Space family
From the Air & Space Museum at Dulles. This was surely a highlight of our family trip to Washington in March. We saw the plane my paternal grandfather designed and the plane my maternal grandfather flew. I had the Navy hymn in my head all day. The kids loved it.
This September will mark seven years of blogging for me. I love writing here. To say it has had a substantial impact on the way I live my life is an understatement. Blogging has introduced me to a community of writers I’d never imagined meeting, brought me back to the person who loves to write, who I’d lost for many years, and reminded me in a visceral way that my life is right here in front of me, and if I don’t pay attention I’ll miss it.
It’s time for a small change. Starting next week I’m going to blog three times a week. Mostly this is because I’m worried I’m repeating myself. A couple of years ago I noted that Joni Mitchell’s Circle Game could easily be the theme song of my life. “Captive on a carousel of time” might have been a more apt (though more trademarked) name for this blog. I feel like the circles are getting smaller, and I am becoming boring. I told Matt about this change, and he asked why, and I said “because I think I’m repeating myself.” Without hesitation, he said, “Yes, that’s probably true.” Oh-kay. There you have it.
Writing here has certainly made clear the central leitmotifs of my life: mourning the passage of time, the mysterious nature of memory, my dogged but imperfect attempts to be here now, and the reality that life is flawed and messy, grand and golden, and that it is impossible (for me) to have light without dark.
It is inexpressibly valuable to have clarity about what those themes are. I understand now, and I did not before, the ways that these spots around which my soul pivots have defined my comings and goings and my feeling and thinking.
But I don’t want to just say the same thing over and over again. I can’t possibly explain how much it means to me that anyone at all is reading my words; honestly, that is a gift beyond measure. Thank you. I know it’s awfully meta to blog about blogging. I won’t do it again, but I just wanted to explain the change in cadence here that will start next week.
And to say thank you.
March 2007. While I rarely think we look alike, I do in this picture.
“Here. Put your hands under her armpits,” my midwife instructed, urgency in her voice. With that, I pulled Grace onto my chest myself. She and I both cried, Matt pronounced her a girl, and they took her away to be weighed. I looked around the room, a wild fear that I have never forgotten galloping in my chest. I had never been more tired, but at the same time every single nerve jangled with awareness.
Someone brought Grace to me and I reached out for her blanket-wrapped body. Her eyes were closed. I looked at her, anticipating the surge of recognition I had been told to expect. I searched her face, waiting for something to break through the frozen numbness that filled me.
Finally, I looked up at Matt, my eyes full of tears. “She has a cleft chin, just like me.” Grace’s chin was literally the first thing to ring the bell that said: this is my child.
****
I sat on the edge of Grace’s bed to tuck her in. Without looking up from her book, she held up a finger and whispered, “I just want to finish my page.” I watched her in silence. After a few seconds she put her bookmark in her book and leaned back against her pillows. She looked at me and frowned.
“What?”
“Do you ever feel anxious that you won’t have time to read all the books you want to read?” I nodded. “I mean, I just want to read so many things.” She pointed at her bookshelf, where a shelf of to-be-read were lined up. “I’m scared that I won’t get to them all.”
****
On one recent car ride, I have no memory of specifically where, Grace was trying to read in the back seat. After a few minutes I heard her shut her book and sigh. I glanced in the rear view mirror to see that she was looking out the window.
“Are you carsick?”
“Yeah.” Grace sounded dejected.
“Remember, try to look through the front.” She turned her head and peered through the windshield. “I’m sorry, Grace. I know you got that from me.” I can’t ride in a car for ten minutes without feeling sick. I’ve had to have taxis pull over between Laguardia and the city so that I can throw up.
“That’s okay, Mum. You gave me so many good things, too.” I caught Grace’s eye in the rear view mirror, eyebrows raised, curious. “You know, like my brain. And my looks.” I burst out laughing and she joined me.
******
We took Grace’s best friend from camp to the airport at the end of a wonderful and much-anticipated weekend visit. After we put her on the airplane, Grace dissolved into tears. I hugged her and felt her chest heaving against mine. We went home, walked to the park to watch Whit and Matt throwing a baseball, shared a happy family dinner, read a book, went to bed.
On and off throughout the evening Grace was tearful, her glossy eyes and mild frown occasionally breaking into full-blown sobs. Several times she asked me forlornly for a hug and to take deep breaths together, something we’ve done for years when she needs to calm herself down.
By the time I tucked her in, I felt spent, at the end of my own rope, out of soothing responses to her sadness. Grace looked at me, her cheeks wet, her eyes beseeching, asking without words for me to make her feel better, to take away this howling missing. Of course I can’t, and when I reflect on it I realize some of my own aggravation was surely that her feelings were uncomfortably familiar, ringing bells of identification deep in my chest.
I looked back at her. “Just try to think about how lucky you are to have such a wonderful best friend,” I said quietly.
Her gaze on me was steady and felt appraising. She swallowed. “This feeling is just part of the deal, right? To have such happy things in life, you are also going to have this. Right?” I nodded at her, blinking. “The great stuff and the sad stuff. You can’t have one without the other.”
****
Sometimes, it takes my breath away, the way parts of me glint in her like strands of gold (as glittery, though rarely as beautiful) catching the light in a fabric.
I know this happiness is provisional:
the looming presences –
great suffering, great fear –
withdraw only
into peripheral vision:
but ineluctable this shimmering
of wind in the blue leaves:
this flood of stillness
widening the lake of sky:
this need to dance,
this need to kneel:
this mystery.
– Denise Levertov, Of Being
Occasionally I have an experience where several people, all known to me but unknown to each other, send me the same article, image, or piece of writing. That happened with this gorgeous piece:
On Friendship – Pam’s words at The Kitchen Witch’s site brought me to my knees. I’ve written often about friendship, about the important ones that thrum through my life as essential as arteries, and about the vagaries of when and how we make friends. I’m honored to call Pam a close friend; she is one of only two people in the entire world who read my first (clunky, painful) memoir, for example. Pam: for everything, thank you. The rest of you: read this piece. You won’t regret it.
Noticing: How to Take a Walk in the Woods – I believe fiercely – perhaps above all else – in the power of noticing the world around us. This piece reminds me of why. I am also both the child of a scientist and a passionate devotee of the field. “Refining our capacity to notice is an act of reverence that we can bring to everywhere and everywhen.”
Word Up– My adoration of Catherine Newman’s writing is well documented. This essay, about talking about the origins of words with her children, moved me to both laughter and tears. In her trademark voice, full of humor and tinged with pathos, Catherine reminds me that to understand words, where they come from, what they mean, is at the root of really seeing and comprehending the world.
My Avatar, My Self – I love everything Dani Shapiro writes, of course, but this piece in particular touched a nerve that’s been humming a lot for me lately. She talks about the increasing trifurcation of our identities in the world today, where a writer has a “real” self, a “creative” self, and an “avatar” self. I have been thinking about her essay and the questions it raises for the week since I read it.
Haven Retreats – I loved Laura Munson’s memoir, This is Not the Story You Think It Is. I have also been privileged to get to know Laura both online and in person, where she was even more warm and wonderful than I had imagined. In fact I missed seeing her last night at my friend Aidan’s house. I recently learned about her Haven retreats and they have vaulted to the top of my fantasy things-to-do list. The idea of spending time learning from Laura in the breathtaking Montana scenery (somewhere I’ve been, and loved, once before) is just head-spinningly wonderful. Someday.
What’s on your bedside table, your kindle, your screen, your mind lately?
My previous Things I Love Lately posts are here.