Month: November 2017

22 Pounds of Wishes

I have 22 pounds of wishes hidden among the weeping wisteria.

The flowers by the pond have been melancholy a long time.

I drink with them.

Look at Lily’s tattoos.

Kind of abstract, don’t you think?

I’ve been told some people are really into that.

But the roses and I share the best laughs because we know it is not about pattern

but all about color and that soft, sweet texture on the fingerpads.

Meanwhile the snapdragons do deep, twisted math at the waters edge

and I drop a wish in the water.

 

End of Time

I wear a necklace of thirst.

My forehead is emblazoned with

The idea is in the umbilical cord.

My shoes light up.

I cannot walk without marching,

Dance without dreaming,

Scream without reading.

I carry a satchel of books.

The first one reads,

In the aftermath are bunnies and prose.

The second reads,

Math is Armageddon.

The third reads,

Armageddon was yesterday. The aftermath

Is bunnies and prose.

Resource Dilution

As a family becomes bigger, family resources become diluted among the increasing number of siblings in the family. Only children get more time, attention, money, and verbal interaction from their parents than do children with siblings. As demographer Judith Blake put it, rather bluntly, families with larger numbers of children tend to dumb down family conversation and activities to suit the youngest children in the family instead of the oldest or the adults, and thus “becomes weighted with infantile minds.”

Because Angelica is an only child our household is geared toward the intellect of adults. This could increase her SAT scores and help her go to a great college and go on to graduate school if she so chooses. Because she is an only child, we have the money to get her Farsi and Russian lessons, as well as music and dance and sign language and really tailor her homeschool experience to her needs and strengths.

Project Talent was  a study that tracked 440,000 kids in high schools across the country until they were nearly 30. They tested the subjects for 32 types of intelligence and only children outscored others in 25 tests and equaled others in 4.

The book from which I am drawing this research is called One and Only, and is written by an only child who is also the mother of an only. It is an in depth, fascinating read even if it does have a natural bias.

Judith Blake is cited a lot throughout the book, and sometimes that isn’t a good thing. She tends to take the human factor right out of things. Big families are beautiful, and give you a network of people to love. It is true that a variety of researchers and writers including Dalton Conley have shown a real competitive advantage for only children. But then I look at friends who have 2, 3, 4, and 5 kids or more and see how much love they have and how their kids are never lonely.

Anyway, just doing some research on only children and birth order and finding some interesting facts.

Burning Suburbia

Blue light is not chasing

my soul.

Shades of slate and gun metal pursue me

in a way the other women wrapped in their profiles and friends

would understand more than they want to believe.

 

Our spirits dream while we say,

How much? That’s too much.

I have to have her there by 3.

We need to get away. It is never just us.

 

In the suburbs I drive over hillock after hillock

again and again,

for bread and milk,

my fingers searching beneath my skirt for something so dirty it is clean,

so corrupt as to be pure.

Shades of Blue

So many shades of blue,

No Blue

Circumference Blue

Film Strip Friday Blue.

I wore a flimsy film strip to the Blue Ball.

Cobalt courted me.

Yellow felt alienated.

Yellow did not go.

Green was the doorman.

My friendship with Sky and Navy and Aquamarine

Has taught me how to talk with my eyes.

Nothing is louder than blue eyes,

Staring at me from the corner with the

Blossoming wallflowers,

Saying,

Dance with me.