dear friends

Three moments

Friday

Matt took the kids out for dinner and taught them his favorite party trick (yes, those are napkin boobs).

I had dinner with two of my dearest friends from college. We are all in various aspects of transition, and sometimes it feels like we all orbit each other like atoms, always aware of one another but never in the same spot. It was an immense pleasure and treat to have a couple of hours to simply sit, and talk, and be. I am reminded over and over again about how important these friendships are, these women who knew me when I was becoming who I am now.

Saturday

Mother-daughter book club at our house in the afternoon. Grace chose a book called Grace for President which I adore. I actually wish the protagonist wasn’t called Grace, because that has nothing to do with why I like it. The book makes me choke up every single time I read it. It’s a great, empowering read for girls in elementary school (with a double bonus lesson about the electoral college).

We did something at book club that we have not done before, which is go around the room and have everyone read a page. There was something magical about those minutes, with girls hesitating before long words, reading aloud, voices growing in confidence as they forged ahead through a paragraph. I was mesmerized, looking around the room at these nascent girls, all tall and lean and angular, seemingly more so by the day, confidence and tentativeness wrapped up in each individual personality. Their eyes shone and their giggles erupted and their camaraderie was palpable.

Sunday

Palm Sunday church service with Mum, Grace, and Whit and then lunch with one other leg of the stool. I loved watching Grace and Whit with these friends that they are growing up with like family. I remember when each of these children was born, literally the day (and I’m not speaking of my own here!) – it really stuns me, as cliched as it is, that they are so big now.

All three moments speak of the themes that shape my life: the unstoppable advance of time, the way that certain moments present an opportunity to be still and really see into the life of things, the deep bonds of motherhood and friendship.  My life exists in the penumbra of my awareness of time’s passage, I know that now: the sadness and inevitability of each moment’s death colors it even as I live it.  Yet somehow I am also seeing that paradoxically, only by accepting this irrefutable truth can I actually, fully inhabit the time that I do have.

Beyond the headlights, retrospect and prospect, and letting go of my need for an order

I have a friend who spent her 20s dabbling. For various unforseen personal reasons she wound up on a somewhat circuitous professional route. She went to journalism school, she travelled around the world, she wrote, she taught yoga. Things happened, bad things, and heartbreak. At 30 she decided to change her life and go back to law school. She had always been intrigued by the idea of law school, though had not anticipated going at this point in her life.

She forged ahead. We spent many hours, drinking wine, crying, talking about the twists in life’s road that we did not anticipate. She was full of angst about her concern that her various choices and jobs did not really add up to anything. She felt tormented at what felt like wasted years. Several months ago, a year into her post-law school job, she emailed me about a new job opportunity that had come her way. I read her email with tears in my eyes. “This is it,” I wrote back, my fingers not able to write as fast as I wanted them to, so eager was I to convey my enthusiasm. “Really?” she responded, admitting that I’d always been the cautious voice of reason and she had not thought I’d react this way. “Yes,” I wrote, “This is the thing that makes it all make sense.”

And I’ve thought about that exchange so much. I don’t know when my friend will make the move into the opportunity that I was so excited about, but I feel certain she will eventually. And suddenly there is a glowing sense of peace about her, at least when I look, a design that has descended onto what previously looked like randomness. In retrospect, now, with this piece of reality in place, we see the order.

What strikes me is that my life is kind of the opposite. All of my decisions made sense prospectively; it’s only now that they appear not to have been adding up to anything. I always made the “right” call, in the moment, at least if you define right by what the world will approve of, as the most conventional option. And now, at 35, I find myself reflecting on 20 years of careful choices that have brought me … here. Home to … myself. To this frantic restlessness.

Maybe what we really need is to let go of the need for an order. Maybe what I need to do is to let go of my desperate desire for there to be a plan, an ordering logic. Perhaps making a decision in the moment, with all of the information we have at that time, is the best we can do. That, and accepting the surprises that come our way, shifting our course infinitessimally but irrevocably. Maybe my friend and I aren’t that different, after all. Maybe we both have the same single and fundamental task: to make peace with the roads we have travelled, as straight or winding as they have been, and to trust that we are up to the task of what lies ahead, whatever it may be.

E.L. Doctorow’s quote comes to mind: “You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” Maybe now my job is to stop squinting past the headlights. It’s only causing me panic that I can’t see, hurting my eyes, and taking my attention away from what is right in front of me.

Les meilleures du monde

Five years ago next week, I opened the door of my house to one of my oldest and dearest friends, in town for Whit’s christening (where she became his godmother), and realized that I had forgotten her birthday. I didn’t even say “I’m glad you are here!” – I was too busy with my full-on Macauley Culkin in Home Alone hands-over-open-mouth moment. Later that day, after the baptism ceremony, we put candles in a big brie my mother had and Gloria blew those out. I will never forget the wide-open eyes of all of the children, staring at the blazing birthday candles, and somebody joking, “those kids are in for all kinds of disappointment when they realize that is stinky french cheese.”
We met in the fall of 1990 in Exeter, New Hampshire, in Ms. Iwakuni’s French class. We were fast friends, and I was very grateful to Gloria for her warmth and welcome, in a place where I was brand-new, awkward, and incredibly far from home. I’ve written about how few specific memories I have of boarding school, but one very vivid one is from the spring of 1992. Gloria and I had both applied early to Princeton. She got in (no surprise: she is a superstar) and I got deferred. The day that the regular admission answers arrived, finding many of us crouched in the post office waiting for letters to be slid into our little glass-fronted mailboxes. Mine arrived. It said, in bold all-caps at the top: “YES!” I skipped out of the post office, elated, thrilled, and a little bit shocked. I walked out into the bright early-spring New Hampshire sun and saw Gloria across the school’s main quad. She saw me and I smiled broadly at her. “I got in!” I said, loudly enough for her to hear, and sprinted towards her across the quad. We hugged. I’ve never forgotten that moment. She was the first person I told the news that in many ways shaped my adult life.

That early French class has always been a trope of our friendship. We got into the habit of saying to each other, “nous sommes les meilleures du monde!” (we are the best in the world – she is, me, I’m not so sure). She wrote that in my yearbook. And she RSVPed to my wedding in French and in English: Glo has always had an eye for touching detail, for flourish.

At Princeton we were friends the same way we were at Exeter: good friends with a strong individual friendship, though not in the same tight group. This was always, for me, a lovely way to have a close friend. Gloria was a sturdy and consistent part of my life, yet had the perspective of not being totally enmeshed in the people I spent every single moment with.

Gloria was at my wedding, and I was at hers. We started getting closer again after 2002. She was one of the few people who was aware of how deeply sad I was after Grace was born, and she came up for a night to Boston with the express purpose of seeing me and, I realized after the fact, supporting me. I remember that dinner, my first out after becoming a mother, well. There were other Boston weekends. Somehow, gradually, the paths of our lives converged again and brought us into closer touch.

She came up, on the day I realized I’d forgotten her birthday, to be at Whit’s christening as his godmother. The photograph above is the evening, post-ceremony, in my kitchen. Since that day we’ve been in much closer touch. It has been a particular joy to watch her very real relationship with Grace and Whit. They both adore her, and I feel like she’s especially able to relate to Grace because she, too, has a brother who is 27 months younger. I am consistently touched by the significant effort she makes to see them (and me) as much as possible, even across an ocean. Grace and Whit walked down the aisle in her wedding to her wonderful husband Jim, a gesture that meant an enormous amount to me (and to them).

We have shared much, Gloria and I: deciding what we want to be when we grow up, the headiness of early romance and heartbreak, a love of words, yoga, and running, international experiences, and the profound, life-changing intensity of umedicated childbirth. Motherhood has been fertile territory for us: together we’ve shared some of the intense highs and surprising lows that come with having a baby. We’ve only just begun to explore what it means to be individual women and mothers (not to mention professionals – her job far more legitimate than mine): I know there are years of conversation ahead as we both find our way in this complicated terrain.

Gloria is one of my truest and dearest friends. She is one of the few friends that I have from those dark days in New Hampshire. I’m impressed over and over again with the confidence and honesty with which she approaches all the various aspects of life, thinking carefully about what she wants, setting her mind to it, and going forth to achieve it. She is determined and strong, intelligent and wise, loving and firm. Gloria has a true adventurer’s spirit, too, and her gift to Whit on his christening was the promise of future trips with him. Lucky man!

Even when we are not in day-to-day touch, Gloria is able to see into the very heart of anything I’m wrestling with. This startles me every time with the deep truth of it: this is intimacy, this is closeness, this is friendship. She intuitively knows what I most care about and value, and is thus able to understand the core of whatever any dilemma or issue is for me. This happened just yesterday. I’m also grateful for a friendship steadfast enough that we can be direct with each other when something bothers us. I feel sure we will be friends for life, and within this certainty there is room to be hurt, room to speak honestly, room to nudge if necessary.

Glo, happy, happy birthday. I won’t forget again. It amazes me that we’ve known each other more than half of our lives. I am grateful every single day for your friendship, and for your warm affection for my children. I know you are already influential to them, and I am glad that they will grow up in the glow of your sheer love of life, your ability to throw yourself into experience with abandon, and your generous heart.

Like a prayer


As I was driving last night, Like a Prayer came on and my thoughts drifted, immediately and firmly, to Leigh. They always do. Leigh is a dear, dear friend of my childhood. We met at a camp on Cape Cod when we were 12 or 13 and for several summers enjoyed an intense friendship. Leigh was everything I was not and wanted to be: beautiful, artistic, musical, outgoing, confident. She played Dorothy in our camp’s presentation of the Wizard of Oz, she mastered all of our various activities with aplomb and ease, and everybody at camp knew her name. For some reason she chose me as her tightest confidant, and we spent several summers arm-in-arm. We were LeighandLindsey. We shared clothes and a bunk bed and whispered stories late into the night and endless letters back and forth during the school year.

One year Leigh and I choreographed a dance to “Like a Prayer” for the talent show. We performed it over and over again, practicing daily in the outdoor theater with rustic wooden benches clustered under a stand of trees. Above the stage, across the front of the simple wooden building, the camp motto was displayed proudly: I Can and I Will. That song, for the rest of my life, will bring me right back to that summer of 1989 or 1990, to Leigh and I dancing down the dusty aisles between the benches, singing along during our practices and with broad smiles during the actual performance. I remember it as a rare moment of abandon and confidence for me: somehow, in the light that Leigh cast off, I felt brave. In her aura I too was lit from within.

This was a special, formative friendship for me, one I have held close even though we were out of touch for years. It was an enormous treat to see each other again a couple of summers ago. The occasion was our camp’s anniversary celebration, and we met for a day of swimming at her family’s house on Cape Cod. It was lovely to see Leigh’s parents, who had been a real part of my childhood, and to meet her son and husband (the pictures are from that day). I was reminded again of how that summer camp brought me some very special friends, chief among them Jessica. There are others, though, and I feel very lucky. (One of these special friends, who lives in Alaska, generously sent Grace – who he has never met – pictures from watching the actual Iditarod this past weekend. Her class has been studying the Iditarod for weeks {yay 1st grade private school education!} and Grace’s bringing the photographs in was apparently an enormous hit. Thank you K!)

Leigh, you are on my mind now and you are every single time I hear Madonna singing Like a Prayer. When I hear that song, I feel as though I can close my eyes and be back on the stage in Brewster, dancing our hearts out, sheer energy and delight radiating from us. I feel in touch with both you and the me I was then. This is such a gift. Your voice, you, those sunlit summers of our teen years, all of that will always feel like home. I hope to see you soon.

Losing my religion, finding my faith

It is my distinct honor to welcome Kristen from Motherese to this space today. Kristen’s blog is one of those I admire most, for her lucid and intelligent probing of questions so relevant to me I often feel she dug them out of my brain. Kristen is dear to me, too, for leaving me one of the comments here that has meant the most to me. It turns out we have a personal connection that neither of us knew, and I love that we found each other through the ether first.

Kristen writes beautifully about questions of identity, politics, parenting, and living in this world.  Her posts are shot through with personal reflection and every single day she makes me think.  Her essay here talks about something that is much on my mind of late: faith.  I am certainly grappling with some big questions of belief in my life: I feel often as though I’m groping around in the dark, occasionally grabbing something solid or feeling a truth, as gentle as a moth’s wing, brush against my cheek.  As I grope, I feel lost but am propelled forward by a distinct, unavoidable longing for something.

I’m delighted and blessed to have her words here today.  Please go check out Motherese.  You won’t regret it

Losing my Religion, Finding my Faith

We worry. We wonder. Anxiety steals our sleep.

I worry, too. I worry all the time.

I worry about forgetting lines to plays that I am not in. I worry about forgetting to mail a mortgage payment. I worry about passing a fifteen-year-old calculus exam. I worry about my dad embarrassing me with an uncouth comment.

I worry that Big Boy will have another meltdown at tumbling class. I worry about what the other mothers will think of me when he does. I worry about why my son would behave that way. I worry about how I will handle it.

These are the shades of my worry.

But there are other shades, too, shades that don’t cast an inky penumbra over my mind.

I don’t worry about dying young. I don’t worry that the world will end before my kids grow up. Even in the face of graphic evidence of the possibility of calamity, I don’t worry about catastrophe – natural, economic, interpersonal.

I have always thought of myself as a neurotic person, as a woman whose days are sketched in anxiety and colored in worry. But recently it occurred to me: I do worry, but I worry about the small things. I do not worry about the big ones. I worry about my performance, about how it will be evaluated. But about the most important things? The life-altering, life-threatening, life-crushing things? I don’t worry.

Instead, I practice random acts of blindness, never allowing these deeper, soul-shaking worries to penetrate my bedrock of faith.

And this is a strange revelation for me. After all, I am an agnostic. I am not a religious person anymore. But I still have a sense of subconscious serenity honed, I think, through an early commitment to religious practice. I grew up with a traditional religious education: I went to Catholic school for nine years and went to church every Sunday, loving the rituals and the singing, the candles and the community. I was never sold on the dogma – on transubstantiation, the ascension, the Holy Trinity. But I believed. I believed in the benevolent, white-haired gentleman. And I prayed to him every night before bed. I confessed my white lies and my gray doubts. I asked him to protect me, to look after my family. And – it seemed – he did.

My family faced its share of health problems. People we loved died. But my own life – and my own experience of it – seemed to take place in its own sort of numinous space.

In my adult life, some bad things have happened to me. I have faced illness, high-risk pregnancies, and physical violence. But I have never doubted my fundamental security.

I don’t spend time these days talking to that white-haired man. I don’t ask for intercession or for forgiveness. Now I am more a veteran of religious practice, with a medal of faith pinned to my chest, a talisman against the deepest doubts.

I am the seasoned traveler in Christina Rossetti’s “Up-Hill”:

Does the road wind up-hill all the way?
Yes, to the very end.
Will the day’s journey take the whole long day?
From morn to night, my friend.
But is there for the night a resting-place?
A roof for when the slow dark hours begin.
May not the darkness hide it from my face?
You cannot miss that inn.

Shall I meet other wayfarers at night?
Those who have gone before.
Then must I knock, or call when just in sight?
They will not keep you standing at that door.

Shall I find comfort, travel-sore and weak?
Of labour you shall find the sum.
Will there be beds for me and all who seek?
Yea, beds for all who come.

In this life – this entropic life – I feel safe.

But now a new worry sprouts: how will my sons, children of an agnostic mother and an atheistic father, unschooled in religion, never steeped in belief, find their safety? Without faith, will the monsters of worry call to them from under their beds and from behind their closet doors?

Do you worry about the small things or the big things? What role does faith play in shielding you from worry?