Month: April 2010

Languages

I grew up in Paris. I went to French school, learned to read in French, and when we moved home my parents said Hilary and I were mostly playing together in French. Point is, I spoke fluent French. These days? Not so much. I can barely remember any words, and I certainly can’t read it or follow conversation. I’m not one of those people who picks up languages easily. I struggle with them. I’ve been thinking lately, though, about how languages can be understood much more conceptually, much more broadly. Language, really, is a way of communicating, right? That can be more than English, French, Spanish, Mandarin.

On Friday morning I went to yoga for the first time in over a month. I was reminded, again, of how my body can flow through the vinyasa series, no matter how long its been. My body speaks that language, by heart. Some kind of powerful spirit and muscle memory takes over and my body just knows what to do. It’s not easy, of course, and I find that it is always, always my shoulders that give out first. Is this because they are so worn out from carrying the weight of the world or a further example of how they are too weak to do that? I don’t know.

The language that I fell seamlessly into on Friday morning is just one manifestation of the myriad ways the body speaks. I know the language of the physical female body, though I can lose touch with it easily. I’ve written before of that sense of something true deep inside my body, something “soaked in blood, and tears, and milk,” something that is one way that intuition expresses itself.  This is the language that whispered in my ear through Grace’s long, difficult unmedicated labor.  It is a deep dialogue between my soul and my body, some message about truth that beats alongside my heart. I speak it, and though I don’t understand it fully I suspect that this language exists beyond the realm of conventional “understanding.”

Another language that operates on the far side of logic is poetry. I speak this language too, where words can be untethered from their ties to the traditional sentence, out past the border of rational thought. Sometimes when I read poetry my heart soars in a way it never does otherwise. The words of Mary Oliver, Jane Kenyon, Sharon Olds, and my thesis poets, Anne Sexton, Maxine Kumin, and Adrienne Rich have all done this. Poetry can skirt around my brain and access my spirit directly. I appreciate this, especially because of all the ways that my head gets in my heart’s way

There are many languages I don’t speak. We’ve covered that I am lousy at traditional foreign languages. I also can’t read music. I’m tone deaf, and music was always something I was terrible at. I remember in grade school trying desperately to figure out how to interpret those little black ovals riding up and down the pleasantly symmetrical horizontal lines, but I just couldn’t and still can’t.

I can’t read financial statements. This makes me a truly pathetic MBA, but there you go. I truly cannot understand what the line items on a balance sheet or income statement are, and I recently embarrassed myself mightily by confessing that I thought “credit” was the opposite of “debt” – in fact apparently they are the same thing. So a credit fund is a debt fund. Which is bonds. Hmm. Who knew. (Who cares?) You learn something new every day!

On the whole I’m pleased with the languages I do speak, and comfortable with those I do not. For someone as concrete and dogmatic as I sometimes can be, it is heartening to note that I am more fluent in the more abstract, soulful languages of the body and poetry than I am in the specific languages of finance and music. The black symbols on the white page may escape me, but the more colorful, more diffuse expressions speak to me. In truth, this distinction surprises me, and I embrace it.

Storm-tossed and run aground

“I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship.” (Louisa May Alcott)

This quote, long known to me, has been in my mind lately. It occurred to me yesterday that overall, though, I feel a strange combination of storm-tossed and run aground. Both whipped around in a frenzy of wind and water, but also stuck, unable to move. This contradiction underlies a tension, I think, that I’ve written about before: the feeling of holding opposite poles in my hands simultaneously. The middle place, I guess. Stuck and lost. At the same time or alternating with an awkward rhythm.

Neither of these feelings is comfortable, and they both entail my Greatest Fear: being out of control. In the storm, I often feel unsafe, buffeted on all sides by influences whose intentions I am not sure of, by events and powers that I do not understand. But when run aground, I feel stuck, trapped, unable to move towards that life I am increasingly sure I want.

“A ship is safe in the harbor, but that is not what ships are built for.” (unknown)

All of the fear around being lost in the storm or stuck on the shoals could easily drive me to seek refuge in a safe, protected place. And oh how I know the feeling of wanting someone to keep the world at bay for me. But then I remind myself: this is not where life is lived. It is the moments when I’ve let go, gone on the (metaphorical) roller coaster, opened my heart up to the inevitable bruising … this is where I have felt most alive. And in truth? Most of the harbors I have known have become their own traps after a while.

“I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky.” (John Masefield)

Hiding, retreating: this is not the solution. The sea – the storm, the wind, the rain, the water, sharp shells in the shallows that can cut you – this is where life is. In the mess, the unpredictable patterns, the haunting call of seagulls and the rhythmic snapping of halyards against masts. In the squeals of children splashing at the water’s edge, in Grace’s incandescent grin when she swam to the distant raft by herself, in the flash of white sails in the sunlight as they pass by.

These thoughts of the sea remind me of my parents, always, powerfully. I close with one of my Dad’s favorite poems, which I also deeply love. It reminds me of what I have always known: that the sea, as disorderly and uncontrollable as it is, is also home. We cannot control the tempestuous ocean of this life. Better to cast out to sea.

Crossing the Bar (Alfred, Lord Tennyson)

Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea,

But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.

The rocky path to Grace

(apologies for reposting, this got inadvertently deleted and I care about this post so wanted it back on the site – I am so sorry to have lost all of your thoughtful comments!)

you probably can’t tell, but the curtain has already come down around me (late fall 2002)

After Terresa honored me by interviewing me at her blog, the Chocolate Chip Waffle, we started talking about how we had both experienced PPD . She pointed me to her beautiful post, PPD Sisters, and prompted me to write about my own experience with post-partum depression. My first reaction was to think of my own PPD sister, who I wrote about last fall. But I’ve thought a lot this weekend about Terresa’s nudge, and wondered why it is that I refer often to my PPD, but I almost never write specifically about it (at least not here).

Part of it is that I have so few memories of those actual weeks. It’s fascinating the way the mind recovers and copes, isn’t it? My memory has smoothed over those weeks of tears and panic like the airbrush facility in photoshop: the pain is still there, I can’t forget it, but its pointy, prickly granularity is sanded down to a more general, uniform memory. So I strive to remember specific moments, but I mostly can describe the overall experience. In my letter to my friend, I referred to the crucible of bewilderment, fear, and wonder known as postpartum depression, and I still think that’s a pretty good summary.

What do I remember about those first days and weeks? I asked myself this anew after Terresa asked about it. I remember a blur of tears, darkness, crying, and most of all a visceral, frantic sense that I had made the biggest mistake of my life. This fear was powerful enough to almost topple me: the panic that I had ruined my life was layered with the guilt for having those feelings in the first place in an incredibly toxic cocktail. I remember walking one raw, early-November afternoon, Grace strapped to my chest in the baby Bjorn, my hand almost freezing off as I held a phone to my ear (one of very few phone calls in those days) and cried to a poor, unsuspecting friend who was expecting a joyful new mother. I remember sitting in the rocking chair in my kitchen, a week-old Grace asleep on my knees, wondering numbly why it was that my doula (there for her postpartum visit) was looking at me so oddly, why she kept urging me to call my midwives, why she took Matt into the other room and whispered something to him.

It all came crashing down at my 2 week midwife check-up. I am still horrified that most women have to wait until 6 weeks for their own appointments after giving birth, and am intensely grateful that my midwifery practice mandated this 2 week appointment. I sat across from the midwife, Grace asleep in her bucket carseat, and dissolved into tears. I remember crying with those all-encompassing sobs that make you feel like you are drowning. I could barely breathe. I was not allowed to leave until the end of the day, at which point I left with prescriptions and therapist appointment cards clutched in my hands and a dawning sense that I was truly not okay.

I have heard many funny stories of how control-fanatic women like myself struggled to adapt to motherhood. I always laugh, but the truth is that my reality was different. I crashed off the cliff of depression so quickly and so utterly that I was not even trying for control (for the first time in my life?). I didn’t even care, which was for me much scarier. I just sat there and cried. I think the fact of my surprise pregnancy contained within it the seeds of my PPD: I had never been in control of this, not from the very beginning. I, who have been able to muscle my way through basically any challenge (mostly because I was good at only selecting those challenges that I could conquer), was completely undone by this 7 pound, 12 ounce baby, and it devastated me.

My body fell apart as rapidly as did my mind: within 2 weeks I was 10 pounds thinner than I had been pre-pregnancy. I did not sleep, I did not eat, I did not smile. I looked like a cadaver, with deep circles under eyes that would not stop crying. I would not talk to anyone; the phone rang and rang and I refused to pick it up. Now I see I was recoiling into the deepest recesses of my body and spirit, trying to physically hide, to pretend somehow that this was not happening.

I tried reasoning with myself. I had had the unmedicated delivery I wanted so desperately, despite it being long and arduous. How could I have survived that experience, whose pain was fresh and blinding, and not be able to bear this? I had delivered a daughter, the gender of child that I’d never even allowed myself to admit how much I wanted. How could I not be grateful? In the face of such a thick, inarticulate fog of despair, whose power felt primal, logic absolutely failed. I could not see past the storm clouds either in my heart or on the horizon (and there were many there, too: an economy in collapse and a terminally-ill father-in-law awaiting a heart transplant).

I admit that for all of my pretense at open-mindedness, I had always thought that people who took anti-depressant medication were simply not trying hard enough. That arrogance disappeared overnight when I swallowed my first zoloft. Grace’s arrival was my hint – and, frankly, it was more like a sharp slap to the face, since I seemed to have trouble hearing the hints – that trying hard was not always going to be enough.

My recovery was gradual. If I plunged off a cliff in a near-vertical line when Grace was born, I climbed out on an angle just north of horizontal. I got significant help. I saw more than one therapist, frequently. I took medication. I can’t remember a specific day that I looked at my daughter and felt the swell of pleasure, of joy, of love that I had expected when she was born. It did happen, though I hate that I can’t note a specific day that those feelings arrived, and I love her fiercely now.

The truth is that I expected motherhood to be simple. I had been told that it would be instinctive, that I would look at my baby and realize I’d always been waiting for her. I didn’t. While I’ve spent my life working for specific achievements, I think I thought that this one thing, being a mother, was my birthright. It wasn’t. I am dogged by a profound guilt about those early days. I ask myself all the time what kind of damage my ambivalence did to her and to our bond. My passage to parenthood was marked by a deep grief that is integrally woven into my identity as a mother.

I delivered Grace myself, pulling her onto my chest with my own two hands. From that moment I began a long and difficult passage to the grace of motherhood. It did not come easily to me. I’ll never know if this has made me a more confident mother, for knowing the treacherous shoals I traversed, or a more insecure one, for the lingering knowledge that I did not embrace my child immediately. I try to tell myself it doesn’t matter now.

One phone call from our knees

A song I love by Mat Kearney came on while I was running yesterday, and one line was stuck in my head all day:

I guess we’re all one phone call from our knees.

The song was referring to a phone call bearing bad news. And I thought of the phone ringing in the middle of the night when Matt’s dad got his heart. I thought of while my mother’s best friend and her mother were dying, and about how every time the phone rang I would startle, and pick it up with icy dread in my stomach. To this day when the phone rings after about 8:30 in the evening my heart lurches, and I assume someone is in the hospital.  One call.  One moment.  One fleeting choice.  On our knees.  Or worse.

I thought more broadly of the decisions, choices, and coincidences that shape our lives irrevocably. As Dani Shapiro says in Devotion, “I had tuned left instead of right; had taken (or not taken) the trip, the flight, the challenge, the chance” – each small choice we make takes us to where we are. A job interview taken, a second drink agreed to, a leaning into a kiss rather than away, walking a different way home. If you imagine our lives as a line etched into space, moving backwards and forward, going through forks in the road, there are some spots that would be luminous in the retelling, glowing with the importance that we did not know they had until after the fact.

Some of the big forks in the road announce themselves, with neon lettering and loud honking sirens: who to marry?  where to go to school?  what job to take?  But I believe that many of the choices that actually create our lives, and, perhaps more importantly, who we are, are small, surprisingly imperceptible in the moment.  And then, over years, the ramifications of each choice make themselves known.  Our lives echo with the decisions we make, with the steps we take, forward, back, left right.

It is the phone calls in the night and the emails out of the blue that are on my mind today, the innumerable small snowflakes of life’s decisions that build into the immovable, permanent icebergs of our lives.  I’ve written before about this, more focused on the the internal experience of these shifts, of this gradual contouring of who we are.

” I am thinking about my personal mythology, about the moments of my life that shaped who I am today. Some of them are big, I know, like the births of my children, but many of them are small. In fact I think it is true, this notion of destiny taking shape in silence. Often the true shifts that change our direction irrevocably happen invisibly to others. This is the terrible, wonderful privacy of this life: nobody can know our internal terrain well enough to walk it without guidance.”

It occurs to me now that being brought to our knees need not always be a tragic thing: one could spin Mat’s lyric around to say that one small phone call, one event we may not have controlled, could bring us to a position of communion and worship with this world.  I imagine he meant the more obvious and negative meaning, but I like my interpretation, which just says to me that both good and bad changes are always a single moment away.  The veil of our glorious, ordinary lives can be pierced, for good or for bad, in every second.  Which just brings me back to the same persistent theme that tugs at me every time I sit down to write: what we have is this.  Right now.  And only this.

Then and now

The first two children of the 402-403 Forbes family, summer 2003 and spring 2010.  Grace and Tate, age 1 and age 7.  Long may they – and we all – be friends.  I love you, Court.