Month: March 2010

A week in moments

I’ve been trying to live in the moments this week (okay, this and every week). And so I wanted to capture a few of them. In words, this time.

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Driving Grace and Whit to school in the morning, stopping at Starbucks for my venti nonfat latte, then heading to school while both children belt out “Funny how falling feels like flying, for a little while” at the top of their lungs. Peeking in the rearview mirror to catch them smiling each other with that conspirational, we-are-sharing-something-fun smile.

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Monday night, 10:45, Whit wandering into my room and saying, “my throat hurts, mummy.” I picked him up to take him back to bed and he sprayed vomit over my shoulder (miraculously, only onto the hardwood floor). I stripped off his pajamas and rushed him into the bathroom. I watched him, wearing only a pull-up, retching over the toilet. He turned to me, shivering on the cold tile, his hair messy with sleep and his eyes watering with the violence of throwing up, and said, “I’m sorry I made a mess on your floor.” Oh, little man. No matter.

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Taking Grace to a one-hour yoga class on Wednesday afternoon (genius: kids’ yoga simultaneous to adult vinyasa class). As we walked to the car, her cheeks were pink and she was quiet. I asked her what was wrong and she said she was tired and did not feel well. “Could it be my spleen, Mum?” she asked with concern. I assured her that if it was I was sure she would have sharp localized pain, but the whole way home I could tell she was trying to control and brush off her anxiety about it. I feel terrible that the requirement to avoid contact sports after mono (for risk of a spleen rupture) has engendered such paralyzing fear.

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Sitting down at a work meeting and pulling a few pages I had printed out from my bag. As I smoothed them on the table and looked through them, I found Whit’s five year appointment health form interleaved amid the work stuff. The form I hadn’t been able to find that morning. Excellent. Also excellent: the curious looks from across the table.

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Snow flurries every single day. Running in the snow on Thursday, coming in to see myself in the front hall mirror, the blue baseball cap from my college roommate’s wedding in Florida totally white with snow.

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My father coming over for an impromptu visit. The children barreling into him with joyful surprise at his appearance. The clink of ice cubes in his scotch glass. His insightful commentary, as always, shot through with humor and wisdom.

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Walking home from hearing Dani Shapiro read last night in the dark and rain by myself. Her words, the themes of Devotion and its probing questions, falling over themselves in my head. Feeling both clear and confused, solitary and not at all alone as I walked with the rain misting in my face.

A glimpse of home

Inspired by Chatting at the Sky today, a glimpse of my home.  My desk, where I spend most of my time. Photographs of old friends and family.  A few quotations.  Printed lines of emails from my mother and father.  Art by Gracie.  Two prints whose messages speak to me.  And of course, my trusty laptop.  What does your home look like today?

Ambivalence and regret roll into my heart like thunder

I had a professional conversation yesterday morning that triggered a landslide of self-doubt. I realized anew, sitting in a conference room as snow drifted down outside, how little I feel I have accomplished in the 10 years since I graduated from business school. I have very clearly chosen a path of a foot in both worlds (“career” and “home,” both in quotations because I think these definitions are simplistic) and as a result I have a home in neither. In being unwilling to give up active participation in either world, did I just end up doing a poor job at both?

What does it mean to have a foot in both worlds? I think it can be wonderful and it can be tormented, depending on the person and the situation. I’m just not sure which it is for me. I’ve always straddled the gulf of the mommy wars, always worked part-time, always spent part of my week in office buildings and part in the sandbox. I have adamantly insisted on keeping a “foot in the door” professionally because I was sure I’d want to “ramp back up” someday. All of these phrases seem foreign on my tongue now, like a language I used to speak but have lost.

I made an active decision to scale back my professional aspirations and involvement in order to have more flexibility to be home with Grace and Whit. And yet I have such an ache about having missed the babyhood of my children. It’s easy to blame that on the fact that I was at work some of the time, but when I’m really honest I don’t think that is the reason at all. I think it’s about my wiring, my frantic restlessness, the way I struggle to be fully engaged in one thing at a time. Still, I wonder if I had chosen to be home full-time I would feel better about my childrens’ infancies, if I would feel I had caught more of the swollen moments of feeling that are what it’s all about.

And yet I also feel frustrated by what feels like wasted years, spent only partially engaged in jobs which, in retrospect, did not mean very much to me. In order to keep the flexibility I prize so highly (to allow, among other things, time for writing) I have had to take jobs that are often peripheral and not core to a company’s function. This has eroded both my sense of real contribution and my feeling part of a cohesive team. What was the point of having missed hours with my faintly baby-powdered scented babies, for something that feels so insubstantial and inconsequential now?

Of course, the dirty truth is that I didn’t really want to be there every single second. I hate admitting that, because now I wish so devoutly that I had every single one of those seconds back. But, still. I know I needed the perspective of time away. I guess I just wish that I felt better about what I had accomplished in the hours I was away. I wish I didn’t feel like a fraud who is hiding the fact that she doesn’t know anything real.

There are two things that people tell me all the time about the way I have navigated the complicated territory of work/home. One is that I am lucky to have flexible, part-time work. This infuriates me because while I am deeply, firmly aware of my tremendous good fortune, I think calling my professional situation lucky trivializes the amount of work and forethought that went into it. And then, of course, my gerbil brain goes off on the wheel of: oh my God, I spent all of that time planning … this??? Anyway. The second is how well I’ve figured out how to have both. And when people tell me that, I always smile and nod and express my satisfaction with my situation. But I haven’t figured anything out, and those comments always make ambivalence and regret roll into my heart like thunder. They remind me of all of the anxieties and misgivings I have about the trade-offs and choices I have made.

Aidan at Ivy League Insecurities wrote a couple of weeks ago about how she frets that she has wasted her education. I relate to this, though my reasons are slightly different. I worry that I am letting down my parents, for their enormous financial and emotional investment in my education. I worry that I am failing the special teachers who took a particular interest in me, made me believe I was not stupid, helped open my mind. And I don’t feel that I am letting those people down because of my specific choices but because of who I am: that I am not more curious, ambitious, intelligent.

Days like today I feel that I’m the epitome of that trite and critical saying, “a mile wide and an inch deep.” I feel as though I’ve skimmed the surface of many worlds but not had the courage to really pick one and immerse myself in it. On other days I think that, as I wrote at Kelly’s blog, Cleavage, I am simply more kaleidoscope than laser. On those days, when I am feeling kinder towards myself, I think a life splintered into myriad pieces just fits me. I think that I could never commit to one place because I never found one that felt like home. I don’t know. I just know that today ten years of frantic effort has left me with a handful of dust and a heart full of questions.

Lift

Today, Lift arrived. I pulled it out of its Amazon cardboard eagerly, turning the slender volume over in my hands. As soon as I had wrestled my children to bed (Whit, despite having been up last night throwing up, despite complaining of being exhausted all day, still went to sleep with the calm and peace of a motorized robot without an off switch). And then I opened the book. And I read it, falling into Kelly’s world for 45 minutes, emerging blinking as though I’d come out of a soothing room with a friend into a bright and cacophonous city street. Lift is a lovely letter to her daughters, Claire and Georgia, a book whose slightness belies the weight of its message.

Kelly’s voice is the same as in The Middle Place: both humorous and serious, somehow light while talking about the heaviest of subjects. She writes clearly, without extravagance or fanfare but with memorable imagery (hair that looked burnt on the ends, razory screams). The book is, ultimately, a meditation on that topic closest to my heart: the way that every moment of life, and motherhood in particular, is shot through with the awareness of the transience of time. Early on she cites a favorite Rilke quote that captures this gorgeously:

“the knowledge of the impermanence of that haunts our days is their very fragrance.”

Sigh. Yes. Kelly uses three stories to talk about the way that risk and loss are woven inextricably through the very fabric of parenthood. She talks about the scare of her second daughter’s infant meningitis, the death in a car accident of her favorite cousin’s teenage son, and her best friend’s decision, at 40, to pursue single motherhood. These narratives, while different, are all animated by the human longing to commit deeply to parenthood in spite of the fact that danger hovers around every corner. They all circle around the same central, unavoidable truth: even knowing how much pain we will cause ourselves, we feel powerfully compelled to take this risk. We can’t help ourselves.

The book’s title and central metaphor is taken from a story Kelly tells about hang gliding. Talking to a friend’s husband about his passion for hang gliding, she asks “what keeps you up?” The friend goes on to explain that the glider is kept aloft by going from “thermal to thermal,” which entails going straight into the turbulence. Kelly expresses confusion, and her assumption that a tiny human being hanging in the sky would want to avoid turbulence. No, says her friend, “Turbulence is the only way to get altitude, to get lift. Without turbulence, the sky is just a big blue hole. Without turbulence you sink.”

And we do, don’t we? We dive into the turbulence. We hurl ourselves into the heart of life, into being parents, despite all of the logical and rational reasons we know we ought to take care. Kelly’s stories illustrate the risks of this. But the rewards, of course, are commensurately (or more) enormous. It’s glitteringly clear that Kelly’s daughters are the most important people in her life. “Mothering you is the first thing of consequence that I have ever done,” she says, and then, later, tells them simply, “You are sacred to me.” Her fierce devotion to her girls, despite her self-confessed weaknesses and propensity to “detonate,” comes through in every line of this book.

My favorite passage in the book is towards the end, as Kelly talks about her dear friend Meg’s decision to pursue pregnancy and motherhood by herself. She muses: “I want her to have this thing I have that’s so ordinary and tedious and aggravating, and then, so divine.” Kelly’s slim letter to her daughters, 82 pages, manages to touch on the grand themes of life: forgiveness, acceptance, risk, faith, passionate adoration. She very humanly describes her own mistakes and with humor she paints a familiar picture of a woman recommitting, over and over again, to being a better, more present, more patient mother. Hers is a profoundly human voice, in awe of the task of mothering even as she acknowledges its immense challenges. Lift‘s words, which speak of both my heart’s tenderest fears and of its profoundest truths, will continue to echo with me for a long time.