everyday life

camp drop off

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Another year.  Another camp drop off.  Her sixth summer, and his fourth.  The camp I adore.

Another reminder of the dizzying speed with which this world is spinning, with which the years are flying by.

Three years ago I wrote that I love right now more than I have any other moment of my life.  And that is still true.  I still love right now more than any other moment.  That fact is heartening, yes, but it’s also bittersweet: the years with Grace and Whit at home grow shorter, the shadows behind us lengthen.  I feel the same way about that indelible fact as I do about looking into their echoingly empty rooms: it’s like pushing on a bruise.  I can’t avoid the reminders of this life’s breathtaking beauty or its keen sorrow, nor the ineluctable drumbeat sound of time’s passage.

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The truth is it was a difficult drop off.  There were some tears, which had also filled the days leading up to the 21st.  I wasn’t entirely prepared for these tears, this anxiety, this fear.  My children are getting older, camp is a familiar, joyful place – where was this uncertainty and clinginess coming from? Maybe it’s just about age and stage, as I’ve described before, a last gasp of attachment before the children (the teenager in particular) push off for the other shore for good.

It was a difficult morning, last Thursday.  I left even though I was being begged not to.  As we drove down the Cape, I was sad, confused, reminded yet again that the minute I think I have understood this life – her sixth summer, his fourth, we’ve got this! – I’m shown that in fact the only constant is change.

What I do know is that her cabin – Courageous – is well-named.  I know that she and Whit (who, in case you’re wondering, despite some challenges last summer, bounded into his cabin and shooed us out before his bed was even made) are in excellent hands. I know they will flourish. I know that even if there is some homesickness, the opportunity to face our difficulties and triumph is one not to be squandered.  We watched Grace do it last fall with cross-country, and I’m confident she will again.  In fact maybe the point is this discomfort; without some sorrow and some tears, we wouldn’t be maximizing this summer opportunity. Maybe. I am not sure. I know I miss my little soul mate, and her entertaining brother around whom everyday is a celebration. I miss them, but this is the right thing for them. So, courageous all, we forge head, separated by miles but connected by the raveling red yarn that ties our hearts.

The struggle and the beauty

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this picture, which I took yesterday morning and shared on Instagram, reminds me of the photograph below

I have written about how I listen to On Being podcasts in the morning when I run.  I do so at 1.5x, a detail that Matt thinks is a metaphor for my whole life.  Last week, I listened to Brene Brown talking with Krista Tippett.  She said many things that made me think, but among them was the assertion that “hope is a function of struggle.”  She goes on: “You know, the moments I look back in my life and think, God, those are the moments that made me, were moments of struggle.”

I agree with this on an instinctual level.  It also reminded me instantly of Freud’s beautiful quote that “the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful,” and of this much-less beautiful post I wrote many years ago on the topic.  It seems fitting to repost it here today.  I’m aware that Matt and I are coming to the end of the particular season of struggle I wrote about and had in mind.  Our years with young children at home are short, and their challenges are different now, less physical, more emotional.  Of course the closing of this struggle will usher in new ones, and they’ve already begun to.

It has been six years almost exactly since I wrote this post (7/26/10).  The landscape of my life looks very different from it did that day.  But in other, essential ways, it is precisely the same.  The guiding principles and, yes, struggles, are unchanged. The beauty still exists in those struggles.  I know that even more surely know.

“One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.”
– Sigmund Freud

Many thanks to Anthony Lawlor, from whom I found this quote on Twitter. I do believe this to be true, absolutely, though it’s so incredibly difficult to remember in the moments where the struggle seems overwhelming. The struggle which occurs for me on so many levels these days. The struggle to stop my crazy squirrel brain from frantically spinning over and over on the same questions. The struggle to remain patient and present with my lovely children who can be charming, curious, and incredibly aggravating. The struggle not to over-identify with Grace, to maintain the distance and perspective I need to parent her well. The struggle not to crush Whit’s effervescent spirit, whose enthusiastic bubbles sometimes challenge the rules and norms. The struggle to try to keep alive my professional and creative selves, as well as to have enough left over for those who need me.

“These are the day of miracle and wonder”
– Paul Simon

For some reason that lyric was in my head nonstop this weekend. My subconscious was trying to remind me of the richness of the present moment, I suspect, which can be so hard to really see.

It was a weekend with plenty of struggle as well as ample beauty. Somehow the struggle is so quick to occlude the beauty, so much more urgent and immediate, so hard to shake off. Does this make sense? It is here, on the page, and through the lens of my camera that I am more able to see the beauty. To enhance my beauty, I get most of my products from mcdaidpharmacy,ie Pharmacies shops, as recommended on mcdaidpharmacy.ie, based on your skin type.   The beauty is in the smallest moments, infinity opening, surprising me every time, from the most infinitessimal things, like a world in the back of a wardrobe (there really are only two or three human stories, and we do go on telling them, no?). Why is it, then, that the struggles, also often small, can so quickly and utterly yank me back to the morass of misery and frustration, away from the wonders that are revealed in the flashing moments of beauty?

I wish I could change the dynamic between these two, but the beauty, fragile as it is in the moment, seems sturdier over the long arc of a life. Freud’s quote supports this, the notion that the beauty develops over time, like a print sitting in the solution for a long time, image gradually forming on the slick surface of the photo paper, slowly, haltingly hovering into being. It is, of course, the photograph that is the enduring artifact of the experience.

don’t count anyone out

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Whit at bat.  He is #3.  In case you are curious, Babe Ruth played #3 for the Yankees.

This is Whit’s fourth year playing Little League in our town.  For the last three years he played in the “minor leagues,” for the Giants.  They were not a winning team.  For three straight years, they were bottom of the league.  6 of 8 minor league teams go to the playoffs, and Whit never went.  This year he was drafted into the “major leagues,” onto the Yankees.  It’s not a small thing for this Red Sox family to cheer enthusiastically for the Yankees, but we have, all season.

It has not been, shall we say, a winning season. Whit’s decided he’s a bad luck charm for baseball.  Heading into the final game they were 2-13.  Some of the losses have been close and others have been heroic (12-0).  The team is great and the coaches are wonderful and Whit’s improving and mostly it’s been a great experience, despite a fairly unrelenting series of losses.  The boys enjoy each other’s company and I’m consistently struck by how they talk to each other, on the field and off.  The coaches are mostly long-time coaches, whose own kids have moved onto older teams but who stuck with it out of passion and interest in the game.  The season is short and the commitment is manageable.  The other parents are great, from a mix of schools and across our neighborhood.  I love it, and so, mostly, does Whit.

We all came to the last game of the season expecting to go out with a whimper.  Hoping to keep the game in the “close” rather than “painful” category.  But this team of scrappy, mostly rookie players turned it around.  They shocked everyone – their parents and their opponents – by winning.  This meant that the other team was knocked out of contention for the top spot.

Our town’s major league has five teams.  One goes to the “mayor’s cup” (and the team we beat in the final game no longer had that option) and the other four go to the playoffs.  So Friday’s playoff game was Whit’s first in four years of Little League.  The Yankees came back to win it again.

Tuesday is the championship game.  I’m aware that this model of play – where the team with the worst record by a long shot can be in the finals – is flawed.  Still, it’s fun, and I’m struck by the lessons that fill team sports.  And I don’t mean the lessons taught by overzealous parents and expensive club sports (I have much ambivalence about the way youth sports have developed in our country or at least in my region).  Even in local, town little league, the learnings abound.

First and foremost, never, ever, ever give up.  You may turn things around in the last game of a disastrous 16 game season, but that’s worth a lot.

Respect your teammates.  Everyone on this team contributes and it’s a marvel to see.  There are no freeloaders.  Do your best.

Don’t goad others, for good or for bad.  Over the last few years, there have been boys at Whit’s school who have teased him for his poorly-performing teams.  I always encouraged him to try to ignore this line of talk, even though I know it stung. Similarly, we have always taught both kids not to draw attention to self when playing well (for example, dramatically celebrating goals is not ok in our house).  You can feel good and celebrate with your team.  But I know that Whit’s not teasing the kids whose teams he knocked out.

I did not play team sports as a kid, and so I’m learning all these things alongside Grace and Whit.  Hockey and cross-country have provided powerful lessons, and this season of baseball has too.  I’m grateful.

Farewell. Alleluia.

kids porch June 2016

Monday evening, June 6 – not the classic both-in-white photo, because they didn’t have the same last day.

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June 4, 2015, their last last day together until high school

Today, we’re out of school.  Actually yesterday was Grace’s last day, and today is Whit’s.  It is the first year in a great many that they haven’t had the same last day of school.  Yesterday I spent some time wandering down memory lane, falling headfirst into the tunnel of nostalgia where I spend too much of my time.  This 2012 post has many years of photos.  And that was already four years ago.  I can feel time whistling by my ears, I really can. A tired cliche. And an outrageously deep truth.

I don’t have a fifth grader and a seventh grader anymore.  This year is over, finished, a door is closed.

Farewell.

And, also, allelulia: summer!  tennis! ice cream! camp! sleeping in! reading books!  There is so much to celebrate and I love summer.  We consciously under-schedule our summer and make very few commitments (other than sleepaway camp, which both kids go to and love), and as a result there are long empty days and evenings on the porch with family.  I can’t wait.

But I also feel sad at what’s over.  Farewell and alleluia coexist for me in inextricable ways.  This year, with its particular drop-off routines and rhythms, was a good one.  Just yesterday morning, Grace, Whit, Matt and I were having breakfast in the kitchen.  Grace yawned before complimenting the fried egg I’d made her while trashing the one her father had made her a few days before.  We all laughed but then I said, “just wait, guys, you’ll miss these mornings, all four of us in the kitchen.”  I poured myself another cup of coffee and explained that it wouldn’t be long until they would be homesick – at least a little – for this particular morning, drooping peonies on the island, a friend egg and Life cereal for Grace and a waffle and some yogurt for Whit.

The thing is, I already am.  I am nostalgic for yesterday.

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The first last day they shared, June 9, 2010

This photo makes me physically ache.  Now they’re tall and lanky – Grace is within an inch of my height – and becoming the people they are.  Not that they always weren’t – in fact one of my primary learnings about parenthood is the way they are who they are from the minute they arrive – but they are young people now.  Childhood itself is in Grace’s rearview mirror, and it’s soon going to be there for Whit, too.

Farewell.

They are smart, and funny, and wise beyond their years.  They are sometimes also moody and irritable, and they leave dirty socks around the house and forgot where they put their water bottles.  But they are the light of my life, no question about it, and I love who they are more every single day.

Alleluia.

Ease doesn’t look like I expected it to

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Lexington Battle Green, 5:15am on Patriot’s Day

I should have expected the slap-down from the universe.  I really should have.

In March 2009 I wrote about fragility.  “At any moment Grace and Whit could meet with danger, either through an accident or through development of illness. When thinking about this post last night, I thought initially: I have chosen not to live in fear of these risks.”  As usual, I write my posts a few days in advance.  The day it went live, Whit ended up in the ER with his second allergic reaction to tree nuts.  It was scary.

In May 2012, I wrote about the 10 things I wanted Grace to know when she turned 10.  One of them was “Don’t lose your physical fearlessness.   Please continue using your body in the world: run, jump, climb, throw.”  Days later, she broke her collarbone.

Over the weekend, I wrote about ease, and the ways in which my life right now is the opposite of ease and, perhaps, the embodiment of it.  The post went up on Monday morning.  Monday itself was an exceedingly bumpy day in our family’s life.  I thought almost all day of my friend Launa‘s image of a family of four as a shopping cart.  When one wheel’s wonky, you just can’t drive smoothly or straight.  Monday we had four wheels out of joint.  Which meant, of course, we went nowhere fast and with great aggravation.

It was, on the surface, a great day.  We got up at 4:40 to go to the reenactment of the first skirmish of the Revolutionary War in Lexington.  I’ve never seen it before, and it was both fascinating and unexpectedly powerful.  But that early wakeup put everybody on edge for the rest of the day.

We watched the marathon some, I worked a lot of the day, the kids both finished homework they had not gotten to over the weekend.  Nothing specifically went wrong.  But everyone was crabby – myself included, most certainly – and there was a lot of short-tempered snapping.  Dinner was filled with tense silence and crossed arms.

I didn’t feel ease.  I felt frustration and a generalized feeling of anger and exhaustion.  How could one early morning derail us all like this? Why are we all living so close to the edge right now (all the time)?  Why does everything feel so hard?

As it often has, reading saved us.  After some dish-clanging and raised-voice dinner cleanup, we all retired upstairs.  Grace and Whit showered.  I did some email.  Before long, I was in my favorite place, sitting in bed with a child on each side of me.  We were all breathing, we were all reading, we were all together.  The dissent and aggravation and tears of the day dissolved in the face of those irrefutable truths.

This is what I’m learning, finally:

This is what ease is.

This is what grace is.  They’re not the same thing, but they are, at least in my head, related. They are also some of the many, many manifestations of the way life is not necessarily what we expect it to be.

Ease is not never being aggravated.  It’s coming back to center more quickly.  I think of the round-bottomed glasses my parents have on their boat, which wobble but don’t actually tip over.  It’s breathing through the discomfort.  It’s trusting that the light will return, even when it’s dark.  It doesn’t look anything like I thought it would, ease, but it’s still here, in every step, in every breath, in every moment.