thoughts and miscellany – Sara Mansfield Taber

May 23, 2018

Life Notes: Rupture and Repair

Maud's Art NYAA FAll 037 — *“Civilization and Nature” by Maud Taber-Thomas*

“The intensity of the conflict between parent and child isn’t what matters. The emotions can be very intense. What matters is the repair afterward.” The professor said this one day during an infant development class I took in graduate school. That notion about rupture and repair has stuck with me, and I have relied on it, and in my experience, it has held up most of the time. Emotional heat has caring behind it, and so long as that emotional warmth is expressed, too, into the efforts at repairing a fracture afterward, often the temporary break results in a stronger bond. I can summon more than one occasion with my children, young, larger, and fully grown, when, fed up at their messes—they are both artists who make great, spreading projects—I burst out at them. “You guys have to clean up or I’ll go crazy!” I always stifled my mess-frustration past a point when it could be calmly conveyed. After their furious, fuming tidyings-up, and my lurking about feeling guilty about my vehemence—and conciliatory hugs all round when the room was, to all parties’ relief, clear and spacious and ready for new messes—there would often be smiles as bursting and full of warmth as my explosion had been, and good-natured chats around cookies and milky tea to boot.

Recently I listened to a program on BBC’s The Forum, a show that features a “Sixty Second Idea to Change the World.” This round, the idea, put forth by Phillip Ball, was: “Make mending an art form: encourage and celebrate the skills of mending in everyday life.” The English science writer explained, “I’m thinking we can learn from the ancient art of mending broken ceramics in Japan, where the mend is seen as an opportunity to make the broken object even more beautiful, in some cases by picking out the network of glue in gold powder.” Mending, he said, ought to be regarded as an important life skill to be taught to children. Most important of all is to “remove the stigma of repair.” Mending ought to be seen as an art form, and mended clothes, rather than regarded as scruffy, should be “as welcome in the boardroom as the workshop.”

Ball’s fellow panelist, physicist Lee Smollen recalled a summer at Oxford when he studied with the mathematical physicist, Roger Penrose. Often their chats took place in the college commons where the staff kept “a cache of broken teacups” because Roger Penrose liked to mend them. While the young physicist and the older one chatted, the older man carefully pieced and glued the china cups.

Originally posted Tuesday, June 18th, 2013

May 23, 2018

LIFE NOTES New Garb for Bad Luck: A Pair of Wellies

The other day I was half-listening to Woman’s Hour on the BBC when I heard a caller say, “In your late forties your luck runs out.” The words rang out clear and cool as a spring breeze. Whoever said them, uttered them as though they were the simple truth. And, instantly, I found myself washed through with relief. Immediately, I had a sense of being forgiven, of being handed a free pass. All the difficulties, all the unforeseen storms that had blown my way as I neared fifty were, perhaps, not my fault, not preventable: just how life is. Part of life’s weather.

I remember a therapist saying to me one time, “Around fifty people start to come up against stuff. They get sick. Things happen.” I was in my mid-forties then and this didn’t ring any bells. I thought she was being needlessly negative. But then things did start to happen as I closed on fifty, and things continued to happen after the half-century mark too. Not all the time or anything, but big, noticeable things I couldn’t sweep under the rug: My father was struck with a galloping version of Parkinsons, my mother’s heart problems stepped up, my family of origin seemed to come up with new forms of psychological torment every month, and, at fifty, almost right on the dot, I was diagnosed with cancer. I was tossed a bit of luck in that it was found early, but it wasn’t nothing. It’s like, at around fifty, some sort of sell-by date has been hit.

Much as it might sound like it, I actually don’t feel grim about this. Certainly, these things that happened to me, and that happen to many around this time, aren’t happy things, but it is a relief to think of “things happening” as normal, developmental, just how it is—rather than “things happening” as being a moral failure. In America, in this country where we are supposed to prevent all hardships through eternal optimism, where we “create our luck,” where being unflappable in the face of any disaster is the mark of a person worth feeding, it is a relief to think that maybe, just maybe, we aren’t responsible for the rough weather that comes our way. We don’t have to deny the trouble that shows up, pretend it didn’t occur, just to prove how strong we are. Rather, my BBC friend makes me think, there’s another, better way: We can say, “Yep, around the half-century mark, tough stuff does happen along. It’s no one’s fault.” Our job is to face into whatever variety of wind it is—dust devil, tornado, or gale, wail and rail as we need to, bear it as bravely as we have in us, but mainly just contend with the lousy weather and muddle through as best we can. Rather than being humiliated or shamed or condemned for bad luck (“Surely you did something to cause this,” carps that nasty, so-robust inner critic) perhaps we can be straight-forward about it and also treat ourselves to a little compassion. Just announce to ourselves, “Okay boys and girls! Time to put on the Sou’wester and Wellies and go down to the wreck.”

Originally posted Wednesday, April 30th, 2013

May 23, 2018

Writing, Stillness and Joy

It is a grey, rain-lit new years day.

Pico Iyer’s piece in the New York Times this first 2012 morning –on the unrelenting stream of information with which we are bombarded—hits the mark, I think. He quotes Blaise Pascal, the 17^th century French philosopher: “Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries and yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries.” The average American, Iyer reports, receives 75 text messages a day, and the average office worker experiences no longer than three minutes at a stretch without interruption. Iyer concludes: “We have more and more ways to communicate, as Thoreau noted, but less and less to say. Partly because we’re so busy communicating.” Stillness and time for reflection have become the luxuries we crave. Jet-setting Iyer, who chooses to live in small Japanese village, advocates, to complement our obligatory involvement in the world, the purposeful creation of regular stretches in our lives when we are “out of radio contact.” He writes, “Nothing makes me feel better—calmer, clearer, happier—than being in one place, absorbed in a book, a conversation, a piece of music. It’s actually something deeper than mere happiness: it’s joy, which the monk David Stindl-Rast describes as ‘that kind of happiness that doesn’t depend on what happens.’”

I will be distracting for one minute to let you know that Bethesda Magazine’s January-February 2012 issue contains my article, “The Spy Who Loved Me: With a father’s confession, the pieces of a mysterious childhood fall into place.” It offers a couple of snippets of my memoir, (due out January 10,) which, during its ten years of gestation, required long, absorbing, sometimes painful but always deeply happy stretches of shutting out the world. I wish everyone the luxury of such joy in 2012.

Originally published on Sunday, January 1st, 2012