Month: May 2011

Planting Dandelions

I read Kyran Pittman’s lovely, funny, wise memoir, Planting Dandelions: Field Notes From a Semi-Domesticated Life, in a single day.  I was smitten by page three:

“‘Look at this,’ I’d say, holding up some fragment of everyday to myself and anyone who happened to be reading, turning it over this way and that.  Look.
People … offer themselves up with a mix of shyness and excitement.  Sometimes they doubt themselves.
I thought maybe it was worth something, but I don’t know …
It’s probably too small to matter …
It’s kind of a mess and it’s broken in places …
“It’s beautiful,” I tell them.  It’s funny.  It’s deep.  It’s extraordinary.
Look.”

Pittman seems to be speaking in lucid, beautiful sentences that which I’m endlessly circling around here on this blog, stumbling over and bumping into in the dark of my life.  Yes.  It’s extraordinary.  Just look.  A couple of paragraphs later, she says that Planting Dandelions shares her “moments of truth.”  She cites “the power of small things to make a life infinitely vast,” and then invites her reader, at the end of her introduction, to “Look.  Look what I found.  Come see.”  This is on page four, and I was already nodding and crying at the same time.

The chapters of Planting Dandelions are loosely organized by theme or life stage.  Pittman talks about the complicated, “scorched-earth” way she and her husband connected, about her early days as a fierce proponent of attachment parenting, about her gradual movement back into work.  She covers sex, religion, the loss of grandparents, school, female friendships in midlife, and the US South, all in a voice that is by turns laugh-out-loud funny and wipe-tears-away tender.

One theme that I particularly related to in Planting Dandelions is the vague sense of bewilderment that dogs Pittman and her husband no matter how old they and their children become.  I totally share this.  I have often joked that I’m waiting for the real mother to come home, and that’s utterly true.  Sometimes I look across a room at my children, or catch a glimpse of them in the rearview mirror, and am absolutely awestruck, astounded, that I am their parent.  When did this happen?  Wasn’t I just, five minutes ago, a college senior, arms flung around my best friends, staggering across Poe Field on a sunny spring day?  I am conscious, every single day, for example when I go to drop off in my actual pajamas, of all the ways in which I thought I’d be more “grown up” by now.  Pittman describes this feeling, which I feel piercingly, regularly:

“…I wanted to fall to my knees, hold him to my chest and say I’m sorry, I wanted to be better for you.  I thought I might have it together by now, but I don’t, and I don’t thin I will before you figure it out and can see for yourself that other people seem to have the secret to life and we, your parents, don’t have a clue.”

There is another strand in Planting Dandelions I found particularly powerful, which is that our children are not, in fact, ours.  They belong to themselves, not to us.  We are deeply privileged to share these years with them, to shepherd and shelter them, but we are not as mightily responsible for the outcomes of their lives as some believe.  Pittman addresses this:

“I lose sight of that from time to time, and delude myself into thinking I’m the auteur of their experience, when actually, I mainly work in catering.  They don’t need me directing, feeding them their lines.  They get it.  The script of life and death, grief and joy, is written on their DNA.”

Towards the end of Planting Dandelions Pittman talks about her decision, a long time in coming, to become a US Citizen.  At one point during her deliberation, she unearths a box of old visas, medical records, and faxes.  She finds a poem, many years old, that her father had written for her.  It contains this line: Going towards yourself is the longest journey of all.  That sentence, at least for me, is the purest distillation of what Planting Dandelions is about.  It’s about the journey home, the way we build a marriage and a family from myriad small, imperfect moments, decisions, and experiences, about how we eventually figure out who we are.  It’s about the way we can lose ourselves in the desperate love of our children, about aging and wrinkles and sag, and about how a community of women becomes ever more important.  It’s about the many paradoxes and mysteries at the heart of even the most ordinary family life.  It’s about the cracks that let the light in.

And I loved it.  I know you will too.

Raw

The other night I stood with a sleepy Whit while he went to the bathroom.  He looked out the window, the strangely-bright dark visible through the white slats of the blind.  “It’s really …” he began, halting, still looking intently out the window.

“It’s really what?  It does look kind of bright to me out there.”

“No, big.  It’s too big.”

“What is too big, Whit?” I brushed his hair back from his face, studying the familiar slope of his nose in the nightlight light.

“Everything.  Everything is too big.”

I sighed and carried him back to bed, aware that he gets heavier every day, wondering, again, if this is the last time.

Yes.  It is all too big.  The next morning was one of those raw, too-big mornings when I could not contain my heart in my chest.  Every morning now, like a drumbeat whose volume rises imperceptibly but inexorably, I hear the “these are the last days you have a child in kindergarten” refrain in my head.  This makes me feel a lot of pressure to stay with Whit and bring him up to his classroom, to read the morning message, to hug him on the mat before morning meeting.  Otherwise I could leave him at early dropoff (which he is very happy to do) and get my day started a good 25 minutes earlier.  Today I planned to stay with him.

And then.  We were heading over to walk Grace to her building when she turned to me, stricken.  “Mummy!  It’s the butterfly place field trip today!  We forgot to bring a camera!”

My heart fell.  We’d talked about this.  I was going to get her a disposable camera to bring to the field trip.  “Oh, Grace, I’m sorry.”

“Can you go now?” Her voice was urgent.

I started doing mental calculations.  The number of minutes before my first conference call.  The fact that I have to run somehow today.  The fact that I wouldn’t be able to take Whit up.  I looked at her, and she could sense that I was about to say no.  Her eyes filled with tears.  I made a decision.  “Fine.  I’ll run now to CVS and hope to get back before you go.”  They were leaving right after morning meeting.

I turned to hug Whit, sent Grace to walk to her building together, and ran to the car.  Every minute is a trade-off.  I felt heaviness in my chest as I thought, again, of all that I try and still cannot manage to do.  No matter how hard we try, we can’t capture it all, we let someone down every day, we have to barrel forward even when all we want to do is make it all stop and stand still.  I felt the loss of a dwindling number of kindergarten mornings with Whit, all because I forgot something I’d promised.  Some days – a lot of days – there is simply not enough of me for everyone around me.  I made it back to hand Grace the cardboard camera before they left.  And then I drove slowly home, feeling skinless, feeling sad, feeling spring pressing in on me on all sides despite the gray drizzle of the day.

And then I read this poem on Now is Good, a lovely blog I read.  And I wept.  Some days, it is all too big.

The Lanyard – Billy Collins

The other day I was ricocheting slowly
off the blue walls of this room,
moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano,
from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,
when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary
where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.

No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one into the past more suddenly—
a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid long thin plastic strips
into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.

I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one, if that’s what you did with them,
but that did not keep me from crossing
strand over strand again and again
until I had made a boxy
red and white lanyard for my mother.

She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sick room,
lifted spoons of medicine to my lips,
laid cold face-cloths on my forehead,
and then led me out into the airy light

and taught me to walk and swim,
and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.

Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.
And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift—not the worn truth

that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hand,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.

The whitewater between thinking and feeling

Great thoughts always come from the heart.
(Marquis de Vauvenargues)

When I was working with the brilliant Lianne Raymond (think someone can’t be gentle and thunderously powerful at the same time?  I didn’t either, until I met Lianne) I used to routinely stumble over thinking and feeling.  She’d ask me how I felt about something and I would launch into an answer that began “I think….”  She’d point this out, with her trademark delicacy, humor, and directness, every single time.  I found my confusion itself confusing.  Aren’t I a feeler?  I’m 100% F in the Myers-Briggs, cry all the time, and am routinely – daily – told I’m far too sensitive to live in this world.  Why was my thinking getting in the way?

This weekend, Dani Shapiro read from Joan Didion’s famous essay, Why I Write.  I’d heard the quote “I write entirely to find out what I am thinking” many times, but had never read the piece in full.  In the essay, Didion confesses a total inability to think, to “deal with the abstract.”  She describes being drawn over and over again to the peripheral, the specific, the concrete.  To that she can touch, smell, see, hear.  To that which she can feel.

And suddenly I understood.   There are two things going on.  The first is that I use my mind to evade actual feeling.  Often it hurts too much to feel, so I try to intellectualize things.  This has been a defense mechanism of mine for a long time.  It has something to do with what Pema Chodron says about “never underestimat[ing] the urge to bolt,” which my friend Pam explored in beautiful detail last week.  I wrote a while ago that my brain must get out of my heart’s way, but I realize that for a long time I intentionally put it there.  It hurt to much to experience my heart directly.

The second is that I realize I actually conflate feeling and thinking: I describe thoughts when I am really talking about feelings.  My mind does veer towards the abstract, but it’s always through the vessel of the specific, usually through nature.  Through the most concrete of details – the light on a steeple at dawn, the smell of magnolia petals crushed under my feet, the way my son’s hair curls at the nape of his neck – I can access the eternal.  The divine, even.  For some reason, which I suspect has something to do with my PhD physicist of a father, I grew up knowing that you start sentences with “I think.”  Even when I’m talking about something utterly different, which is my feelings.  I’m not sure if this is simply acculturation to a world that prizes the intellect above all else, or something else, but it’s a tic I realize I have.

I’m not sure if the grayness I experience between thoughts and feelings for me is some kind of vestige of years of avoidance or a profound respect for the fact that our deepest emotions come from the same raw, root source, the essential wellspring of who we are.  Either way, I adore this quote from Marquis de Vauvenargues.

Do you ever get muddled in the whitewater between thinking and feeling?

Carry it Forward

I’m honored to be over at Christa’s beautiful blog, Carry it Forward, today. Carry it Forward is, in Christa’s own words, “a journey from here to there, pointing out little pieces of good along the way…”

Christa has become a dear and important friend of mine.  She is steadfast and supportive, wise and gentle, brilliant and able, seemingly, to read my mind on a regular basis.   I absolutely love her blog and what I’ve seen of her paintings.  Please click over to read my words imagining how Christa and I would spend a day together.

While you’re there, spend some time on Carry it Forward, reading Christa’s beautiful words and powerful quotations and viewing her evocative photographs.  Christa, thank you for the distinct privilege of sharing my words at your site today.  It means a lot to me.