Years ago, when I was studying for my PhD exams and thus doing a lot of procrastinatory reading, I indulged in one of those fabulously long New Yorker articles about something you don’t particularly think you’re interested in, but the writing draws you in despite the topic (I lost the better part of a week in college to a 3-part piece about interstate trucking).

This happened to be a piece about pilots, and how airline pilots learn to fly, how difficult it is to get the hours in the air required for a commercial pilot’s license unless you’re in the military first (or independently wealthy). And while I was absorbed in the piece, I mentioned it to a friend, whose dad was a commercial pilot at the time, and he said that while of course there’s a lot of complicated work involved in flying a plane, in some ways, once you’ve got that big bird up in the air, it’s kind of like driving a bus. And I found that so comforting, somehow. I’ve never been terribly afraid of flying, but it always used to make me feel a bit anxious, like I needed to concentrate very hard to keep the plane aloft. But now, after the take-off is accomplished and the plane’s leveled off, I tend to relax and think, “Automatic pilot. Like driving a bus.”

Having spent 11 hours on planes yesterday, and today feeling the effects of the 10-hour time difference I crossed, I’ve been thinking a lot about automatic pilot, and how much I wish I could engage it right now. Of course, pilots don’t use it when they are tired, but to avoid getting tired. They can set the course and relax a bit, knowing that they don’t have to concentrate for five or ten solid hours on each little adjustment required to keep a plane in the air. Now I’m not saying that my life here at home is quite like keeping a plane flying, and I’m not responsible for 300 people in this house, but the two people I do share responsibility for are reacting to their jet lag with an astonishing relentlessness, requiring continual food and drink and books and thoughtful responses to incessant “why” questions (Eli will not be brushed off with “Because” right now) and tape and markers and help with lego creations. They are very happy, and very energetic, and –unlike most days when they will go off and play by themselves for a little while and even (Eli anyway) nap for a couple hours in the middle of it–requiring a lot of participation and witnessing to their play, while I just want to curl up in a ball and nap. Why don’t they? That’s my why question for the day.

I guess the auto-pilot system for parenting is called a babysitter. With all the plans I made for this trip, that’s one that slipped through the cracks. Next time.

We’re on the verge of leaving town, but this post by MomBrain inspired me to stop packing and puttering and organizing for a minute and just take a bloggy little snapshot of my desk. Here’s what it holds:

A tube of hand cream and some lip stuff, because a girl can’t write if she’s distracted by chapped lips and dry hands

A lumpy black rock that fits perfectly in the palm of my hand, from a beach near Seattle

A green resin bracelet made by my late father-in-law (clanks the keyboard too much to write with it on)

A box of tissues

A box of ginger altoids

An empty box of ginger altoids filled with paperclips (and yes, I do reach for the wrong one all the time, and yet I don’t feel the need to mark them in any way. It’s my little daily surprise.)

A Venetian glass quill pen and a tiny bottle of blue ink, a birthday present from friends when it looked like I was going to make a go of this writing thing

2 pink ribbons with red, heart-shaped Cancer Is A Bitch dog tags on them, plus an early copy of the book, my friend Gail Konop Baker’s amazing memoir

A parking ticket

A list of things I can’t forget to do before we leave town: grab the boys’ loveys from their beds; take the garage door opener out of the car and leave it for the woman who is house sitting; turn off the computers and printers; pack airplane snacks…

Encouraging notes from my guys: a picture of the sun from Tony, 3 colorful splotches from Eli, and “I hope you feel better!” from Ben

Review copies of The Dinner Diaries by Betsy Block and Opting In: Having a Child Without Losing Yourself by Amy Richards, books on subjects near and dear to my heart

A red clay heart that Ben made for me in preschool

A copy of my book proposal; a copy of a friend’s book proposal; a copy of an essay I’m trying to write

An empty glass of water. Come to think of it, I’m thirsty!

We’re leaving for a big vacation in a few days, and so Tony and I have been reading a lot of guidebooks:

Apparently, Ben thought he could do just as well:

But don’t let that stop you from posting a review on Amazon — there’ll be more great prizes coming later this summer.

Did you hear about the Mama, PhD gear? We’ve got t-shirts, of course, and hats and bags, but did you also know we have the all-important license plate holders and beer steins at our Cafe Press shop? Sure, why not?

So as long as we’re making all this stuff, I’ll be giving some away to faithful readers every once in a while. Today, I’ve got one men’s large Mama, PhD t-shirt for the first person to post a brief review of the book on our Amazon page. And by brief, I do mean brief; if all you have in you is “Nice cover!” then I’ll be satisfied with that. I’m just looking for a little action over there. Post your blurb, send me the link, and you get a cozy t-shirt, good for a nightshirt, beach cover up, or a gift to the Mama, PhD-supporting man in your life.

And next month, maybe I’ll give away a stein!

Libby’s recent column over at Literary Mama brought me back to one of my favorite series, the Bunny Planet books by Rosemary Wells. In each one, a bunny is having a pretty lousy day until the Bunny Queen, Janet, whisks the animal off to the Bunny Planet for “the day that should have been.”

I’ve always identified most with the hapless Claire, who doesn’t get a good breakfast and whose shoes fill with snow on the way to school; she has to sit through two hours of math at school (no matter how long the math lesson was, it always felt like two hours to me), is served baloney sandwiches for lunch, and then is the only girl in her gym class who can’t do a cartwheel: this sounds like any number of bad days in my childhood!

Luckily, in the Bunny Planet, it’s summer and Claire is home, where she can pick vegetables from her garden and then hang out in the kitchen watching her mother cook — this, in turn, sounds like any number of good days from my childhood.

Claire’s mother makes her soup from the summer’s first tomato, but I think my mother would agree that the best thing to do with the very first tomato is a sandwich, and that’s what I made today: just one sliced tomato, on toast, with some mayonnaise, salt and pepper. Yum.

I ate mine too fast to take a picture; this image is from Out of the Garden

Yes, it’s true, the book’s been out a couple weeks now (though we’re not yet at our official publication date), the blog’s been going for a couple of months, and even the store is doing some brisk business in Mama, PhD gear. Clearly it was time for the next step (clearly Elrena either had a pressing deadline, or had just a bit of time on her hands!):

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvXfJqtROjo]

One of the unexpected pleasures of moving up the masthead to Senior Editor of Literary Mama has been getting to correspond with all the other department editors about pieces they’re considering for publication. It’s been particularly enlightening for me to work with our poetry editor, Sharon Kraus, since my formal poetry education is limited–aside from the odd 2-week unit on poetry in one class or another–to one college seminar on Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, plus reading my dad’s work. I still remember how he responded when I wrote him about an English class in which we were studying e.e. cummings: he wrote me a sonnet about how he would teach poetry!

So when Maria Scala, one of Literary Mama’s columns editors, said she was interested in exchanging reviews of recent publications, I jumped at the chance, though I had to warn her — and now caution you readers –that I can’t write very knowledgeably about the form. I respond to what I like, pause to admire unexpectedly effective word choices, remember images that resonate with me. I read her chapbook, Between O and V, straight through over lunch the other day, which is not at all how one should read poetry, I think, but speaks to the appeal of Maria’s writing. Reading these poems felt rather like sitting down with a beautiful bowl of ripe cherries, not wanting to stop consuming them till they were gone, and then sitting still, satisfied, for a time at the end.

There’s a mood of concern in some of these pieces, a sense of worry about the future, which speaks to me (I’m the one who’s got a fortune which reads “You are worrying about something that is not going to happen” taped to her laptop, remember?). “I’m not long for this world / if I don’t have you” goes one stanza; or in a poem titled “Nonna,” in which a mother tries to busy herself away from thoughts of grief, “I fear for the day / when I have to make myself / forget this way.” Deep sigh.

The perspective in these pieces feels familiar to me; it’s a voice old enough to see her parents clearly, as people apart from being parents, and now starting to reconsider some of the impressions and ideas of her childhood. These are moving poems about relationships and writing, particularly interested in family, but there’s a light touch to them, in pieces like “House Rules,” which begins simply “Stick together.” Or the sweetly funny “Now I Am Married,” in which the narrator, her husband away on business, “awakens[s] in the middle of the night / cold and surprised / heartbroken too: / remembering how good it is / to accidentally elbow you in the head / so that I can kiss it better.” I loved “My Friend Is Left-Handed,” which made me laugh, in the context of these carefully-observed pieces, with its opening line: “After all this time, / I never noticed.”

But my favorite is perhaps “My Literary Uncle,” which ends, “I pare down each experience / hoping to leave / a lovely mess of shavings / behind.” This collection is a lovely mess of shavings indeed, and then some.

The blog tour is over, but I have to return to The Maternal Is Political for a moment here to mention one more essay which I read and thought, “Shoot! that should have been in Mama, PhD!” But on reflection, I’m really glad it’s in this book instead, because I want people getting this message everywhere: it’s important to think about the challenges facing student parents (not to mention faculty parents, and school administration parents, and school staff parents…). Don’t we want higher education to accommodate parents, so that it can better accommodate our kids as future students? Clearly this isn’t related for everybody in academic administration these days, but it should be.

So here’s a passage from “Shown the Ropes,” by J. Anderson Coats:

It’s graduation day at Bryn Mawr College. Today I’m at the top. My hands are cut up from the climb. The kid on my back got ten times as heavy and took way fewer naps. I wrote my senior research thesis while taking two writing-intensive history classes, toilet training the kid, and buying my first house.

But up I went, because I knew exactly how far down I could go.

I don’t leave here with a Fortune 500 gig or a slot at Harvard Law. I don’t leave with a dormful of friends or a shoebox of photographs from May Day.

I leave whole.

I leave enmeshed in a prestigious, uncompromising community that rolled the dice on an underage autodidact with more secrets than pedigree, a community I’m proud to claim as my own because it offered the rope without condition, without favor, without slack. A community that gave me the chance to fly and let it be my own.

Tomorrow will be another climb, and I’ll have to shoulder my way into grad school or a nine-to-five. I’ll have to want it twice as bad and work twice as hard.

But this too is what I leave with: an overarching sense of the possible.

Today I’m at the top, and the view from the clouds is something else.

Pick up The Maternal Is Political to read the rest. And if you want to do something concrete to ease the way for one student mom, here’s someone who’s trying to take on the challenge and could use a little help.

This was a big week for the Grant family, as both boys began new summer programs.

Ben’s attending a language immersion program at the local French-American school in preparation for our trip next month, the first time he’s gone to any kind of class without a parent, or any other kid he knew, or without even visiting the building ahead of time. Typically, he was more concerned about his lunch options than about the whole communication in a foreign language aspect (hmm, I wonder where he gets this from?!) But Tony took him the first day, and Ben quickly found the Lego, so the communication issue was rendered moot: the language of Lego is universal.

Meanwhile, Eli began preschool! After a year away, we’re back at our beloved, rough and tumble co-op, a school recently described in a local paper as the “best educational experience in the Bay Area” (hear that, Stanford?) I took him in and stayed for my work day; later he reported to Tony that he was “half wif Mama, half no Mama.” Today, he did the morning all by himself, and reported to me afterwards, to explain his lack of socks, “Mama, some kids throwed water… and… never mind.” Good boy: handled the water play and isn’t a tattle-tale.

Tony and I are giddy: for the first time in 6 years, 3 months, and 12 days of parenting, we have twelve hours a week of scheduled, reliable childcare.