Month: August 2007

I really am her biggest fan. Catherine Newman’s column again made me both laugh and blink back tears. She cites the central preoccupations of her life, and they sound an awful lot like mine:

“Sure, there are recurring themes: anxiety and impatience; my chaotic efforts at peace or the way I lumber after gratitude.”

She is unabashed about the difficulty she has remembering the big picture, the beauty of it all, amid the myriad challenges and annoyances of everyday life. And perhaps this is really what it all comes down to for me, too, the fundamental message in the chorus of everything I’m always talking about. How to remember how incredibly, animatedly, unreservedly wonderful this life of ours is, even beneath a thick layer of day-to-day distractions and sadnesses? How to focus on the child’s smile rather than the carpet of legos that need to be picked up? How to take a deep breath and simply remember Ram Dass: Be. Here. Now.

Working on it.

Still mulling over my fantastic girl Gracie. I found an old editorial by Anna Quindlen in my files, which of course made me cry yet again. Some excerpts:

“Sixteen years ago something unexpected happened: I became the mother of a daughter. … Having a daughter can be a complex matter for a woman. Despite those who burble about someone to shop and chat with, the truth is that in their search for self, girls challenge their mothers in a way that boys rarely do. The ruling principle of burgeoning female identity seems to be a variation on Descartes: I am not my mom, therefore I am. Prudence Quindlen’s revenge, my father used to call our youngest child, figuring she would give me the agita that I had given my own gentle mother. But Maria has done something for me that I never anticipated. She made me want to be a etter woman.
If I were pressed for one word to describe my only daughter, it would be courageous. Swimming underwater at 2, jumping off a diving board at 3, barreling off a 40-foot cliff into the Caribbean in Negril at 5 as drunken college students cheered – that’s my wild, brave girl.
…. She makes me believe in evolution. She’s an authentic human being in a way I was not at 16, less good girl, more real person. She and her wonderful group of friends deal with one another more honestly and productively than I did at the same age. It took me decades to learn what these girls seem to understand intuitively: not to confuse disagreement and rupture, conflict and loss of love.
They’ve hit the ground running because of the changes in the lives of women. The culture grants them opportunities that were once male-only, but it still gives to girls with one hand and takes back with the other. I wonder sometimes about the trade-offs: aprons for eating disorders, strictures for stress, limits for deceptively limitless choices. Still, while my mother’s generation couldn’t even imagine certain freedoms and my generation grew up fighting for them, liberation is the birthright of this group of young women. You can feel it in their strength.
Each wave of feminism has believed in something called the New Woman. The woman who could vote, who could work, who could be truly free. I am the mother of the New Woman. She doesn’t waste a lot of time tailoring the cut of her character to suit the demands of a world that has always had mediocre taste. She never milks her gender, and she is not cowed by guys. She has taught me to dare more and conform less, to cut down on my hypocrisy because she shames me by seeing right through it. Being her mother is like playing basketball with a crack player; she raises the level of the game of life just by showing up….
My hope and my dream for the future of women comes trudging up the stairs every afternoon, her hair bundled into a bun. Last year she gave almost a foot of it away to make a wig for a kid going through chemo, but she mourned her lost length tearfully for a week afterward. Don’t get me wrong: she’s no saint. But she is strong and smart and funny, everything I’ve ever treasured. Oh, if I could grow up to be Maria, to be the kind of person who could jump off that cliff without thinking twice or looking down. For decades my role model was my mother. Now it’s my daughter. I’m just the woman who was lucky enough to come between the two.”

“As I grow to understand life less and less, I grow to love it more and more.” – Jules Renard

My girl Gracie. I talked to Melissa today at length, about labor and all those details – she is due in two days and naturally full of questions, curiosity, anxiety. Describing every detail of Grace’s painful, 36-hour labor really brought me back to those days, almost 5 years ago. I remembered the shakes, the screaming, and described myself in the late stages of natural labor as a “wild animal,” a description with which Matt concurred. A detail I shared with Melissa that many don’t know is that as Grace crowned, I reached down, put my hands under her armpits, and pulled her squalling infant body onto my chest by myself. In some sense, I delivered her (which is not to reduce the enormous contribution of my incredible midwife and doula). I brought Grace – grace? (sorry, can’t help it) – onto myself, into my life, actively and with intention.
I have thought before that that hurricane of an arrival was not uncorrelated with how Grace has swept through my life, through my very sense of myself. Her birth was just the first way in which she has forced me to reevaluate everything I thought I knew, just the first step in a wholesale tear-down of all of those assumptions I had built into solid foundations. Her 7 pound, 12 ounce self was enough to rip me to shreds, physically, emotionally, psychologically. I’d never do it another way, but she wasn’t an “easy” introduction to motherhood.
And perhaps that is what I deserve. When I look at the picture above, we look SO much alike. And the ways in which she is difficult now are all easily traceable to ways in which I am also difficult. She is my doppelganger, the person I hold dearest, the most honest mirror in which I am forced to see myself. Small things decimate her, the littlest loss of control reduces her to tears, and nothing shakes her more than feeling that someone is angry at her. All of these are traits drawn straight from my playbook. Staring me down, she is defiant, stubborn, and bold, but as soon as I raise my voice and imply by my tone alone that she has done something wrong she dissolves into tears and a vicious spiral of tantrummy weeping. She is quixotic, in love with life, replete with questions and overflowing with energy. She plays hard, runs fast, and then falls into sound sleep for twelve hours. In almost every way she is so purely my child; I suppose it is no wonder that she is also the person who can push my buttons faster and more acutely than anyone on this earth.
Someone wise once told me that it’s precisely the qualities that we aspire to in a grown daughter that drive us the most insane in a toddler. That is surely true with the intelligent, fiercely independent Grace Eldredge Russell. She may cause me to turn prematurely gray, but I’m also quite certain that she’ll be the person I’m proudest to know when my days come to an end. I am blessed with, humbled by, and grateful for the task of raising her, and it is clear to me that the dramatic, painful, and empowering way she entered the world was just an introduction to the way she will continue to rattle, impact, and improve me all the way to my core.

Had the most marvelous visit with Hadley and the delicious baby Jack yesterday. I will post picture later once I get it uploaded. In the meantime, the Tabblo I made for Hadley is here.
As I’ve rhapsodized before, Hadley is a one-of-a-kind friend, and one of the few lifers I know I have. Such fun that we both have a big girl and a little boy now. I know I can count on Hadley to provide a lifeline and a sense of humor, and to join me in a glass of wine at lunch, anytime. We can talk about everything from what’s on sale at Bergdorf’s to the best way to cook fresh chard from the farmer’s market. These all-encompassing friendships are both rare and invaluable, which I’m realizing as I get older.
Thank you, Hadley! I love you.