Month: December 2010

Day 4 of Reverb10 – Wonder

#Reverb10, day 4 – Wonder. How did you cultivate a sense of wonder in your life this year?

I let go and let my children lead the way.  In particular over the summer, which was full of wonder.  That wonder was tangible in adventures both big, like Story Land and Lego Land, and small, like hysterical laughter in the morning before tennis camp or Whit finally learning to swim.  I don’t know why it’s taken me so long, but I feel like something finally dissolved this summer, some final wall between me and my life crumbled.  And on the other side was wonder.

Things whose days are numbered

Things whose days are numbered:

1. The Sweet Dreams Head Rub and Ghostie Dance being enough to assure happy slumber for both kids

2. Sitting on the floor of the gym, a child on my lap, singing our hearts out at the Pre-K, K, and 1st grade holiday sing-a-long at school

3. Whit wearing little briefs printed with robots, dinosaurs, and boats

4. Carrying Whit to bed after taking him to the potty at 10pm.  His legs already dangle alarmingly near my knees

5. Grace happily holding my hand walking down the street

6. Buckling carseats

7. Two children in the bath together

8. Shopping for clothes at Baby Gap

9. Whit picking Goodnight Moon for me to read to him before bed

10. Grace’s sheer wonder at a visit from the tooth fairy

Honestly, the truth of this makes my heart throb.  Makes it ache as though it might split open, like an overripe peach.  How do others handle this, the irrefutable drumbeat march of time?  There’s no question this is my rawest wound.  It is a cord of feeling that vibrates painfully inside me and a shadow that haunts the edges of even the sunniest day.

Adrienne Rich asserts of Marie Curie that “her wounds came from the same source of her power.”  I’m still trying to ascertain exactly how my deep hurt about the impermanence of things might also be a strength.  I am not at all clear on how the source of this  churning well of feeling to which I return again and again could also be a source of power, strength, confidence.

I want my heart to dwell here, in the rooms of my days.  I can only recommit, every single day to trying to remember that, to tugging myself back to now.  I do that even knowing full well my own tendency to mourn an experience even as I’m still in the midst of living it.  I wish I could stop grieving that which will be soon gone, but I’m not sure I can.  Most of our last times happen without us knowing, slipping into the past tense in the narrative of our lives almost unnoticed.  I am more aware than many of this, but even so I fail to mark these transitions all the time.

So, here I go, into the season of white lights and carols, paperwhites and holiday cards, eyes and heart wide open.  This may be the last year that Grace believes in Santa Claus.  May be the last year Whit wears a Baby Gap sweater.  May be the last year they both cite that baking cookies with me is their very favorite thing to do.  More numbered days.  They all are, though, aren’t they?

Sometimes it’s hard to keep your head on straight

Whit has been on fire lately.  On Sunday he triggered a thoughtful conversation, one that incidentally mirrored in one of those can’t-be-a-coincidence ways the quote I shared on Thanksgiving, the words that best capture how I felt on that day – and in this season – of gratitude, emotion, celebration, and tradition.

“If the only prayer you ever say in your life is thank you, that will be enough” – Meister Eckhart

I’m also thankful for Whit’s sense of humor, though.  Matt is away this week, so I’m sleeping as late as I possibly can (he believes the day should start at 6 something, I believe the day should start at 7 something, which is actually not as minor a distinction as it might appear).  Yesterday morning I woke up at 7:24, both kids were still sleeping.  They were at school dressed, fed, and hair brushed, at 7:55.  Not bad.

This morning was more standard.  I woke up when I heard Whit come out of his room upstairs.  Minutes later, when I was helping him get dressed, he said, apropos of absolutely nothing: “Sometimes it is hard to keep your head on straight.”  I did a double take.  Why, yes, Whit, it is!

As soon as I stopped laughing, Whit and I headed downstairs to wake Grace up.  She was cranky and teenager-ish getting out of bed, and turned really sour when I told she and Whit that I wouldn’t be picking them up after school today.  “Why?” she whined, and I could tell that she was trying to decide if she was going to get mad or cry.

“Because I have to work,” I replied, trying to brush her hair.

“Why?” she whined again, looking at me plaintively.  My patience on this score is thin.  I spend a LOT of time with my children, happily, and I do not relish the guilt trips Grace has learned to lay on me when I have to be away.

“Because I have to work.  To make money.  And because I like what I do,” I hurriedly repeated the justifications we’ve discussed in detail, ad nauseum.  For the record, Grace proudly tells everyone who asks that she wants to be “a mummy, a veterinarian, and a writer.”  So she’s headed right for this life of juggling.  Tense silence filled the room as I pulled Grace’s hair into pigtails and tried to coax her to get dressed faster.  Whit suddenly chimed in from his spot by the door, where he’d been listening.

“In work, the trophy is money, isn’t it?”

Taken aback (where does he get this stuff?) I swallowed and said, quickly, honestly, “Well, that’s not the trophy for everyone, Whit.” It’s certainly not for me, but I wasn’t going to get into it this morning with the two of them.

After breakfast of Chex and yogurt, we piled into the car.  Grace was still being surly, averting her eyes from mine and sighing dramatically every few minutes.

“Grace, what’s on your mind?” I asked as I turned down Taylor Swift singing Mine and glanced at Grace in the rearview mirror.  She glared back, her jaw set.

“Grace, what’s on your butt?” Whit teased.  Ah.  Yes, he’s still just a five year old boy, too.

The wound and the wonder

I have been thinking a lot about melancholy since my conversation with Chris over Thanksgiving weekend.  I think I was onto something when I said that melancholy was “the backdrop against which my entire life is lived.”  It is nothing less than an orientation towards experience, a lens through which I see the world.

But I don’t know that it’s as gloomy and sad as the connotations “melancholy” carries.  I looked up melancholy in the dictionary and found two definitions:

–noun

1.  a gloomy state of mind, esp. when habitual or prolonged; depression.
2.  sober thoughtfulness; pensiveness.

The first doesn’t feel right, but the second does, absolutely.  I’ve been thinking that melancholy, as applied to me or to how I live my life, is really another way of saying sensitivity.  Yesterday morning I stopped in my tracks, struck dumb by the glow of light leaking across the horizon as the sun began to rise, framed by the window of central parking at Logan Airport.  This morning, walking back to my car after drop-off, I noticed that the brown, curled leaves drifted against the curb, and on the sidewalk, the same way snow does in the winter.  Then this afternoon I observed, again, that thing which is really speaking to me lately: the web of barren branches against a steel gray sky.  And this time I saw two fat swallows high in the branches.  It looked – from my substantial distance – that they were sitting side by side, necks tucked as far as possible into their fat bodies as they faced into the late-fall-wind.

It’s all connected, the way I observe the world in sometimes-excruciating detail, the untrammelled rushes of joy I can feel at the most unexpected times, the heart-wrenching pain my life delivers at others.  This is all a part of being an exceptionally porous person.  Is it any wonder that I’ve had to develop coping mechanisms, be they an aversion to true vulnerability or a tendency towards distraction, in order to mitigate the power of constantly living in such an exposed way?  I’m easily overwhelmed by the grandeur and terror of this life, and I have over 36 years built up a variety of ways of managing the pain that that inundation can bring with it.  It’s a package deal, the wound and the wonder.  I don’t know how to have one without the other.  Even the most swollen, shiny rapture is striated with sadness.

So this is nothing new, I guess, just another assertion that “melancholy” in my case doesn’t mean depressed, or even sad all the time.  It just means incredibly open and sensitive to the world, in both its joy and its sorrow.  I’ve been depressed, have I ever, and this isn’t it.  Danielle LaPorte’s post about Depression vs. Sadness touches on this distinction.  It’s worth reading: Danielle’s words contain great wisdom.  I think the word “melancholy” as often applied to me just describes the skinless way I engage with the world.  I am easily moved, to either end of the spectrum of life’s emotions, easily hurt, easily overjoyed.  That’s just who I am.  And I’m fine being called melancholy.  I just want to describe how I understand the term.