hello, my name is mary allison, and i am a delinquent blogger. i know you are all attributing my silence to one of the following things:

1. i joined the witness protection program and am now living in boise, working at subway, and breeding cocker spaniels.

2. my children have finally driven me past the point of insanity and i have taken off on an impromptu cross-country drive with no definite plans of return.

3. a pillow fort has blocked access to my computer:

alas, if my life held the drama and intrigue of items 1 & 2, i would have written a memoir by now, and i walk through pillow forts every day. no big deal.

all i know is that since my last post on august 30th, the following things have happened:

1. my children started back to school after labor day and then had a five-day fall break two seconds later.

2. i turned 35.

3. i started re-reading eckhart tolle’s a new earth:

4. my job at the university of memphis stopped resembling the tv show apprentice and morphed into relational ministry. in other words, my makeshift marketing campaign has given way to face-to-face contact with actual students! i believe in miracles.

5. the monkey started taking suzuki violin, and i rented myself a fiddle too. we make terrible, fantastic music together. remember this post about great expectations?

6. i made good on my promise to mask the bird’s wall doodlings with wild designs. if you stand still in my house for too long, there is a good chance that you will be stenciled.

new obsession: www.oliveleafstencils.com

p.s. did you know you can stencil fabric and flat-weave rugs? good times.

7. i discovered that i can download books via the audible app on my phone and wash dishes and fold clothes to the riveting saga of the hunger games trilogy. i actually look forward to household chores now. for the love of clean dishes and laundered clothes and all that is holy, suzanne collins needs to write some more books.

8. andy and i took a little trip to lake oconee, outside of atlanta. the kids stayed with my folks. we each slept for 12 hours, three nights in a row. i wore my vintage polyester house dress around the hotel like a crazy person. what’s the point in changing clothes just to wander down the hall for a glass of wine?

9. i got to serve communion to my children at our church’s family camp in middle tennessee. the ritual of communion is mysterious and multifaceted, and i will never fully understand it. but this i know: it was bread from heaven. also, the bird spit his portion of bread into the cup.

http://www.nacome.org/

i promise not to wait a month and a half to post again. off to polish the silver, iron my underwear, and plant bulbs in the front beds before the kids awake.

just kidding. i’m still not martha stewart. some things never change.

• where is the monkey going to school next year?
• where do you live?
• do you work outside of the home?

these are just examples of the myriad questions moms encounter weekly in conversation with one another, all of which require nothing more than a one to two word answer. but far be it from me to offer up a curt couple of words and move on. i find myself launching into laborious explanations about why i have made particular choices; acknowledging the negative associations with the institutions, locales, and lifestyles at hand; and making careful assertions that i am not a summation of my child’s school, my neighborhood, and my mode of working.

but why do i do this?

apparently i am not alone. ayelet waldman, author of bad mother, recounts a conversation she had with a complete stranger in line at a local bakery. waldman is feeding her six-week-old baby with a bottle, and the stranger chides, “breast is best!” waldman then tearfully recites the litany of her breast-feeding woes, not the least of which is caused by her baby’s palate abnormality:

“all this i told the woman standing in line behind me at the cafe. i told her how i had weathered plugged ducts and breast infections; i showed her that the milk in that very bottle was colored a faint shade of purple from the gentian violet i’d been applying to treat a brutal case of thrush. to establish my breast-feeding bona fides, i even told her how especially traumatizing my failure to feed this baby was, given that i’d successfully nursed three children, one for nearly three years” (61).

sometimes i gush forth with too much information because i am trying to convince myself that i’ve taken the better path. sometimes i over-speak because i feel as if it is my obligation to give a thorough answer so as not to appear dismissive. and sometimes i simply want to be known on a deeper level than one can glean from the categories offered by our world.

but no matter what my reasons are, my explanations are a bit ridiculous.  it exhausts me to speak them, so listening to them probably makes people wish they could will themselves into a coma.

in the next few months, i’m going to enter into a little experiment. i’m going to try to resist the urge to insert words where there should be silence. i’m going to try not to control how i am perceived by others. i am going to allow for a little mystery to surround me where there was once a tumultuous sea of language.

if you see me in line at the bakery, babbling on to a stranger about how i’m not going to explain myself because i have given up the tedium of explaining myself, you have my permission to shove a baguette between my poor, jabbering jaws.

[the images displayed above are “wordles” created of the onslaught of language people encounter when they ask me simple questions.]

[the source for this post can be found in the bibliography page located on the sidebar to your right.]