Month: February 2012

These are the days of miracle and wonder

These are the day of miracle and wonder

These are also the days when my 9 year old tells me I’m embarrassing her (“just a little bit, Mummy”) when I take her to school in my Juicy sweatpants.  Does she not realize that these are my daytime sweatpants?  (I actually change out of pajama pants into the Juicys in the morning.  Just ask my husband who mocks me every single time I do it.)

These are the days when the true friends are the ones you can call up and ask for help with pick-up or drop-off, or if it’s okay if a child comes over to their house for a couple of hours.

These are the days when you start having to have medical tests that are sort of scary.  So you text your friends from the waiting room, trying for lightness, when really you’re just terrified.

These are the days of Words With Friends, The Hunger Games, Downton Abbey, US Weekly, Mary Oliver.

These are the days when an evening may include quizzing someone on the multiplication tables (1-12) for 15 minutes, washing someone’s back in a tub overflowing with bubbles, a black tie cocktail party, Gossip Girl, or too many glasses of wine at the local dive bar.  Or all of the above.

These are the days when some friends are doing cleanses, and others are subsisting on white wine and peppermint patties, and you oscillate wildly between those two poles.

These are the days when you know who you truly love, and why.  You know who your genuinely close friends are.

These are the days when a cancer diagnosis in someone you know is no longer shockingly rare, but becoming, instead, horrifyingly, par for the course.

These are the days when, on your birthday, the children of your old friends call to sing you happy birthday.  You can hear the voice of your friend, their mother, and the person who for years was the one doing the singing, in the background.

These are the days of rushing home and taking off your heels – the good pair that you finally bought – and your dress pants and jewelry and pulling on your pjs to read to your children and tuck them in.

These are the days when most of the time you feel 18, but once in a while you feel excruciatingly aware of every single hour you’ve lived.

These are the days of SUVs and minivans, of extra boosters floating around the trunk in case you need to put up the 3rd row, of kids who tell you what radio station to put on and who sing along, knowing every word, to Katy Perry and Taylor Swift and Gym Class Heroes.

These are the days when you cry all the time, often because you feel like your heart is going to burst from the fullness of a single day.

These are the days of miracle and wonder, indeed.

I love you.

I have long disliked Valentine’s Day, have often derided it as the ultimate Hallmark holiday

But now that I have children, suddenly, I love it.  It’s not just my abiding passion for the combination of red and pink.  It’s also that I love having a day so focused on telling my children I love them.  I don’t believe it’s possible for me to tell them that too much.  As firmly, fiercely, as I agree with Jenn Mattern’s wise and beautiful description of why she refuses to teach her daughters that the world revolves around them, I also want Grace and Whit to know deep in their spirits that they are loved by me without exception, without pause, without end.

This reminds me of Peggy Noonan’s wonderful editorial after the 9/11 attacks, where she asserts something I believe deeply: expressing how we feel frequently doesn’t cheapen the words, but allows them to sink into the object of our affection’s very marrow. We are often told the opposite, that we ought not say “I love you” too much, as though somehow we might wear it out or drain it of meaning.  I simply don’t agree with that.  Noonan summarizes her point:

We’re all lucky to be here today and able to say what deserves saying, and if you say it a lot, it won’t make it common and so unheard, but known and absorbed.

So I’ll take today, this day of lunchboxes packed with sandwiches cookied cuttered into heart shapes, backpacks bursting with homemade Valentines, and red velvet cupcakes with whipped cream frosting to tell my children I love you, again, always, no matter what.  I think we should all take the time to tell somehow we love that we do.  Don’t wait, and don’t hesitate.  You can’t say it too much.

Here, now

I don’t know how it’s possible that I didn’t know this song before.  Ray Lamontagne’s Be Here Now has been on repeat, in my car and on my computer, in my head, for the last many days.

It’s not a secret that these have been raw, vulnerable weeks for me.  January brought with it a new and intense awareness of how fragile everything is, one that I did not anticipate as the year turned.  I’ve been walking and listening and crying and reading and hugging my children.  I have been watching the light.  Some days the lengthening of the days feels so visceral, it’s as though I can literally feel the earth turning under my feet.

I can tell I’m particularly porous these days because, even more than usual, I’m crying at everything.  I feel more aware than ever of the extraordinary magnificence of this life.  I walk into Grace’s room and find this on the floor, a drawing from her brother, and dissolve into tears.  Tears of gratitude and tears that acknowledge the unavoidable, blinding pain of this moment’s impermanence.

I cried reading the book that Whit brought home from the library, a frankly poetic picture book called Moonshot, about the flight of Apollo 11.  The description of walking on the moon, in a place where nobody had ever been before, was so full of palpable wonder my expansive emotions overran my body, leaking out in tears.  I wonder how much of Whit’s current fixation with space, the planets, and flight is wound up with the way I keep seeing the moon rising.  A few weeks ago everybody in his class had to pick a biography from the library to bring home and read with their parents.  His choice of Amelia Earhart, predictably, made me cry.

I’ve walked by this window in the Nike store several times, and I’ve even stopped to photograph it before.  But last week I read the words, now familiar, and gasped at their truth.  As much as it feels I’ve plumbed those limits, the truth is I have no idea.  None of us ever can.

One afternoon last week Grace, Whit and I went to Mount Auburn, one of our favorite places.  It was deserted and quiet and the late-afternoon painted everything gold.  We wandered around, noticing things everywhere.  Grace and Whit are drawn to the wild and peaceful place as surely as am I.  They jogged and gazed and enjoyed each other’s company in a place whose every inch speaks of the power of both life and death.  More than once I had to blink back tears as I watched them.

Sometimes there is so much sweetness I can’t stand it.

Be here now.

A glimpse of what endures

We press forward.
But this march of time –
consider it a glimpse
of what endures.

All that hurries will
soon enough be over,
because what lingers
is what consecrates us.

O, young ones, don’t waste
your courage on speed
or squander it in flight.

Everything is at rest:
darkness and light,
blossom and book.

– Rainier Maria Rilke, Sonette an Orpheus I, XXII

Thanks to Sparks and Mirrors to introducing me to this luminous poem.

Moon rising

Several weeks ago, I couldn’t stop seeing nests in the trees.  They were everywhere I turned.  And then there was a week when I kept hearing the deafening chorus of sparrows singing in brown bushes.  I’m sure it is no accident that there are times when the same thing – sight, sound, image – keeps presenting itself to me, over and over again.  It is similar to, and an equal demonstration of the universe’s benevolent if confounding hand, the way quotes, poems, and song lyrics sometimes rise insistently to my mind.

These days I see the moon rising every afternoon.  I often set out on my dusk walks when the world is splashed in that gleaming late-afternoon light, as thick as maple syrup and as golden.  As I walk the light changes quality as the gold gives way to something clearer, more attenuated.  And it is in that still-blue light that I start, always, noticing the moon.  I watch it growing from a faint, ragged-edged disc, almost translucent, into a brighter, more solid orb.  As the day’s light goes down, the moon rises and asserts its radiance.

This doesn’t seem like a coincidence.  Someone recently told me there is a chiaroscuro quality to my writing here (thank you for the lovely comment; you know who you are) and that made me think immediately of the way the moon is always present for me.  Even in a sky still bright with sun, the ultimate icon of the night is visible.  The highest joys of my life have had seams of sorrow in them, and, likewise, there is always some beauty in the depths of sadness.  Light is made meaningful by the presence of darkness.  And each time I watch the moon rise, I remember this anew.