Month: February 2011

(clouds, with otherworldly light)

Do you know that feeling when you read a blog and you think: wow!  This is a better-articulated, more-thoughtful, totally amazing version of every single thing I think about, every single day?  And then you think: my God I wish this person lived nearby.  I want to be her friend!  Well, I do.  And Walking On My Hands is one of those blogs.  Pam is, as her tagline says, learning to live with grace.  I really can’t recommend her blog highly enough.

Last night I had terrible, terrible insomnia.  Whit woke up at 12:30 to go to the bathroom, and the click of his bedroom door when he went back to bed woke me up.  Thursday for me began at 12:30, because I never went back to sleep.  I lay in bed for a while, went upstairs and lay on the couch for a while, watched Gossip Girl, and read Pam’s post.  And then I thought about it for the rest of the night.  The sentence I can’t forget is this:

There are about a zillion ways to hide from your own life, and I have done every one.

The identification with those words was so intense I felt like someone had knocked the wind out of me.  This is what I was doing, all those years when I was in such a frantic hurry that I never actually noticed the right-now of my life.  This is what I was doing when I wasted whole chunks of time mourning something or someone who was already gone.  This is what I was doing when I ignored that whisper inside of me that said hey, maybe this isn’t what you want, and instead hurtled towards the accolades that felt so good to receive.  This is what I was doing when I ate emotionally in the years after college.  This is what I was doing when I ran and ran and ran in the ice-cold winter woods at Exeter, an hour a day, tears often streaming, then frozen, on my cheeks.

Pam’s words fell on fertile soil: the me who is up in the middle of the night with insomnia, suffering from a kind of spiritual indigestion, is even more porous usual.  I couldn’t settle into sleep from my day on Wednesday.  All day I was just off balance, literally and figuratively.  I slipped several times during the day, twice during my early morning run (I caught myself both times) and once, wearing work clothes, in the middle of Back Bay after an interview (I completely wiped out).

Whit cried when I took him to school because these days I drop him off rather than waiting to take him up to his classroom.  I do this because there are about four parking spots in a one-mile radius of school and I don’t feel right hogging one of them for the 30 minutes we used to sit together.  But, still.  In the afternoon Grace pulled me aside, in tears, and listed a litany of all the little things I do that fail and hurt her.

I was keenly aware of my shortcomings as a mother.

I felt overwhelmed by my job.  The demands are coming fast and furious right now, as we enter an annual period of concentrated effort.  My calendar for the next couple of weeks suddenly felt chokingly busy, including a day trip to San Francisco.

My cheeks burned with the prickly heat of not being very good at my job.  Certainly, of doing a poor job balancing it.

I felt the guilty pressure of my nascent book manuscript sitting, untended, on my desktop.  I haven’t had the time to look at it, to really spend time diving into its pages, and that truth hangs over me like a storm cloud, its grayness shading every frame of my day.

My commitment to writing, and to this project in particular, felt perilously close to slipping away.

And so I spent Wednesday afternoon and evening in a funk.  I was tearful and frustrated.  At dinner with two dear friends I was distracted and quiet.  At home with Matt I was short and snappy.  I couldn’t sleep, and when I finally did it wasn’t for long.  I started this post thinking: I still avoid my life.  Isn’t that what I was doing by being pissy, and not really engaged, and wakeful?  I don’t know, though.  Maybe that IS being present to my life.  Even when it’s difficult, and full of obstacles, and feels empty of joy.

Even in the midst of my dense crankiness, however, I read an essay by my friend Katherine and found myself crying, moved.  I realize that the heart of me, that raw, tender place full of shadows and startling blazes of light, is so much closer to the surface now.  Even when it is temporarily occluded by the frustrations of a bad day, it’s never totally lost from sight.  This is what Pam is talking about, I think, when she speaks of not avoiding her life.  Isn’t that heart, in fact, my life?

I have been thinking a lot about The Race to Nowhere, and what I wrote about it, and about the thoughtful comments that people made.  My sister, the younger-and-wiser Hilary, and I have been going back and forth in email about it too.  She is the only person on the planet who shared with me the overwhelmingly rich and challenging terroir of our childhood and uniquely qualified to discuss those days and to hold up a mirror to me.  She is also a deeply thoughtful person and an educator, so I am particularly interested in her view on this subject.

And she said something that really struck me.  With regard to The Race to Nowhere, she averred that she did not like the way that “achievement has become anathema.”  And I agree.  Fully.  In fact when I read the comments on my post last week, I found myself with an uneasy feeling in my stomach, that creeping sensation of not having adequately or articulately conveyed what I really feel.  I’m worried I left out a big piece of my view.

And so here I will try again.  I think achievement is terrific.  I have written time and time again of how important it is for a child to feel the feel mastery.  Of a skill, a place, of themselves.  I will never forget the glow in Grace’s eyes when she rode a two-wheeler alone, the light in Whit’s face when he swam a lap of the pool solo, the sheer, palpable delight Grace felt when she began reading chapter books.  These accomplishments are immensely self-esteem building, and I would never, ever suggest that they are a bad thing.

In my life this theme reached a crescendo at Phillips Exeter Academy, where I went for 11th and 12th grade.  Frankly, my years there were relatively unhappy, for a constellation of personal reasons.  Despite this, even while I was there I felt a deep respect, almost a reverence, for the place, an awareness that I was somewhere unique.  The further I get from Exeter the more crystalline my appreciation of the place becomes.  As the years have passed, and since I’ve had my own children, I’ve come to understand why.

It feels rare, these days, that an institution that deals with children says as baldly as Exeter does: we have high standards.  And we know you can meet them.  I’m not entirely sure why that’s a threatened stance in education today, but as far as I can see it is.  And Exeter unflinchingly does that.  I’ve never been somewhere that so fiercely believed in the potential of its students: we won’t lower the standards, the voices seem to whisper, because we know you can do it.

And they do.  It’s powerful, being believed in.

Nowhere I’ve been to school before or since has even remotely touched the education I received at Exeter.  Exeter pushed me and defied me and never, once, for a single second, gave up on me.  And you know what?  I could do it.  It is the first place that I began to believe that I might have something to say.

I think the problems begin when one’s identity becomes entirely intertwined with achievement.  This is what happened to me; I entirely lost the voice of my soul, which was a whisper, because the voice of the world telling me what to do, and applauding me when I did it, was so deafening.  Of course the risk of this is high when you begin achieving, because the world’s adulation feels good.  At least if you are a pleaser like myself.

But never let me miscommunicate my lack of commitment to the idea of excellence in general, and of achievement in specific.  I hope to raise children who are tuned in enough to their inner voices to discover what it is that makes their hearts soar, and full of energy and passion enough to go after those goals with everything they have.