Month: May 2011

Feast of losses

How shall the heart be reconciled/ to its feast of losses?
(Stanley Kunitz)

This time of year is undeniably about endings.  This is so even as the world bursts into bloom around me, asserting the fact that no matter what, life will return and triumph.  I am always heavy-hearted in the spring, as the school year closes.  Something deep inside me operates on academic time; this has always been true, even in the interval between my own student life and the time when my childrens’ school calendar delineated my days.  When your bloodstream pulses to the rhythm of school, early June is when things end.  I can feel the ending hovering now, growing closer every day, its presence as tangible to me as the thick pollen in the air.

Some days it is simply too much for me.  On these days the losses, the goodbyes, and the endings overwhelm me, and all I want to do is to sit down and sob.  I was talking to a friend the other day about how I am sad about the end of school, and she looked me in frank astonishment.  “Really?” she asked, genuinely surprised.  “But aren’t you glad for the summer?”  Yes, I said, I was, but saying goodbye to a year makes me genuinely, deeply sorrowful.  It occurred to me in that moment, as it does over and over again, that there are lots of people out there who simply not sentimental.    And it also occurred to me, not for the first time, that I’d often like to be one of them.

I guess I’m just awash in the end of things right now, much more aware of the bitter than the sweet.  I ache for all that I have lost: hours, days, weeks, years of my life, my babies and my toddlers, friends and family who are gone from me, younger, more innocent versions of my own self.  Yes.  I know there are many good things ahead, and that every ending brings a beginning in its wake.  I know this intellectually, but it is of no emotional solace when the endings and goodbyes seem to keep coming so relentlessly.

I fold up clothes that don’t fit the kids anymore, save the special things, hand the rest down. I scroll through old pictures in preparation for my college reunion next weekend.  I am visited in my sleep and in my waking by my grandmothers and by Mr. Valhouli.  All that I’ve lost rises up in front of me, sometimes, and I feel as though I could dive into it like into a wave. The past – those lost days and people – seems so near, and I am both reassured and shaken by its proximity.  I can sense those past experiences in an almost-animate way, and I wonder at how something or someone who is gone can feel so near.

Stop!  I feel like screaming in these fecund, beautiful, swollen-with-life days.  I want to press pause and just sit still for one moment, but I can’t, and time cranks inexorably forward.  As I try to grab onto the minutes of my life I feel them slipping by, so I tell myself all I can do is pay attention and live each one.  Still, like a silk cord that I can’t quite grip, time ripples across my palm, and I weep as I watch it go.  Even in the time it took to write this blog post I watched the sun slip beyond the horizon through my little office window, another day winding to its close.

Driving through Harvard Square this weekend I saw that they had put tents up for graduation.  It reminded me of the deep ache in my gut that the sight of the reunions fences gave me every year in college.  The fences meant the end was in sight.  They delineated the site of each major reunion, but they also closed off another one of our precious years on campus.  The fences always, always made me cry.

The fences and the tents in Harvard Square are just manifestations of the threshold between now and the next thing.  I traverse this boundary every single year, and each time I’m startled, anew, by the pain that crossing entails.  I am aware, all the time, of the losses my heart has sustained, but at this time, in liminal moments like the end of the school year or my birthday, I feel them especially sharply.

Happy birthday to the man nobody believes exists

Last year I wrote a happy birthday post for this guy and received several comments to the effect that people didn’t know I was married.  Well, that’s just one of the lines I draw.  There’s a lot of personal stuff I’m happy to share, but one of the places I’ve decided is off limits is my husband.  From this bloggy world, only Denise has actually spent time with Matt.  So, if you have your doubts, she can vouch for his existence. (extra credit: who can name the bff to the right of Matt in this photo?)

But it’s his birthday again, so I think I can break my own rule just for today … Happy, happy, happy birthday, Matt.  This is the 13th of your birthdays we’ve celebrated together.  That first birthday seems like both yesterday and a lifetime ago.

You continue to be so many wonderful things, to me, to the two short and loud people who live here, and to your family and friends:

– Surprisingly talented hydrangea gardener

– Generous morning latte maker

– Persistently, annoyingly early riser

– Miraculous blizzard-avoider

– Magnanimous eater of the random all-vegetable meals I create from our CSA box

– One of the best skiiers I’ve ever been on a mountain with

– Patient children’s golf and tennis coach

– Enthusiastic runner behind a new two-wheeler biker

– (Mostly) tolerant extrovert husband of an introvert

– Animated bedtime story reader

– Indulgent listener to long, detailed stories about adventures like trapeze (think “one time? at band camp?”)

– Barbecue enthusiast

– Doppelganger of our son – such that Grace saw a picture of you & your brother at 3 and asked, “why are there two Whits?”

– Undeniable Fun One of this particular marital pair (stuck with perma-crying non-fun moi)

– Husband, father, son, brother, identical twin, godfather, uncle, cousin, friend

Happy birthday, Matt.  As ever, I’m amazed.

Moments of wonder

Last night I folded up a big Target box and put it in the recycling bin.  The box was covered in sharpie words and crayon drawings, and has been a major focus of this house for several days.  As I took it out, noticing that the air is positively swampy with spring as I did so, I thought how thrilled I am that Grace and Whit still find a cardboard box to be a thrilling thing to play with.   The arrival of a big cardboard box is met with celebrating, and provides days of fodder for playing together or alone.  I love this.

It reminded me of the night, a few weeks ago, when I decided to make a chocolate fudge cake that I’d first made for Whit, on his request, last summer.  I surprised the kids with the cake in the morning, and gave them each fat slices for breakfast.  They looked at me, bewildered wonder on their faces, suspecting, I think, that I was going to announce that I was joking and snatch the plates away.  I wasn’t, and I didn’t.  They were thrilled beyond all reason at this tiny surprise.  Grace even told me recently that she had written a “whole page” in her journal at school about this, and I groaned at her that she wasn’t making me look very good in front of her teacher.

I get the same sense of awed pride when I asked Whit recently what his favorite part of spring break was.  He said, without hesitating, “Disney,” but then he went on, “but close after that, our trip to Walden.”  Or when, after a dinner full of rowdy, obnoxious bickering, they calm down, within minutes, when we go for a pajama-clad ‘notice things’ walk.  Furthermore, that they ask, over and over again, for these walks.

I know for sure that this is one of the things I most want to pass on to my children: the propensity for delight, the willingness to be amazed, an openness to the hugeness of small things.  Whether it’s a trait or an inclination I’m not sure; I don’t know that it matters.  I do know, however, that it is one way to assure a life full of joy.  That doesn’t mean there won’t be great sorrow, too.  As far as I can tell they are often twined entirely together.  If there’s one thing I want to do as a mother, it is to help Grace and Whit hold onto their capacity for wonder.

I noticed, as I tried to find a link, that I have more than a few blog posts with “wonder” in the title.  All of a sudden it occurred to me that maybe that’s what this blog is about: the wonder of ordinary life.  The wonder of that design, of which we sometimes glimpse the contours, though never the whole.  The wonder of human relationships, the sky, the turning of the seasons, poetry, the power contained in the light of a day.  The wonder of living in the slipstream of time, whose eddies are both utterly unique and totally universal.  That’s what this blog has been, for almost five years: a record of my moments of wonder, both in their thunderous joy and their swelling sadness.  And a love letter to those two small guides who have shown me the way here.

So fragile, so lovely.

Inspiration’s been a little slow in coming this week.  My writing has stalled to a complete halt and I’m trying not to panic about it.  I know that the specter of the end of the year has commenced its menacing looming; I can feel it flickering around the edges of every day.  Another school year is drawing to a close, bringing with it incontrovertible evidence that 365 days I can never have back have slipped by.  Grace and Whit grow ever taller, ever further from the babies they were just yesterday, as the raveling string between our hearts unspools.

All I have to offer today, from this morass of emotion, is a few moments from the last several days.

Another dandelion offering from Whit, proffered in a tight fist with a big smile and great pride.  I see no reason not to put these smack in the middle of my kitchen island.  I even move the peonies out of the way.

Grace still loves playing with her American Girls, and her absolute favorite thing is their dogs.  She is obsessed with dogs.  Witness them lined up by her desk.  This isn’t even all of them.  This child lobbies, daily, for a pet of her own.  I’m still holding firm to no but we’ll see …

This is how Whit went to bed the other night.  The famous exercise pants (size 3T) and a pirate hoop earring from Disney World.  Spray paint his torso gold and he could bartend at Studio 54.

The stunning flowers, even on a rainy day, that fill the yard of the kids’ school.  I’m sure the other parents wonder what I’m doing when I stand there, iphone pointed up, and take pictures of trees or sky.

The last pair of Grace’s shoes in size 13.  She is actually wearing a 2 now, but Converse run huge, so these were 13.  I can’t bear that she is out of toddler shoe sizes.  Really, I can’t bear any of it.

I was one of the parents who “helped” the kindergardeners hold the chicks.  Whit had this dear black one with a yellow splotch on his head.  I held him too, and could feel his tiny heart racing like a hummingbird’s against my palms.  So fragile, so lovely.

And then Whit drew this picture and wrote about his chick.  I cried at how I can read his writing now, at his detailed drawing, how he, like me, noticed the spot of yellow.  So fragile, so lovely.

I contradict myself

On Monday afternoon I interviewed about 8 people for positions in finance.  In between interviews, I hurriedly opened Katrina Kenison‘s Mitten Strings for God and devoured a few pages.

Last summer I drove down to New York for an event that Aidan hosted with Dani Shapiro.  As I drove, I listened to Mary Oliver reading her poems (At Blackwater Pond – highly recommended) and intermittently switched over to listen to Top 40.  This mirrored my summer reading list, which was conspicuously short: I read almost everything in Mary Oliver’s oeuvre (many for the second time) and also didn’t miss an issue of US Weekly.

I have many photographs of wine glasses juxtaposed with sippy cups or crayons scattered across a desk with my work computer.

My bag contains separate two stacks of cards: one for my profession, one for my writing.

I often toggle back and forth between an Excel spreadsheet and a Word document.

More than once I’ve run home from a yoga class, showered and pulled my wet hair into a ponytail before sliding into heels and a suit and rushing to a meeting in a downtown high-rise.

These are just the kinds of incongruities that exist in every single day of my life.  And these reflect, I am realizing, the contradictions that live in every cell of my body.  Even more than that – these contradictions animate who I am.

I’ve spent so much energy on angst about these things: how is it that I can devotedly shop at only farmers’ markets in the summer months but also down lots of Diet Coke a day?  What does it mean that I give time and money to one of the causes that means the most to me, homelessness, but also own more than a couple of pairs of Jimmy Choos and Manolo Blahniks?  How did I, an at-least-borderline-introvert, end up in a career where I spend most of my day interacting with people?  Why is it that someone as incredibly sensitive as me, who assumes every single thing is a personal comment on my own inadequacies, is often told she comes across as aloof, even a b%t#h?

Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)
– Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”

Of course there are lines we ought not cross.  There are ways in which one part of our lives can violate important tenets of others, or choices we can make that conflict with our essential values.  I’m not endorsing this.  But beyond these, I’m increasingly convinced that some contradiction is part of almost every person.  The challenge as I see it is to walk the fine line between acknowledging our inherent variety (and the occasional tension it produces) and recognizing when the friction between the various pieces represents that something is awry.

I remember a friend of my parents’ saying once, years ago, that she was suspicious of people who were, as she put it, “smooth like an egg.”  There’s something to this, I think.  Any time I have really gotten to know someone I’ve witnessed incongruities and things I did not expect.  None of us is as simple as most of the world would like to imagine: that is what makes people so fascinating, so tender and so terrible, so human.

My magazine list represents my multi-faceted interests; you could ascribe this list of titles to someone who has no idea what she wants, or you could simply say they reflect a kaleidoscope of a person.  Even in my “about me” page on this blog I instinctively described myself in terms of some of my seemingly opposed traits: “I am strong (I delivered both of my children without any pain medication) and I am weak (I get really sick at least 3 or 4 times a year). I cry every day, possibly more than I laugh (and I want to change this ratio).  I grew up moving around every five years, which has left me with a contradictory combination of restlessness and a deep craving for stability. I’ve been to most of the countries in Europe and only about ten states.”

As long as we do not make choices that oppose essential values, I think this kind of complexity is both entertaining and captivating.  The fact that we do not, any of us, fit into the narrow categories that the world would seek to cram us into is the source of our very humanity. As long as all of these facets are authentically felt, they are not inconsistent; they are real.

Sure, there is friction, because the world is more difficult to order and understand when people are always overflowing out of their compartments and subverting the black-and-white definitions others would like to impose on them.  But it makes the terrain of the world so endlessly transfixing and the stuff of art.  And I don’t want to live in a world where every single week doesn’t contain both wine and sippy cups, poetry and Hollywood magazines, and sneakers and high heels.

Very well then, I contradict myself.

(a repost from September 2010, on a topic that is still very germane for me.  I increasingly believe that each of us contains within us a myriad number of unresolvable paradoxes, and, furthermore, that people who don’t are misrepresenting themselves, probably unconsciously.)