Month: January 2015

Ten Years Old

Whit 10

Dear Whit,

Yesterday, you turned ten.  Your single-digit years came to a close, and the night before last I kissed a single-digit child good night a final time.  Another last, which, you’ve noted before, all belong to you.  I can’t pretend I don’t feel some sorrow about this.  I do.  I stood outside your bedroom after saying goodnight and leaned my head against the doorjamb and cried.  Hard.

Last night we celebrated, as we always do family birthdays, at home with dinner by candlelight.  You got to choose the menu, which was: your favorite brie, chicken parm subs from our local pizzeria, kale salad, and homemade triple chocolate cake.  You and Grace share a fierce preference for homemade cake.  I love that this is how you feel and I gladly make whatever you want.

When I started this blog you were one.  I’ve chronicled so much of your childhood here, from when I observed that you were leaving babyhood to thoughts on saying good night to a growing toddler, to your ninth birthday letter.  I have also written many times about the overjoyed bewilderment that bloomed the day you were born and that has never quite left me.  A boy?  I’m one of two girls and never had a brother and to say that parenting a son was a new frontier is an understatement.  Of course all of parenting is an adventure without a guidebook, and your gender is only one way in which I’ve been startled and delighted by you over the years.

It feels like yesterday I wrote that your babyhood was clinging to you, and now it feels like it’s your childhood that’s hanging on by a thread.  You’re still small and slight and I can easily carry you, but I know those days are numbered.  You are sprinting towards being a young man faster than I can possibly comprehend, following your sister into adolescence.  I stand in the shadow of that fact every day.

You love hockey and have greeted your sister’s decision to start playing the sport with an equal measure of trepidation (“it’s my sport!”) and happiness (“something for us to do together!”).  You are so capable putting on your gear that you no longer need me in the locker room at all, which, I’ll admit, is okay by me because a roomful of nine- and ten-year old Squirts smell a lot worse than did a roomful of seven- and eight-year old Mites.  I’m confident that your team’s heartbreaking loss in last season’s playoffs is an experience you’ll remember forever.  I know I will.  You’re a good baseball player, too: last year you were the lead-off batter for your team and my favorite moment of the season is when you hit a home run while your grandparents were visiting from Florida and watching.  After you ran the bases, I took a picture of you with your grandparents.  Your face is radiant with joy and I remember feeling your heart thumping in your chest like a rabbit as I hugged you before taking it.

More than anything else, your true passion is how things work.  I think you’re a maker at your core.  When people ask you what you want to be when you grow up, you respond, without hesitation, “a robot designer.”  I won’t be surprised if that’s what you do.  You asked for a soldering kit for your birthday and build large, working Legos without help.  I love that you still love Legos.  You enjoy building electronics and are learning rudimentary programming and love doing science experiments on the weekends.  This fall you made a classic baking soda volcano which your godmother was around to witness exploding.

You’ve always been a capable reader, but in the last year you’ve truly discovered the way a good book can engross and transport you.  It started with A Wrinkle in Time, my favorite childhood book, and watching you fall in love with L’Engle’s world was one of the great joys of the last year for me.  You blazed through The Secret Series this fall and read The Phantom Tollbooth in two days over Christmas.  In fact I busted you reading The Phantom Tollbooth by headlamp at midnight on Christmas Eve, took it away, and your first words on Christmas Day when you woke up (at 8:45!) were “where’s my book?”

Late in the fall, in the fourth grade Environmental Assembly, you gave a presentation to a roomful of school mates and parents that knocked my socks off.  You didn’t read from your presentation or notes, you spoke clearly and audibly, and you made us all laugh.  You were nervous and took the presentation entirely seriously, which I loved to see, but you were transformed into someone confident and capable when you took the microphone.  It’s a moment I won’t forget.

I also won’t forget watching you win the Best Camper Award for your unit at camp this summer.  I went to the same camp for 7 years before I won an award, and in your second summer you won the big one.  I missed you while you were away but I feel proud knowing that you clearly came into your own there, and every word your counselor read before he announced your name made me grin.  It brings tears to my eyes to remember the moment he said “Whit Russell,” and the incredulous, overwhelmingly proud look your father and I gave each other.  You, the only boy in the Junior Scouts who had worn a coat and tie to Cup Night, scurried up to hug all your counselors and accept your trophy as I watched, tears running down my cheeks.  My little boy is growing up, and it was clear as I listened to those words that you’re becoming a young man who takes care of others, sets an example, throws himself into new experiences, and still, loves a good prank.

You like to curl up on the couch and read Harry Potter with me, you love to take tubs, and the only fruits or vegetables you’ll touch are lettuce, spinach, and kale.  Beloved, Beloved’s Brother, and Bear all sleep with you, as does Lego, who you won so many years ago during our first trip to Legoland.  You give me our secret sign that means “I love you” as you head off to school in the morning, proudly name pink as your favorite color, exhibit deep loyalty to your closest friends, and make me laugh every single day.  In my 10 years as your mother, you have never met someone who didn’t say something to me about how funny you are.  At the same time, there’s a seam of sensitivity running through you that reminds me of … well, me.  I’m ambivalent about this and often wish I hadn’t handed down my predisposition towards heartache.  Still, since it seems I did, I hope you never stop showing me your feelings, even if that means that sometimes you hurt.  It’s one of the things I worry the most about protecting – your willingness to feel, and to talk about those feelings – as you grow into a young man.

I couldn’t possibly be prouder of you, Whit, my first son, my last baby.  I adore you and I always will.

Love,

Mum

My past birthday letters are here: nine, eight, seven, six, five, four (???), three, two

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Image I shared on Instagram on Monday.  You at 3 months, and you at almost-10.  In between lies a lifetime of laughter and tears and adventures and joys, which passed on a single blink.

 

 

The increasing vulnerability of right now

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Beautiful morning moon, last week, on the way to school.

Through the comments on my post last week about vulnerability, I met a new writer whose work I’m enjoying.  In particular, this post, Dear Lonely Moms of Older Kids, really resonated with me.  It made me think about the fact that if parenting is an exercise in being vulnerable, perhaps as our children get older the challenges on the vulnerability front get harder.

This is turning out to be true for me.  I was telling someone recently about the single choice for which I received the most judgment as the parent of a young child.  That was the decision to let Grace, at 5, fly alone.  I felt comfortable with the decision, Matt felt comfortable with the decision, and Grace herself felt comfortable with it.  I have no regrets.  But for weeks and months after, I faced judgment from other moms on the playground which varied from thinly-concealed to outright and almost-hostile.

That was a long time ago, though, and it was an isolated incident.  Somehow the parenting decisions I make now feel more complicated, more fraught.  They have to do with what media I allow and messages about body image and technology and control over sleep and time.  I find myself saying with a metronomic regularity, “different families make different choices.”  The risk of judgment if I make a choice different from those the parents around me are making seems higher than ever.  And while I know that judgment comes from a place of deeply-held wanting to do the right thing by our own children, it can still sting.

Vulnerability is closely tied with judgment and loneliness, both of which almost instantly make me feel “unable to withstand the effects of a hostile environment,” which is the definition of vulnerability I’m working with these days.

So I feel more judged these days, mostly because I think the decisions feel bigger and more important.  Maybe also because I am increasingly aware of my identity as a working mother, and the more I own that, the more I open myself up to feeling judged about it (some of which I’m entirely willing to admit may be in my head).

I also feel more lonely in general these days now that my children are older.  Lonelier because I’m working more, which is happening for a million reasons.  One of those reasons is that they’re busier, so I have more time to work.  Lonelier because the intensity of new-friend-making that marked the first years at school has abated.  The moms have their friends.

But I also feel, and it’s hard for me to admit this, lonelier for my children.  They’re busier, and, more importantly, they’re doing what they are supposed to be doing, which is separate from me.  This is more pronounced with Grace, who’s older and plunging into adolescence with a speed that makes my head spin.  But still, there’s a marked change in degree of daily intimacy with my children and the truth is I mourn this development.  They also have to judge me as they separate, there’s no question about that.  Again, it’s something I’m seeing more with Grace than with Whit, but there’s some withering scorn sent my way these days that is new.

All of these factors combine to make me feel more vulnerable now that my children are older.  In those first months of parenting Grace, when I was more depressed than I have ever been in my life, when I was reduced to a shell of a person, I couldn’t have imagined another experience would ever disassemble me so entirely.  Yet here I am.

But maybe this isn’t about my children at all?

Some of this may just be being in a vulnerable moment in life.  I feel buffeted by the hostile environment, often, these days.  A friend called me recently with “news” and I told Matt I honestly didn’t know if she had cancer or was pregnant.  Joyfully, it was the latter.  But we’re perched on a knife edge, it feels like, in this middle place, with peril all around us and still, so much heart-shattering joy.

Maybe this increasing sense of vulnerability is just that as I age I grow more comfortable with my own porousness, let down my well-development defense mechanisms, and let more of life – the startling beauty as well as the bitter loss and pain – in.  As much as it slices me, this shift, I don’t think I’d want it any other way.

 

 

the voltage of life

And that’s how we measure out our real respect for people – by the degree of feeling they can register, the voltage of life they can carry and tolerate – and enjoy.

– Ted Hughes, Letters of Ted Hughes

her wounds came from the same source as her power

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I loved the movie version of Wild, a book I adored.  I came straight home and went to my heavily underlined- and written-in copy of Adrienne Rich’s The Dream of a Common Language.  I read the first page, the first poem, which Reese Witherspoon specifically reads and thinks about in the movie.

She died a famous woman denying
her wounds
denying
her wounds came from the same source as her power

I’ve always loved these lines, and often think about them.  Leonard Cohen rose to my mind, then, singing about how “there’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.”

For a long time I’ve wanted to believe this.  I’m often told it’s true.  I think it is.  I want it to be.  I know what my personal wound is.  It is my sensitivity, my awareness of time’s swift passage.  I wrote the paragraph below in 2010 (when I was 36):

It’s all connected, the way I observe the world in sometimes-excruciating detail, the untrammeled rushes of joy I can feel at the most unexpected times, the heart-wrenching pain my life delivers at others.  This is all a part of being an exceptionally porous person.  Is it any wonder that I’ve had to develop coping mechanisms, be they an aversion to true vulnerability or a tendency towards distraction, in order to mitigate the power of constantly living in such an exposed way?  I’m easily overwhelmed by the grandeur and terror of this life, and I have over 36 years built up a variety of ways of managing the pain that that inundation can bring with it.  It’s a package deal, the wound and the wonder.  I don’t know how to have one without the other.  Even the most swollen, shiny rapture is striated with sadness.

Four years later I read this and my first reaction is: I don’t instinctively think about my coping mechanisms anymore.  I wonder what that means.  Have I come to terms with the painful ramifications of my own wound?  I’m still easily overwhelmed by this life, there’s no question about that.  These days that overwhelm, and the observations that flood in its wake, form the bulk of what I write about.  Does that mean I am learning to access the power that comes from the same source as the wound?

I don’t think of myself as a powerful person.  At all.  So maybe that’s not the right word.  Perhaps inspiration works better.  My wounds and my inspiration have the same source.  That makes a lot of sense to me.  It’s also clear to me that the crack in me – the porousness, the sensitivity, the awareness – is absolutely where the light gets in.  It’s also where the shadow lives

And if there’s one thing I know, it’s that I can’t see the light without the shadow.  That much is abundantly clear to me now.  I take pictures of shadows – like the one above – all the time, and am drawn to the intersection of light and dark.  I guess that – the interplay of light and shadow – is one way of describing my wound, and also, I understand at last, my inspiration.

What do you think about Adrienne Rich’s assertion that our wounds come from the same source as our power?