Assignment 2

Assignment 2: part one was to make a long list of possible topics for my end-of-unit project, and submit it to the prof. Part 2 was to write an opening paragraph (up to one page, double-spaced) for two of the topics. Here are the two I chose, and their openers:


Topic 1: "Adjusting to being a stay-at-home mom, from working full-time or more. The isolation of being at home with twins, without much family around."


I have spent the last five impossibly long years in a losing battle against entropy. This system which I call my household tends to disorder at such exponential rates that at one point I nearly gave up the fight, and would have gladly seen my world tumble from "held-together-by-a-string" to something akin to Shel Silverstein's "Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout", a poem about a young girl whose refusal to do her assigned chore of taking out the garbage eventually leaves the entire house buried in rubbish. My husband has shown some improvement, as he no longer leaves trails of discarded clothing like a lazy slug (yes, as opposed to the industrious slugs) and more dirty dishes on nightstands and end tables than some restaurants see in an entire dinner rush. The twin boys, however, seem to be entirely impossible to train. They blow through the house like two miniature tornados, leaving wreckage in their respective wakes, paths crossing, paths diverging--but always, relentlessly, causing fresh batches of work for me. A made bed seems to be the equivalent of an engraved invitation to them: "You are cordially invited to jump upon this surface, to climb under the fitted sheet and burrow around like two little gophers, and to do what you will with the pillows!" They are physically unable to resist this enticing offer, as I'm sure you understand. They have taken home destruction to a Guinness record level, I assure you. May I be stricken with triplets next time if I'm exaggerating by relating that they took an entire flat of eggs and threw each one at the ceiling of their bedroom one morning as I lay sleeping--dreaming of gypsies offering twenty bucks a head for sturdy boys to raise up in their way.



Topic 2: "My father's 40 year battle against depression; my own fierce determination to not follow him, but recognizing similarities in our personalities at a frightening rate."

His response is almost always the same--a sigh, a pause, and an, "I'm okay, I guess." I hate asking, really. The light, airy question we usually toss around without much forethought or much true concern--and with no need for the answer to feel a certain way when it is received. I should call him more. I should ask him that specific question more. I should tell him what a good man he is, how much I admire his work ethic, and how thankful I am for absorbing it through the osmosis of being raised by him. At least we have resumed the practice of exchanging "I love you"s, which I distinctly remember tapering off when I was a preschooler. I know it means as much to him as it should, whenever it is spoken, by nature. He is a sad man, a man whose dreams are as plentiful as the stars in the sky, if markedly less grand, and whose bad back keeps him from leaping for them and dragging them back to earth so he can properly own them. His dreams are big, his business sense sorely lacking. He is too generous, too trusting--and with too little capital to make a proper start of most of his ideas. The phone dating service had to be the worst--at least from my point of view, as a teenager, answering the phone unwittingly on occasion. The crabmeat business was the first of my life, and the most successful, as far as I know. It was thriving, but he still lost the passion for it. It wasn't the twenty-hour days which took the wind from his sails; but it may have been the monotony. Between projects he slips into a phase he calls depression, a phase for which he seeks treatment, to no avail. The only cure I've ever seen for him is a new idea, and the wave of passion for it that he rides until inevitably getting sucked under and pounded into the sand, leaving him bruised and battered. His figurative surfboard is left splintered, floating along beside him to remind him that he has another failure to add to the slide show. His failures have made me aware of risking too much on my own dreams--but more willing to fight for them than I would be without his glaring example of what not to do. My mother balanced his demons for me, her warmth and bottomless depths of positive attitude, filling me with the surety that I could be anything, could do anything. And I have.