Month: August 2010

Witty Whit

Right now my head and heart are running dry. I feel exhausted in a bone-deep way. The words are eluding me.

But this kid? Well, he’s priceless. He can be serious, but usually, he’s not. The material keeps on coming.

****

He didn’t fall asleep last night until 9:30, and for about half an hour before that lay in bed singing California Gurls to himself. Grace somehow can tune him out, which is a skill that I’m pretty sure she’s had to develop to survive. Then he got up at 5:30 and started talking. At 7:20, as we walked into breakfast, I think it’s possible that my normally impenetrably calm, Zen, mother-of-the-year facade cracked slightly. Responding to this, he stopped in his tracks.  He sighed, resignedly, and said, “OK, Mummy, how about I give you a break from questions for a while?”

Sounds good, Whit.

****

The other day Whit was short-circuiting from being tired and overwrought and generally falling apart. He was half-whining, half-crying, dragging his feet as we walked home from the camp bus. He finally burst out, “Mummy! I’m hungry! I’m tired! I am thirsty!” He sobbed.  “I don’t know what I am, but I’m something!”

That’s a feeling I know.

****

Apropos of absolutely nothing, on the long airplane ride home from Legoland, Whit elbowed me urgently.

“What?”

“Do you know what the problem with turtles is, Mummy?”

“What??”

“The problem is they have short legs so when they flip over onto their backs they can’t get back over.”

I tell you, spending an hour inside his head would be comedy.

****

Last week, after dinner, when I was trying to wrestle Whit into the submission of sleep, he began agitating that he was hungry.

I glimpsed a pretzel from a couple of hours earlier on the floor. I scooped it up without his noticing (I thought) and handed it to him. “Here, eat this.”

We walked upstairs towards the bath. Through his mouthful, Whit asked me, “Did you just give me food from the floor?”

“Yes, Whitty, I did,” I sighed. “That’s just the kind of mum I am.”

“That’s the kind of awesome you are!” he exclaimed.

Monsters

I’m thrilled to feature one of my favorite posts by one of my favorite bloggers today.  Corinne from Trains, Tutus, and Teatime agreed to let me share her post, which for some reason (since that title doesn’t appear anywhere) I’ve called “Monsters” in my head.  This is a classic example of Corinne’s ability to “see into the life of things” (WW) which is only one of the reasons I love her.  She writes about her children, her relationship to the beach and to nature, her sobriety (seven months now!) … really, she writes about nothing less than the meaning of life.  Beautifully, eloquently, insightfully.  I’ve been fortunate to spend a bunch of time with Corinne in person and she’s even more lovely, gentle, soulful, and wise than you’d imagine from reading her gorgeous words.  I’m honored to call her my friend.
Please enjoy Monsters, and do click over to Trains, Tutus, and Teatime.  You won’t regret it!
Courage

Fynn tip toes through the hallway of his grandparents house. Textured white walls, cool for the Florida summers, snapshots of his and his sisters babyhoods hung in every room. Only starting to become familiar with the rooms and space, he ducks into a dark, windowless bathroom. He’s looking for shadows…. for Monsters. Armed with a blue flashlight as big as his arm, and a grin, he looks behind the door.

“Monsters!!!”

I ask if he’s scarred. He’s not.

“They’re just shadows, Mommy. Now lets find that cave!”

And off we go down the hall to my parents bedroom, facing shadows turned Monsters turned back to shadows with the glare of a beam of white light. My three and a half year old walking with a bobbing head and dance in his step, full of courage as he tames fears and darkness.

~~~~~

We’ve seen the episode of Curious George at least a hundred times. Monsters in the dark, George frightened and the Man with the Yellow Hat saving the night with a flip of a switch. Shadows from every day objects brought Monsters to life for George. The power goes out at the house in the country, lights unavailable, flashlights found and turned on, George is able to take care his Monsters by himself. Or maybe the scene happened in a cave, or was an entirely different episode. They all blend together in my mind, watched during the pre-dinner rush of dishes and pans waltzing from counter to stove to sink.

~~~~~

The dark hours are the times I struggle. The strength and courage I face the day with dwindles as fatigue sets in. Shadows of memories turn to Monsters. Finding a safe flashlight, one with a clear beam, is the biggest challenge of my recovery from alcoholism {or is it with? It’s never going to disappear… over three months into sobriety I still have trouble with the lingo}

The old source of light came in the form of a bottle, smelling sweet and acidic. It only smudged the Monsters, leaving them blurry enough so they blended into the walls and I could sleep. Not comfortably but I slept, though they were always there.

Now I don’t sleep. I’m learning, slowly, how to face them with a new light, a new source of power and clarity. Perhaps a lighthouse beacon instead of just any old flashlight… Facing them with this new illumination is difficult. It takes patience to steady my shaking hand, to quiet the mind and see and listen and turn them back into shadows inch by inch. But it takes time, and many nights staring at the walls and ceiling, in silent prayer and mediation. Hoping for a miracle within myself, or for The Man with the Yellow Hat to come walking in and calmly turn on the light.

~~~~~

We spend twenty minutes giggling and looking for Monsters. Searching cave after cave. Breathless, I ask him where he learned to be so brave, where he found his courage.

“George, Mommy. George goes into the cave with a flashlight and he’s not scared anymore.”

I’m arming myself with a flashlight, shining a beam of three and a half year old courage and bravery, hope and acceptance, onto the dark walls that house the Monsters. Created by years of numbing and shoving elsewhere, they’re on their way to becoming shadows again. It’s about time.

High Flight

My father’s brother, Jonathan, died in the 80s at the age of 36. I don’t remember very much about his service (I was 8 or 9) but I do remember my father, brown-haired and glossy-eyed, wearing a dark suit, standing at the pulpit of the church and reading High Flight by John Magee. His voice was steady but full of emotion, and I recall like it was yesterday gazing up at my dad from the hard wooden pew next to Hilary. It was one of those moments that I felt like I was floating outside myself, watching, even as I experienced it. I had never heard High Flight before, but I’ve heard it many times since. And every single time, I’ve thought of Jonathan, who was a blue-eyed engineer, a passionate glider pilot who loved the skies and his two blond boys in equal measure.

Today, walking through the Shelburne Museum in the pouring rain, I was stopped dead in my tracks by a plaque bearing the names of soldiers lost in World War II and the words of High Flight. My voice caught in my throat as I paused and told Grace and Whit all that I remembered about Jonathan. In the most unexpected place (northern Vermont in the rain) I found myself thinking of my dad, and his brothers, and the ways that both the ocean and the sky can introduce us to divinity, and the way that tragedy can swoop down and alter our lives forever.

High Flight

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds – and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of – wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air.
Up, up the long delirious, burning blue,
I’ve topped the windswept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or even eagle flew –
And, while with silent lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untresspassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand and touched the face of God.

– John Magee, 1941

I am flashing like tinsel

I mean, by such flightiness, something that feels unsatisfied at the center of my life – that makes me shaky, fickle, inquisitive, and hungry.  I could call it a longing for home and not be far wrong.  Or I could call it a longing for whatever supersedes, if it cannot pass through, understanding.  Other words that come to mind: faith, grace, rest.  In my outward appearance and life habits I hardly change … But at the center: I am shaking; I am flashing like tinsel.

– Mary Oliver (Long Life)

How sheer the veil is between this life and another

Matt has had a lovely assistant, M, for four years. I’ve spoken to her thousands of times (at least) on the phone, and I finally met her a couple of weeks ago at the firm’s summer event in Chatham. She was friendly and warm, her voice familiar even though her face was new.

M died last night. She was 39 and left two children in their early teens. It was entirely unexpected.

I feel sad today, for her, for her family, for the abrupt loss of someone who had so much ahead of her. I feel as though something chilly has brushed past me in the dark, something I can’t see but something I can feel. Yesterday, I spoke to her. Today, she is gone. Where? My mind still struggles with this truth, which is maddeningly abstract and painfully concrete at the same time.

I also feel keenly, shiveringly aware of how close we all tread to the line of our worst nightmares every single day. The yawning terror of what might be, of that we most dread, exists just off to the side of our lives, and though we skirt it and forget it it still threatens. We live on the precipice, walk on a tightrope, exist in a world where the boundary between normal and tragedy is far more gossamer and fragile than we ever let ourselves imagine.

Death has actually been on my mind since my Aunt E’s funeral, actually, and since a dear friend lost his mother unexpectedly in July. As I sat in the pew at my aunt’s memorial service, I thought about how there are many more funerals ahead of me than behind me. And when my friend’s mother died I had an eerie sense of what is to come as the generations fold and my peers and I take our place at the head of the line. Both of these thoughts give me goosebumps, and not in a good way.

I’m sorry for this not-at-all-upbeat post. It seems incongruous, as I sit here on vacation, waiting to pick my boisterous, tired, and sunburned children up from the bus that bears them back from summer camp. But that is the point, I guess: to remember, always, how sheer the veil is between this life and another, between good news and terrible, between just another regular day and the day it all grinds to a halt.

There’s only one way to honor those who have stepped through this veil, one way to turn this tragic reality that flickers at the edges of our experience: to use the awareness of what might be, and of the proximity of the chasm, to heighten our awareness and celebration of the days that we remain safe. To remember, always, those trite sayings that are also so achingly true: today is all we have. Seize it. Take nothing for granted.

I’ll be hugging these two extra hard when they get off the bus today.