Month: November 2015

with my mother, my grandmother, and my great-grandmother, 1974

with my mother and my daughter 2002

I recently read – devoured, more like – Anne-Marie Slaughter’s book, Unfinished Business.  There are a great many points swirling around in my head but one of the foremost ones is in the acknowledgements. Slaughter mentions her first meeting with her editor at Random House. “Tell me about your grandmothers,” the editor asked. Reading that made me gasp.

Tell me about your grandmothers.

I had two simultaneous thoughts.  The first, of Virginia Woolf’s famous quote that “we think back through our mothers, if we are women.”  Indeed.  The second, of my repeated assertion that I come from a formidable matrilineage and of the power of saying the names of the women who came before us.

It’s not a secret that I desperately wanted to have a daughter.  We didn’t find out the gender of either baby before they were born, but I had a strong sense that Grace was a girl.  I didn’t want to say it aloud, though, because I was somehow afraid of jinxing myself.  I wanted a girl for many reasons – I am one of two girls, I adore my own mother, I studied the mother/daughter relationship closely in college – but one of them was certainly wanting to continue what feels like a strong history of women in my family.

And then on October 26, 2002, after a long and difficult labor, she arrived.  And suddenly I had a daughter.  I was a daughter and I had a daughter.  It’s become a familiar thing, at this point, watching my mother with my daughter, but it never gets old.  I do think back through my mother, as Woolf says.  I have written many times of my mother’s expansive warmth, of her magnetism, of how “she has always attracted people to her, and, like a sun, is surrounded by more orbiting planets than I can count.”

I have written often of an afternoon soon after Grace’s birth when Mum came over to sit with her while I tried to nap.  Grace was asleep on the third floor of our house, I lay in my bedroom on the second floor, and Mum puttered in the kitchen on the ground floor.  As I lay in my dark bedroom I felt a tangible cord connecting me both up and down, ahead and backwards in time, my place in the generational line firm, determined.  I will never forget the extremely vivid sensation I felt that afternoon of being ensconced between my mother and my daughter.

My grandmothers were formidable too.  Each bright and principled and very different but equally compelling.  I suspect both of my grandmothers would have had careers, if that was more common in their day.  Both graduated from impressive colleges (Middlebury and Wellesley), read voraciously, supported causes they cared about (both my grandmothers were very active in their local chapters of Planned Parenthood), and provided for me terrific examples of strong women who supported husbands and families while having minds of their own.  I feel fortunate to have had such women in my own lineage, and it’s not an exaggeration to say I think of them every day.

I can feel the matrilineage that I come from – that I’m a part of – throbbing in my veins.  It is a very real, almost tangible part of my life.  Sometimes I sense my grandmothers, and others who were dear to me who are now gone, somewhere just beyond the horizon. I know they’re there.  I think back through them, as Woolf says, on a daily basis, the women whose names I can recite reverently:

Susan, Janet, Priscilla, Marion, Marion, Elsie, Eleanor.

And, of course, Grace.

Tell me about your grandmothers?

  A flashback photo for this post: me in 6th grade after a road race.  I see so much of Grace in this photo!

I’ve written before about the metaphor that cross-country is and has been to me for parenting.  As Grace’s second season comes to a close, I’m thinking about another analogy that the sport presents, this time to life itself.  There are two particular ways that – in my opinion – cross-country metaphorically represents life itself: pacing and peer groupl.

One thing you learn as you become a cross-country runner and experience racing is how to pace yourself.  Do you start out in the front of the pack, and try to stay ahead of others for the whole race?  Do you start slower and trust that you can gain?  How do you gauge how much gas is in your tank, and how fast you can go, and for how long?  I asked Grace these questions recently and found myself a bit surprised that she had fluent answers to them.  She’d clearly thought about these things.  Her answer, in case you’re wondering, is not to lead but to stay with the front group and then feel like she has enough in reserve to sprint to the finish.

I had the great privilege of attending a small breakfast with Anne-Marie Slaughter at the end of October.  There were a great many things that moved me in her comments, but one in particular feels resonant here.  She said that she thinks people – not women, notably, but people – should view their careers as interval training.

This of course brought cross-country to mind.  So much of life is about pacing – how fast you go, how long you can keep going, when you push and when you ease up. The interval training analogy presupposes that life has seasons, and that sometimes are more flexible than others.  I believe this fiercely.

Secondly, so much of life is about who you run with, isn’t it?  Who do you want to follow as your pace-setter, who do you want to accompany into the woods, who do you trust to lead you out of them?  Who do you want to hear breathing at your shoulder, who do you want to push you, who do you maybe want to lose to?

Two themes in my writing – and in my life itself – are metaphors and running.  The former is how I understand the world and the latter is an important mechanism to help me live in it.  You are probably growing weary of both.  If so, I apologize!

Grace warming up before the race last Saturday.  I love this photo of her, in her own world even with hundreds of people around, and in flight.