When Feel Good Ceases to Feel Good

I had a few hours to myself this morning. While my daughter was off at a fabulous playdate, I had the unusual dilemma of deciding what I wanted to do with myself. I was able to knock out a little shopping for the baby and then decided that I would go to Barnes and Noble to do a little shopping for myself. When J and I go to Barnes and Noble, she wants to find books and read to me or have me read to her, she does not want to wait while I slowly make my way through the bookstore reading book jackets and taking random peeks to see if I like the writing style of the author, so today was a treat.

I started in the magazine section with the intention of making my way to books after perusing some celebrity gossip fare. I'm partial to People and US Weekly and I figure with 15 minutes or so I can get most of the dirt out of US Weekly and maybe even get a peek at the latest must-have gear for babies out of FitPregnancy. Today, with time on my side, I was bored with it. (Not the time alone, just the magazines).
I became a parent in a post 9/11 world and I think the blunt force reality of dangers in the world coupled with the awesome responsibility of raising a child manifested itself in a desire to escape with something mindless.

During times of raised threat levels and the DC sniper (when we lived in the area) and through times of C's deployments I kept up on what Britney Spears was up to--and I don't even like her music!! But I can tell you that she went barefoot into a gas station restroom, and that she seems to be utter incapable of getting the whole carseat situation figured out. I can tell you the names of celebrity kids, who celebrities have dated, what they wore, and what they wore gasp(!) more than once. And I am not alone... In all 3 places that I have lived since becoming a parent, I have found that my girlfriends share in the obsession. We are educated women; working moms, stay at home moms, many with advanced degrees, and yet, none of us bat an eyelash when someone asks,"Did you read the latest US Weekly?"

This need for fluffy escapism extended to my literature choices as well. For about the first year and a half of J's life I had an aversion to anything sad or depressing. Unfortunately that proclivity lends itself to not much more than Chick-Lit and the latest tales of ugly ducking girl who is smart but has no fashion sense, figuring out how to make it all work and showing up the jack-ass who dumped her books. Not very stimulating.
I will make the small concession that The Devil Wears Prada was an entertaining book and movie and that Chick-lit by Jennifer Weiner is well written and transcends the genre, but rarely do these books make me think.

The pendulum has shifted and for the last two years or so, I have been delving a bit deeper and have read some amazing and heartwrenching books that have moved me. My book club in Hawaii read Ahab's Wife, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, A Prayer for Owen Meany, and many others, and I have read I Know this Much is True, She's Come Undone, A Map of the World, Vanishing Acts, Say When, The Red Tent, The Lovely Bones, etc....
In fact it was The Lovely Bones, which came out the summer that J was born which proved the turning point for me. I had avoided that book, a book that everyone and their dog was reading, because I knew that it was about a girl who is raped and murdered at the beginning of the novel and that the story is made up of what came in the aftermath. Why invite such misery and such thoughts into my life I wondered? It wasn't until my brother came to visit me at Christmas when my husband was in Iraq and I was struggling to find hope and feel good about anything that I had a breakthrough. Bryce was reading the book and couldn't put it down. When he finished he asked if I would like to read it and when I demurred he said, "You can't avoid reading or feeling sad things and this is a really good book. You have to live your life."

Although nothing pleases me more than a really good read, I still have a hard time picking out books. When I read the backs and see snippets of the problems that arise for these fictional characters, I sometimes wonder if I really want to experience that right along with them. Today I wasn't sure if I wanted to be mired in fictional problems and I am tired of making light of actual celebrity ones and so I chose a non-fiction book instead: The Road Less Traveled. We'll see what it yields.