everyday life

The Alphabet of Right Now

Last night’s sunset

Four separate times on this blog I’ve shared my Alphabet of Right Now (2009, 2011, 2013, 2015). The time felt right for the fifth installment!

Part of the inspiration for this was the general every-other-year cadence I’ve been settling into with my alphabets, but it was also because of Amy Krouse Rosenthal, whose passing in March I noted with sorrow.  Her beautiful book, Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life, has been on my mind since hearing of her tragic death.  This feels like an exercise she might do, or at least one she would celebrate.  Without further preamble, here is my Alphabet of Right Now.

All-Boys – I’m really excited for Whit to be going to an all-boys school in the fall.  Random segue, but if you don’t know the work of Michael Thompson, I highly recommend it.  Just this weekend I read his interview about How to Invest in Boys and found it, like I found all of his work, resonant, wise, and powerful.

Bittersweet – The definition of right now. I am so, so proud of Grace and of Whit, but I also feel overcome with sorrow that this particular season of life is ending.  Both. At once. In every single minute.

Coffee – This is not a new “c,” but it’s an ever-more-important part of my days.  Years ago Matt and I bought a coffeemaker you could pre-set the night before, and every single morning, without fail, I’m delighted by the fresh coffee waiting for me.  It’s a highlight of my day.

Daylight – The days are so long now, and it’s light when we wake up and light past dinner. I know I’m not alone in loving the light. In recent years I’ve come to love the darkness, too, but there’s certainly a surge of something in this season, when everything feels light and alive in the world.

Early – I’ve been waking up really, really early. Earlier than usual. Sometimes I run, but sometimes I feel exhausted and I don’t. I wish I was getting more sleep, but I admit I like the quiet pre-dawn time to myself, too.

Friends – As always, my dear friends shape my life and provide structure, support, and laughter to and in every day.  Particularly now, as I look ahead to a different season of life, I am grateful for the friends whose nearness, literal or metaphorical, buoys me.

Graduation – Both Grace and Whit will celebrate graduations this spring, from 6th and 8th grade (and eah from one of our school’s distinct campuses) respectively. I know they’ll be particularly charged because both children are leaving their current school.  The end of the school year always carries with it a swirl of emotions for me, and that’s more heightened than ever this year.

Hockey – Whit’s team won their division for the first time in our 5 years doing town hockey (and in a rematch of their only other finals outing, against the same team, in the same way). Then they lost the divisional playoff in heartbreaking fashion. As often happens, I found myself grateful for all the ways that team sports educate our children, for all the lessons on and off of the ice.

Italy – Grace, Whit and I had the most wonderful time in March in Rome.  For a week we were just the three of us, walking around, exploring, playing cards, eating pizza, on the verge of returning home and making big decisions and embarking on sweeping changes.  Our visit was sheer magic and I won’t ever forget it.

Jigsaw puzzles – I love puzzles, and do them often.

Kombucha – I am way into Health-Ade Kombucha, especially the Pink Lady Apple flavor. Highly recommend.

Lamott – I’ve always loved Anne, as do many, and her most recent book, Hallelujah Anyway, runs through my head on a daily basis.

Mysteries – I am deep in a phase of reading legal thrillers.  The whole Alex Cooper series by Linda Fairstein (which I wrote about for Great New Books), David Baldacci, John Grisham, Michael Connelley.  These aren’t all I’m reading (see “L”) but I am definitely enjoying plot-driven fiction right now.

No – Saying no is not new for me, but I’m saying no to basically everything that doesn’t revolve around family or work right now.

Open – I’ve written before about being porous, and I’ve never in my life felt more that way than right now. Everything – beautiful and brutal, glorious and gruesome, heartbreaking and happy – pierces me.

Poetry – I’ve been turning to Mary Oliver, Wendell Berry, Adrienne Rich, and other familiar voices as I grapple with a time of earthquake-style change.  There’s no question, as I’ve said before, that poetry is my lingua franca, the language my soul speaks.

Quotes – Are a lifelong preoccupation of mine. I cherish the small stack of quote books that I’ve been keeping since 1985.  I share some of my favorites here on Thursdays (and the archive is here).

Reunions – I am staring down my 25th reunion in a couple of weeks.  How is this possible?  Yet another experience of time’s ability to be both inexorable freight train and dizzying, telescopic roller coaster.

Summer – None of us can wait, for more unstructured time, for long weekend days together, for sitting on the porch with my parents, for tennis and swimming and sleeping in.  My favorite time of the year.

Teeth – Grace is about to get her braces off.  I’m looking forward to seeing her teeth again, though I know she’ll instantly look like the young woman she already is. Yet another end.

Uncertainty – Don’t like it, never have, never will. Unfortunately I feel afloat in a sea of uncertainty right now.

Veterinarian – What Grace wants to be when she grows up.

Waiting for My Real Life to Begin – It was Gloria, in March, who put this song back in my head, and now I can’t stop hearing it.  It feels particularly, utterly right for right now, a season of endings and beginnings where I need to remember all the time that this is just a moment in my life, and to see through the clouds of emotion that cloud my vision. I’ve written about this particular song before, but it remains central and seminal: just be here now.  It doesn’t escape me that it’s Grace’s real life that’s, in many ways, about to begin.

X – Impossible.

Years – Flying by. “There are years that ask questions and years that answer.” – Zora Neale Hurston.

Zigzag – The way I experience life.  My experience of time is rarely linear: it spirals and returns again and again to memories that did may not have seemed important as I lived them, then abruptly spikes forward, accelerating into the unknown before returning again.  I think often the switch-back roads in the Alps we drove when I was a child, my dark-haired father at the wheel, my sister next to me in the backseat.  I always got carsick on those drives, and sometimes, as I confront time, I feel that way still.

Help

The sky is full of glories these days.

Hi everyone.  It’s Sunday morning, and I woke up to a glorious sunrise which turned the white shades on that side of the house pink. One of my regrets about our house is that I don’t have a good angle to photograph the sunrise.  My instagram feed is a parade of sunsets.  What does this mean?  Am I oriented towards the endings of things?  I am not sure.  Could be coincidence.  Could not be.

I am writing to ask for help.

This is sincere, though I’m worried it will seem trite.  For the first time in 10 solid years of blogging I’m considering stopping.  I feel like I repeat myself, over and over again. I can’t think about anything other than time’s drumbeat passage right now.  It might be because Grace is considering high school options.  It’s probably mostly because Grace and Whit are growing so fast I can barely keep up.  That’s not new, of course: they’ve been growing like that since they were born.  But now, all of a sudden, the finish line’s in sight and every single moment is filtered through the reality of how numbered are these days.

I don’t want to keep writing a relentless series of posts about how sad I am.  I am actually not sad – I’m acutely aware, and sensitive, but not sad.  I’m intensely grateful, too.  But anyway.  I know that’s repetitive and dull.  I have also been wriring less and less about Grace and Whit, as they grow older and their stories are more and more their own.  So I need input from you.

What do you want to hear about?  I’m running out of steam, and I hate admitting it, but it’s true.

Help.

 

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.