Month: January 2011

Everyday life is a practice and a poem

Everyday life is a practice and a poem.

These words came to me on Friday in a yoga class.  My first yoga class in more months than I can count.  My body remembered the poses like some deeply known but forgotten language.  My mind ran and ran, occasionally settling into a thought, and this one came back, over and over: every day life is both practice and poem.

A practice and a poem.

Dinner with two old, dear friends.  Drive home in the icy darkness.  Say goodbye to Matt as he leaves for a weekend with his father and brothers.  Refill three heavy humidifiers, lug them up flights of stairs, watch the steady stream of moisture puffing into the darkness of the childrens’ rooms.

Kiss Grace and Whit good night.  Linger over my newly-minted six year old, his face more chiseled and boy-like every day, all traces of babyhood now gone.

Saturday morning, get the children dressed, go to Starbucks, the drycleaner, the grocery store.  Drop the groceries off at home.  Slip on the icy snow bank that lines the sidewalk as I try to bring bags of groceries into the house, the kids still in the car, the exhaust pipe billowing white into the crystalline, cold air.  Stop.  Breathe.

Drive to Whit’s birthday party.  Unload drinks, birthday cake, camera.  Several trips from car to Jump On In.  Grace whines because she wants a chocolate bar from the vending machine and I say no.  One of the other boys at the party’s father buys him a chocolate bar.  I still say no.  She threatens tears, crosses her arms across her chest, glares at me, stomps her foot.  I shake my head.  Stop.  Breathe.

25 boys run wild in a paradise of indoor blow-up jumpy castles.  Grace’s finger gets slammed and she cries, this time for real.  We awkwardly wrap and ice pack around it and watch the finger swell.  I wonder if the afternoon will hold another ER visit.  Stop.  Breathe.

Grace asks me to go down the tallest blow up slide with her.  I agree and climb up, clumsy on the unsteady inflated steps.  Grace holds her ice pack in one hand and my hand in the other.  We fly to the bottom, laughing, laughing.

Drive home.  The sky, which was cornflower blue when we arrived at the birthday party, is beginning to fade to pale gray, that winter whiteness that holds everything and nothing in its color.

I carry several loads of bags of presents into the house.  Do I ever arrive anywhere without a car trunk full of things that need unloading, unpacking, putting-into-place?  Whit pounces on the pile of presents and begins to rip into one.  I raise my voice, “Stop!  Wait for me to get in here!” He slinks into the couch to sit and wait, chastised.  Finally, with pad of paper and pen in hand to record the gifts for thank you notes, I let him loose on the bright pile of boxes.

I fill the recycling bin with wrapping paper, wondering how I will fit in all of the boxes and plastic that the toys will shed once actually opened.  When I open the lid of the recycling bin a cascade of snow falls down my front, and my wrists are suddenly freezing.  I’m wearing a pair of Matt’s sneakers, untied, because they were by the door, and I can feel cold wetness around my heels.  The children are shouting about something just inside the door.  I close my eyes for a minute, inhale, my foot poised above the top step.  Sometimes the work of this life is so daunting.  Breathe.

The children watch the Nancy Drew movie.  I put in a load of laundry and sit down at my desk to upload the pictures from the party.  After several minutes I look in on them, sitting close to each other on the couch, and feel a tidal wave of love break over me.  They both sense me staring and look at me, and two faces split into happy smiles.  I return a smile, through tears.

A practice and a poem.

Race to Nowhere


It’s no secret that I have deep concern about parenting in today’s culture.  I’ve talked about my resistance to over-scheduling my children, my worries about how to preserve wonder in their lives, and my concerns about the overall intensity that seems to be taking over childhood.  I wrote a post on Zen Family Habits about my commitment to and concerns about limiting after-school programming with the kids, I read and loved Lenore Skenazy’s Free Range Kids, and basically this is a drum I’ve beat over and over.  I’m desperate to raise trusting, hopeful children who are able to entertain themselves in a world that seems to squash that out of them no matter what I do.

I experience a constellation of themes and of worries that coalesce into a general unease about the world I’m bringing my children up in.  That said, I’m not entirely sure I understand exactly what the basic issue is, or how to unravel the various things that bother me.  My worries, while very troublesome, remain somewhat inchoate.

It was with great enthusiasm that I read about the new film Race to Nowhere, which strives to understand the root causes of what feels like an epidemic of stress.  Through the lens of particular stories, this film purports to bring to light the undercurrent of stress in parenting school-age children today.  I can’t wait to see it.  From the film’s marketing materials:

Race to Nowhere is a documentary film examining the pressures faced by young people, teachers and parents in our high-stakes, high-pressure public and private education system and culture.  Featuring the heartbreaking stories of young people across the country who have been pushed to the brink, educators who are burned out and worried that students aren’t developing the skills they need, and parents trying to do what’s best for their kids.  Race to Nowhere is a call to mobilize families, educators, experts, and policy makers to examine current assumptions on how best to prepare the youth of America to become healthy, bright, contributing and leading citizens of today and for the future.

If you live in the Boston area, please join me and others at a screening of Race to Nowhere next week.  The film is playing at 5:30 on January 26th at the Brattle Theater in Harvard Square, and I’d love, love, love to see you there.  I many not entirely understand the root of the issue, but I’m crystal clear that it will require collaboration, trust, and community to begin to solve it.

Click HERE for more information on the showing on January 26th, and to purchase tickets.  I look forward to seeing you there.

Six Years Old

Dear Whit,

Today you are six.  It is so appallingly cliched of me, but let me just say that I cannot believe it.  Six years ago you arrived, your birth in the middle of the night the complete opposite of, and antidote to, your sister’s long, arduous labor.  You were not, in fact, as they’d scared me with late-stage ultrasounds and fear-mongering about my not having gained enough weight, a dwarf (I had been told at 38 weeks there was a 25% chance you had dwarfism).  No, you were 6 days early and weighed 7 pounds, 9 ounces.  Two things about you immediately shocked me: your white-blond hair and the fact of your boyness.  We hadn’t found out the gender in either pregnancy, but I realized when you arrived that I had assumed you were a girl.  You were going to be Phoebe, and, I imagined, a colicky baby with a shock of black hair like your sister.

Nope.

Your personality was as different from Grace’s as was your hair color.  My father has always maintained that children are about 95% nature, and I didn’t believe that until I had a second child.  You were a calm, mellow baby, easy to be around, quick to sleep, delighted to cuddle all day long.  You healed many of the wounds I hadn’t even known I was carrying from your sister’s infancy.

From the very beginning, we all adored you.  This photograph of the first time Grace met you reminds me of William Blake’s famous line that “we are here to learn to endure the beams of love.”  You’ve been loved, fiercely, every single minute of your life.   Your father wept when you were born, taken aback by the intensity of his reaction, never having acknowledged to himself how much he wanted to have a son.  Your sister was passionately attached from the first minute; one of my early memories is of her coming in the front door, being handed her favorite doll to play with, and wailing, “But I want to play with the REAL BABY!”  And me, well, I fell in love with you from the first moment I saw you.  With you I enjoyed, for the first and only time in my life, that blissful bonding with a newborn.  Thank you for giving me that experience, for showing me that it wasn’t out of my reach, that I could, in fact, be overwhelmed by the instinct to mother.  Maybe I could do this after all.

These days you are less placid, less quiet, but no less amenable.  You’re game for any adventure.  You are physically bold, something I was reminded of this past weekend when we skiied.  Helmet covering your two-sets-of-stitches scar, you pointed downhill and simply took off.  You are fast and limber and flexible.  You are absolutely fearless.  You love to run and climb and kick and roll and shout and dig; you are, to use another cliched expression, “all boy.”  Sometimes I joke that you need to be run every day, like a dog.  And you do.

You’ve been growing into the sense of humor that we glimpsed early on.  You are just plain funny.  You remember things and bring them up months later, weaving them into a joke or a question, often startling me with your recall and with how closely you are paying attention.  You make puns and are often laugh-out-loud clever.  One thing I worry about, Whit, is making sure that you know there are many things about you other than your sense of humor that are wonderful.  People love and esteem you for far more than just being funny.  I promise.  Please don’t hide behind being the clown – don’t ever stop making me laugh, my beloved, but at the same time please know I adore all the other facets of your personality too (well, most of them).

Whit, you can be remarkably sensitive, and your keen memory for detail serves you well here.  You have demonstrated an awareness of what’s going on in a room, with other people, that’s often taken me aback.  You have wept for missing friends, places, and stages of your life, your tangible heartbreak seeming to emanate from a much older and more mature person.

You are loyal and loving towards your sister, even though you aggravate her, break her Lego contraptions, and draw on her pieces of paper almost daily.  One of my favorite things the two of you do is speak to each other through the heating vent that goes through the walls; each of your rooms has a grate that opens into the vent.  When you’re in your rooms alone, you often whisper to each other, and it makes my heart swell, the way you just want to make sure the other is there.  You always wake up before Grace does and your very, very favorite thing to do is to wake her up by crawling into her bed and snuggling next to her, whispering “I love you, Grace” into her tousled dark hair.

It takes a while to earn your trust, but once that is done it is tenacious and sturdy.  Your favorite person in the entire world is  Christina, who was your teacher last year.  You knew one of your two Kindergarten teachers, Miss Greene, before this year because you knew she was a friend of Christina’s.  The other teacher was new to you.  In November, this other teacher pulled you aside and asked you why you had trouble listening to her; apparently you were much more open to input and direction from Miss Greene.  You looked right at your teacher and said, “I don’t know you yet.  I need to know you before I can listen.”  While I think you need to learn that teachers and other authority figures should be treated with respect, I appreciate very much that you don’t automatically assume that those in “power” are right, and I also value the way your esteem for someone is built over time.

Whitman, I adore you with all of my heart.  You are a comedian with a deep sensitive streak running through you, and that combination both endears and entertains me.  I look forward to many more years of adventures together, and hope you will never lose your unique outlook on the world, informed by both wonder and practicality, equal parts convention and ostentatious individuality.

Happy sixth birthday, my only son, my favorite boy in the whole wide world.  I love you.

Tucking in a 5 year old for the last time

I just tucked this guy in for the last time as a five year old.  I came upstairs for goodnight to see that he’d accessorized his pajamas with this sweatband (which has been a favorite for a long time).  That’s his monkey that he sleeps with every single night, who is (creatively) named Beloved Monkey.  He allowed me to hug him in his bed, because “snuggling is usually better in the bed,” before moving to a sleeping bag on the floor, which is how he prefers to sleep these days.  He also sleeps naked most of the time.  But that headband?  Tonight, he kept it on.

It’s hard to cry, which is my instinct on a night like this, when he makes me laugh so hard.

Goodbye, five year olds.

xo

The world, muffled in the snow globe, then washed clear

I have been thinking for days about writing a post about snow, and, lo and behold, it’s snowing again!  It’s so great with the universe comes through like that.  Of course, it’s been snowing almost non-stop since December 26th, so possibly it’s a coincidence.  When I look out my office window, whose four panes frame so many hours of my gazing out at the world, it looks like I live in a snow globe.

People always write about the “muffled” quality of snow, about its quiet, the silence it lends to the world.  For me this is absolutely true when it’s snowing.  There is an outside-of-real-life feeling when the sky is mottled with moving white snowflakes.   Maybe it’s a vestige of childhood snow days, maybe it’s the way movement in the outside world is slowed down to a crawl.  Something just floats over me, a gossamer cape of wonder, a reminder to breathe and watch.  The snow globe is a good place to live, insulated from the real world, the rough jolts of life somehow less jarring, muted.

And yet when it’s no longer snowing, but the world is covered with snow, I don’t find it muffled at all.  It’s the opposite: I find it sharp, its clarity in such high definition that sometimes it hurts.  Pam Houston’s words always come to mind: “When everything in your life is uncertain, there’s nothing quite like the clarity and precision of fresh snow and blue sky.”  There’s something wide-awake, hyper-saturated and, as she says, precise, about life with clear skies overhead and snow underfoot.  Emerging from my swaddled time in the snowglobe, everything seems purified, clarified, washed clear by the white everywhere.

Today I knelt on the floor by my office window and watched the flakes fall.  This afternoon they were huge, big clumps of snowflakes dropping out of the pale steel-gray sky.  Watching them, I remembered the passage in Donald Miller’s A Million Miles in a Thousand Years about how “each snowflake bore the scars of its journey.”  I looked up into the sky, straining to see as far as I could.  I thought of another time that I instinctively knelt, when, just like today, “…I have felt a presence that disturbs me with the joy of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused.”

Another thing about snow: it is practically impossible (at least for a hack like me) to take pictures that capture the falling snow.  Hello, metaphor.  You just have to watch.  Pay attention.  Inscribe it on the vellum of memory.  What you see is what you get.