dear friends

Having it all

A snapshot of my version of “it all”: hydrangeas (one of our wedding flowers) grown by my husband, in our small front garden, on the kitchen island.  In the back you can see a construction paper garland that Grace recently made for father’s day.

Like everyone else in the blogosphere and real-world-o-sphere, I have been participating in many conversations about Anne-Marie Slaughter’s cover story in the Atlantic, Why Women Still Can’t Have it All.   While I certainly don’t have a clearly-articulated response to Slaughter’s comprehensive and thoughtful examination of working motherhood today, I do have a profound emotional response.  By the third page of the article my eyes were full of tears, the words having touched some reserve of emotion in me as inarticulate as it is endlessly deep.

Most days I feel pretty good about my choices regarding work and family.  Sure, I wonder sometimes what would have happened had I not “leaned back,” as per Sheryl Sandberg, before I was even pregnant.  And yes, I do wonder what it would be like not to work, mostly whether I’d be a more relaxed and less distracted parent to my children.  But on the whole I feel pretty good about the decisions I’ve made and about the trade-offs I make every day (I hate the word and notion of balance when it comes to this topic).  My emotional reaction – quiet, but intense – when I read articles like Slaughter’s, however, suggests that something deeply buried in me still grieves, hurts, and wonders.  About and over what, I am not entirely sure.

Mostly what Slaughter’s article has me thinking about, though, is what “it all” really means.  My friend Kathryn, who is one of those can’t-live-without-her-friends that are for me a big component of feeling like I have anything like “it all,” emailed me to say she was at home because her nanny was out, sitting on her bed with her laptop working while her children lay on either side of her watching TV.  Is this “it all,” she mused?

For me, the answer to that is yes.

I am certain this is a deeply personal equation, and one that changes every day.  For me there are some elements of “it all” that are non-negotiable.  Downtime with my children most days.  A happy relationship with my husband.  Work that I find challenging with colleagues I respect and learn from.  Not missing any – or almost any – school events, plays, concerts, assemblies.  My handful of dear friends, those native speakers whose companionship I cherish.  Time, several days a week, to think and write about this divine and devastating life.  Time to read.  Eight hours of sleep most nights.  Time, several days a week, to run by myself.  The calculus of how each day’s hours are allocated is ever-shifting; I think having “it all” is something we ascertain over the arc of weeks and months, not in a single day.

The point of Slaughter’s piece with which I agree with most vociferously is that flexibility is absolutely essential to making this particularly rich, and demanding, phase of life work.  There’s no question that that is true for me.  I’m certain that my ability to be present for events both big and small in the lives of my children while working full-time has a lot to do with my job’s flexibility.  Of course I’ve made compromises though, and I have written before about how my life over the past years has simultaneously narrowed and widened.  What I’m not totally clear on is where the line is between a mature acknowledgement of the need for compromises and a defeatist acceptance of “not having it all.”

There is lots I don’t have.  Lots.  Tons of children.  A book published.  A fancy house.  A perfect figure.  Extravagant vacations.  Sound sleep every night.  A marathon under my belt.  A high profile CEO job.  A real yoga practice.  Unbitten fingernails.  A yard for my children to run in.  A king size bed.  A red-headed child.  A basic orientation towards calm.

But I think I would say that in the ways I care about, I do have it all.

What is your definition of “it all”?

Undeniably about endings

How shall the heart be reconciled/ to its feast of losses?
(Stanley Kunitz)

This time of year is undeniably about endings.  This is so even as the world bursts into bloom around me, asserting the fact that no matter what, life will return and triumph.  I am always heavy-hearted in the spring, as the school year closes.  Something deep inside me operates on academic time; this has always been true, even in the interval between my own student life and the time when my childrens’ school calendar delineated my days.  When your bloodstream pulses to the rhythm of school, early June is when things end.  I can feel the ending hovering now, growing closer every day, its presence as tangible to me as the thick pollen in the air.

Some days it is simply too much for me.  On these days the losses, the goodbyes, and the endings overwhelm me, and all I want to do is to sit down and sob.  I was talking to a friend the other day about how I am sad about the end of school, and she looked me in frank astonishment.  “Really?” she asked, genuinely surprised.  “But aren’t you glad for the summer?”  Yes, I said, I was, but saying goodbye to a year makes me genuinely, deeply sorrowful.  It occurred to me in that moment, as it does over and over again, that there are lots of people out there who simply not sentimental.    And it also occurred to me, not for the first time, that I’d often like to be one of them.

I guess I’m just awash in the end of things right now, much more aware of the bitter than the sweet.  I ache for all that I have lost: hours, days, weeks, years of my life, my babies and my toddlers, friends and family who are gone from me, younger, more innocent versions of my own self.  Yes.  I know there are many good things ahead, and that every ending brings a beginning in its wake.  I know this intellectually, but it is of no emotional solace when the endings and goodbyes seem to keep coming so relentlessly.

I fold up clothes that don’t fit the kids anymore, save the special things, hand the rest down. I scroll through old pictures in preparation for my college reunion next weekend.  I am visited in my sleep and in my waking by my grandmothers and by Mr. Valhouli.  All that I’ve lost rises up in front of me, sometimes, and I feel as though I could dive into it like into a wave. The past – those lost days and people – seems so near, and I am both reassured and shaken by its proximity.  I can sense those past experiences in an almost-animate way, and I wonder at how something or someone who is gone can feel so near.

Stop!  I feel like screaming in these fecund, beautiful, swollen-with-life days.  I want to press pause and just sit still for one moment, but I can’t, and time cranks inexorably forward.  As I try to grab onto the minutes of my life I feel them slipping by, so I tell myself all I can do is pay attention and live each one.  Still, like a silk cord that I can’t quite grip, time ripples across my palm, and I weep as I watch it go.  Even in the time it took to write this blog post I watched the sun slip beyond the horizon through my little office window, another day winding to its close.

Driving through Harvard Square this weekend I saw that they had put tents up for graduation.  It reminded me of the deep ache in my gut that the sight of the reunions fences gave me every year in college.  The fences meant the end was in sight.  They delineated the site of each major reunion, but they also closed off another one of our precious years on campus.  The fences always, always made me cry.

The fences and the tents in Harvard Square are just manifestations of the threshold between now and the next thing.  I traverse this boundary every single year, and each time I’m startled, anew, by the pain that crossing entails.  I am aware, all the time, of the losses my heart has sustained, but at this time, in liminal moments like the end of the school year or my birthday, I feel them especially sharply.

A repost from last year, and very much how I am feeling right now.  I’m in New Hampshire with our extended family, the other two legs of the stool, for the now-traditional Memorial Day in New Hampshire.  Back tomorrow.

11 Questions, 11 Answers

This blogging world has brought me so many gifts.  One of the richest has been The Tribe, a group of creative women who have (foolishly, and I’m still waiting for them to realize their error) included me in their number.  One of these years I will be able to join the annual retreat on the coast of Oregon.  Elizabeth Grant Thomas is one of the Tribe, and if you don’t know her luminous, thoughtful writing, you should.  She writes about many of the same themes that haunt my work (and my life): impermanence and what endures, relationships and family, the fallibility and brilliance of memory.

Last week Elizabeth shared 11 questions and her answers.  I loved reading her stories, about the adorable way her husband proposed, her favorite historical period, and what day in her life she’d go back and re-live.  Then she tagged me in the meme, and I so enjoyed reading her answers that I was excited about answering with my own.

This is how it works:

  • Post the rules
  • Answer 11 questions the tagger posted for you
  • Create 11 new questions to ask the people you tag
  • Tag 11 people
  • Let them know you’ve tagged them

So herewith, my answers to Elizabeth’s wonderful questions, my own set of new questions, and the 11 people I would love to hear answer them!

1. What book has moved you the most in recent history?

I was tremendously moved by Stephanie Saldana’s The Bread of Angels.

2. What’s your favorite way to spend idle time?

Sitting in my bed, with my daughter next to me, reading (separately).

3. Share a silly photo of yourself.  What’s the story?

This was in high school, when my dear friend C and I were in the Dance Concert together.  We also ran cross-country together, and part of why I love this photograph so is that we are teaming up to run a 10K Mud Run in May together.  20 years and 5 children later, we’re back to running in the woods side by side.  I can’t wait.

4. What astrological sign are you?  Do you believe in astrology, or think it’s a bunch of hooey?

I’m a Leo.  I oscillate between believing and thinking it’s hooey.  Fun fact: my father and my husband are both twins and Geminis.  When I was growing up, I thought being a twin was a requirement of being a Gemini, since my father was both.

5.  What is the most memorable meal you’ve ever had?

Several dinners, cooked over a campfire, out in the African bush when Matt and I were on safari in the summer of 1998.  Somehow they conjured the most extraordinary meals out of nothing, and the setting sure helped.

6. Do you believe in fate, or that we’re masters of our own destinies?

This is a tough one for me.  I’m really not sure.  I lean towards the former, because I often sense the hand of something large and ineffable at work, but I also believe adamantly in the power of hard work and good decisions to shape our lives.

7. What is one of your favorite memories from childhood?

Singing Circle Game with my sister and our “four family” siblings, the extended family we grew up with.  We wore white, we stood in line by height, and all eight of our parents watched us with tears in their eyes.  There are also many special memories from my summers at sleep-away camp.

8. If you know it, what is your Myers-Briggs type?  If you don’t know it, would you characterize yourself as an extrovert or an introvert?

I am an INFJ.  100% F, 100% J, closer to the middle on the other two.  I am a big believer in the Myers-Briggs as a framework for understanding ourselves and others in our lives.

9. What is your favorite flower?

Peonies, hands down.  Ranunculus after that.

10. No one can ever believe that I’ve never seen The Princess Bride.  What movie have you never seen that everyone else seemingly has?

Silence of the Lambs.  I’m too scared.

11. What quote or motto best describes how you endeavor to live your life?

There is no such thing as a complete lack of order, only a design so vast it appears unrepetitive up close.  (Erdrich)

It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work. And when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey.  The mind that is not baffled is not employed.  The impeded stream is the one that sings. (Berry)

To miss the joy is to miss all.  (Stevenson)

Did you really think I could pick one?

And so, here are those I “tag”:

Aidan of Ivy League Insecurities
Christa of Carry It Forward
Denise of Universal Grit
Pamela of Walking On My Hands
Lisa Bonchek Adams
Kathryn of Good Life Road
Hilary from A Year On
MK Countryman from My Suburban Life
Katie Gibson from cakes, teas, and dreams
Rebecca from June Carol Claire
Erin from Elements of Style

And these are my questions:

1. What is your favorite book?  Why?

2. What song brings you back most viscerally to a moment in your history?  Where does it take you?

3. Who is your favorite character in fiction?

4. What is your favorite food?  What about foods you abhor?

5. Are you a morning or a night person?

6. What is your default font when you write on your computer?

7. How many siblings do you have?  How many children do you have (as of now)?

8. What season do you like best?

9. When you were a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?

10. If you practice yoga (even sporadically) what is your favorite pose?

11. When was the last time you cried?

Filling the spaces

It’s true more often than we realize: each new love is built from the wreckage of the loves that came before.  In Kath, Mike saw Lisa; in Art’s eyes, she resembled our mother.  I can’t look at Mike’s face without seeing Dad’s.  Art, to Ma, was the living ghost of Harry Breen.  We love those who fit the peculiar voids within us, our hollow wounds.  We love to fill the spaces the old loves left behind.

– Jennifer Haigh, Faith

This passage, from Jennifer Haigh’s lovely novel Faith, has been haunting me for days.  It’s not an understatement to say that this is the central theme of the novel I am so clunkily attempting to write: an exploration of the holes inside each of us, punched out in the shapes of our earliest loves, first dear friends, and family members, around whose contours our own are shaped.  I am fascinated by the ways our lives are shaped and directed by early experiences, and by the disproportionate power of those we first love.

I am thinking this week about the people in my life who contributed to those hollow wounds, those whose words and input will echo throughout my life.  For many of us the – most, even – I suspect that the response to those who early, and irrevocably, shaped who we are is subconscious.  Certainly we are rarely aware of the spaces as they are being gouged out; more likely we happen upon them, later, either because they howl and ache or because we trip over them, startled, on one way somewhere else.

Are you aware of those who shaped and defined your own peculiar voids?  My sense is that for some these people are obvious, and for others they are a surprise.  Maybe that combination exists, actually, in each individual life: we are carved out and hollowed by both those we might imagine (a parent, a first love) and those whose power we did not understand in the moment (a friend, a quick relationship).  I often think of the interior of others as a landscape (or as of a night sky, full of sparkling) and so I love this image of there being hollows and chasms in that terrain, molded by people long gone.

And on we walk.  Empty and full, shaped and carved out, swollen with love and devastated by loss, every single day.

 

First impressions, and fertile friend-making periods

Matt and I were talking about first impressions last week.  We met 14 years ago, but the first things we thought of each other – and of other people we’ve met since – remain vivid.  We talked about the major categories of impressions, the things that carry weight when you are first getting to know someone.

“Your friends,” he started, with a smile.  “Well, your friends were, from the very first, awesome.”  I’ve written before about how even if he got rid of me, I’m pretty sure Matt would insist on continuing to go to my college reunions.  He loves those women almost as devoutly as I do (and with good reason).

“Yes, they are.”

“I think you can tell a lot – maybe the most of all – about someone by who their best friends are.”

And I agree with him.  My closest friends are a small group of people for whom I feel fierce loyalty and untrammeled pride.  I feel lucky every single time I think of this handful of people who have, for some mysterious reason, decided to bestow their love on me.  Matt’s and my conversation got me thinking, again, about which friends have stuck with me through life’s unanticipated perambulations, about how some grow nearer even as others ebb away.

There have been three fertile periods of friend-making in my life. The first was my childhood friends, my “family friends,”who really functioned more as siblings than anything else in my early life. These friends flanked me through those first important years, though the relationships were driven as much by our parents’ friendships as by anything individual to us. I am not in daily touch with any of those friend-siblings these days, but they remain close to me in the way of people who have shared formative life experiences. Like, perhaps, people who went through trench warfare together. I also had dear friends from my grade school (one of whom I saw last week and realized that Grace is about to be the age we were when we met – holy holy holy!).

The second was college. High school, fractured as it was between England and New Hampshire, was quite fraught for me. I had some good friends in London but we have dropped out of touch, proving to me that the weight of different cultures and the ocean was too heavy for the fragile bonds we shared. At boarding school I pulled into myself for a variety of reasons, and I remember those two years as some of the loneliest of my life. Yes, I had friends, and people with whom I shared the long cold days; one of my very best friends now I met there though it was really in college that our friendship blossomed into what it is now. But I spent a lot of time alone, too, running endless miles in the snowy woods, black trees silhouetted against gray sky, and writing essays and reading books in my tiny bedroom.

College changed all of that. I arrived at Princeton desperately lonely, full of insecurities and fears (yes, believe it, even more than now). I don’t think I had realized the extent to which those two years in New Hampshire saddened me. I was desperate for a place to call home, a group of friends into whose embrace I could relax. Oh, and how I found it. To this day, Princeton remains the place I was happiest. There was standard college drama, of course: sadness, frustration, embarassment, heartbreak. But oh, my friends. I was and am still surprised that such extraordinary women wanted to be my friends. Some of this was, of course, in reaction to the cold years at Exeter. For sure. But it mostly just my lonely heart gratefully opening to the warmth of Princeton, to the spring sky riotously full of magnolia blossoms, to orange tee shirts and mardi gras beads, to young women singing “oh what a night” at the top of their lungs at a dive Chinese restaurant.

Those four years were healing, and the friends I made there will always be the dearest of my life. Anne Patchett writes about how true friends are “native speakers,” and I find myself recalling how at Princeton we basically invented our own language. We were teased for abbreviating everything, and indeed, we did. Abbrevs, T and a P, TDF, the chalice, DTR … I could go on. Those of you who know what all of those things mean know who you are. And you speak my language.

And many of these college friendships have endured, grown thicker and stronger and more sustaining even as we move further away from Princeton. We have passed through early professional choices, graduate school, weddings, divorces, more weddings, babies. I’m not sure I can say it better than I did, in a letter addressed to these wonderful women, several years ago:

“There will be and are other incredibly special friends, but as a community you all are ground zero: yardstick and safe haven, the people who knew me when I was becoming who I am.”

The third rich period of friendship in my life was around pregnancy, delivery, and the transition into motherhood. This passage is so complex, the particular dilemmas and issues of life with a newborn so detailed and specific, that the people I shared it with have become dear friends. These friendships developed in the context of family and children, and the women I have grown close to in that fecund place full of abundant concerns and anxious questions are deeply special to me.

It strikes me that it is not an accident that our truest and most lasting friendships are forged during times of life transition; we are closest to those who have shared experiences that changed who we are. Whether it was childhood, college, or becoming mothers, this is true for me. There are other examples, individuals who have shared things with me that contributed indelibly to who I am. In this way, a very few other people have become a part of my own self, their voices permanently embedded into my private narrative.

There are a few sustaining threads in my life, people whose story I know will always run next to mine, friendships whose sturdy support I lean on routinely.  And how fortunate I am that these people were impressive enough to my husband when he met them that he decided, too, to stick around.

Do you agree that people’s close friends are a significant indicator of who they are?  Are there phases in your life that have yielded particularly close or lasting friendships?  What did you think the first time you met your spouse?

(parts of this are reposted from September 2009)