Last year, in the midst of working on my dissertation, I read about the 52 book challenge. The challenger had to read (no…. was *able* to read) a book each week for an entire year. Thankfully, I read that someone was doing a 26 book challenge. Half the books. THAT is my challenge, I thought! I moved forward, collecting ideas from friends and colleagues, old and new, and gathered all my post it notes and scraps of paper on which I’d scribbled titles of books over the last four years. I had well over a hundred books from which to narrow down my list to 26. I managed to narrow it down to 33. So, I’ll be reading a bit over a book every few weeks. You can find my list on my personal blog here.
Whilst gathering suggestions, I also loftily agreed to blog my reflections for the Standing Committee for Women. As a very new public blogger, I’m glad to have a clear purpose and some accountability to blog. After all, this is ADVENTURE (see my #OneWord2012 post)! My reflections may or may not include a summary and criticism of the book.
My first book was Sing Them Home (see citation at end of post). The book was lengthy (~540pgs), but engaging enough to easily read in chunks.
The book tells the story of a family, three adult children, a doctor father, and two best friends – one of whom is the wife and mother for the first part of their lives and the other of whom is the wife and mother for the second part of their lives. These two parts are separated by a tornado that creates a history of a town, and “sends up” the first best friend. How each of these people comes to understand his or her own story is what makes the book so rich.
In fiction, I like a good plot. But more importantly, I love good characters. I love well-developed characters who do not fit neatly into archetypes. The character development for the most of the characters in this book is excellent. I won’t go into great detail, though I could, but I will say that they are flawed and authentic, beautiful and mistaken, quirky and realistic. They each embody those quirky qualities that in real life we often hide, but Kallos spotlights them to hide the truth and realism that is situated in loss and doubt and heartache and life.
I love a good weather story, and this book, though not about weather, uses weather as metaphor. Weather is interesting and uncontrollable. But we make choices that can situate us to live within that unpredictability or to be taken away by it.
The book was timely in reminding me of one of the biggest messages I’ve learned about people. For all the structure, guidance, planning, and logic in life — people are messy. People are unpredictable and illogical and each one different. For every research study that says a person will do such and such a thing in a given circumstance, there are three that say the same person will do three different things.
People are messy. Life is messy. We make mistakes and we fail. And, that is why this time we have is interesting. And livable. And beautiful. I know this isn’t an ideal truth for others, but I try to accept this truth every day. Here’s how Kallos puts it,
It’s always fun to try to divide people into two groups, as in, “There are two kinds of people in the world: those who see the glass as half-empty and those who see it as half-full.”
Today I am thinking of another way to polarize humans: It seems to me that there are people in the world who are able to contain their lives, neatly, calmly. They create boundaries that allow them to function in whatever way is called for at the present moment. They ignore their children, for example, when that is an appropriate response. They pay their bills precisely at the same time every month, clean the bathroom on Wednesdays, plan a week’s worth of menus.
I am in the other category. There is spillage everywhere, even in the garden. When I’m angry at Llewellyn, I take it out on the rosemary bushes, which are spilling into the thyme bed, selfish rosemary bushes that I used to grow as a badge of my own virtue, since it is said that the virgin cast her cloak upon one.
Motherhood is messy in so many more ways than I expected. I chaos of emotions and laundry. A life without boundaries, splitting at the seams and spilling over everywhere.
I am not a mother, but in the last many years, I have seen my friends love and struggle through motherhood. They strive to be the best mothers they can, and they pitch through guilt and anger and frustration and shame and embarrassment when they are not their best. One of loveliest aspects of the book is the idea that motherhood can be experienced and achieved in a number of ways, and is never perfect. And here’s the important message:
That’s ok. In fact, it’s more beautiful and meaningful that way. So, to my friends who are mothers, you are perfect just as you are. I love this message because I cannot speak from experience, so the book does it for me. It supports that we are all messy and flawed and that is life.
Kallos, S. (2009). Sing them home. New York, NY: Grove Press.
