everyday life

your days are short here

I have had Adlai Stevenson’s line about “your days are short here” in my head recently. I love his whole speech, in particular those last lines, and have written about them before.  But it’s specifically the notion of something drawing to a close that feels salient to me right now.

I can’t get the line out of my head.

Our days are short here.

There are surely fewer days with all four of us under one roof ahead than behind us.  So many years have gone, rippling behind us in a blur of bathtimes and walks and hockey games and car rides.  I’m so thankful for the details I’ve recorded, here and in my enormous photo albums, but still, there’s so much I wish I could do over again.  Of course I can’t, and that’s the very essence of life: you get one go around.  It’s in my essential wiring to be struck dumb by the heartbreak of that, but the flip side of that characteristic is, I believe, how fundamentally open I am to receiving joy and beauty in the most ordinary experiences.

Our days are short here.  This season, which broke open with a colicky newborn and a rainstorm in late October 2002, which felt, for so long, endless, is drawing to a close. Grace is almost my height and Whit is catching up fast.  They’re independent in so many ways, strong and opinionated and funny.  They can cook dinner for us, walk home from school and let themselves in, put themselves to bed.  I can see the adults they are becoming. I love them, a lot, but I also like them.

I considered a book project several years ago that focused on the “new season” of parenting kids in their adolescence.  The first paragraph was this:

In between conference calls last Tuesday I walked to the mailbox a few blocks from my house. I passed the park where I had strolled with both of my children, spent countless hours watching them learn to navigate the slides and then the monkey bars, coached micro-soccer on Saturday mornings for years. I looked at the mothers crouched in the sandbox and at the toddlers making their clumsy way around the structure and felt a pang so acute of all that was gone I had to stop and catch my breath. That time, when empty days without school or commitments unfurled in front of me, seems like another country. My children still play on playgrounds, but I know those days themselves are numbered.

Even that already feels like a different country of its own now!  I feel as though I have taken an extremely long flight and have lost track of what day it is.  I’ve emerged from the terminal into the bright light of a foreign land and I’m blinking into the sun, trying to get my bearings.  I am staring at empty nesters and children who are getting close to driving age.  All these years have through my fingers like so much sand, and no amount of grasping slowed their passage.

Tonight I’m struck by the sorrow of that, though I’m aware, also, of the deep, gorgeous, messy joys that have filled every day in the enormous gulf between my first days as a mother and now.

My days are short here.  And while my children still want to come sit next to me in bed to read,  I’m going to wholeheartedly enjoy it, trying not to wonder if it’s the last time.

Snow, then and now

Winter has hit Boston.  All of a sudden, there are snow days, snow piles, neighbors shoveling in the streets, and aggravated drivers finding roads that have turned unexpectedly one-way.  On Saturday morning we decided to go for a family sled.  There was some bickering, some raised voices, some aggravation (not the least of it, mine).  But amid all of that, there was also Grace and Whit shrieking with joy, deep, untouched drifts of snow, and some happy sibling moments.

I am trying to see that part, and let the other stuff go.  I’m not great at that yet, but I’m trying.

I’m grateful that Matt is healthy again and able to shovel (he is an excellent shoveler – I’m guessing it’s the Vermont roots).  I’m grateful for my interesting book (about spies in the Cold War and Kim Philby; an unusual choice for me, but I’m learning a lot).  I’m grateful that both children sleep well and soundly and that our house is warm.  I’m grateful, grateful, grateful, and I’m trying to let that seep into me, to let it soften the jagged edges of family moments that aren’t as peaceful as I would have liked.

I am also remembering another blizzard, that of January 2005.  Literally hours after we brought Whit home from the hospital, it started snowing and did not stop for a week.

Here’s Grace in her red snowsuit in the backpack.  I remembered that Matt and I bundled her up and took her for a walk in the first days when Whit was at home.  He was sleeping under the watchful eye of a babysitter.  Grace had snow in her eyes, Matt and I were exhausted, and we were all startled, blinking in the bright sun of a new reality.  I vividly recall bringing her back from this walk and handing her her new baby doll in the front hall, at which point she melted down in true 2 year old style, wailing that she wanted to “play with the real baby!”

When I remember that day, and that two year old in a backpack, I can do nothing but shake my head, shocked and awed at how time has flown.  I feel heartbroken, a little, as I do, honestly, every single day of parenting.  But I also feel thankful, and lucky, and deeply aware of both.  Remembering my pledge to let that gratitude soften me, I close my eyes and say thank you, thank you, thank you, and then I open them, look out my window, and watch the snow fall.

Conscious of our treasures

On Monday night, I watched part of Whit’s hockey practice.  I stood at the end of the rink, watching him through the scuffed plexiglass (I can always identify him because he has red laces in his skates), and was overcome with a swell of contentment.  Thornton Wilder’s words, which always remind me of Aidan, rose to my mind:

We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.

I’m not sure what it was about Monday evening that brought those words, or that feeling of awareness of my treasures, to mind.  But I’ve learned enough not to question the moments that rise up, unbidden and unasked for, but to welcome them.  I thought of my just 12 year old son, brand-new braces on his teeth, skating competently in front of me.  I thought of our warm and safe house. I thought of our health and good fortune.  I thought of Aidan, then, grateful for having met her in this wild and wonderful ether, all those years ago.  Why precisely these words – from Wilder, whose Our Town speaks loudly to me – remind me of Aidan I’m not sure, but I’m glad they do.  I texted her with cold fingers from the rink, and then put my phone back in my pocket.

As I stood and watched Whit shooting on goal, I thought of the perennial struggle that exists within me to be here now while I also watched, through a (in this case, literal) pane of clear material.  I’m removed from and engaged in my life at the same time.  I think it’s time to just let go of that struggle, to recognize that the tension that exists between those two poles is at the heart of the way I am in the world.

This is both the animating challenge of my life and the source of most of its color.

Maybe I’m inching towards the acceptance of those poles, which seem as opposed as do my two simultaneous ways of being in the world.  That’s one of my treasures, no question.  So are the family and health I noted, the dear friends (Aidan among them), words on the page and in the ether, the sky at dusk and at dawn, and so many other things.  It’s absolutely true what Wilder says, that when I’m aware of my deep good fortune that I feel most alive.

The bell rang, Whit came off the ice, and, with a gesture that means “hurry up!” I went to go wait for him in the car.  Conscious of my treasures, and fully alive, we drove home.

Around here lately

Whit spent a week studying the reproductive system in school.  On the last day of the unit, they watched a video of a birth.  “How was it?” I asked him.

He thought for a minute and then answered, “Gunky.”

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One Friday night in late January, after family dinner, Grace, Whit and I spent a solid hour looking at old photographs and reading old blog posts. It started with my remembering Whit’s passion for his exercise pants. I felt grateful for the record I have of them as small children.  Then, the evening devolved into poking Whit’s stuffed narwhal’s horn into each other’s ears.  As we do.

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Grace has been wearing her hair in two braids for hockey, which reminds me of both my own childhood hairdo and, far more poignantly, of the two pigtails she used to wear as a toddler. Oh, life.  Taking my breath away on a daily basis since 2002.

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Many years ago we had a spirited car conversation about what we would get if we ever got a tattoo.  Everyone had an answer and mine was a small tear under one eye.  Last week, Whit came home from school with a small tear under one eye, rendered in sharpie.  Because it was sharpie, it took a while to come off!

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As usual, in this dark season (meteorologically and otherwise), life is full of beauty.  Small, glimmering moments.  I just try to keep seeing them.

 

Marching

On Saturday, January 21st, Grace and I left our house at about 10:30 to head into Boston to join the march.  There was a couple behind us in pink hats as we walked down our street to the T stop.  It was crowded at the T stop, and it was slow going down the escalators to the trains.  It started to dawn on me that a lot of people were there.  We had to wait for a couple of trains to go by because only a couple of people could squeeze into the cars, and the platform was jammed.

Finally we got into a car.  As we made our way into Boston, slowly because there were a lot of unusual stops (presumably because the car ahead of us couldn’t shut its doors when trying to leave the station ahead of us), the people in our T car began to sing.  First, We Shall Overcome.  Then, This Land is Our Land.  I had tears rolling down my cheeks within moments.

We got off the T in Boston and made our way slowly down Charles Street towards the Boston Common.  The streets were packed with people walking, holding signs and wearing pink, men and women both. When we got to the Common, we found a corner to stand and Grace climbed the gate so she could see more.  As far as the eye could see: people.  Old, young, male, female, families. There were many fantastic signs, about 95% of which were positive in nature.

I was moved to tears over and over again during the day.  There was a tangible energy in the air, of cooperation and support, of love and energy and, yes, resistance.  But it was peaceful and strong and diverse. I’m a Bostonian through and through, and there are many times this city has moved me. The parades and the tragedies and the triumphs.  All of it.  But Saturday felt different, somehow, soft while still being resolved, determined. There were so many people, and yet it was calm, peaceful.

I kept looking at Grace and several of her friends, most of them 14 now, thinking about how they will vote in the next presidential election, about how I desperately want our country to be what they deserve.  Grace is paying attention.  I was so proud to watch her as she watched the crowd, noticed signs, and sensed the energy around her. I don’t know that I have a specific conclusion other than to say I was tremendously moved to be a tiny part of the tidal wave that was this past weekend.  When I heard people chanting “This is what democracy looks like” I felt a frisson of acknowledgement, deep and true, that I believe that, and also of how far parts of our leadership have drifted from that.

In the days since Saturday I’ve seen one quote over and over again on social media.  My mother gave me a pillow years ago with these same words on it, and I love them:

Here’s to strong women.
May we know them
May we be them
May we raise them.

Amen.  I’m grateful to be flanked by strong women in my own family, and I am more thankful than I can express to have been a small part of Saturday’s demonstration.