the kitchen and periodically emerging to present odd toys and bits in bowls to us as “cupcakes.” At one point, Dec shrieked “MOMMY!” from the playroom and I ran to see what damage control I needed to do. The infraction was this:

“S___ made me some coffee and it’s TOO HOT!”

“Maybe you should blow on it to cool it down,” I offered.

“Okay.”

He also got a little sad when she didn’t want to sit down and hold his hand and watch a documentary about the 95+ moons in our solar system. Then there was a brief skirmish over the toy vacuum cleaner, but the visit was mostly sweet and easy.

S__ currently has the “Why?” affliction in spades. I don’t think she responded to me once during the entire visit with anything other than that question, which I answered nearly every time, although I’m not sure she cared to hear the answer. Last night, Declan was telling his daddy about her visit.

“I told her I loved her,” he offered. Then, not surprisingly: “She asked me why.”

His answer?

“I told her it was because I love her heart.”

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Copyright Tracy Zollinger Turner, Tinymantras.com, 2009.

Motherhood

Santa fraud

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I’ve been kind of surprised by the number of anti-Santa parents I’ve met of late. Or those who will only tell the tale pragmatically, as in, “Santa lived once and was generous and gave gifts to all the children, and now we do the same thing in that spirit.”

More than a few people I’ve spoken with were traumatized by the means that, as children, they were disillusioned of Santa Claus. Being teased out of the fantasy on the playground or school bus made them feel that their parents had lied to them, that they were duped by the world. (My husband is one of those people.)

“I can’t lie to my child, no way,” one mom told me recently.

Personally, I never fully stopped believing in Santa Claus. I can’t swear to him, either, but I met plenty of Santa haters (especially older kids who seemed to take joy in dispelling the story) that gleefully tried to humiliate my faith, and it left no bruises on me.

I think believing in the impossible, or the improbable, is especially good for a science-enamored kid like mine. It’s one thing for him to learn to suspend disbelief at the movie theater, another thing entirely to do that with his own life. I don’t know where the world’s scientific developments would be without the capacity to imagine, desire, fear or believe in things that seem just too crazy to be real.

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Copyright Tracy Zollinger Turner, Tinymantras.com, 2009.