Month: October 2010

Lighthouses

I have always loved lighthouses.  The lighthouse above, Bird Island Light, outside Marion harbor, is my favorite of all.

I can’t decide if lighthouses are adjunct to maps or their antithesis.  Either way, they help us navigate.  Lighthouses orient travelers as they make their way through parts unknown. Lighthouses often stand, alone and proud, on isolated points of land or islands.  They warn of treacherous rocks.  Lighthouses keep us safe, even in the storm.

Like the stars, they are still points of light in the otherwise impenetrable darkness.  Lights that tell us where we are.

I love what lighthouses represent: steadfastness, sureness, orientation, protection.  I was with some of my lighthouses this weekend. There are a few other people and places that have this effect on me, and I prize them all.

Who – and what – are your lighthouses?

Recent reading

I’m back from Florida exhausted, happy, and full of memories old and new.  It was marvelous.

I have never done a link roundup before but have found myself particularly moved by some recent reads, so I thought I’d share them:

Smacksy won my heart with this post about how to win the nickname “Grandpa” at four years old.  I went on to read almost her whole archives, laughing out loud in my office as I did so.

Danielle LaPorte’s words about the Initiated Woman brought tears to my eyes, of both identification and aspiration.

Amanda Magee writes about watching her girls grow, gorgeously invoking that “primal keening” about time’s passage that I think about constantly and ending with a sentence that I felt deep in my chest.

Jen Lee’s posts always move me, but I particularly loved this one about the pull back to gentleness, and about giving ourselves a chance to receive.

Kelly Diels writes, in her incomporable way, of the gifts that fear and loneliness hold, and I find myself nodding, nodding, nodding.

Also, I am reading Carol Edgarian’s upcoming Three Stages of Amazement and ….. wow.  Just, wow.  Extraordinary.

The women who hold my stories

I’m off this morning to Florida to spend the weekend with my friends from Princeton.  There are a couple of notable absences, but there will be a large group of us and I am eager for two days in such familiar and joyful company.

We all knew each other when we were becoming who we are now.  Knew each other before we were mothers and wives and partners at McKinsey.  Before we had real responsibilities, a smattering of wrinkles, and the occasional designer purse.  We’ve shared a lot in the 14 years since we graduated: marriages, divorces, the perfect macaroni and cheese recipe, births, deaths, book recommendations, surprises both joyful and heartbreaking.  We’ve visited each others’ brand new babies in the hospital and we have stood next to each other when we buried parents.  We were and are each others’ bridesmaids and childrens’ godmothers.

We hold each others’ stories, and that is a unique and privileged position.

I’m still struck dumb, honestly, by the fact that women as fantastic as these would hold me dear.  These are strong and intelligent and compassionate and beautiful and gentle and deeply human women, every single one of them.  I respect the choices they’ve made, whether they are similar to mine or different, and I know I can trust them to be gentle with my decisions.   With these women, I am as comfortable as I am anywhere else in the world.  In their light, I am brave, not shy.

I think, again, of the powerful Adrienne Rich (who these women remind me of, because I wrote my college thesis on her) and of the line “There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors.”  We sit down together, we weep, we laugh, and we are all warriors.  All in our own way.  But we are safe together.

One of our favorite things to do is to sit around and look at old pictures.  Pathetic, maybe.  Entertaining, absolutely.  Just a few of the many moments we’ve shared; I’m sure there will be hundreds of pictures from this weekend to add to the pile.  I can’t wait.

I wrote this several days ago … and while my loyalty to and love for my friends has not waned, remotely, I felt a wave of trepidation wash over me this week.  I’m feeling fragile, and raw, and my instinct is to hole up under my covers.  I’ve never had thick skin but in the last few months I feel as though it’s gone entirely; it’s not easy or particularly fun to go through my days without any shield between me and the world.  My true safe havens are few.  Here’s hoping the company of old friends this weekend is one.

Four of us in a boat

I am back from an evening of old and new friends, listening to the rain, wistful and thoughtful.  I met my dear friend Trintje for a glass of wine.  I don’t see her nearly enough but when I do we slip right back into the comfortable rapport of old friends.  We know each others’ backstories, and can pick up where the story left off with ease.  Once again I found myself swearing that we’d see each other more, find a way to reconnect our children, who were each others’ first friends.  I hope we do.  We went together to hear Katrina Kenison read, which was, as always, a pleasure that it’s hard to put into words.  It was especially wonderful to see Trintje, arguably my first mother friend, hearing Katrina’s words about motherhood for the first time.  I felt past and present – and future – overlapping like soft waves on a beach.

The tide goes in, the tide goes out.

One minute we are leaving sleeping infants in pack and plays to skinnydip, and the next minute we are cheering those same children as they swim to the dock all by themselves.  Those children, rounding the corner to 8 years old, each others’ first friends. Though they don’t know each other anymore, their bonds endure, even if only in my mind: it makes me irrationally happy that they are, unbeknownst to each other, being Harry Potter and Hermione Granger for Halloween this year.

There are few people who embody the passage of time for me the way Trintje does; we were friends in the early days, when we were so tired we felt we had sand in our eyes, when we were so disoriented and shell-shocked we thought we would never stand upright again. And now that we are, we find ourselves nostalgic for the wild magic of those days.

Then I came home and went to tuck Whit in, curling up behind him on his bottom bunk, running my hand along the string of pearls of his spine.  I feel such intense sadness about time passing, such a frantic need to grab hold of right now, and sometimes I can’t imagine how others don’t feel that.  How do you walk through a day without every single minute being shadowed by its own passing?  Whenever I kiss my children goodnight my breath catches in my throat: they will never be this exact age again.  I can never have this moment back.  Ever.  Sometimes I find this poignancy of this absolutely unbearable.

As I lay next to Whit I looked around the yellow-walled room.  It’s such a cliche, but so powerfully true: I can close my eyes and be back in this same room, rocking infant Grace to sleep in the rocker, wondering when she will ever stop crying.  This third floor room under the roof with the slanting ceilings holds so many memories.  Its carpet has absorbed buckets of my tears as I cried wondering if I could do this.  Its walls have absorbed my wails as well as those of both of my children, and the same lullabyes over and over for almost eight straight years.  This is the room in which I became a mother.

And Trintje, you were by my side as I made that perilous passage.  You were there cheering me on when I feared I might not make it across.  Remember these two?  They were there with us.  We were four in a boat.  And it was turbulent, and I was seasick.  But you know what?  I’d go back every single time.  Every time.  Thanks for seeing me across.

What if my sensitivity is the road home?

I wanted her to see that the only life worth living is a life full of love; that loss is always part of the equation; that love and loss conjoined are the best opportunity we get to live fully, to be our strongest, our most compassionate, our most graceful selves.
-Pam Houston

I was thinking this weekend of the universality of sadness, of the inescapable fact that the sunshine of every life is mottled with shadow.  I think the thing that varies is our sensitivity to the shadow.  Some of us are just feel more keenly the loss that is always part of the deal.  Some of us are more prone to shadow than sun.  Some of us have a narrow but deep moat of loneliness around our hearts which is uncrossable by anyone else.

I love Pam Houston’s confident assertion that this awareness of loss lends itself to strength, compassion, and grace.  I spend a lot of time worrying about what I have bequeathed to my children, through example and heredity.  Pam Houston’s words offer a stunning change of perspective and I can imagine – momentarily – that this inheritance is a gift and not a burden.  What if, as Adrienne Rich said, “her wounds came from the same source as her power”?  What if what seems like great weakness is the source of great strength?

I fret about the message I’m sending my children by not hiding from them my occasional sweeping sorrow.  Sure, there are days I act happy when I feel blue.  And of course there are genuinely joyful days, many, many of them.  But there are also days where my eyes unexpectedly fill with tears and when they ask why I explain, quietly, that the world is making me sad.  I just re-read my words about a particularly sad weekend Grace had last winter and cried, again, struck by the fact that already, at seven, she has the self-awareness to say “I’m just sad, Mum.”  Actually it’s more than the awareness that strikes me: she has the propensity to be just sad in the first place, and this is clearly part of the legacy I leave her.  I often feel soggy with guilt about it.

Grace and Whit both witness and inherit my melancholy leanings, though so far Grace exhibits them much more frequently.  I have decided, personally, that to teach them to honor and accept all of their feelings, even the difficult ones, is more important than to put on a happy face all the time.  Of course, I am not sure I’d actually be able to fake it, so it might be convenient to call this a “decision.”  But I do believe that helping my children to recognize their strong emotions, even sadness and anger, is an important thing for me to do.  I also think there is great power in learning that one can be thoroughly tossed around in emotional whitewater and still come out the other side, spluttering, maybe, with sand in your pants, but still, standing.

In fact the words I wrote in July (in my musing on whitewater) seem to echo Pam Houston’s gorgeous lines (though less elegantly):

I know the terms I want to live my life by start with compassion and empathy and kindness, and that they include a deep need to honor the reality, savage and beautiful as it is, of my life.

It makes me sigh with comfort to weave together my own definition of what matters most and Pam Houston’s belief that awareness of loss can contribute to a fully-lived life.  It only comes in passing, this profoundly reassuring sense that my sensitivity, which marks how I approach everything, could be, in fact, my road home.  But in those moments I feel grateful and calm: maybe Grace and Whit can take what they learn from me and use it to be strong, and compassionate, and full of grace.

I do want my children to learn that the best lives are full of love, and that loss is part of the deal – I believe both of those things as firmly as I believe anything.  If I can do anything to help Grace and Whit believe this, through my example, my genetic material, or my direct teaching, then I will have done some good in the world.  Of that I am sure.